The Christmas Kalends of Provence Part 8

After a lapse of nearly fifteen centuries, the Roman theatre at Orange--founded in the time of Marcus Aurelius and abandoned, two hundred years later, when the Northern barbarians overran the land--seems destined to arise reanimate from its ruins and to be the scene of periodic performances by the Comedie Francaise: the first dramatic company of Europe playing on the n.o.blest stage in the world.

During the past five-and-twenty years various attempts have been made to compa.s.s this happy end. Now--as the result of the representations of "Oedipus" and "Antigone" at Orange, under government patronage and by the leading actors of the National Theatre--these spasmodic efforts have crystallized into a steadfast endeavour which promises to restore and to repeople that long-abandoned stage.[4]

[Ill.u.s.tration: GENERAL VIEW OF THE THEATRE]

If they know about it--over there in the Shades--I am sure that no one rejoices more sincerely over this revival than do the Romans by whom the theatre at Orange was built, and from whom it has come down to us as one of the many proofs of their strong affection for that portion of their empire which now is the south-east corner of France. To them this region, although ultimately included in the larger Narbonensis, always was simply Provincia--_the_ Province: a distinguishing indistinction which exalted it above all the other dependencies of Rome. Constantine, indeed, was for fixing the very seat of the Empire here; and he did build, and for a time live in, the palace at Arles of which a stately fragment still remains. Unluckily for the world of later periods, he was lured away from the banks of the Rhone by the charms of the Bosporus--and so, without knowing it, opened the Eastern Question: that ever since has been fought over, and that still demands for its right answering at least one more general European war.

Thus greatly loving their Province, the Romans gladly poured out their treasure in adding to its natural beauties the adornments of art.

Scattered through this region--through the Provence of to-day, and, over on the other side of the Rhone, through Languedoc--are the remnants of their magnificent creations: the Pont-du-Gard; the arena, and the baths, and the Tour-Magne, and the beautiful Maison-Carree, at Nimes; at Arles the arena, the palace of Constantine, and the wreck of the once exquisite theatre; the baths at Aix; the triumphal arches at Orange and Carpentras; the partly ruined but more perfectly graceful arch, and the charming monument, here at Saint-Remy--all these relics of Roman splendour, with many others which I have not named, still testify to Roman affection for this enchanting land.

The theatre at Orange--the Arausio of Roman times, colonized by the veterans of the Second Legion--was not the best of these many n.o.ble edifices. Decidedly, the good fortune that has preserved so large a part of it would have been better bestowed upon the far more beautiful, because more purely Grecian, theatre at Arles: which the blessed Saint Hilary and the priest Cyril of holy memory fell afoul of in the fifth century and destroyed because of its inherent idolatrous wickedness, and then used as raw material for their well-meant but injudicious church-building. But the Orange theatre--having as its only extant rival that at Pompeii--has the distinction of being the most nearly perfect Roman theatre surviving until our day; and, setting aside comparisons with things nonexistent, it is one of the most majestic structures to be found in the whole of France. Louis XIV., who styled it "the most magnificent wall of my kingdom," placed it first of all.

The unknown architect who wrought this great work--traversing the Roman custom of erecting a complete building on level ground--followed the Grecian custom of hollowing out a hill-side and of facing the open cutting with a structure of masonry: which completed the tiers of seats cut in the living rock; provided in its main body the postscenium, and in its wings the dressing-rooms; and, rising in front to a level with the colonnade which crowned and surrounded the auditorium, made at once the outer facade and the rear wall of the stage.[5] The dominant characteristic of the building--a great parallelogram jutting out from the hill-side into the very heart of the town--is its powerful ma.s.s. The enormous facade, built of great blocks of stone, is severely simple: a stony height--the present bareness of which formerly was a little relieved by the vast wooden portico that extended along the entire front--based upon a cornice surmounting open Tuscan arches and broken only by a few strong lines. The essential principle of the whole is stability. It is the Roman style with all its good qualities exaggerated. Elegance is replaced by a heavy grandeur; purity by strength.

