We know no more than the names of these early works, and are unable to judge their worth. But when we study the later plays we may deduce the conclusion that in the earlier ones a premature flame, raging too hotly, burned itself out. If the dramas which first appeared in the press charm us by their maturity and concentration, they depend for these qualities upon the fate which left their predecessors unknown. Their calm is built upon the passion of those which were sacrificed unborn; they owe their orderly structure to the heroic zeal of their martyred brethren. All true creation grows out of the dark humus of rejected creations. Of none is it more true than of Romain Rolland that his work blossoms upon the soil of renunciation. CHAPTER V THE TRAGEDIES OF FAITH _Saint Louis. Aërt. 1895-1898_ Twenty years after their first composition, republishing the forgotten dramas of his youth under the title _Les tragédies de la foi_ (1913), Rolland alluded in the preface to the tragical melancholy of the epoch in which they were composed. "At that time," he writes, "we were much further from our goal, and far more isolated." The elder brothers of Jean Christophe and Olivier, "less robust though not less fervent in the faith," had found it harder to defend their beliefs, to maintain their idealism at its lofty level, than did the youth of the new day; living in a stronger France, a freer Europe. Twenty years earlier, the shadow of defeat still lay athwart the land. These heroes of the French spirit had been compelled, even within themselves, to fight the evil genius of the race, to combat doubts as to the high destinies of their nation, to struggle against the lassitude of the vanquished. Then was to be heard the cry of a petty era lamenting its vanished greatness; it aroused no echo from the stage or from the people; it wasted itself in the unresponsive skies--and yet it was the expression of an undying faith in life.