Then turning to Bougainville, he continued, ‘And you, leader of the ruffians who obey you, pull your ship away swiftly from these shores. We are innocent, we are content, and you can only spoil that happiness. We follow the pure instincts of nature, and you have tried to erase its impression from our hearts. Here, everything belongs to everyone, and you have preached I can’t tell what distinction between ‘yours’ and ‘mine’. Our daughters and our wives belong to us all. You shared that privilege with us, and you enflamed them with a frenzy they had never known before. They have become wild in your arms, and you have become deranged in theirs. They have begun to hate each other. You have butchered one another for them, and they have come back stained with your blood. We are free, but into our earth you have now staked your title to our future servitude. You are neither a god nor a demon. Who are you, then, to make them slaves? Orou, you who understand the language of these men, tell us all, as you have told me, what they have written on that strip of metal: This land is ours. So this land is yours? Why? Because you set foot on it! If a Tahitian should one day land on your shores and engrave on one of your stones or on the bark of one of your trees, This land belongs to the people of Tahiti, what would you think then? …
‘Leave us to our ways; they are wiser and more decent than yours. We have no wish to exchange what you call our ignorance for your useless knowledge. Everything that we need and is good for us we already possess. Do we merit contempt because we have not learnt how to acquire superfluous needs? … Do not fill our heads with your factitious needs and illusory virtues. Look at these men. See how upright, healthy and robust they are. Look at these women. See how they too stand up straight, how healthy, fresh and lovely they are. Take this bow; it’s mine. Call upon one, two, three, four of your comrades, and together with them try to draw it. I draw it unaided; I till the soil; I climb mountains; I go through the forest; I can run a league across the plain in less than an hour; your young companions can hardly keep up with me, and yet I’m more than ninety years old.
‘Woe to this island! Woe to all present Tahitians and to those still to come, from the day of your arrival! We used to know but one disease, old age, to which men, animals and plants were all equally prey, but you have now brought us another. You have infected our blood … Wretched man. You must bear guilt, either for the ravages that will follow the deadly caresses of your people, or for the murders we shall commit to arrest the poison. You speak of crimes. Can you imagine any worse than yours? What is the punishment, where you come from, for the murder of your neighbour? Death by the sword. Where you come from, what is the punishment for the coward who poisons his victim? Death by fire. Compare your own offence to this second crime and tell us, scourge of nations, what punishment you deserve? […]
Go away now, unless your cruel eyes relish the spectacle of death. Go away, leave, and may the seas that spared you on your voyage absolve themselves of their guilt and avenge us by swallowing you up before your return. And you, inhabitants of Tahiti, go back to your huts. Go back and let these unworthy foreigners hear nothing as they depart but the roaring waves. Let them see nothing but the foaming spray as it whitens a deserted shore.’
He had scarcely finished speaking before the crowd of natives disappeared. A great silence stretched over the island. Nothing was to be heard but the dry whistling of the wind and the muffled breaking of the waves, all the length of the coast. It was as if the air and the sea had absorbed the man’s words and were moved to obey him.
B –
Well now! What do you think of that?
A –
The speech seems fierce to me, but in spite of what I find abrupt and primitive, I detect ideas and turns of phrase which appear European.
B –
Bear in mind that it’s a translation from Tahitian into Spanish, and from Spanish into French. The previous night the old man had made a visit to that same Orou to whom he called out the next day, in whose home knowledge of the Spanish language had been preserved for generations. Orou had written down the speech of the old man in Spanish, and Bougainville had a copy of it in his hand while the old man spoke.
A –
I can now understand only too well why Bougainville suppressed this fragment.
IIC10 Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) from A Monument to Johann Winckelmann
Herder is best known for his contribution to the development of the philosophy of history (cf. IIIA1), and his work marked a shift away from the prevailing rationalist and universalist commitments of the Enlightenment. His encounter with Goethe in 1770 led directly to the formation of the Sturm und Drang movement in German art and literature, and indirectly to Romanticism. Another component of these changes was a scepticism about the priority of the classical Greek heritage in art, and a developing interest in non‐classical forms including the Gothic, non‐Western arts, and folk culture. In 1778, Herder wrote a tribute to Winckelmann (‘A Monument to Johann Winckelmann’), in which he took the opportunity to dissent from Winckelmann’s insistence on the autochthonous development of Greek art, and the way in which he had ahistorically applied a model of Greek art to assess Egyptian art and thereby judge it inferior. For Herder this is to fail to take account of Egyptian art’s grounding in a very different set of values than the Greek. He thus begins to open up, already in the late eighteenth century, a surprisingly modern sense of cultural relativism. The present extracts are taken from Denkmal Johann Winckelmann’s: Eine ungekrönte Preisschrift Johann Gottfried Herder’s aus dem jahre 1778, von Dr. Albert Duncker, Verlag von Theodor Kay, Kassel, 1882, pp. 41–44 and 48–51. They were translated for the present volume by Richard Elliot.
The great admirer of the Greeks supposes that ‘They, like all peoples, invented their art themselves; to no other people are they indebted.’1 This principle makes their entire history very straightforward for we no longer need to think in terms of a transmission or transition from one people to another, and the book falls into as many sections as there are peoples under discussion. It does indeed seem true in a general and ideal sense because not only can each and every people invent its own art, most have actually invented some beginnings of it, just as children paint and bake horses or faces from bread or wax. Winckelmann and his followers’ arguments are also based for the most part on general, hypothetical possibilities and are (in academic parlance) a priori, in this instance proving nothing, or not enough, precisely because they prove too much.
For one thing, while the ability of a people – to say nothing of a people such as the Greeks – to invent their own art has probably never been doubted, the question is: can it be historically proven that the Greeks did actually invent theirs? On this I believe history would speak against rather than for. For another, no one art is, in any case, exactly the same as any other. Blocks of wood and quadrilateral stones are not art. Indeed they have, since time immemorial, been, or been venerated as, symbolic deities without ever becoming art, let alone art of any beauty. The question here is: who achieved the first advances in the creation of a work of art as such, ascertained the mechanical aspects of art (always the most difficult part) and provided a model? Who subsequently had the idea of employing art in religious worship and the like (for which other things could have been used), thereby setting a precedent in custom and usage? Finally, should one not also intensify and multiply the difficulties when thinking about how one people might have been able to act upon another, in how something could pass from one people to another? Otherwise doubts will be entertained about the plainest matters and objections raised to the simplest. Ultimately, any movement is impossible for which merely pacing up and down and pondering is the only and best rebuttal.