[2] _Histoire de l’Opera en Europe, avant Lully et Scarlatti_, (Les origines du theatre lyrique modern), and also _Les causes de la decadence de la peinture italienne_. Concerning the literary impressions that were decisive in his development, he says that his education, like that of most young Frenchmen, was founded upon the classics of the seventeenth century. He found his way, himself, to the writers who gave him spiritual sustenance: Shakespeare, Goethe, and the Encyclopedists, especially Diderot. In 1886, along with his school comrades, he became acquainted with Tolstoy. In his book on Tolstoy, Rolland says, “He was the purest light that illumined our youth, the cheering star in the twilight of the end of the century—our only real friend in contemporary European art.” It was Tolstoy’s intoxicating adoration of life that enraptured the young Frenchmen as well as the young Northerners. It was the realism in Tolstoy’s art that “opened the portals to life”; it was the mysticism in Tolstoy’s nature that opened their ears to “the music of the soul for which they longed” ... “Tolstoy was to our generation what Werther was to the youth of the eighteenth century.” “But,” wrote Rolland in a letter, “the most potent influence in my life was and continues to be—music. It has been an ever-flowing spring, not only for my emotional life, but also for the interpretation of life. For, to him who can rightly listen, music is a language that can interpret the subtlest emotions of the soul, and reveal manifold secrets which literature has never been able to express. If in any degree I understand the German soul, it is due to music.” Romain Rolland is familiar, alike, with the old German masters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and with those of most recent times. _Jean Christophe_, the world’s greatest novel concerning a musician and music, is therefore written by a thoroughly-trained connoisseur and practitioner of music; a man who demonstrates that, for his own and for his hero’s individual culture, music is the most profound determining influence. Even though Romain Rolland differs from Tolstoy in questions pertaining to his conception of music, still it is in Tolstoy’s spirit that he glorifies in this form of art its universal breadth, its power—beyond national boundaries and personal limitations—to unite mankind in and through the joy of beauty, which is one of the highest conditions of the soul.