Italian: 'What is not refined is not Italian . . . love of perfect form and artistic finish' (Garnett); "preferring . the sensuous to the ideal" (Symonds); "la spontaneità del genio greco-latino si rebella ad un lavoro minuzioso di analisi, esigenti profondi studii e larghe cognizioni.... Uno dei caratteri più generali e più salienti del mondo latino odierno e la smania di vivere, di godere" (Robiati). Il Trionfo della Morte.

Russian: "Tolstoi is essentially a Russian writer, sharing the general mental quality of his country, of which one characteristic feature consists in the inability to bring its beliefs and feelings into harmony" (Waliszewski); "the heroes of our most remarkable poems and romances one and all suffer from the same malady, the incapacity of recognizing any aim in life, any worthy motive for activity" (Dobrolouboff, quoted in Turner).— Anna Karénina, Smoke, Dead Souls.

Spanish: "On the one hand empty honor, careless cruelty, besotted superstition, administrative corruption, and on the other sobriety, uncomplaining industry and cheerful courage" (Matthews); "no literature has so completely a national character" (F. Schlegel); essentially chivalric" (Sismondi); "complete synthesis of gravity of matter and gayety of manner" (Coventry Patmore). — Don Quixote, Pepita Jiménez.

There are few great novels which do not show the influence of more than one nationality. The history of . fiction is largely a study of international relations. For European fiction in general, there have been periods of Italian, Spanish, French, and English supremacy. The spirit of the novel could say with Browne, in the Religio Medici, "all places, all airs, make unto me one country.' Some degree of cosmopolitan influence belongs to the essential nature of certain types of fiction-pastoral and Utopian romance, the romance of chivalry, and the modern "international novel" being examples. A kind of pseudo-cosmopolitan spirit has been criticized in recent years, and contrasted with the truth of fidelity to national ideals, and with the picturesque reality of local color.

A study of great historical and political interest is found in the na tional modification of general European æsthetic movements. Pseudoclassicism was essentially French, but it underwent local variation in England, Russia, and Scandinavia. — Romanticism was an essentially Germanic movement, and while it exerted great influence in Russia and Italy, it was not fully at home in those countries. Karamzin was a disciple or imitator of Richardson, Sterne, and Rousseau, but "the romantic element in [Russian] literature was of necessity borrowed, and could not be self-created" (Turner). Foscolo imitated Werther, and Manzoni imitated Scott, but "the romantic school is at variance with all [Italian] literary traditions and . . . canons of taste" (Garnett). Garnett suggests that the lack of Gothic architecture in Italy may be a cause of anti-romantic quality in the literature.

The influence of race, like that of nationality, varies with industrial, political, and religious conditions. Race consciousness is probably deeper in some races than in others. In modern fiction it seems particularly strong in the Slav, the Jew, and the Scandinavian. Recent political and commercial movements have developed a new type of Anglo-Saxon race spirit, which has its record in fiction. In these large social fields, as well as in the individual life, "consciousness of kind" is often aroused or intensified by antagonism to another kind.

Race consciousness is clearly defined in Gogol, Tolstoi, Sienkiewicz, Björnson, and Zangwill. In Balzac it seems almost entirely obscured by the national.

Complex intermingling of the two forms of influence is abundantly exemplified in fiction. In America there is a general sense of the triumph of political unity over racial diversity. Continuity of race under very different political conditions may be studied by comparing the early Greek romances with the modern, the sagas with the Weird Tales of Jonas Lie, the novels of "Old Spain" with those of Spanish-American countries.

Many novelists have been influenced by foreign residence. Compare the native and the Parisian influences in Kielland, Turgenieff, and Henry James. The mixture of European and African blood in Dumas and in Pushkin invites the curious scientific student to investigate the twofold influence in their fiction.

154. Linguistic Influence. The general nature of language modifies the expression of the novelist, limiting it in some directions and expanding it in others. As a thinker, the novelist meets the same difficulty as essayist or philosopher in finding language forms for complete and exact embodiment of general ideas; as an artist, his descriptive imagery, his narration, his dialogue are inevitably moulded by the linguistic medium. The imperfect plastic quality of language calls for great labor or great genius in the representation of delicate shades of emotional experience, individual or social, contemporaneous or historical.

