supremacy of the Latin races. It was he who, in the words of Mme. de Staël, united in himself the genius of the North with the genius of the South. It was from the day when he wrote, and it was because he had written, that the literatures of the North unfolded themselves to the French mind, and took possession of it. Jean-Jacques, said Mme. de Staël once more, although he wrote in French, belongs to "the Teutonic school"; he impregnated the national genius with "foreign vigour." Employing the same idea, and giving it greater precision, M. de Vogüé has recently said: "There is one very cogent argument, and one only, which can be brought against those who would see in French romanticism a product of foreign influences, and that is that the germ of all our romanticism exists in Rousseau. But this precious fellow, who is lawful father to Bernardin and Chateaubriand, and grandfather to George Sand and the rest of them, actually has the presumption to be a Swiss. Has he not a very strongly marked foreign appearance, one which in many respects is already of a northern cast, even on his first irruption in the midst of French tradition? It is painful to have to confess it, but in order to defend ourselves from the reproach of having been poisoned with German and English virus, we are constrained to recognize that Swiss blood has, for a century past, been flowing through our inmost veins."

The whole object of this book is to exhibit Rousseau as the Iman who has done the most to create in the French nation both the taste and the need for the literatures of the North.

In the first place I have endeavoured to show that Rousseau profited greatly by the influence which had been exercised in France, ever since the commencement of the eighteenth century, by "the most remarkable of the Germanic nations"—the only one, in fact, of which that century acquired a thorough knowledge -namely, England. During the interval between his arrival in Paris in 1744 and the publication of La Nouvelle Héloïse in 1761, English influence strengthened its hold upon the French alike in science, in philosophy, in the drama and in fiction. A contemporary, struck with the current of ideas which connected the two countries during those decisive years, remarked that if at

that time France had brought a telescope to bear upon the things of the mind the instrument would have been constantly directed towards England; and Buckle once declared that this union of the French with the English intellect was "by far the most important fact in the history of the eighteenth century."1 I have studied the origins of this movement; I have tried to show how the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, by driving the national genius abroad, if I may say so, paved the way for the advent of the Northern literatures, and I have reminded the reader of the way in which the work of Protestant criticism was carried on by Muralt, Voltaire and Prévost, all of whom Rousseau had read and closely studied. Disseminated by these men of talent or of genius, English influence had, at the moment when Jean-Jacques began to write, become a power. It was the secret hope of all who, more or less vaguely, were dreaming of a revival of French literature. To Diderot, the friend of Rousseau, and to the whole of Diderot's school, England seemed the home of liberty of thought: "The Englishman," wrote one of them, borrowing both metaphor and thought from Rousseau, "never bows his head to the yoke which the majority of men bear without a murmur, but prefers freedom, however stormy, to tranquil dependence." 2

This stormy freedom of the English genius was destined to captivate Jean-Jacques. By his foreign descent, his religious convictions, and his literary aspirations, he was sooner or later to feel himself drawn towards this eighteenth century Salentum. We shall see the extent to which it actually fascinated him, and how his admiration for England, while it did not in his own mind take the form of a protest against the classical tradition of France, was rendered such by force of circum

stances.

But the anglomania of his contemporaries was not enough for Rousseau. His most celebrated work is in part an imitation of a famous English novel. Every writer of his day remarked that, as an English critic has expressed it, the soul of Clarissa

1 History of Civilization, vol. ii. p. 214.

2 Journal encyclopédique, April 1758.

b

ture.

had "transmigrated into the heroine of La Nouvelle Héloïse." 1 I have endeavoured to specify Jean-Jacques' debt to Richardson, and to show why the latter, too little known at the present day, is the precursor of the former in the history of European literaThe whole of the bourgeois literature of modern times, and this is saying a great deal, has sprung from this English novel, and, as has been excellently observed, "it is undeniable that Clarissa Harlowe stands to La Nouvelle Héloïse in this same relation as La Nouvelle Héloïse stands to Werther, René and Jacopo Ortis."2 For the first time a great English writer had served as model for one of the great writers of France. Can we wonder that Rousseau's contemporaries remarked the fact as a sign of the times?

