Romain Rolland Part 5

We discern ourselves in the past, in a mingling of like characters and differing lineaments, with errors and vices which we can avoid. But precisely because history depicts the mutable, does it give us a better knowledge of the unchanging."

What, he goes on to ask, have French dramatists. .h.i.therto brought the people out of the past? The burlesque figure of Cyrano; the gracefully sentimental personality of the duke of Reichstadt; the artificial conception of Madame Sans-Gene! "Tout est a faire! Tout est a dire!" The land of dramatic art still lies fallow. "For France, national epopee is quite a new thing. Our playwrights have neglected the drama of the French people, although that people has been perhaps, since the days of Rome, the most heroic in the world. Europe's heart was beating in the kings, the thinkers, the revolutionists of France. And great as this nation has been in all domains of the spirit, its greatness has been shown above all in the field of action. Herein lay its most sublime creation; here was its poem, its drama, its epos. France did what others dreamed of doing. France wrote no Iliads, but lived a dozen. The heroes of France wrought more splendidly than the poets. No Shakespeare sang their deeds; but Danton on the scaffold was the spirit of Shakespeare personified. The life of France has touched the loftiest summits of joy; it has plumbed the deepest abysses of sorrow. It has been a wonderful 'comedie humaine,' a series of dramas; each of its epochs a new poem."

This past must be recalled to life; French historical drama must restore it to the French people. "The spirit which soars above the centuries, will thus soar for centuries to come. If we would engender strong souls, we must nourish them with the energies of the world." Rolland now expands the French ode into a European ode. "The world must be our theme, for a nation is too small." One hundred and twenty years earlier, Schiller had said: "I write as a citizen of the world. Early did I exchange my fatherland for mankind." Rolland is fired by Goethe's words: "National literature now means very little; the epoch of world literature is at hand." He utters the following appeal: "Let us make Goethe's prophesy a living reality! It is our task to teach the French to look upon their national history as a wellspring of popular art; but on no account should we exclude the sagas of other nations. Though it is doubtless our first duty to make the most of the treasures we have ourselves inherited, we must none the less find room on our stage for the great deeds of all races. Just as Anacharsis Cloots and Thomas Paine were chosen members of the Convention; just as Schiller, Klopstock, Was.h.i.+ngton, Priestley, Bentham, Pestalozzi, and Kosciuszko, are the heroes of our world; so should we inaugurate in Paris the epopee of the European people!"

Thus did Rolland's manifesto, pa.s.sing far beyond the limits of the stage, become at its close his first appeal to Europe. Uttered by a solitary voice, it remained for the time unheeded and void of effect.

Nevertheless the confession of faith had been spoken; it was indestructible; it could never pa.s.s away. Jean Christophe had proclaimed his message to the world.

CHAPTER XI

THE CREATIVE ARTIST

The task is set. Who shall accomplish it? Romain Rolland answers by putting his hand to the work. The hero in him shrinks from no defeat; the youth in him dreads no difficulty. An epic of the French people is to be written. He does not hesitate to lay the foundations, though environed by the silence and indifference of the metropolis. As always, the impetus that drives him is moral rather than artistic. He has a sense of personal responsibility for an entire nation. By such productive, by such heroic idealism, alone, and not by a purely theoretical idealism, can idealism be engendered.

