"L'empereur est pareil à l'aigle, sa compagne.
A la place du cœur, il n'a qu'un ecusson!"
Such words as these produced a powerful effect on the ambitious young men who were the real audience of the play. The drama, the tragedy, of ambition moved them as deeply as the drama of independence. They knew that great public aims are attained, great tasks accomplished only by manly resolution nourished upon the intensest emotions, longings, and joys of the heart, which have been offered as a burnt-offering on the altar of the aim—therefore they understood Carlos.
Nevertheless the fifth act, with the duet between the lovers, is in its purely lyric excellence the gem of the play. Here was love as those young men felt it and desired to have it represented. This dialogue on the threshold of the bridal chamber which the lovers are never to enter; this blending of a happiness so great and intense that, as Hernani says, it demands hearts of bronze on which to engrave itself, with all the horrors of annihilation; this sensual feeling, which is chaste and harmonious in her, pure and ardent in him, blissful in both; Donna Sol's supra-mundane enthusiasm; Hernani's longing to forget the past in the present and its peace—all this was Romanticism of the kind the youth of the day demanded and greeted with thunders of applause.
As a drama Hernani is extremely imperfect; it is a lyrical, rhetorical work, containing much that is extravagant. But it has the one, all-important merit, namely, that in it an independent and remarkable human soul has expressed itself unrestrainedly. From such a work it is possible to learn much of its author's mental idiosyncrasy. He is there with his genius, his limitations, his character, his whole past—with his conceptions of liberty and authority, of honour and nobility, of love and of death.
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.
[IV]
CHARLES NODIER
From the year 1824 onwards Hugo, Dumas, Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve, De Musset, and De Vigny met almost every Sunday evening at the house of a friend who that year took up his residence in the outskirts of Paris, near the Arsenal, in a modest dwelling which went by the name of the Little Tuileries. Their host was a man who in point of age belonged to the previous generation (he was born in 1780), but who in his mental attitude had anticipated the nascent literature, which he consequently at once and without hesitation took under his protection. His name was Charles Nodier.