Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/26



Soutli-Eastern Europe can pride itself on so generous an interpreter of the French romantics.

Alexandri, who spoke some Italian, without however being conversant with either the old or new Italian literature, and who despised the German, mingled no other inspiration with that which he derived from Lamartine and Hugo. The author of the « Bonnets de la Comtesse », the correspondent of Edouard Grenier, who resided for some time in Jassy as the secretary of Prince Gregory Ghica, at one time in his career the Roumanian Minister in Paris, remained French in sympathies to the end.

In the sixtieth year of the century, just as Greece had in Rhizo Rhangabe a supporter of French literature, so Roumania was fortunate in producing such an exponent of European poetry as Michael Eminescu. This son of a Moldavian farmer and descendant of a family of petty yeomen, as did the Transylvanian Budai Deleanu, found material in all trends of European literature, and was the most noble and intellectual personality of his age. His leanings towards all forms and periods of German literature from the classics of Weimar to the later representatives of romanticism such as Lenau and Platen were easily identifiable. In Roumania and, more even than in Roumania, in the Bucovina (which is that part of Moldavia occupied by the Austrians in 1775), where no other Roumanian litterature was to be found as text-books for schools and works dealing with local historical research, the German litterature was known and, in course of time, appreciated. Eminescu was also a pupil of the Roumanian school in the Bucovina and lived for some years in Vienna, then a centre of German intellectuality, though not of the more pronounced type of the western states. He was acquainted with the philosophical ideas of Germany, not excepting the negative works of Schopenhauer.