The theme is easy to find. Rolland turns to the greatest moment of French history, to the Revolution. He responds to the appeal of his revolutionary forefathers. On the 27th of Floreal, 1794, the Committee of Public Safety issued an invocation to authors "to glorify the chief happenings of the French revolution; to compose republican dramas; to hand down to posterity the great epochs of the French renascence; to inspire history with the firmness of character appropriate to the annals of a great nation defending its freedom against the onslaught of all the tyrants of Europe." On the 11th of Messidor, the Committee asked young authors "boldly to recognize the whole magnitude of the undertaking, and to avoid the easy and well-trodden paths of mediocrity." The signatories of these decrees, Danton, Robespierre, Carnot, and Couthon, have now become national figures, legendary heroes, monuments in public places. Where restrictions were imposed on poetic inspiration by undue proximity to the subject, there is now room for the imagination to expand, seeing that this history of the period is remote enough to give free play to the tragic muse. The doc.u.ments just quoted issue a summons to the poet and the historian in Rolland; but the same challenge rings from within as a personal heritage. Boniard, one of his great-grandfathers on the paternal side, took part in the revolutionary struggle as "an apostle of liberty," and described in his diary the storming of the Bastille. More than half a century later, another relative was fatally stabbed in Clamecy during a rising against the coup d'etat. The blood of revolutionary zealots runs in Rolland's veins, no less than the blood of religious devotees. A century after 1792, in the fervor of commemoration, he reconstructed the great figures of that glorious past. The theater in which the "French Iliads" were to be staged did not yet exist; no one had hitherto recognized Rolland as a literary force; actors and audience were alike lacking. Of all the requisites for the new creation, there existed solely his own faith and his own will. Building upon faith alone, he began to write _Le theatre de la revolution_.

CHAPTER XII

THE DRAMA OF THE REVOLUTION

1898-1902

Planning this "Iliad of the French People" for the people's theater, Rolland designed it as a decalogy, as a time sequence of ten dramas somewhat after the manner of Shakespeare's histories. "I wished," he writes in the 1909 preface to _Le theatre de la revolution_, "in the totality of this work to exhibit as it were the drama of a convulsion of nature, to depict a social storm from the moment when the first waves began to rise above the surface of the ocean down to the moment when calm spread once more over the face of the waters." No by-play, no anecdotal trifling, was to mitigate the mighty rhythm of the primitive forces. "My leading aim was to purify the course of events, as far as might be, from all romanticist intrigue, which would serve only to enc.u.mber and belittle the movement. Above all I desired to throw light upon the great political and social interests on behalf of which mankind has been fighting for a hundred years." It is obvious that the work of Schiller is closely akin to the idealistic style of this people's theater. Comparing Rolland's technique with Schiller's, we may say that Rolland was thinking of a _Don Carlos_ without the Eboli episodes, of a _Wallenstein_ without the Thekla sentimentalities. He wished to show the people the sublimities of history, not to entertain the audience with anecdotes of popular heroes.

Thus conceived as a dramatic cycle, it was simultaneously, from the musician's outlook, to be a symphony, an "Eroica." A prelude was to introduce the whole, a pastoral in the style of the "fetes galantes." We are at the Trianon, watching the light-hearted unconcern of the ancien regime; we are shown powdered and patched ladies, amorous cavaliers, dallying and chattering. The storm is approaching, but no one heeds it.

Once again the age of gallantry smiles; the setting sun of the Grand Monarque seems to s.h.i.+ne once more on the fading tints in the garden of Versailles.

_Le 14 Juillet_ is the flourish of trumpets; it marks the opening of the storm. _Danton_ is the critical climax; in the hour of victory comes the beginning of moral defeat, the fratricidal struggle. A _Robespierre_ was to introduce the declining phase. _Le triomphe de la raison_ shows the disintegration of the Revolution in the provinces; _Les loups_ depicts a like decomposition in the army. Between two of the heroic plays, the author proposed to insert a love drama, describing the fate of Louvet, the Girondist. Wis.h.i.+ng to visit his beloved in Paris, he leaves his hiding-place in Gascony, and is the only one to escape the death that overtakes his friends, who are all guillotined or torn to pieces by the wolves as they flee. The figures of Marat, Saint-Just, and Adam Lux, which are merely touched on in the extant plays, were to receive detailed treatment in the dramas that remain unwritten. Doubtless, too, the figure of Napoleon would have towered above the dying Revolution.

