‘Oui, les grandes amours travaillent pour le Ciel!’
even as in Cyrano the poet renounces his love in favour of his friend. And that friend again ... Cyrano is a veritable vertigo of self-sacrifice!
The tragedy of L’Aiglon is the oblation of a young man’s life to a great idea. Chantecler also is a man—or rather a cock—with a mission to which he is willing to immolate all personal delight. The plays of Edmond Rostand are a sort of serum against selfishness! Despite their rodomontade and their buffoonery, they are nobly moral.
But how they irritate a fastidious taste, with their perpetual posturing, their gesticulations, their pirouettes, and their impertinence! Was ever a real poet and a sincere knight-errant so quaintly disguised as an acrobat, and sometimes, alas! even as a commercial ‘gent’! Is it possible to be at once quite sincere and yet so appallingly clever? He moves us when he expresses the sense of patriotism or the praise of courage. He had a peculiar gift for expressing admiration blent with pity. He had, in fact, a chivalrous soul, an instinct for all that is gracious or grand, a sensibility that was sincere but shallow. Had he but lived a few months longer, how admirably he would have celebrated the Fêtes of Victory!
Was he a great poet? It is perhaps too soon to say. Bad taste never yet prevented any one from being a great poet. This is a point on which I cannot insist too strongly. When Juliet says:—
‘Give me my Romeo and when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he shall make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world shall be in love with night.’
Shakespeare is writing Rostand with a vengeance.
When in Victor Hugo’s La Forêt Mouillée the sparrow makes believe his woodland glade is the court of Louis XIV., and says in a series of puns, first of all, to a tuft of heather (bruyère):—
‘Bonjour,
La Bruyère! (à une branche d’arbre)
Bonjour, Rameau!
(à une corneille sur le rocher)
Bonjour, Corneille!
(au nénufar) Bonjour, Boileau!’
let us admit at once that Victor Hugo wallows (and not in this instance only) in the very slough of that bad taste so dear to Rostand. How pleased Rostand would have been to call the water-lily, say, John Drinkwater!