The auditorium as originally constructed--save for the graceful colonnade which surmounted its enclosing wall, and for the ornamentation which certainly was bestowed upon the rear wall of the stage and probably upon the facing-wall of the first tier of seats--was as severe as the facade: simply bare tiers of stone benches, divided into three distinct stages, rising steplike one above another in a great semi-circle. But when the theatre was filled with an eager mult.i.tude its bareness disappeared; and its brilliant lowest division--where sat the n.o.bles clad in purple-bordered white robes: a long sweep of white dashed with strong colour--fitly brought the auditorium into harmony with the splendour of the permanent setting of the stage.

It was there, on the wall rising at the back of the stage and on the walls rising at its sides, that decoration mainly was bestowed; and there it was bestowed lavishly. Following the Grecian tradition (though in the Grecian theatre the sides of the stage were open gratings) that permanent set represented very magnificently--being, indeed, a reality--a royal palace, or, on occasion, a temple: a facade broken by richly carved marble cornices supported by marble columns and pilasters; its flat surfaces covered with brilliantly coloured mosaics, and having above its five portals[6] arched alcoves in which were statues: that over the royal portal, the _aula regia_, being a great statue of the Emperor or of a G.o.d.

Extending across the whole front of this wall, entirely filling the s.p.a.ce between the wings, was the stage. Ninety feet above it, also filling the s.p.a.ce between the wings, was a wooden roof (long since destroyed) which flared upward and outward: at once adding to the acoustic properties of the building and protecting the stage from rain.

Still farther to strengthen the acoustic effect, two curved walls--lateral sounding-boards--projected from the rear of the stage and partly embraced the s.p.a.ce upon which the action of the play usually went on.

I shall not enter into the vexed question of scenery. It is sufficient to say that this permanent set, in regard to which there can be no dispute--a palace, that also would serve as a temple--made an entirely harmonious framework for most of the plays which were presented here.

Indeed, a more fitting or a more impressive setting could not have been devised for the majority of the tragedies of that time: which were filled with a solemn grandeur, and which had for their chief personages priests or kings. Above all, the dignity of this magnificent permanent scene was in keeping with the devotional solemnity of the early theatre: when an inaugural sacrifice was celebrated upon an altar standing in front of the stage, and when the play itself was in the nature of a religious rite.

II

Certainly for two centuries, possibly for a longer period, the people of Arausio maintained and enjoyed their theatre. The beautiful little city of which it was a part was altogether charming: abounding in comforts and luxuries and rich in works of art. From the hill-top where now stands the statue of the Virgin was to be seen in those days a miniature Rome. Directly at the base of the hill was the theatre, and beyond it were the circus and the baths; to the left, the Coliseum; to the right, the Field of Mars; in front--just within the enclosing ramparts, serving as the chief entrance to the town--the n.o.ble triumphal arch that remains almost perfect even until this present day. Only the theatre and the arch are left now; but the vanished elegance of it all is testified to by the fragments of carved walls and of mosaic pavements which still continue to be unearthed from time to time. Surrounding that opulent little city were farms and vineyards and olive-orchards--a gentle wilderness interset with garden-hidden villas whereto the citizens retired to take their ease; and more widely about it was the broad Rhone Valley, then as now a rich store-house of corn and wine and oil.

No wonder that the lean barbarians of the North came down in hungry hordes and seized upon that fatness as Roman strength decayed; and no wonder, being barbarians, that the invaders wrecked much of the beauty which they could neither use nor understand. After the second German invasion, in the year 406 of our era, there was little left in Gaul of Roman civilization; and after the coming of the Visigoths, four years later, Roman civilization was at an end.

Yet during that period of disintegration the theatre was not injured materially; and it actually remained almost intact--although variously misused and perverted--nearly down to our own day. The Lords of Baux, in the twelfth century, made the building the outguard of their fortress on the hill-top in its rear; and from their time onward little dwellings were erected within it--the creation of which nibbled away its magnificent substance to be used in the making of pygmy walls. But the actual wholesale destruction of the interior did not begin until the year 1622: when Prince Maurice of Na.s.sau and Orange, in manner most unprincely, used the building as a quarry from which to draw material for the system of fortifications devised for his little capital by his Dutch engineers. And this piece of vandalism was as useless as it was iniquitous. Only half a century later--during the temporary occupation of Orange by the French--Prince Maurice's fortifications, built of such precious material, were razed.

