Such a wealth of design and execution was unprecedented. In one work alone, Tolstoi's _War and Peace_, had Rolland encountered a similar conjuncture of a historical picture of the world with a process of inner purification and a state of religious ecstasy. Here only had he discerned the like passionate sense of responsibility towards truth. But Rolland diverged from this splendid example by placing his tragedy in the temporal environment of the life of to-day, instead of amid the wars of Napoleonic times; and by endowing his hero with the heroism, not of arms, but of the invisible struggles which the artist is constrained to fight. Here, as always, the most human of artists was his model, the man to whom art was not an end in itself, but was ever subordinate to an ethical purpose. In accordance with the spirit of Tolstoi's teaching, _Jean Christophe_ was not to be a literary work, but a deed. For this reason, Rolland's great symphony cannot be subjected to the restrictions of a convenient formula. The book ignores all the ordinary canons, and is none the less a characteristic product of its time. Standing outside literature, it is an overwhelmingly powerful literary manifestation. Often enough it ignores the rules of art, and is yet a most perfect expression of art. It is not a book, but a message; it is not a history, but is nevertheless a record of our time. More than a book, it is the daily miracle of revelation of a man who lives the truth, whose whole life is truth. CHAPTER V KEY TO THE CHARACTERS As a romance, _Jean Christophe_ has no prototype in literature; but the characters in the book have prototypes in real life. Rolland the historian does not hesitate to borrow some of the lineaments of his heroes from the biographies of great men. In many cases, too, the figures he portrays recall personalities in contemporary life. In a manner peculiar to himself, by a process of which he was the originator, he combines the imaginative with the historical, fusing individual qualities in a new synthesis. His delineations tend to be mosaics, rather than entirely new imaginative creations. In ultimate analysis, his method of literary composition invariably recalls the work of a musical composer; he paraphrases thematic reminiscences, without imitating too closely. The reader of _Jean Christophe_ often fancies that, as in a key-novel, he has recognized some public personality; but ere long he finds that the characteristics of another figure intrude. Thus each portrait is freshly constructed out of a hundred diverse elements.