This romanticist play is a piece of tragical symbolism. It reminds us a little of another youthful composition, the work of a poet who has now attained fame. I refer to Fritz von Unruh's _Die Offiziere_, in which the torment of enforced inactivity and repressed heroic will gives rise to warlike impulses as a means of spiritual enfranchisement. Like Unruh's hero, Aërt in his outcry proclaims the torpor of his companions, voices his oppression amid the sultry and stagnant atmosphere of a time devoid of faith. Encompassed by a gray materialism, during the years when Zola and Mirbeau were at the zenith of their fame, the lonely Rolland was hoisting the flag of the ideal over a humiliated land. CHAPTER VIII ATTEMPT TO REGENERATE THE FRENCH STAGE With whole-souled faith the young poet uttered his first dramatic appeals in the heroic form, being mindful of Schiller's saying that fortunate epochs could devote themselves to the service of beauty, whereas in times of weakness it was necessary to lean upon the examples of past heroism. Rolland had issued to his nation a summons to greatness. There was no answer. His conviction that a new impetus was indispensable remaining unshaken, Rolland looked for the cause of this lack of response. He rightly discerned it, not in his own work, but in the refractoriness of the age. Tolstoi, in his books and in the wonderful letter to Rolland, had been the first to make the young man realize the sterility of bourgeois art. Above all in the drama, its most sensual form of expression, that art had lost touch with the moral and emotional forces of life. A clique of busy playwrights had monopolized the Parisian stage. Their eternal theme was adultery, in its manifold variations. They depicted petty erotic conflicts, but never dealt with a universally human ethical problem. The audiences, badly counseled by the press, which deliberately fostered the public's intellectual lethargy, did not ask to be morally awakened, but merely to be amused and pleased. The theater was anything in the world other than "the moral institution" demanded by Schiller and championed by d'Alembert. No breath of passion found its way from such dramatic art as this into the heart of the nation; there was nothing but spindrift scattered over the surface by the breeze. A great gulf was fixed between this witty and sensuous amusement, and the genuinely creative and receptive energies of France.