452 ROMANCE LITERATURE 



not equally to admire and love him, as Alessandro Manzoni admired 

 and loved him with his whole soul. I find a resemblance, 'striking 

 in every respect, between Fauriel and him who would surely (and 

 how much more worthily!) have spoken to you in my place, if he had 

 not been taken from us before 'his time. He shared with Gaston 

 Paris an unquenchable thirst of knowledge. This thirst led them 

 in great part to the same sources: classical languages and literature, 

 modern literature, Romance and Germanic, the literature of the 

 Middle Ages, linguistics, which in Fauriel's time had hardly begun, 

 and popular poetry; and Fauriel accomplished what Paris only 

 longed for. 1 He mastered two Oriental languages: Sanscrit (which, 

 together with Chezy and Frederick Schlegel, he introduced among 

 the French) and Arabic. And if Gaston Paris knew Russian, 

 Fauriel knew the Bask language, and moreover Celtic, which might 

 make him the object of special envy. I regret to break off this com- 

 parison without exhausting it. 



Averse, as much as -any one ever was, to notoriety, Fauriel had 

 communicated but little to the public of his persistent and manifold 

 studies, of his intense meditations, when, almost sixty years old, he 

 was installed in the chair of the Faculte des Lettres. From thence 

 he spoke, and this was his principal mode of publication. In 1831 

 and 1832 he lectured on Provencal poetry; in the two following 

 years on Dante, of what preceded and prepared him, of the lin- 

 guistic history of Italy. And the habit of writing his lectures per- 

 mitted, sooner or later after his death, these courses at least, 

 amongst many he had held, to be published in book form. 2 They 

 are as rich in thought as in fact, and can still be valuable to whoever 

 runs no risk of being carried away by certain aberrations. They con- 

 tain yeast for many a batch of bread. The most noteworthy thing in 

 Fauriel, and that which shows him essentially modern, is his vivid 

 curiosity concerning origins. With this, and to the strong liking 

 which, from earliest youth, he had felt for simple and spontaneous 

 poetry, was allied his intense interest in epic poetry. He had 

 studied (and this means that he compared) the Indian, the Persian, 

 and the Germanic as well as the Greek monuments. And he was 

 well acquainted with Wolf's ideas concerning Homeric poems. 3 

 What a pity that, being a southerner, he was soon attracted more 

 by the literature of the langue d'oc than by that of the langue d'o'il, 

 and that the very nature of his chair made him persevere in this to 

 the end! The consequence of this was that, instead of studying 



1 SOP the note of my commemorative speech on Paris in the Atli deHa R. Acca- 

 dcmin dell a Criisca, " Adunanza pubblicn del di 27 dicembre, 1903," Firenze, 1904. 



2 The one. in 1S47, under the title Histoire de la Poisie Provencale ; the other, 

 seven years later, Dnnte ft Irs Origines de la Lnnyne ci de la Literature italiennes, 



3 See what is said by Mohl in the Histoire de la Poisie Provenrale, vol. n, p. 223; 

 and a short note of mine in the Romania, vol. xiv, p. 402. 



