Page:Rolland - People's Theater.djvu/58

40 have felt free to do this, and also the Germans, with all their boasts about exactitude, and their famous translations, "almost as good as the original"—what volumes this phrase tells of their appreciation! And we in France have all the more reason to accept such profanation, though without doubt the popular audiences in this country come nearer to appreciating certain sides of Shakespeare's work than the ordinary audience. They understand what is instinctive and violent in it; but still, how immeasurably far from his myriad-minded genius do they still remain! It is a pitiful thing to have to bring the works of a great man down to the level of the masses!

We should also be forced to mutilate the plays of the great poetic dramatists of the beginning of the nineteenth century. Among the popular dramas of that time, I should beyond all question put the Wilhelm Tell of Schiller, and the Prinz Friedrich von Hamburg of Heinrich von Kleist, the most powerful of German tragic writers. Kleist's work is passionate and grandiose; even nowadays it arouses great enthusiasm among German audiences, but it is the very apotheosis of the Prussian monarchical ideal, and we might be somewhat embarrassed to further that. But the play is valuable to us because it is an almost unique type of the patriotic drama, in the best sense of the term, without jingoism, and without the usual flattery of the base instincts of the multitude. As for the admirable Wilhelm Tell, vibrating with thick red blood and