Jean-Christophe was a man of yesterday. His creed was to think no lie, to consent to no injustice, and to love his neighbour as himself. Here M. Rolland shows him in his puissant and solitary decline, dominating a new generation that rises round his knees, strangely different, with other ideals. Truth? Humanity? The old-fashioned words are rarely heard. We hear of Authority, of Order, of the claims of one’s race, of the rights and responsibilities of the strong. This new generation, which has witnessed no war, has the mind and disposition of conquerors. Christophe surveys with tender ironical affection the lovable breed of airmen, and sportsmen, and soldiers who fill France to-day--fresh, and frank, and admirably valiant, full of prompt physical courage and intellectual docility. _Jean-Christophe_ is perhaps the most remarkable work of contemporary fiction: a singular moral fervour, a rare imagination, an unequalled sensibility, a torrent of sarcasm, rancour, revolt, tenderness, stream from its disconcerting pages. But these delicate notations of minute variations in sensibility, though infinitely precious to the psychologist, transgress the limits that strict art prescribes. Romain Rolland sacrifices every grace of measure and composition to his abundance, to his enthusiasm for Life. He has no sense of style. His endless files of short, breathless sentences succeed each other interminably, with no variation, till we experience at last the sensation of a drop falling at regular intervals on the crown of our head! He has been called ‘un volcan qui ne vomit que des cendres.’ And then the rare flame strikes out--passages of infinite tenderness or of solemn grandeur. Still, let me own, while I admire _Jean-Christophe_, I think sometimes with regret of a Turgeneff, no less subtle, who composed his novels at a like tremendous length, and then, pen in hand, went through his manuscript again, and reduced it by two-thirds. When we open by chance one of those old novels, still famous, long unread, which nourished the minds of our ancestors--_Clarissa Harlowe_, _La Nouvelle Héloise_, or _L’Astrée_, or _Amadis_--or any other of those immense, untidy romances, vast bazaars or stores of their age, which provided several generations with every necessary of life, we are nearly always astonished to find them so interesting and so good. Our forefathers were no fools: what they loved in these books, which were for them a school of feeling, was not Art, but Life. Nothing is more instructive in this connection than to read a letter of Mme de Sévigné’s on the interminable masterpiece of La Calprenède; the great lady, so delicate, so difficile, ‘blessée des méchants styles,’ can scarcely understand her own enthusiasm:--