Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/393

 the common spiritual characteristics of the period." Above all, in La Légende des Siècles we have (as Hugo himself tells us in his preface) "an effort to express Humanity in a kind of cyclic work, to paint it successively and simultaneously under all the aspects—of history, fable, philosophy, religion, science—which unite in one immense movement of ascent towards the light; to show in a kind of mirror, dark and clear, that grand figure, one and multiple, gloomy and radiant—Man." Contrast this picture of the human race "considered as a grand collective individual accomplishing epoch after epoch a series of acts on the earth," with the picture of the world's past and future offered by a Miracle-play; contrast the profound depths of personality in Faust with the personages of a Morality-play; what an expansion of social sympathies, what an immense deepening of individual consciousness!

It would be easy to multiply examples of the social spirit as the grand maker of modern literature—the Prometheus of Shelley, the Ahasuerus of Edgar Quinet. It would be easy to illustrate the union of this social spirit with a spirit profoundly individual alike in the novels of George Eliot and the poetry of Walt Whitman. But our contrast of Faust with the medieval drama reminds us that, besides expanded sympathies and deepened personality, this social evolution of Europe was leaving other marks on its national literatures in new aspects of Nature and animal life. The splendid descriptions of Nature in Faust—Spring budding as old Winter flies to the bleak mountains, the green-girt cottages shimmering in the setting sun, the sunrise at the opening of the Second Part—contrast strikingly with the few bald allusions to Nature in the Mysteries and Moralities. Byron calls his Heaven and Earth and his