Page:Rolland - Two Plays of the French Revolution.djvu/11

Rh studies and his lectures, he found time to experiment with the dramatic form, and in 1896 he published his Saint Louis. As this was later included in a volume called Tragedies of Faith—Les Tragédies de la Foi— together with two other plays, he evidently conceived it as one of a series of works based upon a single underlying idea.

Saint Louis depicts, in the author's own words, "religious exaltation." In Saint Louis and the two other plays which accompany it—Aërt and Le Triomphe de la Raison—"One can observe the presence of the main currents and passions of the French youth of to-day." All three show "the ardor of sacrifice, but a sacrifice which is courageous, militant: a double reaction against cowardice of thought and cowardice of action, against skepticism and against the relinquishment of the great destiny of the nation." But in spite of this "program," M. Rolland is an artist far too austere to write thesis-plays; he has often spoken in contempt of them. Nor did he in the least appeal to the great public; for his plays have as yet not proved acceptable to them. Saint Louis is a beautiful poem, not a tragedy after all, but a triumph, for no hero may see the fruits of his labor, and if a temporary failure seems for a moment to cloud the sky, it is only temporary. This is the message of Saint Louis. The good monarch who, "dying at the foot of the mountain, sees Jerusalem only through the eyes of his army," is a figure of hope. Aërt takes us from the time of the Crusades to "an imaginary Holland of the seventeenth century." Aërt, the son of a murdered patriot, is imprisoned by