Romain Rolland Part 4

CHAPTER V

THE TRAGEDIES OF FAITH

_Saint Louis. Aert. 1895-1898_

Twenty years after their first composition, republis.h.i.+ng the forgotten dramas of his youth under the t.i.tle _Les tragedies de la foi_ (1913), Rolland alluded in the preface to the tragical melancholy of the epoch in which they were composed. "At that time," he writes, "we were much further from our goal, and far more isolated." The elder brothers of Jean Christophe and Olivier, "less robust though not less fervent in the faith," had found it harder to defend their beliefs, to maintain their idealism at its lofty level, than did the youth of the new day; living in a stronger France, a freer Europe. Twenty years earlier, the shadow of defeat still lay athwart the land. These heroes of the French spirit had been compelled, even within themselves, to fight the evil genius of the race, to combat doubts as to the high destinies of their nation, to struggle against the la.s.situde of the vanquished. Then was to be heard the cry of a petty era lamenting its vanished greatness; it aroused no echo from the stage or from the people; it wasted itself in the unresponsive skies--and yet it was the expression of an undying faith in life.

Closely akin to this ardor is the faith voiced by Rolland's dramatic cycle, though the plays deal with such different epochs, and are so diverse in the range of their ideas. He wishes to depict the "courants de foi," the mysterious streams of faith, at a time when a flame of spiritual enthusiasm is spreading through an entire nation, when an idea is flas.h.i.+ng from mind to mind, involving unnumbered thousands in the storm of an illusion; when the calm of the soul is suddenly ruffled by heroic tumult; when the word, the faith, the ideal, though ever invisible and unattainable, transfuses the inert world and lifts it towards the stars. It matters nothing in ultimate a.n.a.lysis what idea fires the souls of men; whether the idea be that of Saint Louis for the holy sepulcher and Christ's realm, or that of Aert for the fatherland, or that of the Girondists for freedom. The ostensible goal is a minor matter; the essence of such movements is the wonder-working faith; it is this which a.s.sembles a people for crusades into the east, which summons thousands to death for the nation, which makes leaders throw themselves willingly under the guillotine. "Toute la vie est dans l'essor," the reality of life is found in its impetus, as Verhaeren says; that alone is beautiful which is created in the enthusiasm of faith. We are not to infer that these early heroes, born out of due time, must have succ.u.mbed to discouragement since they failed to reach their goal; one and all they had to bow their souls to the influences of a petty time. That is why Saint Louis died without seeing Jerusalem; why Aert, fleeing from bondage, found only the eternal freedom of death; why the Girondists were trampled beneath the heels of the mob. These men had the true faith, that faith which does not demand realization in this world. In widely separated centuries, and against different storms of time, they were the banner bearers of the same ideal, whether they carried the cross or held the sword, whether they wore the cap of liberty or the visored helm. They were animated with the same enthusiasm for the unseen; they had the same enemy, call it cowardice, call it poverty of spirit, call it the supineness of a weary age. When destiny refused them the externals of greatness, they created greatness in their own souls.

Amid unheroic environments they displayed the perennial heroism of the undaunted will; the triumph of the spirit which, when animated with faith, can prove victorious over time.

The significance, the lofty aim, of these early plays, was their intention to recall to the minds of contemporaries the memory of forgotten brothers in the faith, to arouse for the service of the spirit and not for the ends of brute force that idealism which ever burgeons from the imperishable seed of youth. Already we discern the entire moral purport of Rolland's later work, the endeavor to change the world by the force of inspiration. "Tout est bien qui exalte la vie." Everything which exalts life is good. This is Rolland's confession of faith, as it is that of his own Olivier. Ardor alone can create vital realities.

There is no defeat over which the will cannot triumph; there is no sorrow above which a free spirit cannot soar. Who wills the unattainable, is stronger than destiny; even his destruction in this mortal world is none the less a mastery of fate. The tragedy of his heroism kindles fresh enthusiasm, which seizes the standard as it slips from his grasp, to raise it anew and bear it onward through the ages.

CHAPTER VI

SAINT LOUIS

1894

This epic of King Louis IX is a drama of religious exaltation, born of the spirit of music, an adaptation of the Wagnerian idea of elucidating ancestral sagas in works of art. It was originally designed as an opera.