In later times quarrying was carried on in the theatre on a smaller scale; but, practically, all that this most outrageous Prince left standing of it still stands: the majestic facade, together with the rooms in the rear of the stage; the huge wings, which look like, and have done duty as, the towers of a feudal fortress; the major portion of the side walls; most of the substructure, and even a little of the superstructure, of the tiers which completed the semi-circles of seats hollowed out of the hill-side; and above these the broken and weathered remains of the higher tiers cut in the living rock. But the colonnade which crowned the enclosing walls of the auditorium is gone, and many of the upper courses of the walls with it; the stage is gone; the wall at the rear of the stage, seamed and scarred, retains only a few fragments of the columns and pilasters and cornices and mosaics which once made it beautiful; the carvings and sculptures have disappeared; the royal portal, once so magnificent, is but a jagged gap in the masonry; the niche above it, once a fit resting place for a G.o.d's image, is shapeless and bare. And until the work of restoration began the whole interior was infested with mean little dwellings which choked it like offensive weeds--while rain and frost steadily were eating into the unprotected masonry and hastening the general decay.

III

This was the theatre's evil condition when, happily, the architect Auguste Caristie, vice-president of the commission charged with the conservation of historical monuments, came down to Orange early in the nineteenth century--and immediately was filled with an enthusiastic determination that the stately building should be purified and restored.

The theatre became with him a pa.s.sion; yet a steadfast pa.s.sion which continued through more than a quarter of a century. He studied it practically on the ground and theoretically in the cabinet; and as the result of his patient researches he produced his great monograph upon it (published in a sumptuous folio at the charges of the French Government) which won for him a medal of the first cla.s.s at the Salon of 1855. In this work he reestablished the building substantially as the Roman architect created it; and so provided the plan in accordance with which the present architect in charge, M. Formige--working in the same loving and faithful spirit--is making the restoration in stone. Most righteously, as a princ.i.p.al feature of the ceremonies of August, 1894, a bust of Auguste Caristie was set up in Orange close by the theatre which owes its saving and its restoration to the strong purpose of his strong heart.

And then came another enthusiast--they are useful in the world, these enthusiasts--who took up the work at the point where Caristie had laid it down. This was the young editor of the _Revue Meridionale_, Fernand Michel--more widely known by his pseudonym of "Antony Real." By a lucky calamity--the great inundation of the Rhone in the year 1840--Michel was detained for a while in Orange: and so was enabled to give to the theatre more than the ordinary tourist's pa.s.sing glance. By that time, the interior of the building had been cleared and its n.o.ble proportions fully were revealed; and as the result of his first long morning's visit he became, as Caristie had become before him, fairly infatuated with it.

For my part, I am disposed to believe that a bit of Roman enchantment still lingers in those ancient walls; that the old G.o.ds who presided over their creation--and who continue to live on very comfortably, though a little shyly and in a quiet way, here in the south of France--have still an alluring power over those of us who, being at odds with existing dispensations, are open to their genial influences. But without discussing this side issue, it is enough to say that Michel--lightly taking up what proved to be the resolute work of half a lifetime--then and there vowed himself to the task of restoring and reanimating that ruined and long-silent stage.

For more than twenty years he laboured without arriving at any tangible result; and the third decade of his propaganda almost was ended when at last, in August, 1869, his dream was made a reality and the spell of silence was broken by the presentation of Mehul's "Joseph" at Orange.

And the crowning of his happiness came when, the opera ended, his own ode composed for the occasion, "Les Triomphateurs"--set to music by Imbert--echoed in the ancient theatre, and the audience of more than seven thousand burst into enthusiastic cheering over the victory that he had won. Truly, to be the hero of such a triumph was worth the work of nine-and-twenty years.

Even through the dismal time of the German war no time was lost. M.

