But then Shakespeare and Victor Hugo have amazing qualities wherewith to counter-balance these conceits. In art, that is everything. The smallest chip of pure gold compensates for a bag full of pebbles: a work of art must be estimated by the degree of its merits and not by the quantity of its defects. If there is dross along with the gold—even though there be much more dross than gold—let us be thankful if the gold itself is pure and unaffected by the presence of the baser residue. There is the question.
I borrow from a book, recently published in French by a Hungarian Professor, M. Haraszti, some details of the youth and origin of Rostand. In 1868, he was born at Marseilles of a wealthy family of merchants and bankers, long established there. For a hundred years, at least, they had all been lovers of the arts. Early in the Nineteenth Century, the quatuors of Beethoven were performed, for the first time in France, in the Rostands’ salon. In 1844, a Mademoiselle Victorine Rostand—a great-aunt of the poet’s—published a volume of lyrics in the manner of Lamartine. Edmond’s uncle, the banker, Alexis Rostand, has composed an opera and more than one oratorio; and his father, the economist Eugène Rostand, is himself a poet. A volume of verse, Les Sentiers Unis, published in 1876, celebrates the precocity and charm of the child, Edmond, at that time eight years old; and it is interesting to learn that, even at that early date, he was remarkable for his original grace of words and flow of language:—
‘Cette petite langue exquise,
Un vrai jargon de Paradis,
De mots qu’il façonne à sa guise.
De diminutifs inédits;
D’inimitables tours de phrases....’
At eight years of age the child, Edmond Rostand, was certainly the father of the man. As a schoolboy, at the lycée of Marseilles, his Quixotic, pathetic temperament—his characteristic preference for the unsuccessful—was already established. An old, drunken usher scorned by the masters, tormented by the boys, a dreamy Bardolph whom his pupils (on account of his shining nose) surnamed Pif-Luisant, was young Rostand’s chosen companion. And in his first volume of verse, the poet dedicates a charming poem to the tippler of genius who gave him, perhaps, his first idea of Cyrano:—
‘Toi que j’ai tant aimé ... doux pochard ... Pif-Luisant.’
At one-and-twenty years of age, Edmond Rostand published his first volume of verse, Les Musardises, and shortly afterwards married the beautiful young poetess of Les Pipeaux, three years younger than himself. I can remember Rosemonde Gérard in her nineteenth year, a vision of loveliness, as, one evening, in the salon of the old poet, Leconte de Lisle, she stood up, so slender, so smiling, so ravishingly blonde and fresh, and recited a lyric as charming as herself. Madame Rostand has a talent of her own, sincere, simple, femininely sentimental. All the lovers in France know her Chanson éternelle:—
‘Car vois-tu chaque jour je t’aime davantage,
Aujourd’hui plus qu’hier, et bien moins que demain.’
Photo: Dormac To face p. 56
Edmond Rostand