My American Lectures/French and Other Literature in S. E. Europe
FRENCH AND OTHER LITERATURE IN SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE
French literature of the middle-ages penetrated Greek South-Eastern Europe in two forms. First, as a direct influence of the chansons de geste as sung in the castles of the western barons, who had established themselves in the conquered provinces of the former Byzantine Empire; so that the figures of the French epics were adopted by the vanquished and new works in their own languages reproduced the well-known tales of fierce and gallant strife and amorous romance. Secondly, by passing through the Francized realm of the two Sicilies, the French poems were an incitement to present, in the Serb poesies, the poetized history of other struggles and sufferings.
Subsequently a long period was put to western literary penetration. In the fifteenth century the Latin life of South-Eastern Europe was no longer represented by French dukes or Catalan and Navarrese adventurers; Venice, the practical and the calculating, was the sole heiress of the former barons in Greece, and the last of these was a nobleman of indifferent attainments like Pierre de St. Exupery, or a fortune-hunter in the style of the Italian tyrants of his time, like Antonio Acciaiuoli, Lord of Athens. Constantinople was never French under the latinocracy, notwithstanding men like Balduin of Flanders, his brother Robert, Pierre de Courtenay who wore the Comnene crown; inasmuch as it broke the continuity of the old Greek fashions, the ruling Occident was personified by the Venetian merchants, and the supremacy of the Italian language (established in Byzantine times when Venetian, Genoese, Pisan, and the old Amalfitans were considered the natural bourgeoisie of this new Rome), became more and more apparent. This familiarity with the spoken language of the majority of the Latin inhabitants of the eastern capital was to outlive all changes in the imperial domination and to subsist down to the seventeenth century.
But it is necessary to add that this long intercourse in the middle-ages as well as in the modern era had no literary influence; it remained in this sense — not like art, which became, in the days of the Palaeologues, common to East and West — completely sterile.
In the fifteenth century, Bulgaria no longer existed in the politically-important part of mediaeval SouthEastern Europe. In literature it owed all to Byzantium, the works of which passed to some extent into the old Slavonic tongue through the efforts of the cultured clergy at the court of the Czars. The Roumanian territories were particularly characteristic of that time and in this respect. Their epic poetry was at first the mere translation of Serbian songs. Then upon this model new forms were created, epitomising the exploits of the reigning princes or of their predecessors. Lyric poetry, less popular than the epic in the regions south of the Danube, had as its point of departure the same as what surely had been formerly achieved in mediaeval Italy, but feelings belonging to this sentimental and visionary race were expressed in noborrowed forms; this is the origin of the melancholy doinas, which sang of love and especially of the longing for the loved one, But for the epics the models employed were
Slavonic and not Latin. The only people among the races in this part of Europe speaking a Latin language and thinking in Latin was the last to participate in the currents sweeping from the great western Latinity.
Only in an isolated city of the Adriatic, Ragusa, subjected alternately to the Norman and Venetian will and maintaining unbroken relations with all cities on the coast of Italy overlooking it, the transmission of literary influence was never interrupted. This course was pursue dafter the common Italian tongue had taken the place of the Slavonic of the surrounding countries. The neighbouring Slavs of the Serb branch and, through their intermediary, other Balkan States took from Ragusa such celebrated books as the Romance of Alexander the Great, enriched by the skill of a southern Italian wrister. Besides the works of imagination coming from Byzantium, and thanks to the lively spirit of the Ragusan, to his interest in new things, the peninsula was able to lay claim to poetic achievements of which the far more developed Occident need not have been ashamed. But the part played by Eastern inspiration in fairy tales and treatises on life-philosophy remained predominant.
The sixteenth century was in most of the western countries first and foremost an age of scholarship. The Renaissance brought editions of the classics, commentaries, grammars, dictionaries, servile imitations of the Romans and the Greeks. South-Eastern Europe, being partly the Hellenic territory of old, gained an importance which, up to this moment, had not been recognised. Travellers like Bongars came to Wallachia, to the Balkans, in search of documents of epigraphy; the ambassadors of all Christian nations were often commissioned to buy rare manuscripts. The supporters of insurgent Protestantism, in their fight against Catholicism, hoped to find allies in the indigent Greek Church, subjected to the spoliation and humiliation of the Turk. The Germans were thus interested in the Orthodox faith. Crusius, the author of the « Turco-Graccia », Gerlach, who has bequeathed us his priceless Byzantine Journal, and Chytraeus were the missionaries of these religious and archaeological explorations. But only in Ragusa was Petrarch, and even Dante himself, known and imitated; throughout the rest of this broad region no hope of literary influence was to be found. In the Italian-speaking quarters of Constantinople, Pera and Galata, in Chios (autonomous until the second half of the century) habits of life were mainly occidental, but literature consisted only in the preservation of the old popular songs. The reason of this was that for a profane literature the conditions were here wanting; the life of an enlightened court or of a highly developed and very rich middle-class. The Wallachian princess Catherine, the daughter of an occidental-minded father, had in Venice, in the retirement of Murano, a Latin sister, called, after the Roumanian manner, Mărioara, and the latter corresponded with Veronese himself. The very commonplace character of the correspondence this princess maintained with Mărioara, however, is in the debased Greek of her day.
