The Fourteenth of July and Danton/The Fourteenth of July/Author's Note
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The author has sought moral truth in this play rather than anecdotic exactitude. He has seen fit to take greater liberty with the action, which is developed in the poetry of popular legend, than in Danton. In that play, he applied himself to the development of the psychology of certain characters, for the whole drama is concentrated in the souls of three or four great men. It is otherwise with the present work: individuals disappear in the great ocean of the people. If you wish to represent a tempest, you must not describe each wave, but a whole angry sea: an exact rendering of details is much less important than the passionate sweeping truth of the whole. There is something false and insulting to the intelligence in the disproportionate place given nowadays to historic anecdotes, tiny incidents, and the dust shaken out of the pages of history, all of which is emphasized at the expense of the human side. It is my ideal to resuscitate the forces of the past, reveal once more the springs of action, and not to offer a cold and denatured miniature to the curious who care more for externals than for the soul of the hero. I have endeavored to make live again the heroism and the faith of the nation in the throes of the Revolution during the Republican epoch, in order that we, a nation of greater maturity and more than ever conscious of the great destiny that awaits us, may continue and finish the work interrupted in 1794. If we are strong enough to realize this, we are strong enough to do our best toward the accomplishment of our task. The end of art is not dreams, but life. Action should spring from the spectacle of action.