In this romance, Germany likewise is viewed in a twofold aspect; but whereas France is seen first from without, with the eyes of a German, and then from within, with the eyes of a Frenchman, Germany is first viewed from within and then regarded from abroad. Moreover, just as happened in the case of France, two worlds are imperceptibly superimposed one upon the other; a clamant civilization and a silent one, a false culture and a true. We see respectively the old Germany, which sought its heroism in the things of the spirit, discovered its profundity in truth; and the new Germany, intoxicated with its own strength, grasping at the powers of the reason which as a philosophical discipline had transformed the world, and perverting them to the uses of business efficiency. It is not suggested that German idealism had become extinct; that there no longer existed the belief in a purer and more beautiful world freed from the compromises of our earthly lot. The trouble rather was that this idealism had been too widely diffused, had been generalized until it had grown thin and superficial. The German faith in God, turning practical, and now directed towards mundane ends, had been transformed into grandiose ideas of the national future. In art, it had been sentimentalized. In its new manifestations, it was signally displayed in the cheap optimism of Emperor William. The defeat which had spiritualized French idealism, had, from the German side, as a victory, materialized German idealism. "What has victorious Germany given to the world?" asks Jean Christophe. He answers his own question by saying: "The flashing of bayonets; vigor without magnanimity; brutal realism; force conjoined with greed for profit; Mars as commercial traveler." He is grieved to recognize that Germany has been harmed by victory. He suffers; for "one expects more of one's own country than of another, and is hurt more by the faults of one's own land." Ever the revolutionist, Christophe detests noisy self-assertion, militarist arrogance, the churlishness of caste feeling. In his conflict with militarized Germany, in his quarrel with the sergeant at the dance in the Alsatian village inn, we have an elemental eruption of the hatred for discipline felt by the artist, the lover of freedom; we have his protest against the brutalization of thought. He is compelled to shake the dust of Germany off his feet.