Jefferson  is  somewhere  reported  to  have  said
that  if  he  could  not  live  in  America,  he  should
find  France  the  most  congenial  to  his  mode  of
thought  of  all  nations;  Franklin  certainly  gave
no  different  impresson  to  the  land  that  so
highly  honored  him.  The  Englishman  Thomas
Paine,  rejected  by  his  country  and  adopted  by
America  and  by  France,  as  it  were  in  concerted
protest  against  the  ideas  of  the  common  enemy,
is  only  a  striking  example  of  the  trend  of  inter
national  opinion.  Is  it  not  easily  comprehen
sible  that  the  ordinary  French  reader  of  the
'20's  should  have  been  a  little  disconcerted  and
a  little  piqued  at  the  anglophile  tendency  of
the  American  literature  of  that  day?  It  is  a
noteworthy  fact  that  the  critics  of  this  litera
ture  were  as  yet  to  come  in  France;  the  strag
gling  notes  so  far  encountered  were  for  the  most
part  written,  excepting  Daunou's,  by  hands  that
have  left  no  work  by  which  they  may  be  judged


24      FRENCH   CRITICISM   OF  AMERICAN   LITERATURE

more  trustworthy  than  the  most  casual  reviewer
for  periodicals;  and  such  indeed  they  seem  to
have  been.  But  as  such,  incidentally,  they
doubtless  represent  with  considerable  exacti
tude  the  prevalent  opinions.