There is a single case of occidentalism — that is to say of Italian occidentalism — in the Greek literature of the period, and it conserves the Hellenic form. A great role was played at this juncture by the Roumanians in the Christian life of South-Eastern Europe, where their princes superseded the old Roman emperors and influenced the mixed Occidental and Oriental culture of such Russian territories as were subject to the Polish crown. The example is the epic of a Cretan, George Palamede, consecrated to the martial deeds of Michael the Brave, Prince of
Wallachia and conqueror of Transylvania and Moldavia, the natural leader of all Greeks, to whom he belonged on his mother’s side, and a potential emperor of a free Byzantium. His poem, of long harmonious rhythm, is an imitation of the « Gerusalemme Fiberata ». At the same time, the simple popular form was employed by one of Michael’s officers, the Greek Stavrinos, to celebrate the same stirring exploits. The Greek domain of Venice had still, for the most part, been preserved. It was unfruitful in many districts, as in the formerly illustrious island of Cyprus, that heritage of the French knightly kings, the Fusignans, of literary products. Crete was the sole domain of literature in the colonial empire of the Republic. If Palamede, a Greek, could use the form of Tasso, a contemporary, for presenting an oriental subject, to Vincenzo Cornaro, an Italian of old noble family, must the credit go for the idea of recurring to the memories of eastern contests of chivalry (between the Dukes of Athens, the Lords of Morea, and their adversaries) in order to compose the popular poem of the «New Erotocrite». The first Greek plays after the Italian manner were written, and perhaps performed, in the same island, which may thus be considered to have been the cradle of the new Greek literature.
At this moment not only French diplomacy in Constantinople, honoured before all other because the kings of France were praised as the Lords of all Christianity, as the emperors among the « believers of Jesus », spoke and wrote Italian in all their relations with the Turks of the Sulimanic era, but the Italian of the concetti was the courtly language in the milieu of the ruling dowager queen, the Florentine Catherine de Medicis. A refugee from the East, the most handsome, intelligent and gifted of all Oriental adventurers, the Wallachian Peter Cercel ( Earring) wrote at the Court of France his beautiful «Inno a Dio » and exclusively employed the best Italian in his correspondence.
Notwithstanding the great influence of the French Jesuits at Constantinople in the first half of the following century, an influence which was opposed by the Latin-writing colonists of Holland, who were represented by the ambassador of the Low Countries, the French language gained no ground in this region. If the Fathers preached in French, they wrote to the neighbouring princes of Wallachia and Moldavia in Italian. The same occidental form was used by the English Ambassadors despatched to Turkey in the reign of Queen Elizabeth of England; a certain Austell and Edward Barton.
A change was introduced only when Louis XIV took the lead as the first of all kings of his time, the arbiter of all courtly life and the initiator of a unified etiquette. De Hayes, that persecuted and harassed ambassador of the French king, was no longer obliged exclusively to employ Italian, the influence of which continued in the first half of the eighteenth century. His successor, de Nointel, proud of the literary achievements of his country, was able to present to a diplomatic gathering at the Embassy a series of French classical plays.
At the same time, if French was not spoken at the Court of the rich Wallachian prince, Constantin Brâncoveanu, who reigned with all the pomp and circumstance of a western monarch, a French Ludovicist inspiration is to be detected in the carefully elaborated chronicles of his reign and in the large measure of protection accorded by this enlightened prince to all exponents of learning.