"

Thus Rousseau felt an instinctive admiration for the English, and imitated them. He was the brilliant personification of all that was most original and most independent in the English genius. Thomson sang the praises of nature thirty years earlier, and with no less feeling, than he; twenty years before the publication of La Nouvelle Héloïse Young had given expression to that enchanting sorrow" which so charmed Saint-Preux; while old Ossian revealed the sweet springs of melancholy simultaneously with Rousseau. The works of these writers made their appearance in France when his literary career was at its height. In truth, he owes them nothing. But their influence became blended with his; in them French readers, betweeen 1760 and 1789, found the same aspirations, the same unrest, the same lyricism as they had found in Rousseau,— everything, in short, which they thirsted for but had failed to discover in the classical literature of France. How could they help being struck with the kinship between the genius of Rousseau and that of the northern writers? How could they help regarding this as an instance, to use the expression of a contemporary, of "cross-fertilization" in the intellectual sphere? Was it not inevitable that Mme. de Staël should have said that

1 Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library, 1st ed., p. 68.

2 Marc Monnier, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les étrangers, in Rousseau jugé par les Genevois d'aujourd'hui (Geneva, 1879).

he had infused the French intellect with "foreign vigour," since it was from his school that it learned to enjoy foreign works in preference to those of purely French origin? If the idea was an illusion, we can at any rate both account for it and excuse it. It was through this school-that of Rousseau and the English -that our fathers learned to appreciate what Mme. de Staël calls "the genius of the North." They became, or began to be, "cosmopolitans"; that is to say, they grew weary of the protracted supremacy of the literatures of antiquity. The ancients, wrote the author of De la Littérature not long afterwards, "leave little regret" behind them, and five-and-twenty years later the romantic school, through the medium of Stendhal, added the opinion that "spite of all the pedants, Germany and England will win the day against France."1

It is true that cosmopolitanism did not take shape as a theory until after the Revolution, with Mme. de Staël. I hope I have succeeded in showing that as an aspiration, already well-defined, it dates from the previous century, and that, in contrasting the Teutonic with the Latin genius, the new criticism simply carried the revolution effected by Rousseau to its inevitable consequence. The influence of the northern literatures has increased or diminished during the past century in proportion to that of Jean-Jacques; the reason being that the former is but the latter in another form.

It should further be observed that the French were not awakened all at once to an interest in northern literature. Just in the same way eighteenth century France failed to understand Shakespeare, and the critics treated this as a proof of its inability to appreciate the literatures of other nations. Not only, however, is it difficult to recognize Shakespeare in the crude versions of that day, but between the eighteenth century and Shakespeare there is something more than the mere difference of race, there is the gulf that separates two epochs. Not 1 Stendhal, Racine et Shakespeare (1823), p. 246.

2 Observe that down to 1776, the year in which the first volume of Letourneur's version appeared, the only manner in which French readers could become acquainted with Shakespeare was through the grotesque parody of La Place. See J. J. Jusserand, Shakespeare en France sous l'ancien régime (Paris, 1898).

all at once did the French mind, which could no longer appreciate either Ronsard or Rabelais, succeed in understanding the English Renaissance.

Nevertheless, even in the eighteenth century, it both understood and appreciated the novels of Richardson and Sterne, and the poetry of Young, Thomson, and Ossian, all of them thoroughly English writers and anything but "classical." They form the escort of Rousseau, who is greater than them all. Some are his models, others his predecessors or contemporaries. All are bound to him by a family likeness: Mme. de Staël constantly speaks of "Rousseau and the English", and she is right. The cosmopolitan spirit was born, during the eighteenth century, of the fruitful union between the English genius and that of Jean-Jacques.

Such is the thesis of the present work.

The reader will be good enough to observe that I do not identify the cosmopolitan spirit with the influence of any one in particular of the literatures of Europe. The chief place is allotted to England, because she was the first, and, for a century, practically the only, country to exercise an influence upon France. Of German literature nothing was known during the eighteenth century beyond a few names, and Gessner was the only writer with whom Rousseau was acquainted. Those who read Werther or the Robbers, which owed their inspiration to him, could discern in them one more proof of the kinship between his genius and that of the Germans. Only a few of the more inquiring minds paid any attention to the writings of "the Danes and Swedes" mentioned by Mme. de Staël. England was thus the first country to exercise an influence upon France; an influence which gave the cosmopolitan movement the tendency it has maintained throughout the present century—namely, to raise a protest, in the name of foreign and modern literature, against the influence of the classical spirit.

But is there such a thing as a "classical spirit," a "French spirit," or an "English spirit"? And what right have we to distinguish a "Germanic" from a "Latin" genius? Are not these expressions simply empty formulas, which have no real