Romain Rolland Part 6

THE WOLVES

1898

In _Le triomphe de la raison_, men to whom conscience is supreme were confronted with a vital decision. They had to choose between their country and freedom, between the interests of the nation and those of the supranational spirit. _Les loups_ embodies a variation of the same theme. Here the choice has to be made between the fatherland and justice.

The subject has already been mooted in _Danton_. Robespierre and his henchmen decide upon the execution of Danton. They demand his immediate arrest and condemnation. Saint-Just, pa.s.sionately opposed to Danton, makes no objection to the prosecution, but insists that all must be done in due form of law. Robespierre, aware that delay will give the victory to Danton, wishes the law to be infringed. His country is worth more to him than the law. "Vaincre a tout prix"--conquer at any cost--calls one.

"When the country is in danger, it matters nothing that one man should be illegally condemned," cries another. Saint-Just bows before the argument, sacrificing honor to expediency, the law to his fatherland.

In _Les loups_, we have the obverse of the same tragedy. Here is depicted a man who would rather sacrifice himself than the law. One who holds with Faber in _Le triomphe de la raison_ that a single injustice makes the whole world unjust; one to whom, as to Hugot, the other hero in the same play, it seems indifferent whether justice be victorious or be defeated, so long as justice does not give up the struggle. Teulier, the man of learning, knows that his enemy d'Oyron has been unjustly accused of treachery. Though he realizes that the case is hopeless and that he is wasting his pains, he undertakes to defend d'Oyron against the patriotic savagery of the revolutionary soldiers, to whom victory is the only argument. Adopting as his motto the old saying, "fiat just.i.tia, pereat mundus," facing open-eyed all the dangers this involves, he would rather repudiate life than the leadings of the spirit "A soul which has seen truth and seeks to deny truth, destroys itself." But the others are of tougher fiber, and think only of success in arms. "Let my name be besmirched, provided only my country is saved," is Quesnel's answer to Teulier. Patriotism, the faith of the ma.s.ses, triumphs over the heroism of faith in the invisible justice.

This tragedy of a conflict recurring throughout the ages, one which every individual has forced upon him in wartime through the need for choosing between his responsibilities as a free moral agent and as an obedient citizen of the state, was the reflection of the actual happenings during the days when it was written. In _Les loups_, the Dreyfus affair is emblematically presented in masterly fas.h.i.+on. Dreyfus the Jew is typified by an aristocrat, the member of a suspect and detested social stratum. Picquart, the defender of Dreyfus, is Teulier.

The aristocrat's enemies represent the French general headquarters staff, who would rather perpetuate an injustice once committed than allow the honor of the army to be tarnished or confidence in the army to be undermined. Upon a narrow stage, and yet with effective pictorial force, in this tragedy of army life was compressed the whole of the history which was agitating France from the presidential palace down to the humblest working-cla.s.s dwelling. The performance at the Theatre de l'Oeuvre on May 18, 1898, was from first to last a political demonstration. Zola, Scheurer-Kestner, Peguy, and Picquart, the defenders of the innocent man, all the chief figures in the world-famous trial, were for two hours spectators of the dramatic symbolization of their own deeds. Rolland had grasped and extracted the moral essence of the Dreyfus affair, which had in fact become a purifying process for the whole French nation. Leaving history, the author had made his first venture into the field of contemporary actuality. But he had done this only, in accordance with the method he has followed ever since, that he might disclose the eternal elements in the temporal, and defend freedom of opinion against mob infatuation. He was on this occasion what he has always remained, the advocate of that heroism which knows one authority only, neither fatherland nor victory, neither success nor expediency, nothing but the supreme authority of conscience.

CHAPTER XVII

THE CALL LOST IN THE VOID

The ears of the people were deaf. Rolland's work seemed to have been fruitless. Not one of the dramas was played for more than a few nights.