Opening with a musical and lyrical prelude, this symphonic composition was to end with a postlude. After the great storm, castaways from the s.h.i.+pwreck were to foregather in Switzerland, near Soleure. Royalists and regicides, Girondists and Montagnards, were to exchange reminiscences; a love episode between two of their children was to lend an idyllic touch to the aftermath of the European storm. Fragments only of this great design have been carried to completion, comprising the four dramas, _Le 14 Juillet_, _Danton_, _Les loups_, and _Le triomphe de la raison_. When these plays had been written, Rolland abandoned the scheme, to which the people, like the literary world and the stage, had given no encouragement. For more than a decade these tragedies have been forgotten. To-day, perchance, the awakening impulses of an age becoming aware of its own lineaments in the prophetic image of a world convulsion, may arouse in the author an impulse to complete what was so magnificently begun.

CHAPTER XIII

THE FOURTEENTH OF JULY

1902

Of the four completed revolutionary dramas, _Le 14 Juillet_ stands first in point of historic time. Here we see the Revolution as one of the elements of nature. No conscious thought has formed it; no leader has guided it. Like thunder from a clear sky comes the aimless discharge of the tensions that have acc.u.mulated among the people. The thunderbolt strikes the Bastille; the lightning flash illumines the soul of the entire nation. This piece has no heroes, for the hero of the play is the mult.i.tude. "Individuals are merged in the ocean of the people," writes Rolland in the preface. "He who limns a storm at sea, need not paint the details of every wave; he must show the unchained forces of the ocean.

Meticulous precision is a minor matter compared with the impa.s.sioned truth of the whole." In actual fact, this drama is all tumultuous movement; individuals rush across the stage like figures on the cinematographic screen; the storming of the Bastille is not the outcome of a reasoned purpose, but of an overwhelming, an ecstatic impulse.

_Le 14 Juillet_, therefore, is not properly speaking a drama, and does not really seek to be anything of the kind. Consciously or unconsciously, Rolland aimed at creating one of those "fetes populaires"

which the Convention had encouraged, a people's festival with music and dancing, an epinikion, a triumphal ode. His work, therefore, is not suitable for the artificial environment of the boards, and should rather be played under the free heaven. Opening symphonically, it closes in exultant choruses for which the author gives definite directions to the composer. "The music must be, as it were, the background of a fresco. It must make manifest the heroical significance of the festival; it must fill in pauses as they can never be adequately filled in by a crowd of supernumeraries, for these, however much noise they make, fail to sustain the illusion of real life. This music should be inspired by that of Beethoven, which more powerfully than any other reflects the enthusiasms of the Revolution. Above all, it must breathe an ardent faith. No composer will effect anything great in this vein unless he be personally inspired by the soul of the people, unless he himself feel the burning pa.s.sion that is here portrayed."

Rolland wishes to create an atmosphere of ecstatic rapture. Not by dramatic excitement, but by its opposite. The theater is to be forgotten; the mult.i.tude in the audience is to become spiritually at one with its image on the stage. In the last scene, when the phrases are directly addressed to the audience, when the stormers of the Bastille appeal to their hearers on behalf of the imperishable victory which leads men to break the yoke of oppression and to win brotherhood, this idea must not be a mere echo from the members of the audience, but must surge up spontaneously in their own hearts. The cry "tous freres" must be a double chorus of actors and spectators, for the latter, part of the "courant de foi," must share the intoxication of joy. The spark from their own past must rekindle in the hearts of to-day. It is manifest that words alone will not suffice to produce this effect. Hence Rolland wishes to superadd the higher spell of music, the undying G.o.ddess of pure ecstasy.

The audience of which he dreamed was not forthcoming; nor until twenty years had elapsed was he to find Doyen, the musician who was almost competent to fulfill his demands. The representation in the Gemier Theater on March 21, 1902, wasted itself in the void. His message never reached the people to whose ear it had been so vehemently addressed.

Without an echo, almost pitifully, was this ode of joy drowned in the roar of the great city, which had forgotten the deeds of the past, and which failed to understand its own kins.h.i.+p to Rolland, the man who was recalling those deeds to memory.