But a certain Italian character of Roumanian culture remained strongly affirmed. The spiritus rector of all cultural manifestations in Wallachia was an uncle of Brâncoveanu, Constantin Cantacuzino the Stolnic. This authentic scion of the old Greek imperial house was educated first in Adrianople and Constantinople and later in Venice, where other Roumanians too often came, not only for trade, but also, like Pepano, for cultural purposes. He went to the University of Padua, where medicine was taught in the manner of the Renaissance, viz: «philosophically » as a « iatrophilosophy ». The spirit of Allatius, Helladius, Cottonius regned there, and he profited by an education on western lines. Returning to his country (where he was the leading factor until his shocking death, at an extremely advanced age, when he was, with his son, the reigning prince Stephen Cantacuzino, murdered by the Turks), he wore the large robes of the oriental, shaved his head like the Turks, and dined seated after the manner of his masters. But his spirit remained Venetian; he wrote Italian as if it were his own language and was pleased to meet in Bucharest representatives of all western races, including the English doctor Chishull, who praises him in his descriptions of an eastern journey. The Italian periods, not the simple phrases of Rennaissance-Latin, distinguish a rare work, which was unfortunately never finished and has been preserved like the torso of an exquisite but unfinished statue, a work in which everything, the critical sense, the instinct for national integrity and not merely for scattered fragments, the disposition to polemics, which is western, is in the Italian manner.
In the neighbouring principality of Moldavia, the Occident first penetrated through Poland and by means of the Latin of the Renaissance. The first exponent was Gregory Ureche, the initiator, about the middle of the seventeenth century, of a critical historiography dominated by the sense of Roman origins. The work is worthy of the highest praise. Its phrasing has a Roman discipline; few words are used to express a concentrated thought, the sentences are incisive and there is no leaning towards the coquetries of style. Ureche was a fighter first and foremost and a political counsellor of his princes. Through his successor, Miron Costin, some decades later, Poland transmitted the taste for the individual presentation of facts; history degenerates into autobiography, a sort of unrestrained personal chronicle, not directed and controlled by leading ideas; all the caprices of vanity and greed are permissible. His scholastic exercises on the origins of his race bear the same impressionistic seal. But here too, in spite of the Latin-Polish influence of the Jesuit school at J assy, where the sons of Miron Costin and other young men of good family were taught, the Italian current is perceptible. Co-nationals of the Cretan doctors working in Bucharest (possibly Pylarino, the discoverer of the vaccine, who was in the employ of the house of Brâncoveanu, was a Cretan) and of the Cretan merchants were the preacher of the Court, Abramios, and a «iatro-philosopher », Jeremias Cacavela, but the foremost among the learned Roumanians of their time, not excepting the translator of Herodotus, Eustratius, and the initiator of Russia in the field of science, the new champion against the Pope and against Islam, Nicholas Milescu, was the young prince Demetrius Cantemir.
Living at Constantinople in the company of the half-Francized Levantines (in a portrait, almost certainly by a French painter, he wears the white and blue turban of his sovereign masters, with the foulard cravat and the small-sword of Versailles), Cantemir may be considered, notwithstanding his interest in the philosophy of one Van Helmont, a Dutchman, or his relations with the Academy of Berlin, as the herald of French literary characteristics into the Roumanian world. His «Hieroglyphic History», except for a few borrowings from the old Hellenic novelist Heliodorus, is nothing more or less (his characters disguised under the names of beasts) than the romantic exposition of his life in the Turkish capital, where he was held hostage for his father: it is the first Roumanian novel, and a Very good one too. Systematising the problems of Roumanian origins, he anticipated the conceptions of contemporary anthropogeography in his manner of describing Moldavia under all aspects, from historical facts down to popular superstition, just as he announced new geographical methods in plotting the contours of the Caucasian mountains; while the organic conception of rise and decay in the history of empires has passed on to Montesquieu through the Cantemirian history, a transmission to the european West for which Demetrius’s son is responsible. This Antioch, Russian Ambassador in Paris, was the first after Peter the Great to introduce to a backward Russia, through his satires, the spirit of Boileau, and a Roumanian, Herescu (himself a refugee under the protection of the Czar), gave to the Russian theatre its first comedies of western form. Mary, the daughter of the first Cantemir, herself a master in more languages than one, was the first occidental spirit among the women of the Russian Empire.
This condition of things was wholly changed in the second half of the 18th century: so that by 1770, long before the French Revolution, all the South-East of Europe was Francized. French literature is the leading element, after the ancient Greek, and often in contradiction to the Greek of modern times, considered to be an obsolete form of expression, no longer corresponding to the mental needs of a new society. Writers in their own languages still searched the classical, and above all the philosophical, literature of France, for models. Often the genuine manifestations of the nations called to a new life were endangered by the powerful influence of this splendid foreign model.
