Page:Rolland - Two Plays of the French Revolution.djvu/14

8 it goes out into the provinces in pursuit of the Girondin proscripts, it devours itself." Thus M. Rolland.

The remaining plays are three in number, and inferior in dramatic and literary quality to the six just discussed. The first of these is an anti-war propaganda piece, Le Temps viendra, published in 1903, and inspired by the Boer war. La Montespan, a French historical drama, followed in 1904, and Les Trois Amoureuses, also based upon history, in 1906.

In order to grasp the full significance of M. Rolland's plays it will be necessary to consider his interesting book, Le Théâtre du Peuple. Ever since the early eighties M. Rolland had been a staunch admirer and in some ways a disciple of Tolstoy. The young Frenchman, however, expressed his doubts to the Russian, and in 1887 Tolstoy wrote a long letter which was, according to one of M. Rolland's biographers, a sort of preliminary sketch for What Is Art? And when that astounding book appeared, with its iconoclastic attacks on M. Rolland's idols, he was at first prone to disagree, but Le Théâtre du Peuple is ample proof that "literature for the people" had sunk deep into the Frenchman's heart. The theater, in common with most modern art, is a whitened sepulcher, rotten to the core, affected, aristocratic, anti-democratic. The evil is not only in the plays, but in acting and the physical arrangement of the playhouse itself. New plays must be written for the masses, plays which they can understand, plays which bring them together as a class and in which they can participate. M. Rolland