They were acquainted with the compass, but did not apply it to its right use in navigation. For as they inhabited a land that abounds with every thing, they had no need like us to circumnavigate the globe. The compass as well as gunpowder was only a matter of curiosity in respect to them, nor indeed were they much to be lamented for the want of such improvements.
It is surprizing that this ingenious nation never went beyond the elements of geometry, that they were ignorant of semitones in music, that their astronomy and all their sciences were at the same time so antient and so limited. It seems as if nature had given to this species of men so different from ours, organs formed for discovering all at once whatever was necessary for them, and incapable of going any further. We on the contrary have made our discoveries very late; but we have been quick in bringing things to perfection.
* * *
Following the apparent course of the sun, the next country I come to, is India, a country almost as extensive as China, and more known on account of the precious commodities in all ages brought from thence by the industry of merchants, than from any exact relations of it.
A chain of mountains but little interrupted, seems to have fixed its limits towards China, Tartary and Persia; and the rest is surrounded by the sea. And yet India on this side of the Ganges, was for a long time subject to the Persians; for which reason Alexander the revenger of Greece and the conqueror of Darius, pushed his conquests even into that part of India which was tributary to his enemy. Since the time of Alexander, the Indians have lived in a licentiousness and effeminacy inspired by the goodness of the climate, and the richness of the soil. […]
The figures we make use of in arithmetic, which we received from the Arabs, near the time of Charlemaign, came from India: and perhaps the antient medals so highly valued by the curious among the Chinese, are a proof that the arts were cultivated in India, before they were known in China. […]
Some have imagined that the human race came originally from Indostan, alledging that the weakest animal must have been produced in the mildest climate: but we are in the dark in regard to all originals. Who can say that there were neither insects, nor herbs, nor trees in our climate, when they were in the east?
India was known only by name in the time of Charlemaign; and the Indians were ignorant that there was a Charlemaign. The Arabs, sole masters of the maritime commerce, supplied both Constantinople and the Franks with the commodities of the Indes. The Venetians bought them up at Alexandria. The demand for them in France among private people was not yet very considerable; they were long unknown in Germany, and throughout the north. The Romans had carried on this trade themselves, as soon as they were masters of Egypt. Thus the western nations have always carried their gold and silver to India, and enriched that country, which is so rich of itself.
India having been in all ages a trading industrious nation, its civil polity must have been excellent; and that country, to which Pythagoras had travelled for instruction, must have been governed by good laws, without which the arts are never cultivated.
* * *
If any remains of the Asiatic arts merit our curiosity, it is the ruins of Persepolis described in many books, and copied in several prints. I am not ignorant of the admiration inspired by those ruins, that escaped the torches with which Alexander and the courtesan Thais, set Persepolis in flames. But could a palace erected at the foot of a chain of barren rocks, be a masterpiece of art? The columns which are yet standing, cannot surely be reckoned either of a just proportion, or of an elegant design. The capitals are loaded with foolish ornaments, and nearly as high as the shaft; All the figures are as heavy and hard as those which unluckily disgrace our Gothic churches. They are monuments of grandeur but not of taste; and the whole confirms me in the opinion, that if we confine ourselves to the history of the polite arts, we shall find no more than four ages in the annals of the world, namely those of Alexander, of Augustus, of the Medicis, and of Lewis XIV.
* * *
In proportion as the Mahometans grew powerful, they became polite. These caliphs, who were always acknowledged as the sovereigns of religion, and apparently of the empire, by those who no longer received their orders at such a distance, lived in tranquillity in their new Babylon, and soon revived the arts. Aaron Rachild [Harun al‐Rashid], contemporary of Charlemaign, was more respected than any of his predecessors, and made himself obeyed even in Spain and India; he revived the sciences, taught the agreeable and the useful arts to flourish, drew learned men into his country, composed verses, and made politeness take place of barbarism throughout his vast dominions. […]
An infallible proof of the superior genius of a nation in regard to the polite arts, is the cultivation of true poetry. I speak not of high flown bombast compositions, nor of the heap of insipid commonplaces about the sun, the moon, and the stars, the mountains, and seas; but of that bold yet elegant taste which obtained in the reign of Augustus, and which we have seen revived under Lewis XIV. This poetry which abounds with images and sentiments, was known in the time of Aaron Rachild. Amidst a variety of examples I shall select one that strikes me, and I give it because it is concise. It relates to the famous downfall of Giafar Barmecides.
Weak mortal, whom prosperity
Has intoxicated with its dangerous charms,
Learn how precarious is the favour
Of kings, from the example of Barmecides;
And dread being happy.
This last verse is translated word for word. Nothing can be more beautiful in my opinion than, dread being happy. The Arabic tongue had the advantage of being perfected a great while ago; it was ascertained before the time of Mahomet, and has not altered since. Of the several jargons then spoken in Europe, there is not at present the least vestige. Which way soever we turn ourselves, we must own we were born but yesterday. We go beyond other nations in many respects; and perhaps it is because we came the last.
IIC5 Voltaire (François‐Marie Arouet; 1694–1778) from ‘Essay on Taste’
The openness to non‐European civilizations evidenced in Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs (cf. IIC4) did not always extend to their art. While he was capable of surpassing a Judaeo‐Christian estimation of the intellectual, religious and moral dimensions of other societies, his socio‐cultural radicalism was balanced by something altogether more conventional when it came to matters of ‘taste’. For Voltaire, as indeed for many later writers on art, ‘taste’ as it related to aesthetic responses to artistic form (as distinct from individual preferences for certain foods, etc.) had an objective aspect. In the 1960s, as part of the debate over the ‘crisis of Modernism’, the critic Clement Greenberg wrote that it was no more possible to dislike good art – or to like bad art – than it was to have ‘sugar taste sweet or lemons taste sour’. This tension between ‘taste’ as a natural faculty and as something it is possible to educate through experience is arguably one that has never been satisfactorily resolved. On its other side, however, lies a total subjectivism that flies in the face of any settled notion of lasting values. To thinkers of the eighteenth‐century European Enlightenment, cultural pluralism seldom extended to aesthetics. In the present extract, Voltaire is in no doubt that taste in matters of art is restricted to Europe, and other places, including ‘uncultivated wastes’ lacking civil society (i.e. America), countries where ‘all representations of living creatures’ are ‘prohibited by religion’ (i.e. the Islamic sphere), and ‘Asiaticks’ (presumably China and India), simply lack it. The extracts are from Voltaire’s ‘Essay on Taste’ [1757], published as a supplement to Alexander Gerard’s An Essay on Taste, London: A. Millar, and Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and J. Bell, 1759, pp. 213, 215 and 221–2. (A variant extract from the essay can be found in Art in Theory 1648–1815, IIIb8, pp. 531–2.)
The external sense with which nature has furnished us, and by which we distinguish and relish the various kinds of nourishment, that are adapted to health and pleasure, has in all languages given occasion to the metaphorical word taste, by which we express