下载掌阅APP，畅读海量书库
立即打开
AËRT was written a year later than Saint Louis; more explicitly than the pious epic does it aim at restoring faith and idealism to the disheartened nation. Saint Louis is a heroic legend, a tender reminiscence of former greatness; Aërt is the tragedy of the vanquished, and a passionate appeal to them to awaken. The stage directions express this aim clearly:"The scene is cast in an imaginary Holland of the seventeenth century. We see a people broken by defeat and, which is much worse, debased thereby. The future presents itself as a period of slow decadence, whose anticipation definitively annuls the already exhausted energies.... The moral and political humiliations of recent years are the foundation of the troubles still in store."
Such is the environment in which Rolland places Aërt, the young prince, heir to vanished greatness.This Holland is, of course, symbolical of the Third Republic. Fruitless attempts are made, by the temptations of loose living, by various artifices, by the instilling of doubt, to break the captive's faith in greatness, to undermine the one power that still sustains the debile body and the suffering soul. The hypocrites of his entourage do their utmost, with luxury, frivolity, and lies, to wean him from what he considers his high calling, which is to prove himself worthy heir of a glorious past. He remains unshaken.His tutor, Maître Trojanus (a forerunner of Anatole France), all of whose qualities, kindliness, skepticism,energy, and wisdom, are but lukewarm, would like to make a Marcus Aurelius of his ardent pupil, one who thinks and renounces rather than one who acts. The lad proudly answers: "I pay due reverence to ideas,but I recognize something higher than they, moral grandeur." In a laodicean age, he yearns for action.
But action is force, struggle is blood. His gentle spirit desires peace; his moral will craves for the right. The youth has within him both a Hamlet and a Saint-Just, both a vacillator and a zealot. He is a wraithlike double of Olivier, already able to reckon up all values. The goal of Aërt's youthful passion is still indeterminate; this passion is nothing but a flame which wastes itself in words and aspirations. He does not make the deed come at his beckoning; but the deed takes possession of him, dragging the weakling down with it into the depths whence there is no other issue than by death. From degradation he finds a last rescue,a path to moral greatness, his own deed, done for the sake of all. Surrounded by the scornful victors, calling to him "Too late," he answers proudly, "Not too late to be free," and plunges headlong out of life.
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 Offizier , 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.