Michel and his enthusiastic colabourers--prominent among them being "Antony Real, _fils_," upon whom has descended worthily his father's mantle--cared for the material preservation of the building; and succeeded so well in keeping alive a popular interest in their work that they were able to arrange for yet another dramatic festival at Orange in August, 1874. Both grand and light opera were given. On the first evening "Norma" was sung; on the second, "Le Chalet" and "Galatee." To the presentation of these widely differing works attached a curious importance, in that they brought into strong relief an interesting phase of the theatre's psychology: its absolute intolerance of small things.

"Norma" was received with a genuine furore; the two pretty little operas practically were failures. The audience, profoundly stirred by the graver work, seemed to understand instinctively that so majestic a setting was suited only to dramas inspired by the n.o.blest pa.s.sions and dealing with the n.o.blest themes.

During the ensuing twelve years there was no dramatic performance in the theatre; but in this interval there was a performance of another sort (in April, 1877) which in its way was very beautiful. M. Michel's thrilling "Salute to Provence" was sung by a great chorus with orchestral accompaniment; and sung, in accord with ancient custom--wherein was the peculiar and especial charm of it--at the decline of day. The singers sang in the waning sunlight, which emphasized and enlarged the grandeur of their surroundings: and then all ended, as the music and the daylight together died away.

IV

In August, 1886, a venture was made at Orange the like of which rarely has been made in France in modern times: a new French play demanding positive and strong recognition, the magnificent "Empereur d'Arles," by the Avignon poet Alexis Mouzin, was given its first presentation in the Orange theatre--in the provinces--instead of being first produced on the Paris stage. In direct defiance of the modern French canons of centralization, the great audience was brought together not to ratify opinions formulated by Parisian critics but to express its own opinion at first hand. Silvain, of the Comedie Francaise, was the _Maximien_; Madame Caristie-Martel, of the Odeon (a grand-daughter of Caristie the architect who saved the theatre from ruin), was the _Minervine_. The support was strong. The stately tragedy--vividly contrasting the tyranny and darkness of pagan Rome with the spirit of light and freedom arising in Christian Gaul--was in perfect keeping with its stately frame. The play went on in a whirl of enthusiastic approval to a triumphant end.

There was no question of ratifying the opinion of Parisian critics: those Southerners formed and delivered an opinion of their own. In other words, the defiance of conventions was an artistic victory, a decentralizing success.

Then it was that the Felibres--the poets of Languedoc and of Provence who for forty years have been combating the Parisian attempt to focus in Paris the whole of France--perceived how the Orange theatre could be made to advance their anti-centralizing principles, and so took a hand in its fortunes: with the avowed intention of establishing outside of Paris a national theatre wherein should be given in summer dramatic festivals of the highest cla.s.s. With the Felibres to attempt is to accomplish; and to their efforts was due the presentation at Orange in August 1888, of the "Oedipus" of Sophocles and Rossini's "Moses"--with Mounet-Sully and Boudouresque in the respective t.i.tle-roles. The members of the two Felibrien societies of Paris, the Felibrige and the Cigaliers, were present in force at the performances--so timed as to be a part of their customary biennial summer festival in the Midi--and their command of the Paris newspapers (whereof the high places largely are filled by these brave writers of the South) enabled them to make all Paris and all France ring with their account of the beauty of the Orange spectacle.

Out of their enthusiasm came practical results. A national interest in the theatre was aroused; and so strong an interest that the deputy from the Department of the Drome--M. Maurice Faure, a man of letters who finds time to be also a statesman--brought to a successful issue his long-sustained effort to obtain from the government a grant of funds to be used not merely for the preservation of the building, but toward its restoration. Thanks to his strong presentation of the case, forty thousand francs was appropriated for the beginning of the work: a sum that has sufficed to pay for the rebuilding of twenty of the tiers. And thus, at last, a substantial beginning was made in the recreation of the majestic edifice; and more than a beginning was made in the realization of the Felibrien project for establishing a national theatre in provincial France.

