Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/25

 a Roumanian garment, to receive the acclamations of an appreciative public in the capital of Wallachia.

If the classical theatre was able to find appreciation, not so the novel and the poem. In South-Eastern Europe, the fashion had passed on to the new romantic movement, The patron of contemporary Roumanian literature, John Eliad, a former teacher of local traditional form, was a pamphleteer of great talent; not a truly inspired poet, notwithstanding his very high ideals as regards also the epic form, he was the introducer of Lamartine to Wallachia; the Moldavian Constantin Ne-gruzzi, in his early years a classical writer and an imitator of epics like the « Henriade », also knew the Russian romantic poetry of Pushkin, and translated the -«Odes et Ballades » of Hugo. The fantasy in the little sketches of this writer is similar to that so lavishly employed by Washington Irving: the source was from such French novelists as Charles Nodier.

In Greece, the brothers Soutzo, Alexander and Panagiotes, were classics, though they failed to approach Lord Byron in satire, or declamatory and martial poesy. Serbia alone remained faithful its own particular source of inspiration — the mediaeval sagas of Kossovo.

All chords of the romantic lyre were struck in Roumania by Basil Alexandri, who did not disdain in his maturity to essay the epic in the manner of the 18th century. Popular poetry collected by himself in his native valleys of Moldavia, the Lamartinian lake, the lagoons of Venice or the waters of the Golden Horn, stark scenes of battle with the traditional enemies of his race, copies of the far-fetched historical plays of Hugo, all these are to be found in his writings without complete adaptation or original synthesis. A great « representative man » as regards prolificity rather than profundity. No other country of