Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/24



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