It was in the expression of love that Christophe was most rawly conscious of untruth: for he was in a position to compare it with the reality. The conventional love songs, lacrymose and proper, contained nothing like the desires of man or the heart of woman. And yet the people who had written them must have loved at least once in their lives! Was it possible that they could have loved like that? No, no, they had lied, as they always did, they had lied to themselves: they had tried to idealize themselves.... Idealism! That meant that they were afraid of looking at life squarely, were incapable of seeing things like a man, as they are.--Everywhere the same timidity, the same lack of manly frankness. Everywhere the same chilly enthusiasm, the same pompous lying solemnity, in their patriotism, in their drinking, in their religion. The _Trinklieder_ (Drinking Songs) were prosopopeia to wine and the bowl: _"Du, herrlich Glas ..."_ ("Thou, noble glass ..."). Faith--the one thing in the world which should be spontaneous, springing from the soul like an unexpected sudden stream--was a manufactured article, a commodity of trade. Their patriotic songs were made for docile flocks of sheep basking in unison.... Shout, then!--What! Must you go on lying--"_idealizing_"--till you are surfeited, till it brings you to slaughter and madness!... Christophe ended by hating all idealism. He preferred frank brutality to such lying. But at heart he was more of an idealist than the rest, and he had not--he could not have--any more real enemies than the brutal realists whom he thought he preferred. He was blinded by passion. He was frozen by the mist, the anæmic lying, "the sunless phantom Ideas." With his whole being he reached upwards to the sun. In his youthful contempt for the hypocrisy with which he was surrounded, or for what he took to be hypocrisy, he did not see the high, practical wisdom of the race which little by little had built up for itself its grandiose idealism in order to suppress its savage instincts, or to turn them to account. Not arbitrary reasons, not moral and religious codes, not legislators and statesmen, priests and philosophers, transform the souls of peoples and often impose upon them a new nature: but centuries of misfortune and experience, which forge the life of peoples who have the will to live. * * * * *