442 ROMANCE LITERATURE 



Andres ; 1 but if they did not take too much scholarship for granted, 

 they might be those of La Harpe. 



To the nineteenth century is due the credit of turning semi-con- 

 sciousness and aspirations to full self-knowledge, and of uniting 

 brooks and torrents into one great flood. A scarcely definable in- 

 fluence is traceable even here to the French Revolution, awful 

 storm, as we are apt to figure it, which, however, cleared away an 

 unbearable sultriness, and which, whilst it strewed the ground with 

 branches and trunks, revived the energy imprisoned in the soil. It 

 certainly stands between two ages which it renders vastly different 

 one from another. 



But a foreign nation shared in a singularly large degree in the work 

 which we wish to survey: the German nation, which was led to fulfill 

 this office by a chain of circumstances, beginning with the very fact 

 of her being foreign ; a condition which might at first appear a diffi- 

 culty. This would have been an obstacle if the Germany of the eight- 

 eenth century had not purposely thrown all her windows wide open, 

 so as to look out on every side, and so that light and air might pour 

 in from every direction. The apparent disadvantage was thus 

 changed into the immense advantage of feeling for any literature, 

 for any single literary product, an interest determined only by 

 intrinsic reasons. That universality was set up as a principle was 

 due largely to the fact that, from a literary point of view, Germany 

 may be considered a new nation, just then traversing its classical 

 period. In this universality the simple and popular, to which, 

 through natural disposition and through historical motives, the 

 nation had always remained alive, shared to such a degree as often to 

 become a governing criterion. And to this, sometimes fused with it, 

 sometimes distinct, was coupled the love of national subjects. This 

 did not in the least prevent Germany from attaining great vigor of 

 speculative and scientific thought, which penetrated everywhere, 

 quickened everything, even scholarship, and for which the univers- 

 ities were fertile and marvelous workshops. It is, therefore, easy to 

 understand that the first history of modern literature, in which the 

 knowledge of facts and aesthetic considerations were on a par, should 

 be Germanic. Certainly Frederik Boutenvek, who published eleven 

 volumes from 1801 to 1819, 2 and in a deliberate succession correspond- 

 ing to an organized plan, passed from Italy to Spain and Portugal, 

 :tnd from there to France and England, ending up with Germany, did 

 not carry away a mere mass of information from his Romance teach- 

 ers. He conceives his history as a " Geschichte des asthetischen 

 Geistcs und Geschmacks," 3 and in "Geist" and "Geschmack" we 



1 Vol. i, p. 423, in the original edition of Parma. 



: Geschichte dcr Pocsic und Beredsamkcit seit clem Ende d?s dreizehntcn Jahr- 

 hvnderts. 



3 See at the very beginning the general preface at the head of the first volume. 



