Читать книгу Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 5. The Romantic School in France - Георг Брандес - Страница 6

And the work presents to us not only Victor Hugo and a bit of the Spain of 1519, but the young generation of its own day and a piece of the France of 1830. Hernani is the essence of the spirit which inspired the youth of France at the time of the Revolution of July; it is an image of France which, seen in a romantic light, expands into an image of the world.

But when, instead of confining our attention to a single work, we proceed, as now, to study a whole literature, hosts of pictures of moods and thoughts, of portraits, and of images of the world, pass before us. We shall detain them to compare them with one another and see in what they agree, by this means attaining to a certainty of what the fundamental characteristic of the age is; then we shall let them pass before us in historical succession, and try, by carefully observing in what they differ from one another, to discover the law which produces these differences; we shall watch, as it were, the flight of the arrows which indicate the direction of the spiritual currents.