This ideological scaffolding is unmistakable in every one of Rolland's dramas. The scenic variations, the motley changes in the cultural environments, cannot prevent our realizing that the problems revealed to our eyes emanate, not from feelings and not from personalities, but from intelligences and from ideas. Even the historical figures, those of Robespierre, Danton, Saint-Just, and Desmoulins, are schemata rather than portraits. Nevertheless, the prolonged estrangement between his dramas and the age in which they were written, was not so much due to the playwright's method of treatment as to the nature of the problems with which he chose to deal. Ibsen, who at that time dominated the drama, likewise wrote plays with a purpose. Ibsen, far more even than Rolland, had definite ends in view. Like Strindberg, Ibsen did not merely wish to present comparisons between elemental forces, but in addition to present their formulation. These northern writers intellectualized much more than Rolland, inasmuch as they were propagandists, whereas Rolland merely endeavored to show ideas in the act of unfolding their own contradictions. Ibsen and Strindberg desired to make converts; Rolland's aim was to display the inner energy that animates every idea. Whilst the northerners hoped to produce a specific effect, Rolland was in search of a general effect, the arousing of enthusiasm. For Ibsen, as for the contemporary French dramatists, the conflict between man and woman living in the bourgeois environment always occupies the center of the stage. Strindberg's work is animated by the myth of sexual polarity. The lie against which both these writers are campaigning is a conventional, a social, lie. The dramatic interest remains the same. The spiritual arena is still that of bourgeois life. This applies even to the mathematical sobriety of Ibsen and to the remorseless analysis of Strindberg. Despite the vituperation of the critics, the world of Ibsen and Strindberg was still the critics' world.