Youth and Egolatry by Pío Baroja
page 43 of 206 (20%)
page 43 of 206 (20%)
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obverse and reverse.
The same thing occurs sometimes also among painters. The evolution of El Greco in painting upsets the whole theory of art. There is no instance of a like transformation either in ancient or modern literature. Some such change has been imputed to Goethe, but I see nothing more in this author than a short preliminary period of exalted feeling, followed by a lifetime dominated by study and the intellect. Among other writers there is not even the suggestion of change. Shakespeare is alike in all his works; Calderon and Cervantes are always the same, and this is equally true of our modern authors. The first pages of Dickens, of Tolstoi or of Zola could be inserted among the last, and nobody would be the wiser. Even the erudite rhetorical poets, the Victor Hugos, the Gautiers, and our Spanish Zorrillas, never get outside of their own rhetoric. BAROJA, YOU WILL NEVER AMOUNT TO ANYTHING (_A Refrain_) "Baroja does not amount to anything, and I presume that he will never amount to anything," Ortega y Gasset observes in the first issue of the |
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