This marriage with Mademoiselle Gérard, granddaughter of Napoleon’s marshal, the victor of Wagram, the victim of Moscow and Waterloo, confirmed Edmond Rostand in his meditations on the dramatic fiasco of the First Empire—that extraordinary antithesis of triumph and disaster, of all tragedies the most touching to martial and patriotic France.
The poet, however, was too wise to undertake this tremendous subject with a ‘prentice hand. He made his debut as a playwright in 1894, at the age of twenty-six, with a pretty little fanciful comedy, Les Romanesques. A year later, Sarah Bernhardt produced his Princesse Lointaine, playing herself the part of the Lady of Tripoli. Sarah Bernhardt again, in the Easter week of 1896, brought out La Samaritaine. And at Christmas, 1897, came the conquering hero, Cyrano de Bergerac.
I cannot analyse Rostand’s plays, which everybody knows, which are (with Kipling’s novels) the immense, the international, the universal success of our times; I cannot calmly plod through the plots of these familiar pieces with the patience I employ on an obscure play of Paul Claudel’s, known perhaps to a hundred readers in the British Isles.
Every one (every schoolboy, as Macaulay would say) has by heart the story of Cyrano. We all remember the chivalrous hero, with his hideous nose (Pif-Luisant), and his romantic nature; his passion for the pretty blue-stocking, Roxane; his handsome, stupid friend, Christian, in whom Roxane thinks she discovers a kindred soul; and how Cyrano writes Christian’s love letters, using the comely face and figure of his friend as a mask for his own soul, which thus approaches the beloved, though under another name; and how Christian, when he finds that his betrothed really loves, not him, but the mind of the chivalrous friend whom he has used as a secretary, gets himself killed in battle, in order that the two persons whom he loves best may be free to meet and to mate; and we have not forgotten that Roxane is inconsolable for the handsome Christian; that Cyrano never has the cruel courage to reveal his passion until, after fifteen years of mute misery, he dies: is it not written in the chronicles of every theatre in Europe?
But it is not this pretty, precious, sentimental story which made the triumph of Cyrano; it is the indescribable, incommunicable glory and gaiety of youth, the ardour, the joy, the fun, the fury, the frolic which make the piece a perfect Fountain of Jouvence. There is a heroic cheerfulness in Cyrano, a love of life, a generosity, an activity, a movement, and a flame, which so admirably suit the temper of the dawning Twentieth Century that we hardly know whether the public made the play, or the play the public.
Ten years afterwards, Rostand produced his L’Aiglon, which was not greeted with quite the same triumph—the same joy for success, the same rejoicing for victory. But little by little it, too, won its audience; and, personally, I prefer this travesty of Hamlet, with all its faults, to the brilliant, the inimitable Cyrano.
For there is a deeper tenderness, a loftier poetry, a more impassioned patriotism in L’Aiglon than in any other of Rostand’s plays; that superficiality, that haunting sense of insincerity, which elsewhere are as the snake in the grass, are scarcely perceptible here. The poor sick son of the dead hero, the ‘ineffectual angel,’ the sensitive, inefficient young Duc de Reichstadt, Napoleon’s heir, is drawn with a feeling and a depth of knowledge which make me suspect that in his sad protagonist the poet drew, not merely a historical personage, but his own generation, the children of 1870, the sons of the defeat, decadent and dilettante, incapable of action, but so touching and so often noble in their disinterestedness, their sense of the Ideal, their love of liberty. Rostand, I think, in love and pity has drawn their portrait—and then drew that of Flambeau to inspire a bolder generation.
The boldest of the bold is Chantecler, the cock of Gaul. In his legend of Chantecler, Edmond Rostand bids us mark that courage needs more to its making than mere temerity. He does not say, with Danton, ‘De l’audace, de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace.’ He says, ‘De l’audace, et puis du bon sens, et puis le sens de la vérité!’
This history of a poultry-yard has somewhat disconcerted the adorers of Cyrano. But Boileau and the big-wigs of the Court of Louis Quatorze were doubtful at first (and thought that Pegasus had taken to pedestrian by-ways) when La Fontaine produced his inimitable Fables; and only a few years ago in London the public, expectant of more Plain Tales from the Hills, gave a hesitating reception to that Jungle Book of Mr Kipling’s which already (in France at least) is regarded as his principal title to honour. There are always amateurs who insist on repetition, and blame Wouvermans if he paint a picture without a white horse in it. To my thinking, Edmond Rostand proved himself a poet in looking no further than the farm-yard gate to find a subject for his verse.
There is something singularly impressive to the dreamer, to the man of imagination, in the certainty that our world is inhabited by a race of beings who see the things we see, and move in the circles wherein we have our being, but look on everything from a different point of view, and perhaps with different senses. Ants, that have no ears, yet hear through their feet, perceiving the vibrations conveyed by solid bodies; flies, whose innumerable eyes discern the X-rays as a colour; these, and homing swallows, are more mysterious than fairies. In the eye of a mystic, a cock is no less wonderful than a ghost; a mouse than a muse; a primrose by the river’s brim than the herb moly (that white-blossomed flower which Hermes gave to Ulysses), or than the plant called Love-in-Idleness that charmed Titania’s eyes. The fact that so immense a variety of existences shares with us the boon of life, and feels the same sun, is a perpetual fable to a certain order of minds, who may affirm with Chantecler:—