Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/139

 middle of the 19th century. It was the adaptation of occidental and oriental traditions to suit the needs of the local folk-lore.

The same thing occurred in literature. At a time when the monks, the secretaries of the princes and the writers of the meagre annals now surviving in the Slavonic tongue, borrowed from the Slavs in the Balkans and from the Ruthenians under the sceptre of Poland, the poetry of the people sweetly sang the sufferings of loving hearts and the valiant deeds of warrior-princes, of which the Serbs, masters of the ballad, and themselves imitators of the French, were the teachers. No difference existed in these products of the general Roumanian soul between the higher and the lower classes of the Eastern and Western districts; the wandering shepherds took with them the plaintive doinas and the singers at the feasts of the princes did not attempt to differentiate between Wallachian or Moldavian epics.

When, in the 17th century, cultivated literature appeared in the Roumanian language, Moldavia took the lead, her chroniclers recalling the glorious Latin origins of the race and her priests inculcating in the people a mild Christianity, as that of the Archbishop Dositheus, who translated the psalms in verse. All that was achieved in the northern principality was imitated, adopted and developed by the southern. About 1690 the Gospel, after many attempts, was presented in a definitive form. A single Roumanian style abolished the particularities of the different provinces. As in the popular ballad, the same note of generality, the same possibility of its being understood by all members of the nations is the characteristic feature of this literature.

Of later days the cultured poets and writers of prose in the 18th and 19th centuries naturally employed this rare element