The hero is born in Germany. No German book, I think, not even _Werther_, gives with a sweeter serenity, the peculiar charm of Rhenish ‘Gemüthlichkeit’ than these early volumes of _Jean-Christophe_. But, as the hero grows older, he finds himself constantly hostile to the dreamy optimism of his environment. He hates the humbler forms of German idealism--that public and private Phariseeism which will not admit the world to be that which it is; the majestic sentimentality which invades all German art; that general artifice of emotion, moral nobleness, sensibility, and poetry which exasperates when it does not endear. Even the ‘cher vieux Schultz,’ ‘le bon Allemand,’ Christophe’s one admirer; even Modesta, the blind girl who will not allow that she has any cause to be unhappy, irritate the choleric young man, despite their candid goodness and their tranquil courage, because of a certain unconscious hypocrisy in their attitude, a habit of ignoring the truth when it happens to be disagreeable. Christophe cannot as yet admit that human nature is incapable of assimilating unadulterated reality: he has still to learn that every nation mixes with the truth some special spice of lies; and that there are more dangerous condiments than a romantic optimism. He himself, in his cult of force, is no less local, no less German: he is merely a German of a later generation. When Christophe flies to France, he finds to his discomfiture that sincerity is not a common attribute, even across the frontier; but French insincerity is of a different sort, cynical, excitable. France has ever been a _fanfaron de vices_, and loves to brag of her depravity rather than to practise it. The angry, heady, passionate, fuming youth spares no class or type in his first revolt against his new environment: the squalor of the poor, the struggling ambition and snobbish meannesses of the world of art, the hollow ceremony of fashionable circles combine to make him hate Paris. Little by little he penetrates below the surface: his friend Olivier Jalin interprets to him the real France. The intellectuals and the æsthetes of twenty years ago, who so irritate Christophe on his first arrival, were but the foam on the face of a deep reality. ‘C’est curieux que vous soyez Française!’ says the musician to his friend’s sister, with her honest, girlish face, her round, full forehead, her little straight nose, her neat small chin, and the brown locks that frame so demurely her thin cheeks.