Most of them were buried after a single performance, slain by the hostility of the critics and the indifference of the crowd. Futile, too, had been the struggles of Rolland and his friends on behalf of the people's theater. The government to which they had addressed an appeal for the founding of a popular theater in Paris, paid little attention.

M. Adrien Bernheim was dispatched to Berlin to make inquiries. He reported. Further reports were made. The matter was discussed for a while, but was ultimately shelved. Rostand and Bernstein continued to triumph in the boulevards; the great call to idealism had remained unheard.

Where could the author look for help in the completion of his splendid program? To what nation could he turn when his own made no response, _Le theatre de la revolution_ remained a fragment. A _Robespierre_, which was to be the spiritual counterpart of _Danton_, already sketched in broad outline, was left unfinished. The other segments of the great dramatic cycle have never been touched. Bundles of studies, newspaper cuttings, loose leaves, ma.n.u.script books, waste paper, are the vestiges of an edifice which was planned as a pantheon for the French people, a theater which was to reflect the heroic achievements of the French spirit. Rolland may well have shared the feelings of Goethe who, mournfully recalling his earlier dramatic dreams, said on one occasion to Eckermann: "Formerly I fancied it would be possible to create a German theater. I cherished the illusion that I could myself contribute to the foundations of such a building.... But there was no stir in response to my efforts, and everything remains as of old. Had I been able to exert an influence, had I secured approval, I should have written a dozen plays like _Iphigenia_ and _Ta.s.so_. There was no scarcity of material. But, as I have told you, we lack actors to play such pieces with spirit, and we lack a public to form an appreciative audience."

The call was lost in the void. "There was no stir in response to my efforts, and everything remains as of old." But Rolland, likewise, remains as of old, inspired with the same faith, whether he has succeeded or whether he has failed. He is ever willing to begin work over again, marching stoutly across the land of lost endeavor towards a new and more distant goal. We may apply to him Rilke's fine phrase, and say that, if he needs must be vanquished, he aspires "to be vanquished always in a greater and yet greater cause."

CHAPTER XVIII

A DAY WILL COME

1902

Once only has Rolland been tempted to resume dramatic composition.

(Parenthetically I may mention a minor play of the same period, _La Montespan_, which does not belong to the series of his greater works.) As in the case of the Dreyfus affair, he endeavored to extract the moral essence from political occurrences, to show how a spiritual conflict was typified in one of the great happenings of the time. The Boer War is no more than a vehicle; just as, for the plays we have been studying, the Revolution was merely a stage. The new drama deals in actual fact with the only authority Rolland recognizes, conscience. The conscience of the individual and the conscience of the world.

_Le temps viendra_ is the third, the most impressive variation upon the earlier theme, depicting the cleavage between conviction and duty, citizens.h.i.+p and humanity, the national man and the free man. A war drama of the conscience staged amid a war in the material world. In _Le triomphe de la raison_, the problem was one of freedom versus the fatherland; in _Les loups_ it was one of justice versus the fatherland.

Here we have a yet loftier variation of the theme; the conflict of conscience, of eternal truth, versus the fatherland. The chief figure, though not spiritually the hero of the piece, is Clifford, leader of the invading army. He is waging an unjust war--and what war is just? But he wages it with a strategist's brain; his heart is not in the work. He knows "how much rottenness there is in war"; he knows that war cannot be effectively waged without hatred for the enemy; but he is too cultured to hate. He knows that it is impossible to carry on war without falsehood; impossible to kill without infringing the principles of humanity; impossible to create military justice, since the whole aim of war is unjust. He knows this with one part of his being, which is the real Clifford; but he has to repudiate the knowledge with the other part of his being, the professional soldier. He is confined within an iron ring of contradictions. "Obeir a ma patrie? Obeir a ma conscience?" It is impossible to gain the victory without doing wrong, yet who can command an army if he lack the will to conquer? Clifford must serve that will, even while he despises the force which his duty compels him to use. He cannot be a man unless he thinks, and yet he cannot remain a soldier while preserving his humanity. Vainly does he seek to mitigate the brutalities of his task; fruitlessly does he endeavor to do good amid the bloodshed which issues from his orders. He is aware that "there are gradations in crime, but every one of these gradations remains a crime." Other notable figures in the play are: the cynic, whose only aim is the profit of his own country; the army sportsman; those who blindly obey; the sentimentalist, who shuts his eyes to all that is painful, contemplating as a puppet-show what is tragedy to those who have to endure it. The background to these figures is the lying spirit of contemporary civilization, with its neat phrases to justify every outrage, and its factories built upon tombs. To our civilization applies the charge inscribed upon the opening page, raising the drama into the sphere of universal humanity: "This play has not been written to condemn a single nation, but to condemn Europe."

