Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/19

 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,