Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/206

 — Roumanian, Latin, Greek, Turkish, Slavonic — all topics, from the Oriental songs to a geography on the lines of the anthropogeographical essays of our own days, and to a history whose lines of original development preceded and inspired the parallel ideas of Montesquieu. French philosophy was introduced by a large number of émigrés, who were employed as teachers of languages and secretaries by princes and nobles; freemasonry had some adherents, including members of the clergy, in the latter half of the eighteenth century. French romanticism, French liberalism swept over the Roumanian cities in the past century, while German thought, which later exercised a strong influence, combined to form a new modern synthesis.

Withal, the fundamental elements in the traditional intellectual and moral training were not lost. Mihail Eminescu, the greatest Roumanian poet, and one of the foremost poets of modern Europe, shows the influence of the Germans in his enunciation of the fatal emptiness of all being; of Alfred de Vigny in the defiance which he hurls at human destiny; of the popular mind in his use of the most picturesque legends of his nation, of all the charms inherent in the rich and delicate Roumanian nature.

It was through Roumanian channels that new currents of science and arts began to flow in South-Eastern Europe; it was Roumanian intellectuals, such as Nicolae Milescu in theological studies, Demetrius Cantemir, Fellow of the Berlin Academy, in the new lay directions, Antiochus Cantemir in classical French poetry, Herescu (Cherascov) in the theatre, who introduced Russia to spheres of knowledge other than the Byzantine. Serbia was a subject country under Turkish domination, Bulgaria did not exist; the Greeks were long tutored by the Moldavians and Wallachians, who paid for and controlled their religious organizations, in the holy places, from Thessaly and