Rolland actually composed an overture to the work; but this, like his other musical compositions, remains unpublished. Subsequently he was satisfied with lyrical treatment in place of music. We find no touch of Shakespearean pa.s.sion in these gentle pictures. It is a heroic legend of the saints, in dramatic form. The scenes remind us of a phrase of Flaubert's in _La legende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier_, in that they are "written as they appear in the stained-gla.s.s windows of our churches." The tints are delicate, like those of the frescoes in the Pantheon, where Puvis de Chavannes depicts another French saint, Sainte Genevieve watching over Paris. The soft moonlight playing on the saint's figure in the frescoes is identical with the light which in Rolland's drama s.h.i.+nes like a halo of goodness round the head of the pious king of France.

The music of _Parsifal_ seems to sound faintly through the work. We trace the lineaments of Parsifal himself in this monarch, to whom knowledge comes not through sympathy but through goodness, and who finds the aptest phrase to explain his own t.i.tle to fame, saying: "Pour comprendre les autres, il ne faut qu'aimer"--To understand others, we need only love. His leading quality is gentleness, but he has so much of it that the strong grow weak before him; he has nothing but his faith, but this faith builds mountains of action. He neither can nor will lead his people to victory; but he makes his subjects transcend themselves, transcend their own inertia and the apparently futile venture of the crusade, to attain faith. Thereby he gives the whole nation the greatness which ever springs from self-sacrifice. In Saint Louis, Rolland for the first time presents his favorite type, that of the vanquished victor. The king never reaches his goal, but "plus qu'il est ecrase par les choses plus il semble les dominer davantage"--the more he seems to be crushed by things, the more does he dominate them. When, like Moses, he is forbidden to set eyes on the promised land, when it proves to be his destiny "de mourir vaincu," to die conquered, as he draws his last breath on the mountain slope his soldiers at the summit, catching sight of the city which is the goal of their aspirations, raise an exultant shout. Louis knows that to one who strives for the unattainable the world can never give victory, but "il est beau lutter pour l'impossible quand l'impossible est Dieu"--it is glorious to fight for the unattainable when the unattainable is G.o.d. For the vanquished in such a struggle, the highest triumph is reserved. He has stirred up the weak in soul to do a deed whose rapture is denied to himself; from his own faith he has created faith in others; from his own spirit has issued the eternal spirit.

Rolland's first published work exhales the atmosphere of Christianity.

Humility conquers force, faith conquers the world, love conquers hatred; these eternal truths which have been incorporated in countless sayings and writings from those of the primitive Christians down to those of Tolstoi, are repeated once again by Rolland in the form of a legend of the saints. In his later works, however, with a freer touch, he shows that the power of faith is not tied to any particular creed. The symbolical world, which is here used as a romanticist vehicle in which to enwrap his own idealism, is replaced by the environment of modern days. Thus we are taught that from Saint Louis and the crusades it is but a step to our own soul, if it desire "to be great and to defend greatness on earth."

CHAPTER VII

AeRT

1898

_Aert_ 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; _Aert_ is the tragedy of the vanquished, and a pa.s.sionate 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 Aert, 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, Maitre Troja.n.u.s (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 Aert's youthful pa.s.sion is still indeterminate; this pa.s.sion 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 Offiziere_, in which the torment of enforced inactivity and repressed heroic will gives rise to warlike impulses as a means of spiritual enfranchis.e.m.e.nt. Like Unruh's hero, Aert in his outcry proclaims the torpor of his companions, voices his oppression amid the sultry and stagnant atmosphere of a time devoid of faith. Encompa.s.sed 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.

CHAPTER VIII

ATTEMPT TO REGENERATE THE FRENCH STAGE

With whole-souled faith the young poet uttered his first dramatic appeals in the heroic form, being mindful of Schiller's saying that fortunate epochs could devote themselves to the service of beauty, whereas in times of weakness it was necessary to lean upon the examples of past heroism. Rolland had issued to his nation a summons to greatness. There was no answer. His conviction that a new impetus was indispensable remaining unshaken, Rolland looked for the cause of this lack of response. He rightly discerned it, not in his own work, but in the refractoriness of the age. Tolstoi, in his books and in the wonderful letter to Rolland, had been the first to make the young man realize the sterility of bourgeois art. Above all in the drama, its most sensual form of expression, that art had lost touch with the moral and emotional forces of life. A clique of busy playwrights had monopolized the Parisian stage. Their eternal theme was adultery, in its manifold variations. They depicted petty erotic conflicts, but never dealt with a universally human ethical problem. The audiences, badly counseled by the press, which deliberately fostered the public's intellectual lethargy, did not ask to be morally awakened, but merely to be amused and pleased.

