form a just judgment, the whole wealth of facts must be taken into consideration. It is this ethical demand for justice to the small no less than to the great which makes spacious forms essential to Rolland. This is why his creative artistry demands an all-embracing outlook, a cyclic method of presentation. Each individual work in these cycles, however circumscribed it may appear at the first glance, is no more than a segment, whose full significance becomes apparent only when we grasp its relationship to the focal thought, to justice as the moral center of gravity, as a point whence all ideas, words, and actions appear equidistant from the center of universal humanity. The circle, the cycle, which unrestingly environs all its wealth of content, wherein discords are harmoniously resolved--to Rolland, ever the musician, this symbol of sensory justice is the favorite and wellnigh exclusive form. The work of Romain Rolland during the last thirty years comprises five such creative cycles. Too extended in their scope, they have not all been completed. The first, a dramatic cycle, which in the spirit of Shakespeare was to represent the Renaissance as an integral unit much as Gobineau desired to represent it, remained a fragment. Even the individual dramas have been cast aside by Rolland as inadequate. The _Tragédies de la foi_ form the second cycle; the _Théâtre de la révolution_ forms the third. Both are unfinished, but the fragments are of imperishable value. The fourth cycle, the _Vie des hommes illustres_, a cycle of biographies planned to form as it were a frieze round the temple of the invisible God, is likewise incomplete. The ten volumes of _Jean Christophe_ alone succeed in rounding off the full circle of a generation, uniting grandeur and justice in the foreshadowed concord. Above these five creative cycles there looms another and later cycle, recognizable as yet only in its beginning and its end, its origination and its recurrence. It will express the harmonious connection of a manifold existence with a lofty and universal life-cycle in Goethe's sense, a cycle wherein life and poesy, word and writing, character and action, themselves become works of art. But this cycle still glows in the process of fashioning. We feel its vital heat radiating into our mortal world. CHAPTER IV THE UNKNOWN DRAMATIC CYCLE. 1890-1895