422 ENGLISH LITERATURE 



and Indian poems, followed in 1783 by a rendering of the Arabian 

 Moallakat and of Kalidasa's Sakuntala in 1789. He was the founder 

 and lifelong president of the Asiatic Society. Through his and 

 Colebrooke's efforts, moreover, translations of Indian and Persian 

 books on law and philosophy were undertaken that added a literary 

 interest in India to the political. 



The outcome of it was the rise of Oriental studies which pervaded 

 all the European countries, and which in Germany resulted in the 

 creation of such works as Friedrich von Schlegel's Sprache und Weis- 

 heit der Inder (1808), Goethe's Westostlicher Divan (1819), Riickert's 

 long series of Oriental poems and translations (from 1822 on), Platen's 

 fairy epic Die Abassiden (1834), Bodenstedt's Lieder des Mirza 

 Schaffy (1851), and others. Schopenhauer's philosophy was greatly 

 influenced by these Oriental studies, and the beginning of compara- 

 tive Indo-Germanic philology was one of the earliest consequences of 

 this new movement. In Denmark it gave rise to pieces like Oehlen- 

 schlager's Aladdin (1805), a dramatic fairy-tale from the Arabian 

 Nights. In France Chateaubriand (Les Martyrs, 1809, Itineraire de 

 Paris a Jerusalem, 1811, Les aventures du dernier des Abencerages) , 

 Victor Hugo (Les Orientales, 1828), and others, owe much to this era 

 of Orientalism. 



Its effect on English literature, too, was far-reaching. It so hap- 

 pened that the commencement of Oriental studies, in the sixties 

 of the eighteenth century, coincided with the beginnings of the 

 romantic movement inaugurated by Macpherson, Percy, Walpole, 

 Chatterton, as a reaction against the rule of rationalism. The Orient 

 with its wonders and mysteries, its legends and fairy-tales, its splen- 

 dor of colors and sensuousness, has always been particularly congenial 

 to romanticism; no wonder, therefore, that the adherents of the new 

 spirit soon turned to the East for inspiration in their poetry. 



The revival of the interest in the Orient which now began in 

 England was furthermore nourished and deepened by political events 

 like Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt (1798-99), the Peninsular 

 War (1808-14), and the struggle for independence in Greece, events 

 in all of which England was most vitally concerned. 



' In consequence of all this, a second period of cultivation of Oriental 

 subjects was opened in English literature, as different in its character 

 from the first as romanticism differs from rationalism. Beckford led 

 the van with his splendid Eastern tale Vathek (1786), already men- 

 tioned, which has with it all the fairy charm of the Arabian Nights. 

 Coleridge's gorgeous vision, Kubla Khan (composed in 1797),Landor's 

 Gebir (1798). and Southey's Arabian epic, Thalaba the Destroyer 

 (1801), came next. Almost all the leading poets of this great era 

 came under the spell of these Oriental influences, nearly all of them 

 treated Eastern subjects in their poems, the only exceptions being 



