Reading Chinese in Oxford - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 55

all sorts of secret knowledge of human history and human institutions. The world
was still opening up in the first half of the seventeenth century, and it was clear
to the brightest scholars that the richest troves of texts and traditions lay to the
east. Half a century later, this conviction faltered. By the time Hyde was negotiat-
ing his retirement after completing what he regarded as his masterwork on Persi-
an religion, no one much cared any more. Had Selden written Historia Religionis
Veterum Persarum , readers would have been snatching it from the shelves as soon
as it appeared. The problem wasn't just that the great Selden was not the author. It
was that the time for believing that such work must point the way forward to new
and startling discoveries had passed. Things Oriental were becoming things orna-
mental, matter for amusing conversation with the king, perhaps, but not the stuff
of serious discussion with one's intellectual peers. Selden could see himself stand-
ing at a new dawn of knowledge creation, likening Oriental languages to Galileo's
telescope: both would yield discoveries of which earlier generations had not even
dreamed. What the historian Nicholas Dew has termed 'Baroque Orientalism' held
fewer such promises. Not too long thereafter the study of Asia would slide into
what Claire Gallien has dubbed 'pseudo-Orientalism', a field not of scholarship
and critical insight but of fantasy and amusement: all that Coleridgian nonsense
about 'stately pleasure-domes' and 'caverns measureless to man'.
The young Hyde had caught the tail end of the Orientalist wave when he was
brought in to work on the Polyglot Bible in the 1650s. The mature Hyde had used
his Orientalist knowledge to compile the first catalogue of the Bodleian Library in
the 1670s. The elder Hyde couldn't sell his magnum opus, and flogged part of his
collection of Persian and Arabic manuscripts to the library that employed him for
cash. Compared with what Selden had done and what he had donated fifty years
earlier, this was a meagre showing. The man whom Brian Walton had praised as
a 'youth of the highest promise' hadn't lived up to expectations - of others or of
himself. It wasn't his fault. The world had changed around him.
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With the office of Keeper came the privilege of having a portrait painted for the
benefit of posterity. The accumulated portraiture of Keepers hangs today in the old
SchoolofAstronomyandRhetoric-nowtheBodleian'sgiftshop.Hyde'shasbeen
giventhespotabovethecashregister(Fig.7).Thepaintingisstandardforthestyle
prevailing at the end of the seventeenth century. It is not a great work of art, but
it is not without interest, especially for us. It shows its subject from the waist up