The festival of last August--again promoted by the Felibres, and mainly organized by M. Jules Claretie, the Director of the Comedie Francaise--was held, therefore, in celebration of specific achievement; and in two other important particulars it differed from all other modern festivals at Orange. First, it was directly under government patronage--M. Leygues, minister of public instruction and the fine arts, bringing two other cabinet ministers with him, having come down from Paris expressly to preside over it; and, secondly, its brilliantly successful organization and accomplishment under such high auspices have gone far toward creating a positive national demand for a realization of the Felibrien dream: that the theatre, again perfect, shall become the home of the highest dramatic art, and a place of periodic pilgrimage, biennial or even annual, for the whole of the art-loving world.

I am disposed to regard myself as more than usually fortunate in that I was able to be a part of that most brilliant festival, and I am deeply grateful to my Felibrien brethren to whom I owe my share in it. With an excellent thoughtfulness they sent me early word of what was forward among them, and so enabled me to get from New York to Paris in time to go down with the Felibres and the Cigaliers by train to Lyons, and thence--as blithe a boat-load of poets as ever went light-heartedly afloat--on southward to Avignon on the galloping current of the Rhone.

V

Avignon was crowded with dignitaries and personages: M. Leygues, who was to preside over the festival; the ministers of justice and of public works, who were to increase its official dignity; artistic and literary people without end. Of these last--who also, in a way, were first, since to them the whole was due--our special boat from Lyons had brought a gay contingent three hundred strong. With it all, the City of the Popes fairly buzzed like a hive of poetic bees got astray from Hymettus Hill.

From Avignon to Orange the distance is less than eighteen miles, not at all too far for driving; and the intervening country is so rich and so beautiful as to conform in all essentials--save in its commendable freedom from serpents--to the biblical description of Paradise.

Therefore, following our own wishes and the advice of several poets--they all are poets down there--we decided to drive to the play rather than to expose ourselves to the rigours of the local railway service: the abject collapse of which, under the strain of handling twelve or fifteen hundred people, the poets truthfully prophesied.

It was five in the afternoon when we got away from Avignon. A mistral--the north wind that is the winter bane and summer blessing of Provence--was blowing briskly; the sun was shining; the crowded Cours de la Republique was gay with flags and banners and streamers, and with festoons of coloured lanterns which later would be festoons of coloured fire. We pa.s.sed between the towers of the gateway, left the ramparts behind us, and went onward over the perfect road. Plane-trees arched above us; on each side of the road were little villas deep-set in gardens and bearing upon their stone gate-posts the names of saints. As we increased our distance from the city we came to market-gardens, and then to vineyards, olive-orchards, farms. Rows of bright-green poplars and of dark-green cypress--set up as shields against the mistral--made formal lines across the landscape from east to west. The hedges on the lee-side of the road were white with dust--a lace-like effect, curious and beautiful. Above them, and between the trees, we caught glimpses of Mont Ventour--already beginning to glow like a great opal in the nearly level sun-rays. Old women and children stood in the gateways staring wonderingly at the long procession of vehicles, of which our carriage was a part, all obviously filled with pleasure-seekers and all inexplicable. Pretty girls, without stopping to wonder, accepted with satisfaction so joyous an outburst of merrymaking and unhesitatingly gave us their smiles.

We crossed the little river Ouveze, and as we mounted from it to the northward the tower of the ruined Chateauneuf-du-Pape came into view. A new key was struck in the landscape. The broad white road ran through a brown solitude: a level upland broken into fields of sun-browned stubble and of grey-brown olive-orchards; and then, farther on, through a high desolate plain tufted with sage-brush, whence we had outlook to wide horizons far away. Off to the eastward, cutting against the darkening sky, was the curious row of sharp peaks called the Rat's Teeth. All the range of the Alpilles was taking on a deeper grey. Purple undertones were beginning to soften the opalescent fire of Mont Ventour.

Presently the road dipped over the edge of the plain and began a descent, in a perfectly straight line but by a very easy grade, of more than a mile. Here were rows of plane-trees again, which, being of no great age and not meeting over the road, were most noticeable as emphasizing the perspective. And from the crest of this acclivity--down the long dip in the land, at the end of the loom of grey-white road lying shadowy between the perspective lines of trees--we saw rising in sombre ma.s.s against the purple haze of sunset, dominating the little city nestled at its base and even dwarfing the mountain at its back, the huge fabric of the theatre.