What were the reasons for this unexpected fact?
First, in a period when French literature and the French mode predominated all over Europe, and when America separated itself from the British commonwealth, it was due to the presence of French teachers, if not in such countries as Serbia, Bulgaria and such territories as these which were under Turkish domination, in Constantinople and in the Roumanian principalities. To them was often confided the education of the future « grand interpreters » of the Porte, whose first duty it was to know French, the new language of diplomacy, i. e. the future princes of the Danube. The nobles, court officials and others naturally followed their example.
But not only for certain of the Roumanians, but also for a good number of Greeks, the centre of French influence in Vienna was highly important.
In that imperial city the French mode was introduced by the mere fact of the Emperor, Francis of Lorraine, the husband of the Austrian and Hungarian heiress, Maria-Theresia, being a Frenchman by language and education. His role, often much underestimated, was by no means a small one. In his house and at his court, the French language was always to be heard and was sympathetically received. But these French customs could only be of use to the Greeks, as well as to many Orientals, and to some Roumanians too, by cooperation with the factors of French influence. This was also due to the existence of an oriental trading company, formed at the end of the 17th century to strengthen relations between the Austrian States and all provinces of the Orient — the so-called
«Greek Company», the establishments of which were scattered the length and breadth of the Imperial States. Vienna was the headquarters and as, for the Greek of good family or culture, school and church go hand in hand, schoolmasters were trained in this atmosphere of French ideas and feeling.
They wanted fresh school-books. A great part of the scientific French literature of the time was translated for the use of the Greek schools; the list of these, comprising some of the best works extant, is an interesting one. A Roumanian who had made a journey to Italy and was able to use Italian translations, and perhaps also French originals, Amphilochus, the temporary Bishop of Hotin in Bessarabia, published in the ninetieth year of the century a geography after Bouffier, and an arithmetic, while about the same time he translated a work of higher theology.
As regards the belles lettres of France, Greek interest centred on the comedies of Molière, whom alone they considered the best entertainer, as well as a more than successful rival of the oriental Karaguez of Constantinople. In Greek translations the names were changed to give a more local and natural aspect to the play. On the other hand, Racine’s works had no charm for a nation which had lost its driving-force and could not appreciate the myriad subtleties of life in the most artificial court in Europe. Among contemporaries, Voltaire was wholeheartedly decried as an enemy of all religion, a skilful preacher of incredulity and of anarchy of thought, as the grandfather of all free-masons. Instead of threading his baneful mazes, sentimental spirits, — who were not wanting—, preferred the reveries of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the nature-lover and the guide and counsellor of the weak and simple souls.
The task of translation from the French was certainly difficult, often to the point of impossibility, though on the whole it was not necessary as, from this period on, South-Eastern Europe was able to read from the originals. These were to be found in the libraries of all Roumanian noblemen and of the higher clergy, the latter of whom were less impeded by religious scruples than is commonly admitted. The highly cultured Bishop of Râmnic in Wallachia, Cesarius, is known to have asked his book-seller in Transylvania for the dangerous Encyclopaedia of the Philosophers and would not accept a similar book bearing the same title. In such libraries, besides, were found the futile literature of the second-half of the century, including the « Amours du Chevalier de Faublas », and the «Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle» by Bossuet, with Roumanian glossaries.
Towards the end of the 18th century translators appeared. Their choice was often queer and unexpected. Some of them, in the Roumanian Principalities, where certain of the bishops even adopted free-masonry, soared to the heights of contemporary western poetry. Besides the interpreter of the works of the Frenchman Florian, Alexander Beldiman, one Constantin Conachi, a Moldavian, rendered Pope’s «Essay on Man» into his dry Roumanian. A gifted Greek, Athanasius Christopoulos, imitated the lyrics of France of the time of Jean Baptiste Rousseau, not forgetting his initiation into the joyous verse of Anakreon. But the Italian tradition survived. The most important of all Wallachian poets, a contemporary of Conachi, John Văcărescu, spoke and wrote good Italian, years after the dispersal of a group of twenty young Roumanians living in Venice, by order of the Sultan, who feared the danger of political contacts with the west. More, the best-known of all Italian poets, Metastasio, found in the boyar Slătineanu, a translator for his «Achilles in Schiro ».