This influence is more marked in connection with specialized forms of language. Some scholars find the language to be the essential bond of national unity; dialect is an inviting but at the same time a resisting medium; the distinctions between literary and colloquial language, academic and uncultured, courtly and plebeian, are readily traced in the fiction of Europe.

Theoretically, the ideal language for the novel proper may be characterized as modern, without too much traditional influence, complex in its sources, flexible in adapting new elements, possessed of a prose form free from melodic and rhythmical emphasis, highly specialized for different social groups and mental tones, and already tempered for the novel by master hands. The qualities adapted to the short story and the romance are somewhat different.

These conditions are not met with equal success by the present languages of Europe. Greek is perhaps too reminiscent of the classical

period, and has not yet known the transforming power of a great novelist; Italian is too traditional, too conscious of Latin inheritance and of Dante, too desirous of formal perfection;1 Spanish and French probably show too much influence from academic authority. German and English - possibly "American English" in particular — seem, in theory, to be among the most novelistic of the great living tongues of the Occident.

In any form of plot-literature, more values can be preserved in translation than is possible in lyric poetry. The large objective picture of manners, the external relations of the dramatis personæ, the outline of plot-structure, etc., may be transferred from one language to another without great loss; but lyric grace, the atmosphere of mental moods, the connotation of dramatic speech, and the harmonies of language are entirely altered in translation. From the reader's point of view, that language is most novelistic which is most familiar and most habitually associated with his daily experience.

It is said that English translations of French translations of Russian novels are very remote from the linguistic atmosphere of the original. — It would be difficult to conceive d'Annunzio writing in English, or Fielding in Italian. — Criticism has suggested that George Eliot would have found German a better medium than English for her philosophical ideas. Latin, historically if not inherently, is one of the least novelistic of languages. If northern Europe had rested satisfied with Utopia, the Iter Subterraneum, and Argenis, there would have been little hope for Robinson Crusoe, Wilhelm Meister, or Dead Souls. Even the influence of Latin on other languages may injure realistic illusion, as in the heroic romance, and in Rasselas.

1 D'Annunzio, in the preface to Il Trionfo della Morte, while recognizing the inadequate expressive power of the modern Italian novelist, defends the language itself: "dico che la lingua italiana non ha nulla da invidiare e nulla da chiedere in prestito ad alcun' altra lingua europea non pur nella rappresentazione di tutto il moderno mondo esteriore ma in quella degli 'stati d'animo' più complicati e più rari in cui analista si sia mai compiaciuto da che la scienza della psiche umana è in onore."

155. Literary Influence. - Though the novel, in its best examples, is modeled in large measure directly from life, its general development has been influenced by most of the other types of literature, and there are few individual masterpieces in which both remote and immediate literary influence may not be profitably studied. A grouping of these types arranged approximately according to increasing degree of influence upon the Stoffgeschichte and Formgeschichte of the novel, might appear somewhat as follows:

(1) The lyric, the ballad, satirical, descriptive, and pastoral poetry. The medieval ballad literature is causally related to the romance of chivalry and the prose saga; the revival of ballad spirit, and the development of a school of landscape poetry in the eighteenth century are intimately associated with the romantic movement in prose fiction; the relations of verse pastoral to pastoral romance are readily traced.

(2) Philosophy, science, criticism, the essay. The scientific spirit is not only influential on the realism and naturalism of the nineteenth century, but is clearly represented in the voyage imaginaire of the Renaissance, as in The New Atlantis and Cyrano de Bergerac's États et Empire de la Lune, and in the reactionary views in Gulliver. The political philosophy of Plato had direct influence on Utopian fiction, and that of Rousseau on the "revolutionary novel," as in Caleb Williams. Positivism guided the ethical spirit of George Eliot, and materialism of a later date, with evo lutionary doctrine, have almost created as well as controlled the school of Zola. By way of reaction, idealism, even mysticism, are now having their turn. Esthetic criticism in general, and criticism of the epic, drama, and novel in particular, have always exerted considerable influence.