us, let us learn from them, and seek to rejuvenate ourselves. If this is beyond our powers, if we are too old to do so, let us at least rejoice that they are young." Generations must grow and die as men grow and die. Everything on earth is subject to nature's laws, and the man strong in faith, the pious freethinker, bows himself to the law. But he does not fail to recognize (and herein we see one of the profoundest cultural acquirements of the book) that this very flux, this transvaluation of values, has its own secular rhythm. In former times, an epoch, a style, a faith, a philosophy, endured for a century; now such phases do not outlast a generation, endure barely for a decade. The struggle has become fiercer and more impatient. Mankind marches to a quicker measure, digests ideas more rapidly than of old. "The development of European thought is proceeding at a livelier pace, much as if its acceleration were concomitant with the advance in our powers of mechanical locomotion.... The stores of prejudices and hopes which in former times would have nourished mankind for twenty years, are exhausted now in a lustrum. In intellectual matters the generations gallop one after another, and sometimes outpace one another." The rhythm of these spiritual transformations is the epopee of _Jean Christophe_. When the hero returns to Germany from Paris, he can hardly recognize his native land. When from Italy he revisits Paris, the city seems strange to him. Here and there he still finds the old "foire sur la place," but its affairs are transacted in a new currency; it is animated with a new faith; new ideas are exchanged in the market place; only the clamor rises as of old. Between Olivier and his son Georges lies an abyss like that which separates two worlds, and Olivier is delighted that his son should regard him with contempt. The abyss is an abyss of twenty years. Life must eternally express itself in new forms; it refuses to allow itself to be dammed up by outworn thoughts, to be hemmed in by the philosophies and religions of the past; in its headstrong progress it sweeps accepted notions out of its way. Each generation can understand itself alone; it transmits a legacy to unknown heirs who will interpret and fulfill as seems best to them. As the heritage from his tragical and solitary generation, Rolland offers his great picture of a free soul. He offers it "to the free souls of all nations; to those who suffer, struggle, and will conquer." He offers it with the words: "I have written the tragedy of a vanishing generation. I have made no attempt to conceal either its vices or its virtues, to hide its load of sadness, its chaotic pride, its heroic efforts, its struggles beneath the overwhelming burden of a superhuman task--the task of remaking an entire world, an ethic, an æsthetic, a faith, a new humanity. Such were we in our generation.