The theater was anything in the world other than "the moral inst.i.tution"

demanded by Schiller and championed by d'Alembert. No breath of pa.s.sion found its way from such dramatic art as this into the heart of the nation; there was nothing but spindrift scattered over the surface by the breeze. A great gulf was fixed between this witty and sensuous amus.e.m.e.nt, and the genuinely creative and receptive energies of France.

Rolland, led by Tolstoi and accompanied by enthusiastic friends, realized the moral dangers of the situation. He perceived that dramatic art is worthless and destructive when it lives a life remote from the people. Unconsciously in _Aert_ he had heralded what he now formulated as a definite principle, that the people will be the first to understand genuinely heroic problems. The simple craftsman Claes in that play is the only member of the captive prince's circle who revolts against tepid submission, who burns at the disgrace inflicted on his fatherland. In other artistic forms than the drama, the t.i.tanic forces surging up from the depths of the people had already been recognized. Zola and the naturalists had depicted the tragical beauty of the proletariat; Millet and Meunier had given pictorial and sculptural representations of proletarians; socialism had unleashed the religious might of the collective consciousness. The theater alone, vehicle for the most direct working of art upon the common people, had been captured by the bourgeoisie, its tremendous possibilities for promoting a moral renascence being thereby cut off. Unceasingly did the drama practice the in-and-in breeding of s.e.xual problems. In its pursuit of erotic trifles, it had over-looked the new social ideas, the most fundamental of modern times. It was in danger of decay because it no longer thrust its roots into the permanent subsoil of the nation. The anaemia of dramatic art, as Rolland recognized, could be cured only by intimate a.s.sociation with the life of the people. The effeminateness of the French drama must be replaced by virility through vital contact with the ma.s.ses. "Seul la seve populaire peut lui rendre la vie et la sante." If the theater aspires to be national, it must not merely minister to the luxury of the upper ten thousand. It must become the moral nutriment of the common people, and must draw fertility from the folk-soul.

Rolland's work during the next few years was an endeavor to provide such a theater for the people. A few young men without influence or authority, strong only in the ardor and sincerity of their youthfulness, tried to bring this lofty idea to fruition, despite the utter indifference of the metropolis, and in defiance of the veiled hostility of the press. In their "_Revue dramatique_" they published manifestoes.

They sought for actors, stages, and helpers. They wrote plays, formed committees, sent dispatches to ministers of state. In their endeavor to bridge the chasm between the bourgeois theater and the nation, they wrought with the fanatical zeal of the leaders of forlorn hopes. Rolland was their chief. His manifesto, _Le theatre du peuple_, and his _Theatre de la revolution_, are enduring monuments of an attempt which temporarily ended in defeat, but which, like all his defeats, has been trans.m.u.ted, humanly and artistically, into a moral triumph.

CHAPTER IX

AN APPEAL TO THE PEOPLE

"The old era is finished; the new era is beginning." Rolland, writing in the "Revue dramatique" in 1900, opened his appeal with these words by Schiller. The summons was twofold, to the writers and to the people, that they should const.i.tute a new unity, should form a people's theater.

The stage and the plays were to belong to the people. Since the forces of the people are eternal and unalterable, art must accommodate itself to the people, not the people to art. This union must be perfected in the creative depths. It must not be a casual intimacy, but a permeation, a genetic wedding of souls. The people requires its own art, its own drama. As Tolstoi phrased it, the people must be the ultimate touchstone of all values. Its powerful, mystical, eternally religious energy of inspiration, must become more affirmative and stronger, so that art, which in its bourgeois a.s.sociations has grown morbid and wan, can draw new vigor from the vigor of the people.

To this end it is essential that the people should no longer be a chance audience, transiently patronized by friendly managers and actors. The popular performances of the great theaters, such as have been customary in Paris since the issue of Napoleon's decree on the subject, do not suffice. Valueless also, in Rolland's view, are the attempts made from time to time by the Comedie Francaise to present to the workers the plays of such court poets as Corneille and Racine. The people do not want caviare, but wholesome fare. For the nourishment of their indestructible idealism they need an art of their own, a theater of their own, and, above all, works adapted to their sensibilities and to their intellectual tastes. When they come to the theater, they must not be made to feel that they are tolerated guests in a world of unfamiliar ideas. In the art that is presented to them they must be able to recognize the mainspring of their own energies.