The true hero of the piece is not General Clifford, the conqueror of South Africa, but the free spirit, as typified in the Italian volunteer, a citizen of the world who threw himself into the fray that he might defend freedom, and in the Scottish peasant who lays aside his rifle with the words, "I will kill no longer." These men have no other fatherland than conscience, no other home than their own humanity. The only fate they acknowledge is that which the free man creates for himself. Rolland is with them, the vanquished, as he is ever with those who voluntarily accept defeat. It is from his soul that rises the cry of the Italian volunteer, "Ma patrie est partout ou la liberte est menacee." Aert, Saint Louis, Hugot, the Girondists, Teulier, the martyrs in _Les loups_, are the author's spiritual brethren, the children of his belief that the individual's will is stronger than his secular environment. This faith grows ever greater, takes on an ever wider oscillation, as the years pa.s.s. In his first plays he was still speaking to France. His last work written for the stage addresses a wider audience; it is his confession of world citizens.h.i.+p.

CHAPTER XIX

THE PLAYWRIGHT

We have seen that Rolland's plays form a whole, which for comprehensiveness may compared with the work of Shakespeare, Schiller, or Hebbel. Recent stage performances in Germany have shown that in places, at least, they possess great dramatic force. The historical fact that work of such magnitude and power should remain for twenty years practically unknown, must have some deeper cause than chance. The effect of a literary composition is always in large part dependent upon the atmosphere of the time. Sometimes this atmosphere may so operate as to make it seem that a spark has fallen into a powder-barrel heaped full of acc.u.mulated sensibilities. Sometimes the influence of the atmosphere may be repressive in manifold ways. A work, therefore, taken alone, can never reflect an epoch. Such reflection can only be secured when the work is harmonious to the epoch in which it originates.

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, wis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sions; 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 ant.i.theses 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 G.o.ds 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 circ.u.mstances, but are lured to action by the fascination of their own thoughts; the circ.u.mstances are merely the friction-surfaces upon which their ardor is struck into flame. When to the eye of the realist they are vanquished, when Aert 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.

Rolland has openly proclaimed the name of the intellectual father of his tragedies. Shakespeare was no more than the burning bush, the first herald, the stimulus, the inimitable model. To Shakespeare, Rolland owes his impetus, his ardor, and in part his dialectical power. But as far as spiritual form is concerned, he has picked up the mantle of another master, one whose work as dramatist still remains almost unknown. I refer to Ernest Renan, and to the _Drames philosophiques_, among which _L'abbesse de Jouarre_ and _Le pretre de Nemi_ exercised a decisive influence upon the younger playwright. The art of discussing spiritual problems in actual drama instead of in essays or in such dialogues as those of Plato, was a legacy from Renan, who gave kindly help and instruction to the aspiring student. From Renan, too, came the inner calm of justice, together with the clarity which never failed to lift the writer above the conflicts he was describing. But whereas the sage of Treguier, in his serene aloofness, regarded all human activities as a perpetually renewed illusion, so that his works voiced a somewhat ironical and even malicious skepticism, in Rolland we find a new element, the flame of an idealism that is still undimmed to-day. Strange indeed is the paradox, that one who of all modern writers is the most fervent in his faith, should borrow the artistic forms he employs from the master of cautious doubt. Hence what in Renan had a r.e.t.a.r.ding and cooling influence, becomes in Rolland a cause of vigorous and enthusiastic action. Whilst Renan stripped all the legends, even the most sacred of legends, bare, in his search for a wise but tepid truth, Rolland is led by his revolutionary temperament to create a new legend, a new heroism, a new emotional spur to action.