CHAPTER XIV

DANTON

1900

_Danton_ deals with a decisive moment of the Revolution, the waterparting between the ascent and the decline. What the ma.s.ses had created as elemental forces, were now being turned to personal advantage by individuals, by ambitious leaders. Every spiritual movement, and above all every revolution or reformation, knows this tragical instant of victory, when power pa.s.ses into the hands of the few; when moral unity is broken in sunder by the conflict between political aims; when the ma.s.ses, who in an impetuous onrush have secured freedom, blindly follow demagogues inspired solely by self-interest. It seems to be an inevitable sequel of success in such cases, that the n.o.bler should stand aside in disillusionment, that the idealists should hold aloof while the self-seeking triumph. At that very time, in the Dreyfus affair, Rolland had witnessed similar happenings. He realized that the genuine strength of an idea subsists only during its non-fulfilment. Its true power is in the hands of those who are not victorious; those to whom the ideal is everything, success nothing. Victory brings power, and power is just to itself alone.

The play, therefore, is no longer a drama of the Revolution; it is the drama of the great revolutionist. Mystical power crystallizes in the form of human characters. Resoluteness becomes contentiousness. In the very intoxication of victory, in the queasy atmosphere of the blood-stained field, begins the new struggle among the pretorians for the empire they have conquered. There is struggle between ideas; struggle between personalities; struggle between temperaments; struggle between persons of different social origin. Now that they are no longer united as comrades by the compulsion of imminent danger, they recognize their mutual incompatibilities. The revolutionary crisis comes in the hour of triumph. The hostile armies have been defeated; the royalists and the Girondists have been crushed and scattered. Now there arises in the Convention a battle of all against all. The characters are admirably delineated. Danton is the good giant, sanguine, warm, and human, a hurricane in his pa.s.sions but with no love of fighting for fighting's sake. He has dreamed of the Revolution as bringing joy to mankind, and now sees that it has culminated in a new tyranny. He is sickened by bloodshed, and he detests the butcher's work of the guillotine, just as Christ would have loathed the Inquisition claiming to represent the spirit of his teaching. He is filled with horror at his fellows. "Je suis soule des hommes. Je les vomis."--I am surfeited with men. I spue them out of my mouth.--He longs for a frank naturalness, for an unsophisticated natural life. Now that the danger to the republic is over, his pa.s.sion has cooled; his love goes out to woman, to the people, to happiness; he wishes others to love him. His revolutionary fervor has been the outcome of an impulse towards freedom and justice; hence he is beloved by the ma.s.ses, who recognize in him the instinct which led them to storm the Bastille, the same scorn of consequence, the same marrow as their own. Robespierre is uncongenial to them. He is too frigid, he is too much the lawyer, to enlist their sympathies. But his doctrinaire fanaticism, his far from ign.o.ble ambition, give him a terrible power which makes him forge his way onwards when Danton with his cheerful love of life has ceased to strive. Whilst Danton becomes every day more and more nauseated by politics, the concentrated energy of Robespierre's frigid temperament strikes ever closer towards the centralized control of power. Like his friend Saint-Just--the zealot of virtue, the blood-thirsty apostle of justice, the stubborn papist or calvinist--Robespierre can no longer see human beings, who for him are now hidden behind the theories, the laws, and the dogmas of the new religion. Not for him, as for Danton, the goal of a happy and free humanity. What he desires is that men shall be virtuous as the slaves of prescribed formulas. The collision between Danton and Robespierre upon the topmost summit of victory is in ultimate a.n.a.lysis the collision between freedom and law, between the elasticity of life and the rigidity of concepts. Danton is overthrown. He is too indolent, too heedless, too human in his defense. But even as he falls it is plain that he will drag his opponent after him adown the precipice.

In the composition of this tragedy Rolland shows himself to be wholly the dramatist. Lyricism has disappeared; emotion has vanished amid the rush of events; the conflict arises from the liberation of human energy, from the clash of feelings and of personalities. In _Le 14 Juillet_ the ma.s.ses had played the princ.i.p.al part, but in this new phase of the Revolution they have become mere spectators once more. Their will, which had been concentrated during a brief hour of enthusiasm, has been broken into fragments, so that they are blown before every breath of oratory.

