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 accumulated 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 multitude. "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 impassioned 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 "fêtes 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 passion 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 multitude 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 frères" 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 goddess 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 kinship 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 masses 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 passes into the hands of the few; when moral unity is broken in sunder by the conflict between political aims; when the masses, 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 nobler 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 passions 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 soûle 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 passion 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 masses, 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 ignoble 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 analysis 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 masses had played the principal 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 passivity, 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 Jaurès characterize it, Jaurès who himself resembled Danton in his power of oratory, introducing the work when it was staged at the Théâtre Civique on December 20, 1900—a performance forgotten in twenty-four hours, like all Rolland's early efforts.