A third time Rolland's intellectual ardor led him to try his mettle in the field of action. A third time, for a space, did he enter into a comradeship that he might fashion life out of life. A group of young men had come to recognize the futility and harmfulness of the French boulevard drama, whose central topic is the eternal recurrence of adultery issuing from the tedium of bourgeois existence. They determined upon an attempt to restore the drama to the people, to the proletariat, and thus to furnish it with new energies. Impetuously Rolland threw himself into the scheme, writing essays, manifestoes, an entire book. Above all, he contributed a series of plays conceived in the spirit of the French revolution and composed for its glorification. Jaurès delivered a speech introducing _Danton_ to the French workers. The other plays were likewise staged. But the daily press, obviously scenting a hostile force, did its utmost to chill the enthusiasm. The other participators soon lost their zeal, so that ere long the fine impetus of the young group was spent. Rolland was left alone, richer in experience and disillusionment, but not poorer in faith. Although by sentiment Rolland is attached to all great movements, the inner man has ever remained free from ties. He gives his energies to help others' efforts, but never follows blindly in others' footsteps. Whatever creative work he has attempted in common with others has been a disappointment; the fellowship has been clouded by the universality of human frailty. The Dreyfus case was subordinated to political scheming; the People's Theater was wrecked by jealousies; Rolland's plays, written for the workers, were staged but for a night; his wedded life came to a sudden and disastrous end--but nothing could shatter his idealism. When contemporary existence could not be controlled by the forces of the spirit, he still retained his faith in the spirit. In hours of disillusionment he called up the images of the great ones of the earth, who conquered mourning by action, who conquered life by art. He left the theater, he renounced the professorial chair, he retired from the world. Since life repudiated his single-hearted endeavors he would transfigure life in gracious pictures. His disillusionments had but been further experience. During the ensuing ten years of solitude he wrote _Jean Christophe_, a work which in the ethical sense is more truly real than reality itself, a work which embodies the living faith of his generation. CHAPTER X A DECADE OF SECLUSION