But as soon as Jean Christophe begins to love Italy, he grows afraid of this love. He realizes that Italy is also essential to him, in order that in his music and in his life the impetuosity of the senses shall be clarified to a perfect harmony. He understands how necessary the southern world is to the northern, and is now aware that only in the trio of Germany, France, and Italy does the full meaning of each voice become clear. In Italy, there is less illusion and more reality; but the land is too beautiful, tempting to enjoyment and killing the impulse towards action. Just as Germany finds a danger in her own idealism, because that idealism is too widely disseminated and becomes spurious in the average man; just as to France her liberty proves disastrous because it encourages in the individual an idea of absolute independence which estranges him from the community; so for Italy is her beauty a danger, since it makes her indolent, pliable, and self-satisfied. To every nation, as to every individual, the most personal of characteristics, the very things that commend the nation or the individual to others, are dangerous. It would seem, therefore, that nations and individuals must seek salvation by combining as far as possible with their own opposites. Thus will they draw nearer to the highest ideal, that of European unity, that of universal humanity. In Italy, as aforetime in France and in Germany, Jean Christophe redreams the dream which Rolland at two-and-twenty had first dreamed on the Janiculum. He foresees the European symphony, which hitherto poets alone have created in works transcending nationality, but which the nations as yet have failed to realize for themselves. CHAPTER XVI THE JEWS In the three diversified nations, by each of which Christophe is now attracted, now repelled, he finds a unifying element, adapted to each nation, but not completely merged therein--the Jews. "Do you notice," he says on one occasion to Olivier, "that we are always running up against Jews? It might be thought that we draw them as by a spell, for we continually find them in our path, sometimes as enemies and sometimes as allies." It is true that he encounters Jews wherever he goes. In his native town, the first people to give him a helping hand (for their own ends, of course) were the wealthy Jews who ran "Dionysos"; in Paris, Sylvain Kohn had been his mentor, Lévy-Coeur his bitterest foe, Weil and Mooch his most helpful friends. In like manner, Olivier and Antoinette frequently hold converse with Jews, either on terms of friendship or on terms of enmity. At every cross-roads to which the artist comes, they stand like signposts pointing the way, now towards good and now towards evil.