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 s.e.xual 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 a.n.a.lysis of Strindberg. Despite the vituperation of the critics, the world of Ibsen and Strindberg was still the critics' world.

On the other hand, the problems with which Rolland's plays were concerned could never awaken the interest of a bourgeois public, for they were political, ideal, heroic, revolutionary problems. The surge of his more comprehensive feelings engulfed the lesser tensions of s.e.x.

Rolland's dramas leave the erotic problem untouched, and this d.a.m.ns them for a modern audience. He presents a new type, political drama in the sense phrased by Napoleon, conversing with Goethe at Erfurt. "La politique, voila la fatalite moderne." The tragic dramatist always displays human beings in conflict with forces. Man becomes great through his resistance to these forces. In Greek tragedy the powers of fate a.s.sumed mythical forms: the wrath of the G.o.ds, the disfavor of evil spirits, disastrous oracles. We see this in the figures of Oedipus, Prometheus, and Philoctetes. For us moderns, it is the overwhelming power of the state, organized political force, ma.s.sed destiny, against which as individuals we stand weaponless; it is the great spiritual storms, "les courants de foi," which inexorably sweep us away like straws before the wind. No less incalculably than did the fabled G.o.ds of antiquity, no less overwhelmingly and pitilessly, does the world-destiny make us its sport. War is the most powerful of these ma.s.s influences, and, for this reason, nearly all Rolland's plays take war as their theme. Their moral force consists in the way wherein again and again they show how the individual, a Prometheus in conflict with the G.o.ds, is able in the spiritual sphere to break the unseen yoke; how the individual idea remains stronger than the ma.s.s idea, the idea of the fatherland--though the latter can still destroy a hardy rebel with the thunderbolts of Jupiter.

The Greeks first knew the G.o.ds when the G.o.ds were angry. Our gloomy divinity, the fatherland, blood-thirsty as the G.o.ds of old, first becomes fully known to us in time of war. Unless fate lowers, man rarely thinks of these hostile forces; he despises them or forgets them, while they lurk in the darkness, awaiting the advent of their day. A peaceful, a laodicean era had no interest in tragedies foreshadowing the opposition of the forces which were twenty years later to engage in deadly struggle in the blood-stained European arena. What should those care who strayed into the theater from the Parisian boulevards, members of an audience skilled in the geometry of adultery, what should they care about such problems as those in Rolland's plays: whether it is better to serve the fatherland or to serve justice; whether in war time soldiers must obey orders or follow the call of conscience? The questions seemed at best but idle trifling, remote from reality, charades, the untimely musings of a cloistered moralist; problems in the fourth dimension. "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?"--though in truth it would have been well to heed Ca.s.sandra's warning. The tragedy and the greatness of Rolland's plays lies in this, that they came a generation before their day. They seem to have been written for the time we have just had to live through. They seem to foretell in lofty symbols the spiritual content of to-day's political happenings. The outburst of a revolution, the concentration of its energies into individual personalities, the decline of pa.s.sion into brutality and into suicidal chaos, as typified in the figures of Kerensky, Lenin, Liebknecht, is the antic.i.p.atory theme of Rolland's plays. The anguish of Aert, the struggles of the Girondists who had likewise to defend themselves upon two fronts, against the brutality of war and against the brutality of the Revolution--have we not all of late realized these things with the vividness of personal experience? Since 1914, what question has been more pressing than that of the conflict between the free-spirited internationalist and the ma.s.s frenzy of his fellow countrymen? Where, during recent decades, has there been produced any other drama which can present these soul-searching problems so vividly and with so much human understanding as do the tragedies which lay for years in obscurity, and were then overshadowed by the fame of their late-born brother, _Jean Christophe_? These dramas, parerga as it seemed, were aimed, in an hour when peace still ruled the world, at the center of our contemporary consciousness, which was then still unwoven by the looms of time. The stone which the builders of the stage contemptuously rejected, will perhaps become the foundation of a new theater, grandly conceived, contemporary and yet heroical, the theater of the free European brotherhood, for whose sake it was fas.h.i.+oned in solitude decades ago by the lonely creator.