The number of students coming from South-Eastern Europe increased, despite the vigilance of the now-alarmed Turk, who required that Roumanians should first ask permission from the Porte to leave for western centres of learning. On their return home they brought with them (in the German centres like Halle and Leipsig they made studies of medicine) foreign books of very diverse characters. Other books were disseminated in Bucharest and Jassy by the Austrian consulates which, Austria having the monopoly of the posts, drove a profitable trade in the sale of French journals and books. Lists of imported works, in which the best and the worst of the market were incontinently mingled, are fortunately extant.
But out of all this no original Roumanian manifestation appeared in the two principalities, as had happened, at least, in all other countries of South-Eastern Europe ; no genuine product of the national psychology occurred. The honour of having done so, however, lies with Roumanian Transylvania as regards the declining years of the eighteenth century. Here, German influence prevailed, due to the Habsburg domination of the province. The conquering emperor, who wrested from the Turks this ancient home of the Roumanian race, which had been occupied by the Hungarians for a thousand years and was later the refuge of Hungarian autonomy, was only responsible for the introduction of soldiers, officials and Jesuits, whose orders were to destroy the Calvinism of the Hungarians, if not Saxon Lutheranism too. Some German elementary schools were set up about 1780, for an exclusively political purpose, providing a German mode of culture, the character of which is to be defined.
None of the movement begun by Ressing and so gloriously carried on by Schiller and Goethe was evident: all that was present was the Austrian Court-culture of a philosophical nature, strongly influenced in its turn by contemporary French and Italian elements, Vienna, the city of Metastasio, being then also a centre of Italian art, music and literature.
A Transylvanian, employed as judge during the later days of his life in Galicia, John Budai Deleanu, is the splendid result of the Viennese synthesis as applied to Roumanian realities. His gipsies, his old warriors of the 15th century are truly representative of Roumanian life, but the philosophy of France echoes throughout his sentences and not merely were the stanzas of Ariosto employed for a language in the course of literary development, but the types and images of the great Italian singer of fairies and epic deeds were made to serve the turn of the Transylvanian.
Attempts to perform plays in Greek are mentioned before the nineteenth century, at a time when French and German plays also presented classical and modern themes to a select and very small public. But in Roumania more than in liberated Greece, had the national theatre been established by young noblemen.
This explains the rapid increase, especially in Bucharest, of theatrical repertory. Molière’s works were, here again, the first to be made use of. The more cultured of the sons of the prominent families inscribed themselves as translators; certain of their translations have the charm of a certain naivete. The grandson of the old Italian scholar Văcărescu, Iancu, proved himself capable of attaining the pure, serene heights of Racine. It was only by a hazard, through the agency of a Greek, Aristia, who had perhaps been educated in an Italian school, that the noble accents of Alfieri’s speech in « Saul» could be clothed in a Roumanian garment, to receive the acclamations of an appreciative public in the capital of Wallachia.
If the classical theatre was able to find appreciation, not so the novel and the poem. In South-Eastern Europe, the fashion had passed on to the new romantic movement, The patron of contemporary Roumanian literature, John Eliad, a former teacher of local traditional form, was a pamphleteer of great talent; not a truly inspired poet, notwithstanding his very high ideals as regards also the epic form, he was the introducer of Lamartine to Wallachia; the Moldavian Constantin Ne-gruzzi, in his early years a classical writer and an imitator of epics like the « Henriade », also knew the Russian romantic poetry of Pushkin, and translated the -«Odes et Ballades » of Hugo. The fantasy in the little sketches of this writer is similar to that so lavishly employed by Washington Irving: the source was from such French novelists as Charles Nodier.
In Greece, the brothers Soutzo, Alexander and Panagiotes, were classics, though they failed to approach Lord Byron in satire, or declamatory and martial poesy. Serbia alone remained faithful its own particular source of inspiration — the mediaeval sagas of Kossovo.
All chords of the romantic lyre were struck in Roumania by Basil Alexandri, who did not disdain in his maturity to essay the epic in the manner of the 18th century. Popular poetry collected by himself in his native valleys of Moldavia, the Lamartinian lake, the lagoons of Venice or the waters of the Golden Horn, stark scenes of battle with the traditional enemies of his race, copies of the far-fetched historical plays of Hugo, all these are to be found in his writings without complete adaptation or original synthesis. A great « representative man » as regards prolificity rather than profundity. No other country of
Soutli-Eastern Europe can pride itself on so generous an interpreter of the French romantics.
