138 ORIJENTALISM emer surveying as if from a peculiarly suited vantage point the passive, seminal, feminine, even silent and supine East, then going on to articulate the East, making the Orient deliver up its secrets under the learned authority of a philologist whose power derives from the ability to unlock secret, esoteric languages—this would persist in Renan. What did not persist in Renan during the 1840s, when he served his apprenticeship as a philologist, was the dramatic attitude: that was replaced by the scientific attitude. For Quinet and Michelet, history was a drama. Quinet suggestively describes the whole world as a temple and human history as a sort of religious rite. Both Michelet and Quinet saw the world they discussed. The origin of human history was something they could describe in the same splendid and impassioned and dramatic terms used by Vico and Rousseau to portray life on earth in primitive times. For Michelet and Quinet there is no doubt that they belong to the communal European Romantic undertaking * ‘either in epic or some other major genre—in drama, in prose romance, or in the visionary ‘greater Ode’—radically to recast into terms appropriate to the historical and intellectual circumstances of their own age, the Christian pattern of the fall, the redemption, and the emergence of a new earth which will constitute a restored paradise.”** I think that for Quinet the idea of a new god being born was tantamount to the filling of the place left by the old god; for Renan, however, being a philologist meant the severance of any and all connections with the old Christian god, so that instead a new doctrine—probably science—would stand free and in a new place, as it were. Renan’s whole career was devoted to the fleshing out of this progress. He put it very plainly at the end of his undistinguished essay on the origins of language: man is no longer an inventor, and the age of creation is definitely over.** There was a period, at which we can only guess, when man was literally transported from silence into words. After that there was language, and for the true scientist the task is to examine how language is, not how it came about. Yet if Renan dispels the passionate creation of primitive times (which had excited Herder, Vico, Rousseau, even Quinet and Michelet) he instates a new, and deliberate, type of artificial creation, one that iis performed as a result of scientific analysis. In his lecon inaugurale at the Collége de France (February 21, 1862) Renan proclaimed his lectures open to the public so that it might see at first hand “‘le

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 139 laboratoire méme de la science philologique” (the very laboratory of philological science) .*7 Any reader of Renan would have understood that such a statement was meant also to carry a typical if rather limp irony, one less intended to shock than passively to delight. For Renan was succeeding to the chair of Hebrew, and his lecture was on the contribution of the Semitic peoples to the history of civilization, What more subtle affront could there be to “sacred” history than the substitution of a philological laboratory for divine intervention in history; and what more telling way was there of declaring the Orient’s contemporary relevance to be simply as material for European investigation?** Sacy’s comparatively lifeless fragments arranged in tableaux were now being replaced with something new. The stirring peroration with which Renan concluded his legon had another function than simply to connect Oriental-Semitic philology with the future and with science. Etienne Quatremére, who immediately preceded Renan in the chair of Hebrew, was a scholar who seemed to exemplify the popular caricature of what a scholar was like. A man of prodigiously industrious and pedantic habits, he went about his work, Renn said in a relatively unfeeling memorial minute for the Journal des débats in October 1857, like a laborious worker who even in rendering immense services nevertheless could not see the whole edifice being constructed. The edifice was nothing less than “la science historique de l’esprit humain,” now in the process of being built stone by stone.** Just as Quatremére was not of this age, so Renan in his work was determined to be of it. Moreover, if the Orient had been hitherto identified exclusively and indiscriminately with India and China, Renan’s ambition was to carve out a new Oriental province for himself, in this case the Semitic Orient. He had no doubt remarked the casual, and surely current, confusion of Arabic with Sanskrit (as in Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin, where the fateful talisman’s Arabic script is described as Sanskrit), and he made it his job accordingly to do for the Semitic languages what Bopp had done for the Indo-European: so he said in the 1855 preface to the comparative Semitic treatise. Therefore Renan’s plans were to bring the Semitic languages into sharp and glamorous focus a /a Bopp, and in addition to elevate the study of these neglected inferiorlanguages to the level of a passionate new science of mind @ la Louis Lambert. On more than one occasion Renan was quite explicit in his asser