The happy days of freedom in Rome were followed by many years of arduous labor, during which the duties of daily life thrust the image into the background. Rolland had for a season become a man of action, and had no time for dreams. Then came new experiences to reawaken the slumbering vision. I have told of his visit to Beethoven's house in Bonn, and of the effect produced on his mind by the realization of the tragedy of the great composer's life. This gave a new direction to his thoughts. His hero was to be a Beethoven redivivus, a German, a lonely fighter, but a conqueror. Whereas the immature youth had idealized defeat, imagining that to fail was to be vanquished, the man of riper years perceived that true heroism lay in this, "to know life, and yet to love it." Thus splendidly did the new horizon open as setting for the long cherished figure, the dawn of eternal victory in our earthly struggle. The conception of Jean Christophe was complete. Rolland now knew his hero. But it was necessary that he should learn to describe that hero's counterpart, that hero's eternal enemy, life, reality. Whoever wishes to delineate a combat fairly, must know both champions. Rolland became intimately acquainted with Jean Christophe's opponent through the experiences of these years of disillusionment, through his study of literature, through his realization of the falseness of society and of the indifference of the crowd. It was necessary for him to pass through the purgatorial fires of the years in Paris before he could begin the work of description. At twenty, Rolland had made acquaintance only with himself, and was therefore competent to describe no more than his own heroic will to purity. At thirty he had become able to depict likewise the forces of resistance. All the hopes he had cherished and all the disappointments he had suffered jostled one another in the channel of this new existence. The innumerable newspaper cuttings, collected for years, almost without a definite aim, magically arranged themselves as material for the growing work. Personal griefs were seen to have been valuable experience; the boy's dream swelled to the proportions of a life history.