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 institution" demanded by Schiller and championed by d'Alembert. No breath of passion 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 amusement, 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 _Aërt_ 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 titanic 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 sexual 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 anæmia of dramatic art, as Rolland recognized, could be cured only by intimate association with the life of the people. The effeminateness of the French drama must be replaced by virility through vital contact with the masses. "Seul la sève populaire peut lui rendre la vie et la santé." 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 théâtre du peuple_, and his _Théâtre de la révolution_, are enduring monuments of an attempt which temporarily ended in defeat, but which, like all his defeats, has been transmuted, humanly and artistically, into a moral triumph.