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 Floréal, 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 documents 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'état. 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 théâtre de la révolution.
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 théâtre de la révolution, "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 encumber 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 "fêtes galantes." We are at the Trianon, watching the light-hearted unconcern of the ancien régime; 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 shine 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. Wishing 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 shipwreck 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