(Article, ‘Gobineau,
(Joseph) Arthur, Comte de,’ first published in The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, ed. Nicholas
Vazsonyi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013))
Gobineau,
(Joseph) Arthur, Comte de (b.
Ville d’Avray, 14 July 1816; d. Turin, 13 Oct. 1882), novelist, diplomat,
essayist, ethnologist. Protégé of Alexis de Tocqueville, who as Foreign
Minister appointed Gobineau his Cabinet Head. Gobineau’s diplomatic career took
in Germany, Persia, Brazil, and Sweden. In Essai
sur l'inégalité des races humaines (The
Inequality of Human Races, 1853-5), Gobineau made
racial distinction – white (intelligent, courageous), black (sensual, brutal),
and yellow (materialistic, feeble) – history’s guiding principle. The white
race, whether Germanic, ancient Greek, or Indo-European (“Aryan”), enabled
civilization. Apparent exceptions, such as China, were ascribed to white
influence. Civilization partly depended upon miscegenation, interracial
breeding, yet in that dilution lay its downfall. Gobineau was not anti-Semitic;
he admired the effort of “white” Jews through Mosaic Law to maintain their “purity.”
Tocqueville protested that Gobineau’s argument was probably wrong and certainly
pernicious.
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| Palazzo Vendramin, Venice, 1870, photograph by Carlo Noya |
The Wagners briefly met
Gobineau in Rome in 1876. There is neither evidence nor likelihood that Wagner
read Gobineau or learned of his ideas until after their 1880 meeting in Venice; Wagner makes no mention of Gobineau’s
theories before 1880, nor does Cosima in her diaries. Thus, despite
the claims of writers such as Robert Gutman (Richard Wagner: The Man, The Mind, and his Music, ch. 13), the possibility of
influence upon Parsifal,
whose poem was essentially completed in 1877, its “orchestral sketch” in 1879,
tends towards zero. Gobineau visited Wahnfried
in 1881 (when Wagner presented his collected writings to “the Count”) and in 1882.
“Scientific” fatalism might
appeal to Wagner as Schopenhauer’s
disciple, though not as revolutionary. Gobineau presented not a political
program, but an alleged scientific truth, echoing the Enlightenment project of
discerning fundamental historical laws, akin to those of Newton – or, as later
racists would prefer, Darwin. Gobineau believed in human degeneration; Wagner
varied. Whereas Gobineau’s driving force was miscegenation, Wagner, in a late
echo of Feuerbach, pointed to dietary change. Though Wagner seems to have come
to attribute some importance to miscegenation, he introduced a gendered element and retained the
prospect of regeneration or redemption through art and religion. Thus an 1881 Brown
Book entry, possibly intended in part to correct Gobineau’s
non-racial essay, La Renaissance: “In
the mingling of races, the blood of the nobler males is ruined by the baser
feminine element: the masculine element suffers, character founders, whilst the
women gain as much as to take the men’s place. (Renaissance). The feminine thus
remains owing deliverance: here art – as there in religion; the immaculate
Virgin gives birth to the Savior.” (BB/E, 23 Oct 1881). Gobineau denied
universality and founded morality upon ontology: Aryan deeds were good because they
were performed by Aryans. Wagner, however, desired universal redemption, Jews included; morality should transform
ontology.
Yet, as with Schopenhauer,
Wagner found “confirmation” of previously held views, and “corrected” instances
in which both writers erred. Cosima describes Wagner, during Gobineau’s 1881 visit,
as “downright explosive in favor of Christian theories in contrast to racial
ones” (Cosima Wagner's Diaries, 3 June 1881). Correspondence demonstrates mutual respect but both
men standing their intellectual ground. Despite some writers’ claims,
Gobineau’s influence on Wagner was minimal, differences more revealing than
correspondences. However, the pan-Germanist Ludwig
Schemann and other members of the Bayreuth
Circle founded a Gobineau Association in 1894, transforming Gobineau’s
pessimism into a racial and political opposition between Aryan and Jew. Cosima
dissociated herself and the Festival.
Eugène, Eric (ed.), Richard et Cosima
Wagner/Arthur Gobineau: Correspondance 1880-1882 (Saint-Genouph: Nizet, 2000).
Schemann,
Ludwig, Gobineau. Eine Biographie, 2
vols. (Strasbourg: Triibner,
1913-16).