THE LITERATURES OF FRANCE, ENGLAND, AND GERMANY

Twice at least in the course of their long history, it is known that the literature and even the language of France has exerted over the whole of Europe an influence, whose universal character other languages perhaps more harmonious,—­Italian for instance,—­and other literatures more original in certain respects, like English literature, have never possessed.  It is in a purely French form that our mediaeval poems, our ‘Chansons de Geste,’ our ‘Romances of the Round Table,’ our fabliaux themselves, whencesoever they came,—­Germany or Tuscany, England or Brittany, Asia or Greece,—­conquered, fascinated, charmed, from one end of Europe to the other, the imaginations of the Middle Ages.  The amorous languor and the subtlety of our “courteous poetry” are breathed no less by the madrigals of Shakespeare himself than by Petrarch’s sonnets; and after such a long lapse of time we still discover something that comes from us even in the Wagnerian drama, for instance in ‘Parsifal’ or in ‘Tristan and Isolde.’  A long time later, in a Europe belonging entirely to classicism, from the beginning of the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century, during one hundred and fifty years or even longer, French literature possessed a real sovereignty in Italy, in Spain, in England, and in Germany.  Do not the names of Algarotti, Bettinelli, Beccaria, Filengieri, almost belong to France?  What shall I say of the famous Gottschedt?  Shall I recall the fact that in his victorious struggle against Voltaire, Lessing had to call in Diderot’s assistance?  And who ignores that if Rivarol wrote his ’Discourse upon the Universality of the French Language,’ it can be charged neither to his vanity nor to our national vanity, since he was himself half Italian, and the subject had been proposed by the Academy of Berlin?

All sorts of reasons have been given for this universality of French literature:  some were statistical, if I may say so, some geographical, political, linguistic.  But the true one, the good one, is different:  it must be found in the supremely sociable character of the literature itself.  If at that time our great writers were understood and appreciated by everybody, it is because they were addressing everybody, or better, because they were speaking to all concerning the interests of all.  They were attracted neither by exceptions nor by peculiarities:  they cared to treat only of man in general, or as is also said, of the universal man, restrained by the ties of human society; and their very success shows that below all that distinguishes, say, an Italian from a German, this universal man whose reality has so often been discussed, persists and lives, and though constantly changing never loses his own likeness....