PART THREE

THE HEROIC BIOGRAPHIES

I prepare myself by the study of history and the practice of writing. So doing, I welcome always in my soul the memory of the best and most renowned of men. For whenever the enforced a.s.sociations of daily life arouse worthless, evil, or ign.o.ble feelings, I am able to repel these feelings and to keep them at a distance, by dispa.s.sionately turning my thoughts to contemplate the brightest examples.

PLUTARCH, _Preamble to the Life of Timoleon_.

CHAPTER I

DE PROFUNDIS

At twenty years of age, and again at thirty years of age, in his early works, Rolland had wished to depict enthusiasm as the highest power of the individual and as the creative soul of an entire people. For him, that man alone is truly alive whose spirit is consumed with longing for the ideal, that nation alone is inspired which collects its forces in an ardent faith. The dream of his youth was to arouse a weary and vanquished generation, infirm of will; to stimulate its faith; to bring salvation to the world through enthusiasm.

Vain had been the attempt. Ten years, fifteen years--how easily the phrase is spoken, but how long the time may seem to a sad heart--had been spent in fruitless endeavor. Disillusionment had followed upon disillusionment. _Le theatre du peuple_ had come to nothing; the Dreyfus affair had been merged in political intrigue; the dramas were waste paper. There had been no stir in response to his efforts. His friends were scattered. Whilst the companions of his youth had already attained to fame, Rolland was still the beginner. It almost seemed as if the more he did, the more his work was ignored. None of his aims had been fulfilled. Public life was lukewarm and torpid as of old. The world was in search of profit instead of faith and spiritual force.

His private life likewise lay in ruins. His marriage, entered into with high hopes, was one more disappointment. During these years Rolland had individual experience of a tragedy whose cruelty his work leaves unnoticed, for his writings never touch upon the narrower troubles of his own life. Wounded to the heart, s.h.i.+p-wrecked in all his undertakings, he withdrew into solitude. His workroom, small and simple as a monastic cell, became his world; work his consolation. He had now to fight the hardest fight on behalf of the faith of his youth, that he might not lose it in the darkness of despair.

In his solitude he read the literature of the day. And since in all voices man hears the echo of his own, Rolland found everywhere pain and loneliness. He studied the lives of the artists, and having done so he wrote: "The further we penetrate into the existence of great creators, the more strongly are we impressed by the magnitude of the unhappiness by which their lives were enveloped. I do not merely mean that, being subject to the ordinary trials and disappointments of mankind, their higher emotional susceptibility rendered these smarts exceptionally keen. I mean that their genius, placing them in advance of their contemporaries by twenty, thirty, fifty, nay often a hundred years, and thus making of them wanderers in the desert, condemned them to the most desperate exertions if they were but to live, to say nothing of winning to victory." Thus these great ones among mankind, those towards whom posterity looks back with veneration, those who will for all time bring consolation to the lonely in spirit, were themselves "pauvres vaincus, les vainqueurs du monde"--the conquerors of the world, but themselves beaten in the fray. An endless chain of perpetually repeated and unmeaning torments binds their successive destinies into a tragical unity. "Never," as Tolstoi pointed out in the oft-mentioned letter, "do true artists share the common man's power of contented enjoyment." The greater their natures, the greater their suffering. And conversely, the greater their suffering the fuller the development of their own greatness.