When, after the lapse of many years, we dryly say or write the words, "they formed a school," we seldom take the trouble to conjure up any adequately vivid impression of what the formation of a school of literature and art signifies. There is a mysterious magic about the process. Some one remarkable man, after a long unconscious or half-conscious struggle, finally with full consciousness, frees himself from prejudices and attains to clearness of vision; then, everything being ready, the lightning of genius illuminates what he beholds. Such a man gives utterance (as did Hugo in a prose preface of some score of pages) to some thoughts which have never been thought or expressed in the same manner before. They may be only half true, they may be vague, but they have this remarkable quality that, in spite of more or less indefiniteness, they affront all traditional prejudices and wound the vanity of the day where it is most vulnerable, whilst they ring in the ears of the young generation like a call, like a new, audacious watchword. What happens? Scarcely are these words spoken than there comes with the speed and precision of an echo a thousand-tongued answer from the wounded vanities and injured interests, an answer like the furious baying of a hundred packs of hounds. And what more? First one man, then another, then a third, comes to the spokesman of the new tendency, each with his own standpoint, each with his revolt, his ambition, his need, his hope, his resolve. They show him that the words he has spoken are incarnated in them. Some communicate directly with him, some with each other in his spirit and his name. Men who but lately were as unknown to each other as they still are to the public, who have been spiritually languishing, each in his separate seclusion, now meet and marvel to find that they understand each other, that they speak the same language, a language unknown to the rest of their contemporaries. They are young, yet all are already in possession of what to them constitutes life; the one has his dearly-bought joys, the other his bracing sufferings; and from these life-elements each has extracted his own portion of enthusiasm. Their meeting is electric; they exchange ideas with youthful haste, impart to each other their various sympathies and antipathies, enthusiasms and detestations; and all these well-springs of feeling flow together like the streams that form a river.