_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