Among the still young masters of the young in France, the men rising fifty--Rostand, Claudel, Boylesve, Gide, Suarès, Francis Jammes, Romain Rolland--only the first and the last are really well known beyond our frontiers. Claudel is appreciated in Germany as an interesting exotic; but there, as well as in England and Italy, Romain Rolland has an audience of his own. In some ways he is the most approachable of French writers to an English, or, indeed, to an Italian mind. His intense moral earnestness, his love of nature, his lack of irony, and his sense of sarcasm, no less than an idealism devoid of all religiosity, distinguish him among the men of his generation. And he is an Individualist. When Claudel gibes at the idols which Freethinkers raise on their altars--the geniuses and the heroes, all the great men--be sure he is thinking of Romain Rolland, and perhaps of Suarès. Hero-worship, love of the poor and humble, faith in the human mind and its divine destinies, are indeed, to Romain Rolland, as much a religion as the doctrines of the Catholic Church to Claudel, or to his convert, Francis Jammes. Romain Rolland owes his fame to _Jean-Christophe_, his great novel in ten volumes, the _Clarissa_ of our age. But he has written many other books. Romain Rolland’s unknown works are voluminous and abundant. Some twenty years ago I used to take them to the _Revue de Paris_ and expend all my small store of diplomacy in persuading the editor to print those immense and formless dramas, _Saint Louis_, _Aert_, _Danton_, in which rare streaks of real genius illumined desolate wastes of verbiage. I cannot say that any of them attained success. Having striven to express his mind in these inchoate symphonies, Romain Rolland tried a new form of art, in which from the first stroke he was singularly successful: his _Lives of Great Men (Vies des Hommes Illustres)_, have the terseness, the morality, the grandeur, and the natural piety of Plutarch’s _Lives_. He has written nothing better than his _Beethoven_ or his _Michael Angelo_, and he has given us a _Mazzini_, a _Tolstoi_ only less excellent. These are quite little books, so far as size is concerned. And the mind of Romain Rolland continued to teem with images and ideas, with a sense of the tragedy of human destiny, and yet with an invincible hope in human reason. He had a thousand things to say to the men of his generation; his heart burned within him. So he invented a great man of his own making, Jean-Christophe.