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. Nodier's life had been one of strange vicissitudes; he had been an _emigré_ in the Jura, a newspaper editor in Illyria, and now he was a librarian in Paris.[1] His most remarkable characteristic as an author is that he is always from ten to twenty years in advance of every literary movement. His novel _Jean Sbogar_, the story of a species of Illyrian Karl Moor, which he planned in Illyria in 1812 and published in 1818, although improbable and uninteresting as a tale, is remarkable from the fact that its author, long before the days of Proudhon and modern communism, has put some of the most striking truths and untruths of the communistic faith into the mouth of his hero. Jean Sbogar writes:-- "The poor man's theft from the rich man would, if we were to go back to the origin of social conditions, prove to be merely the just return of a piece of silver or of bread from the hands of the thief to the hands of the man from whom it was stolen." "Show me a power which dares to assume the name of law, and I shall show you theft assuming the name of property."