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.