INTRODUCTION.
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art, which follows the same line of development.
The movement of art may be represented by an undulating line, the summits of the huge waves being divided sometimes by centuries, whilst the smaller waves, forming the surface of the huge ones, are separated by several generations. There has been no successor to Shakespeare or Dante or Homer, who mark the three great periods of European history.
There has been no successor to Goethe and Schiller in Germany, to Hugo and De Musset in France, or to the great novelists of the past generation, Thackery, Dickens, George Elliot and Walter Scott in England.
Russia has had a similar artistic history, although condensed into the short space of the present century. With Pushkin and Lermontov she
