We infer that the innermost essence of Rolland's plays must in one way or another have conflicted with the age in which they were written. In actual fact, these dramas were penned in deliberate opposition to the dominant literary mode. Naturalism, the representation of reality, simultaneously mastered and oppressed the time, leading back with intent into the narrows, the trivialities, of everyday life. Rolland, on the other hand, aspired towards greatness, wishing to raise the dynamic of undying ideals high above the transiencies of fact; he aimed at a soaring flight, at a winged freedom of sentiment, at exuberant energy; he was a romanticist and an idealist. Not for him to describe the forces of life, its distresses, its powers, and its passions; his purpose was ever to depict the spirit that overcomes these things; the idea through which to-day is merged into eternity. Whilst other writers were endeavoring to portray everyday occurrences with the utmost fidelity, his aim was to represent the rare, the sublime, the heroic, the seeds of eternity that fall from heaven to germinate on earth. He was not allured by life as it is, but by life freely inter-penetrated with spirit and with will. All his dramas, therefore, are problem plays, wherein the characters are but the expression of theses and antitheses in dialectical struggle. The idea, not the living figure, is the primary thing. When the persons of the drama are in conflict, above them, like the gods in the Iliad, hover unseen the ideas that lead the human protagonists, the ideas between which the struggle is really waged. Rolland's heroes are not impelled to action by the force of circumstances, but are lured to action by the fascination of their own thoughts; the circumstances are merely the friction-surfaces upon which their ardor is struck into flame. When to the eye of the realist they are vanquished, when Aërt plunges into death, when Saint Louis is consumed by fever, when the heroes of the Revolution stride to the guillotine, when Clifford and Owen fall victims to violence, the tragedy of their mortal lives is transfigured by the heroism of their martyrdom, by the unity and purity of realized ideals.