Dusk had fallen as we drove into Orange--thronged with men and beasts like a Noah's ark. All the streets were alive with people; and streams of vehicles of all sorts were pouring in from the four quarters of the compa.s.s and discharging their cargoes on the public squares to a loud buzzing accompaniment of vigorous talk--much in the way that the ark people, thankful to get ash.o.r.e again, must have come buzzing out on Ararat.

I am sorry to say that the handling of a small part of this crowd by the railway people, and of the whole of it by the local management, was deplorably bad. The trains were inadequate and irregular; the great mistake was made of opening only three of the many entrances to the theatre; and the artistic error was committed (against the protest of M.

Mounet-Sully, who earnestly desired to maintain the traditions of the Greek theatre by reserving the orchestra for the evolutions of the chorus) of filling the orchestra with chairs: with the result that these so-called first-cla.s.s seats--being all on the same level, and that level four feet lower than the stage--were at once the highest-priced and the worst seats in the building. Decidedly the best seats, both for seeing and hearing, were those of the so-called second cla.s.s--the newly erected tiers of stone. But so excellent are the acoustic properties of the theatre, even now when the stage is roofless, that in the highest tier of the third-cla.s.s seats (temporary wooden benches filling the s.p.a.ce not yet rebuilt in stone in the upper third of the auditorium) all the well-trained and well-managed voices could be clearly heard.

Naturally, the third-cla.s.s seats were the most in demand; and from the moment that the gates were opened the way to them was thronged: an acute ascent--partly rough stairway, partly abrupt incline--which zigzagged up the hill between the wall of the theatre and the wall of an adjacent house and which was lighted, just below its sharpest turn, by a single lamp pendant from an outjutting gibbet of iron. By a lucky mischance, three of the incompetent officials on duty at the first-cla.s.s entrance--whereat, in default of guiding signs, we happened first to apply ourselves--examined in turn our tickets and a.s.sured us that the way to our second-cla.s.s places was up that stairway-path. But we heartily forgave, and even blessed, the stupidity of those officials, because it put us in the way of seeing quite the most picturesque bit that we saw that night outside of the theatre's walls: the strong current of eager humanity, all vague and confused and sombre, pressing upward through the shadows, showing for a single moment--the hurrying ma.s.s resolved into individual hurrying figures--as it pa.s.sed beneath the hanging lamp, and in the same breath swept around the projecting corner and lost to view. It looked, at the very least, treasons, conspiracies, and mutinous outbursts--that shadowy mult.i.tude surging up that narrow and steep and desperately crooked dusky footway. I felt that just around the lighted turn, where the impetuous forms appeared clearly in the moment of their disappearance, surely must be the royal palace they were bent upon sacking; and it was with a sigh of unsatisfied longing that I turned away (when we got at last the right direction) before word came to me that over the swords of his dying guardsmen they had pressed in and slain the king!

[Ill.u.s.tration: "IT LOOKED TREASONS, CONSPIRACIES AND MUTINOUS OUTBURSTS"]

The soldiers on guard at the ascent, and thickly posted on the hill-side above the highest tiers, gave colour to my fancy. And, actually, it was as guards against a.s.sa.s.sins that the soldiers were there. Only a little more than two months had pa.s.sed since the slaying of President Carnot at Lyons; and the cautionary measures taken to a.s.sure the safety of the three ministers at Orange were all the more rigid because one of them was the minister of justice--of all the government functionaries the most feared and hated by anarchists, because he is most intimately a.s.sociated with those too rare occasions when anarchist heads are sliced off in poor payment for anarchist crimes. This undercurrent of real tragedy--with its possibility of a crash, followed by a cloud of smoke rising slowly above the wreck of the gaily decorated ministerial box--drew out with a fine intensity the tragedy of the stage: and brought into a curious psychological coalescence the barbarisms of the dawn and of the noontime of our human world.

VI

We came again to the front of the theatre: to an entrance--approached between converging railings, which brought the crowd to an angry focus, and so pa.s.sed its parts singly between the ticket-takers--leading into what once was the postscenium, and thence across where once was the "court" side of the stage to the tiers of stone seats.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GREAT FAcADE]