The ardors of the Revolution are dissipated in intrigues. It is not the heroic instinct of the people which now dominates the situation, but the authoritarian and yet indecisive spirit of the intellectuals. Whilst in _Le 14 Juillet Rolland_ exhibits to his nation the greatness of its powers; in _Danton_ he depicts the danger of its all too prompt relapse into pa.s.sivity, the peril that ever follows hard upon the heels of victory. From this outlook, therefore, _Danton_ likewise is a call to action, an energizing elixir. Thus did Jaures characterize it, Jaures who himself resembled Danton in his power of oratory, introducing the work when it was staged at the Theatre Civique on December 20, 1900--a performance forgotten in twenty-four hours, like all Rolland's early efforts.

CHAPTER XV

THE TRIUMPH OF REASON

1899

_Le triomphe de la raison_ is no more than a fragment of the great fresco. But it is inspired with the central thought round which Rolland's ideas turn. In it for the first time there is a complete exposition of the dialectic of defeat--the pa.s.sionate advocacy of the vanquished, the transformation of actual overthrow into spiritual triumph. This thought, first conceived in his childhood and reinforced by all his experience, forms the kernel of the author's moral sensibility. The Girondists have been defeated, and are defending themselves in a fortress against the sansculottes. The royalists, aided by the English, wish to rescue them. Their ideal, the freedom of the spirit and the freedom of the fatherland, has been destroyed by the Revolution; their foes are Frenchmen. But the royalists who would help them are likewise their enemies; the English are their country's foes.

Hence arises a conflict of conscience which is powerfully portrayed. Are they to be faithless to their ideal, or to betray their country? Are they to be citizens of the spirit or citizens of France? Are they to be true to themselves or true to the nation? Such is the fateful decision with which they are confronted. They choose death, for they know that their ideal is immortal, that the freedom of a nation is but the reflection of an inner freedom which no foe can destroy.

For the first time, in this play, Rolland proclaims his hostility to victory. Faber proudly declares: "We have saved our faith from a victory which would have disgraced us, from one wherein the conqueror is the first victim. In our unsullied defeat, that faith looms more richly and gloriously than before." Lux, the German revolutionist, proclaims the gospel of inner freedom in the words: "All victory is evil, whereas all defeat is good in so far as it is the outcome of free choice." Hugot says: "I have outstripped victory, and that is my victory." These men of n.o.ble mind who perish, know that they die alone; they do not look towards a future success; they put no trust in the ma.s.ses, for they are aware that in the higher sense of the term freedom it is a thing which the mult.i.tude can never understand, that the people always misconceives the best. "The people always dreads those who form an elite, for these bear torches. Would that the fire might scorch the people!" In the end, the only home of these Girondists is the ideal; their domain is an ideal freedom; their world is the future. They have saved their country from the despots; now they had to defend it once again against the mob l.u.s.ting for dominion and revenge, against those who care no more for freedom than the despots cared. Designedly, the rigid nationalists, those who demand that a man shall sacrifice everything for his country, shall sacrifice his convictions, liberty, reason itself, designedly I say are these monomaniacs of patriotism typified in the plebeian figure of Haubourdin. This sansculotte knows only two kinds of men, "traitors"

and "patriots," thus rending the world in twain in his bigotry. It is true that the vigor of his brutal partisans.h.i.+p brings victory. But the very force that makes it possible to save a people against a world in arms, is at the same time a force which destroys that people's most gracious blossoms.

The drama is the opening of an ode to the free man, to the hero of the spirit, the only hero whose heroism Rolland acknowledges. The conception, which had been merely outlined in _Aert_, begins here to take more definite shape. Adam Lux, a member of the Mainz revolutionary club, who, animated by the fire of enthusiasm, has made his way to France that he may live for freedom (and that he may be led in pursuit of freedom to the guillotine), this first martyr to idealism, is the first messenger from the land of Jean Christophe. The struggle of the free man for the undying fatherland which is above and beyond the land of his birth, has begun. This is the struggle wherein the vanquished is ever the victor, and wherein he is the strongest who fights alone.

CHAPTER XVI