Alexandri, who spoke some Italian, without however being conversant with either the old or new Italian literature, and who despised the German, mingled no other inspiration with that which he derived from Lamartine and Hugo. The author of the « Bonnets de la Comtesse », the correspondent of Edouard Grenier, who resided for some time in Jassy as the secretary of Prince Gregory Ghica, at one time in his career the Roumanian Minister in Paris, remained French in sympathies to the end.
In the sixtieth year of the century, just as Greece had in Rhizo Rhangabe a supporter of French literature, so Roumania was fortunate in producing such an exponent of European poetry as Michael Eminescu. This son of a Moldavian farmer and descendant of a family of petty yeomen, as did the Transylvanian Budai Deleanu, found material in all trends of European literature, and was the most noble and intellectual personality of his age. His leanings towards all forms and periods of German literature from the classics of Weimar to the later representatives of romanticism such as Lenau and Platen were easily identifiable. In Roumania and, more even than in Roumania, in the Bucovina (which is that part of Moldavia occupied by the Austrians in 1775), where no other Roumanian litterature was to be found as text-books for schools and works dealing with local historical research, the German litterature was known and, in course of time, appreciated. Eminescu was also a pupil of the Roumanian school in the Bucovina and lived for some years in Vienna, then a centre of German intellectuality, though not of the more pronounced type of the western states. He was acquainted with the philosophical ideas of Germany, not excepting the negative works of Schopenhauer.
He was interested in all social questions of the period and his political conceptions were founded on the noblest principles of European thought.
He was no exclusive follower of the Germans, however ; his solid classical training preserved him from falling a slave to any one foreign influence. He merely passed through Italy, but French literature was not unknown to him, and in some of his best philosophical poems the inspiration of Alfred de Vigny, the scornfully romantic apostle of unvanquished human pride is undeniably present.
Above all, he knew all there was to be known of the lore of his race: folk-songs, superstitious beliefs, legends, the history of centuries of conflict, all were within his ken. He had lived in nearly all the provinces of free and en laved Roumania, and his poetry was integral synthesis of all Roumanian vitality, past and present. In his own country he has ruled supreme to the present day. The exclusive influence of the later period of French literature was taken into account only by certain intellectuals, against whom the generation of 1900 to 1910 fought a victorious battle, re-establishing true good taste and much-needed national inspiration. After the war, with another current proceeding from Austrian or, more generally, the European modernism of Rilke, the old fashion returned and for many modern poets it is today the only true Mecca towards which to strive. But at least sound tradition cannot be destroyed by the vain caprices of imitators or improvisors, any more than by the technicians of high-sounding syllables.
Greece and Serbia themselves passed through a similar period of transition without however finding so definite a genius as Eminescu. In the former country the first waves of inspiration in modern poetry were French, to wit in the works of Rhigas, author of the Greek « Marseillaise », the martyr of the national cause who, in Bucharest, came into touch with French revolutionary ideas, or Italian, as in the case of Salomos, the author of a much more impressive hymn of liberty in the classical style. In her relations with the Latin West the Ionian Islands played the same role for Greece as Ragusa for the Serbs, in the 16th and 17th centuries, and as Poland and Transylvania for Roumania. But, soon after the creation of the Balkan States, the problem of the new literature presented itself in particularly pressing form. The writers of the former centuries used the old Hellenic forms which could no longer be retained if the Greeks of the predominating class, at least, were to have the privilege of understanding their own literature. For such as Zalakostas and Valaoritis, the forging of a new language was a matter of some difficulty, and each resolved the problem in his own manner. But no Tuscany was available for the Greeks and it was impossible to blend the particularities of very different districts in order to mould the national literature to a general form. Notwitstanding this, the importance of the question produced good results: instead of pursuing the path of servile imitation, the poets gave all their attention to the philological problem. Thus the poetry of Kostas Palamas is in the deepest sense of the word Greek — purely Greek.
As regards Serbia, the abandonment of over-hackneyed themes comprised within the cycle of Kossovo cried the need of new directives. Notwithstanding Serbia’s former relations with Austria and Hungary, they were not found there. After a period of indecision lasting for nearly a quarter of a century, and the vogue of the new heroic poetry, of a local character, by Zmaj Jovanović, the new French forms of the Parnassian school were adopted. Borrowing the vague style of Henri de Régnier, men like
Ducid and Rakic wrote fine poems, of a rare delicacy and a deep philosophy. Following the steps of a great and completely original author of Ragusan plays, Voinovid, after the war a revival of the national forms has set in and, indeed, was to be anticipated.