Frenchman to follow the English in mingling the sacred with the profane and in boldly employing a distinctly secular work as the vehicle of earnest convictions. Thus in following Rousseau over the same ground Mme. de Staël merely consolidated and justified in the sphere of criticism a revolution which had already been accomplished in that of imaginative literature.

But by so doing she did but place one gulf the more between the "French and Catholic" spirit, and the "Teutonic and Protestant" spirit. She introduced an entirely fresh element, afterwards, as every one knows, turned to account by Taine, into the definitions of Southerner and Northerner respectively. She gave a more rigorous statement of the problem of race, upon which cosmopolitanism depends. She made her readers keenly sensible of a fact which the Protestant books of Ibsen and George Eliot have since given us occasion to repeat, that to a large extent "the differences between literatures are bound up with the profound differences between peoples."

Conclusion

THE COSMOPOLITAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE DURING THE

NINETEENTH CENTURY

I

To give precision to an idea is to render it fruitful.

De la Littérature, the book we have been discussing, gave form to the aspirations of the eighteenth century; it was the logical outcome of the work undertaken and continued, from the close of the seventeenth century onwards, by the refugees, by Prévost, by Voltaire and by Diderot; from the books of Rousseau and the English it extracted, not perhaps such a theory of poetry as might have been written by Rousseau, but at any rate that of which his books contained the germ. Through Mme. de Staël, and because she identified the influence of Jean-Jacques with the influence of the northern literatures, the " genius of the North" became, in a manner, conscious of itself. It became a power in literary criticism, and from the standpoint of classical tradition a danger. More or less explicitly it assumed an attitude of opposition to the ancient tradition of France. It definitely took its place in the concert of European powers, never again to surrender it. But a few years, and Lamartine, on submitting his earliest poems, entitled Méditations, to Didot the publisher, received the characteristic reply: "Give up novelties like these, which would denationalise the French genius."1 Again a few years and the romantic school, in the name of "the literature of the North", made war upon the "French genius"; one of its members, in the heat of battle, going so far as to exclaim: "The English and the Germans for ever! Give me nature in all its fierceness and 1 See Raphaël.

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brutality!" And Stendhal was found to say with a sort of fierce joy "Spite of all the pedants, Germany and England will win the day against France; Shakespeare, Schiller and Lord Byron will prevail over Racine and Boileau." 2

To-day there is no longer any doubt that Stendhal was wrong, that neither Lord Byron nor Schiller have caused or will cause Racine to be forgotten, and that romanticism was in no sense a defeat of the French by the German intellect. There is even something puerile in the very idea. If it were true, France would have given up reading French books from 1823 down to the present time, and like Germany during the early years of the eighteenth century would have handed itself over, bound hand and foot, to foreign influences. What period of French literary history has been more fruitful than that which extends from 1820 to 1848? What writers have been more truly and entirely national than Hugo, Vigny and Michelet? What literature has exerted greater influence, or shone with more lustre in Europe during the past fifty years, than the French ?-On these points facts speak so plainly that they require no commentary. "The true strength of a country"-wrote Mme. de Staël, indiscreetly enough" lies in the character natural to it, and the imitation of foreign nations, in any respect whatever, implies a lack of patriotism." I am not so sure of this; I really do not think that Corneille was wanting in patriotism because he borrowed le Cid from Spanish sources, or Molière because he took l'Étourdi from the Italians, or Racine because he went to the Greek authors-who also, after all, are "foreigners"-for the subjects of his tragedies. Imitation is not abdication, and it would be the easiest of tasks to show that Lamartine is none the less Lamartine because he imitated Byron, and Musset none the less Musset because his comedies are inspired by Shakespeare. At no period in its history-not even, nay, least of all, in the middle ages-has the literature of France been shut up within itself. "The literature that confines itself within its own frontiers," writes M. Gaston Paris, "especially at a period so stirring and so fruitful as our own, thereby 1 L. Thiessé, Mercure du xixe siècle, 1826 (quoted by Dorison, Alfred de Vigny). 2 Racine et Shakespeare, p. 246.

condemns itself to a stunted and withered existence." French romanticism avoided this narrow-minded course. By calling to mind what it owes to neighbouring literatures we do not diminish its originality. No one, in fact, disputes that the great writers who followed Rousseau and Mme. de Staël are "French" writers in the full sense of the word. If they were not, it would not be worth while to investigate the origins of the revolution they have accomplished, nor would it take us long to learn all that there is to know about the spirit by which they were animated.

But it is because they are strongly individual, full of life, and, when all is said and done, highly original, that it is, to say the least, imprudent to claim for them a function they did not fulfil, that of inauguration. Just as of old the literatures of antiquity, working like a leaven within the French mind, occasioned the rise of the classical literature of France, so the "literatures of the North," during the last century and the present one, have caused the germination of the great harvest of romanticism. To employ the apt phrase of Arvède Barine, they imparted to the French race a powerful intellectual shock, the vibrations of which have since "lost themselves in that vortex of forces whose resultant is the French genius." And this in two ways; firstly and principally through Rousseau, who not only supplemented that genius by a turn of mind, an imagination, and a sensibility which were already of a northern cast, but also, as Mme. de Staël expressed it, infused it with "foreign vigour"; and, in the second place, through the English works which, during the present century, have been followed by those of the Germans and the Russians, and have exerted a profound influence, not altogether distinct from that of Rousseau himself, upon the whole of the romantic generation. If romanticism was in reality "a rebellion against the spirit of a race which had become latinized to the core". the phrase is M. Brunetière's, it was truly Rousseau who raised the standard of revolt. Benjamin Constant, said SainteBeuve, is "of the lineage of Rousseau, with a tinge of Germanic blood in his veins." Most of the French romantic school are of the same extraction as Benjamin Constant.

Mme. de Staël said precisely the same, and we must congratulate her thereon.

But even had we to leave this problem of the foreign sources of romanticism unsolved, we should none the less be justified in closely following the fortunes of the "cosmopolitan" idea during our own century. A question that blocks our way is not to be set aside as unimportant or obscure by a mere stroke of the pen. The mere fact that this question has occupied the minds of several generations of men, including certain writers of genius, gives it a right of citizenship in the history of ideas. Attempts were formerly made to convict Macpherson of skilful imposture. But the poems of Ossian, whether authentic or not, remain a monument in the literary history of Europe, and nothing can alter the fact that Chateaubriand ranked Ossian higher than Homer.Similarly, it is impossible for the most sceptical of critics, the most incredulous with regard to "the French spirit" and "the Germanic genius," to change the fact that this entity-"northern literature"-has exercised a most powerful influence over the men of our own epoch. Doubtless it will be open to him to dispute the strength of the historical scaffolding with which Mme. de Staël supported her theory; he will be free to scoff at her misty and mythical Ossian, and to deny the Caledonia of the poets; he may spare himself the trouble of following the author of De la Littérature and her critic, Fontanes, in their inquiry "whether the progress of the arts is from the North to the South, or from the South to the North." If, lastly, he calls in the assistance of ethnography, he may adduce proofs against Taine that his theory of the European races is false, that there is neither a purely "Latin" nor a purely "Germanic" group of peoples, and that the English nation contains many other elements than that which consists of a cross between Norman and Saxon.1 We may even admit, should he insist upon the point, that none of the European races has a genius peculiar to itself. Will the historian be, on this account, any the less bound to recount the vicissitudes of the "cosmopolitan spirit in literature" during the nineteenth century?

1 Cf. Angellier, Robert Burns, Introduction, and the first volume of M. J. Jusserand's fine work, Histoire littéraire du peuple anglais.