More appropriate, in Rolland's opinion, are the attempts which have been made by isolated individuals like Maurice Pottecher in Bussang (Vosges) to provide a "theatre du peuple," presenting to restricted audiences pieces easily understood. But such endeavors touch small circles only.

The chasm in the gigantic metropolis between the stage and the real population remains unbridged. With the best will in the world, the twenty or thirty special representations are witnessed by no more than an infinitesimal proportion of the population. They do not signify a spiritual union, or promote a new moral impetus. Dramatic art has no permanent influence on the ma.s.ses; and the ma.s.ses, in their turn, have no influence on dramatic art. Though, in another literary sphere, Zola, Charles Louis Philippe, and Maupa.s.sant, began long ago to draw fertile inspiration from proletarian idealism, the drama has remained sterile and antipopular.

The people, therefore, must have its own theater. When this has been achieved, what shall we offer to the popular audiences? Rolland makes a brief survey of world literature. The result is appalling. What can the workers care for the cla.s.sical pieces of the French drama? Corneille and Racine, with their decorous emotion, are alien to him; the subtleties of Moliere are barely comprehensible. The tragedies of cla.s.sical antiquity, the writings of the Greek dramatists, would bore the workers; Hugo's romanticism would repel, despite the author's healthy instinct for reality. Shakespeare, the universally human, is more akin to the folk-mind, but his plays must be adapted to fit them for popular presentation, and thereby they are falsified. Schiller, with _Die Rauber_ and _Wilhelm Tell_, might be expected to arouse enthusiasm; but Schiller, like Kleist with _Der Prinz von Homburg_, is, for nationalist reasons, somewhat uncongenial to the Parisians. Tolstoi's _The Dominion of Darkness_ and Hauptmann's _Die Weber_ would be comprehensible enough, but their matter would prove somewhat depressing. While well calculated to stir the consciences of the guilty, among the people they would arouse feelings of despair rather than of hope. Anzengruber, a genuine folk-poet, is too distinctively Viennese in his topics. Wagner, whose _Die Meistersinger_ Rolland regards as the climax of universally comprehensible and elevating art, cannot be presented without the aid of music.

However far he looks back into the past, Rolland can find no answer to his question. But he is not easily discouraged. To him disappointment is but a spur to fresh effort. If there are as yet no plays for the people's theater, it is the sacred duty of the new generation to provide what is lacking. The manifesto ends with a jubilant appeal: "Tout est a dire! Tout est a faire! A l'oeuvre!" In the beginning was the deed.

CHAPTER X

THE PROGRAM

What kind of plays do the people want? It wants "good" plays, in the sense in which the word "good" is used by Tolstoi when he speaks of "good books." It wants plays which are easy to understand without being commonplace; those which stimulate faith without leading the spirit astray; those which appeal, not to sensuality, not to the love of sight-seeing, but to the powerful idealistic instincts of the ma.s.ses.

These plays must not treat of minor conflicts; but, in the spirit of the antique tragedies, they must display man in the struggle with elemental forces, man as subject to heroic destiny. "Let us away with complicated psychologies, with subtle innuendoes, with obscure symbolisms, with the art of drawing-rooms and alcoves." Art for the people must be monumental. Though the people desires truth, it must not be delivered over to naturalism, for art which makes the ma.s.ses aware of their own misery will never kindle the sacred flame of enthusiasm, but only the insensate pa.s.sion of anger. If, next day, the workers are to resume their daily tasks with a heightened and more cheerful confidence, they need a tonic. Thus the evening must have been a source of energy, but must at the same time have sharpened the intelligence. Undoubtedly the drama should display the people to the people, not however in the proletarian dullness of narrow dwellings, but on the pinnacles of the past. Rolland therefore opines, following to a large extent in Schiller's footsteps, that the people's theater must be historical in scope. The populace must not merely make its own acquaintance on the stage, but must be brought to admire its own past. Here we see the motif to which Rolland continually returns, the need for arousing a pa.s.sionate aspiration towards greatness. In its suffering, the people must learn to regain delight in its own self.

With marvelous vividness does the imaginative historian display the epic significance of history. The forces of the past are sacred by reason of the spiritual energy which is part of every great movement. Reasoning persons can hardly fail to be revolted when they observe the unwarranted amount of s.p.a.ce allotted to anecdotes, accessories, the trifles of history, at the expense of its living soul. The power of the past must be awakened; the will to action must be steeled. Those who live to-day must learn greatness from their fathers and forefathers. "History can teach people to get outside themselves, to read in the souls of others.