MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON I HAVE been busy this week preparing for the Franco-Belgian Tribune in Brussels a lecture on the subject of " French Influence Upon English Literature." As I re-examined this once familiar subject after a gap of many years, I came to the conclusion that the assumptions which I had previously accepted bore but little relation to the facts. I had been taught at school that it was Chaucer who gave to English literature that French polish which he had acquired at the Court of Richard II. I had been led to assume that French influence had invaded this island in a series of recognisable waves ; that when he became satiated wtih our own romanticism we adopted with relief the discipline of French formality ; and that when after a while we became bored by an alien classicism we reacted against it in a burst of romantic resistance. I had been informed, more- over, that French influence always receded when the political relations between the two countries became strained, and that it was during those rare periods when the two countries were at peace with each other that the effect of Paris upon London became most marked. A neat pattern had in this way been impressed on my mind, which for all these years I had accepted without revolt. On the one hand, there was French " classicism " which affected our modes of thought during those periods when our great gifts of imagination had become disordered and overgrown ; on the other hand, there was British " romanticism " which invaded France during those periods when ,he had become bored with the orderly perspectives, the clipped hedges, of her national design. This all sounded easy and convincing, and in fact, the theory can be supported by many telling illustrations. You have the influence of Boileau upon Pope ; you have the influence of Byron upon Lamartine. Yet somehow the scepticism of maturer age refuses to accept these obvious and facile patterns. The tides of influence. in their variegated ebb and flow, are not quite so neat and distinguishable as all that.
Previous page
