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THE young man of twenty-two, just liberated from the walls of the Parisian seminary, fired with the genius of music and with that of Shakespeare's enthralling plays, had in Italy his first experience of the world as a sphere of freedom. He had learned history from documents and syllabuses. Now history looked at him with living eyes out of statues and figures; the Italian cities, the centuries, seemed to move as if on a stage under his impassioned gaze.Give them but speech, these sublime memories, and history would become poesy, the past would grow into a peopled tragedy. During his first hours in the south he was in a sublime intoxication. Not as historian but as poet did he first see Rome and Florence.
"Here," he said to himself in youthful fervor, "here is the greatness for which I have yearned. Here, at least,it used to be, in the days of the Renaissance, when these cathedrals grew heavenward amid the storms of battle, and when Michelangelo and Raphael were adorning the walls of the Vatican, what time the popes were no less mighty in spirit than the masters of art—for in that epoch, after centuries of interment with the antique statues, the heroic spirit of ancient Greece had been revived in a new Europe." His imagination conjured up the superhuman figures of that earlier day; and of a sudden, Shakespeare, the friend of his first youth, filled his mind once more. Simultaneously as I have already recounted, witnessing a number of performances by Ernesto Rossi, he came to realize his own dramatic talent. Not now, as of old, in the Clamecy loft, was he chiefly allured by the gentle feminine figures. The strongest appeal, to his early manhood, was exercised by the fierceness of the more powerful characters, by the penetrating truth of a knowledge of mankind, by the stormy tumult of the soul. In France, Shakespeare is hardly known at all by stage presentation, and but very little in prose translation. Rolland, however, now attained as intimate an acquaintanceship with Shakespeare as had been possessed a hundred years earlier, almost at the same age, by Goethe when he conceived his Oration on Shakespeare . This new inspiration showed itself in a vigorous creative impulse. Rolland penned a series of dramas dealing with the great figures of the past,working with the fervor of the beginner, and with that sense of newly acquired mastery which was felt by the Germans of the Sturm und Drang era.
These plays remained unpublished, at first owing to the disfavor of circumstances, but subsequently because the author's ripening critical faculty made him withhold them from the world. The first, entitled Orsino , was written at Rome in 1890. Next, in the halcyon clime of Sicily, he composed Empedocles ,uninfluenced by Hölderlin's ambitious draft, of which Rolland heard first from Malwida von Meysenbug.In the same year, 1891, he wrote Gli Baglioni . His return to Paris did not interrupt this outpouring, for in 1892 he wrote two plays, Caligula , and Niobé . From his wedding journey to the beloved Italy in 1893 he returned with a new Renaissance drama, Le siège de Mantoue . This is the only one of the early plays which the author acknowledges to-day, though by an unfortunate mischance the manuscript has been lost.At length turning his attention to French history, he wrote Saint Louis (1893), the first of his Tragédies de la foi . Next came Jeanne de Piennes (1894), which remains unpublished.... Aërt (1895), the second of the Tragédies de la foi , was the first of Rolland's plays to be staged. There now (1896-1902) followed the four dramas of the Théâtre de la révolution . In 1900 he wrote La Montespan and Les trois amoureuses .
Thus before the era of the more important works there were composed no less than twelve dramas,equaling in bulk the entire dramatic output of Schiller,Kleist, or Hebbel. The first eight of these were never either printed or staged. Except for the appreciation by his confidant Malwida von Meysenbug in Der Lebens Abend einer Idealistin (a connoisseur's tribute to their artistic merits), not a word has ever been said about them.
With a single exception. One of the plays was read on a classical occasion by one of the greatest French actors of the day, but the reminiscence is a painful one.Gabriel Monod, who from being Rolland's teacher had become his friend, noting Malwida von Meysenbug's enthusiasm, gave three of Rolland's pieces to Mounet-Sully, who was delighted with them. The actor submitted them to the Comédie Française, and in the reading committee he fought desperately on behalf of the unknown, whose dramatic talent was more obvious to him, the comedian, than it was to the men of letters. Orsino and Gli Baglioni were ruthlessly rejected, but Niobé was read to the committee. This was a momentous incident in Rolland's life; for the first time, fame seemed close at hand. Mounet-Sully read the play. Rolland was present. The reading took two hours, and for a further two minutes the young author's fate hung in the balance. Not yet, however,was celebrity to come. The drama was refused, to relapse into oblivion. It was not even accorded the lesser grace of print; and of the dozen or so dramatic works which the dauntless author penned during the next decade, not one found its way on to the boards of the national theater.
We know no more than the names of these early works, and are unable to judge their worth. But when we study the later plays we may deduce the conclusion that in the earlier ones a premature flame, raging too hotly, burned itself out. If the dramas which first appeared in the press charm us by their maturity and concentration, they depend for these qualities upon the fate which left their predecessors unknown. Their calm is built upon the passion of those which were sacrificed unborn; they owe their orderly structure to the heroic zeal of their martyred brethren. All true creation grows out of the dark humus of rejected creations. Of none is it more true than of Romain Rolland that his work blossoms upon the soil of renunciation.