and exclaim with Shakespeare’s Troilus,—
‘He would pun thee unto shivers!’
Chantecler took seven years in the writing. I know nothing of the mystery of its composition; but one may perhaps suppose that Rostand wrote the first two acts in a real objective vein of poetry—tender, amused, imaginative, and then shut them in a drawer, forgot them, and some time later on, resumed the task in a mood of intellectual exasperation against the literary world of Paris. In this latter part, the poultry-yard à la La Fontaine has changed to a parody of the boulevard and all the charm has vanished. This third act is a sort of bantam imitation of Jean-Christophe, in La Foire Sur la Place. There is an operatic beauty in the hymn of the owls; there is gaiety and good humour later on; and, in the episode of the Nightingale, I find a tender philosophic loveliness. And yet we cannot defend ourselves from the impression that Rostand wrote the first two acts in a sudden vein of poetry; and then, long afterwards, took up the incompleted masterpiece and finished it as best he could, with the help of his gifted family circle. We know that of the four Rostands, three were poets—Edmond Rostand, his wife, and Maurice, their elder son.... This, of course, is the mere supposition of a critic’s idle brain.
We might take for the motto of all Rostand’s work, a saying of Friar Trophime in La Princesse Lointaine: ‘La seule vertu, c’est l’enthousiasme.’ Like Maurice Barrès, Rostand too, in his way, was a Professor of Energy. In his last years, he was writing a new Faust. That story of a great Intellectualist who quits the kingdom of his mind for the freshest fields and humblest pastures of the realm of instinct is well suited to the genius of Edmond Rostand. Why should he not write a new Faust? Did not the classic poets of antiquity all work on the same subjects? And did not Corneille and Racine (in the same year, if I remember right) each of them produce a Titus et Bérénice? It would be interesting to read the Faust of Rostand’s eager imagination. Edmond Rostand, as I have said, is not a poet for poets. He had the same sort of reputation in France that Mr Kipling has in England—colossal, undoubtedly, but hardly literary. Either of them, perhaps, is more appreciated in Europe at large—in Europe and America—than in the salons of their own metropolis. Something inelegant, cocksure, aggressive, sometimes a little superficial, checks in either of them the natural homage of the difficult—of the delicate. They gather no violets—Athena’s, Sappho’s violets!—but what a quantity of buttercups and daisies!
PAUL CLAUDEL
It is not easy to account for the enthusiasm aroused in France, among the younger writers, by the works of Paul Claudel, unless we accept the explanation that, with all his faults, he is a great poet. He is a difficult author, often wilfully obscure and allusive; his dramas are lyrical symbols rather than plays and, whatever he write, ode or tragedy, he uses the same medium, a sort of rhythmical prose, sometimes like Walt Whitman’s dithyrambs, and sometimes like the Psalms.
Nothing is less familiar, less lifelike, more hieratic, than the manner of Claudel. In every detail of his art he innovates and experiments: style, language, conception, even the very names of his characters bear witness to a restless personality, starting off on a quest of his own, continuing no other writer, impatient of yoke or path. And though he lose himself and stumble in his search for an Ideal, be sure he will never turn back, never take the highroad, but just go on persistently, making a rule and a guide for himself out of the exigencies of his own peculiar temperament and creating a doctrine out of his fantasies.
He is often absurd, violent, rhetorical, extravagant; his plays are frequently no more than psychological dialogues between the dissociated elements of his own personality. At other times he will suggest to us a Pindar disguised in the mantle of Saint Thomas Aquinas. He is often as unreal as Il Greco! And yet this incomplete and exasperating poet is, in truth, a great artist (or at least has the makings of one), and it is not out of pure perversity that a Francis Jammes has compared him to Pascal, that others have called him haut comme Dante. They exaggerate; but there is in them more understanding than in the perplexed spectator of L’Échange or L’Otage, who is persuaded that M. Claudel only does it to annoy.
What is then the message that Paul Claudel is obscurely crying to his generation, faltering like the prophet, ‘â, â, Domine, nescio loqui?’
He brings to these young men, accustomed to the shifting relativities of Bergson, bathed since their boyhood in the perpetual flow of a stream whose onrush falls into no estuary, the vision of an absolute Unity. To Claudel, movement, life, are but a transient wave-and-wobble on the surface of Reality, un tremblement essentiel devant la face du Saint.’ Behind the streaming veil he discerns the Eternal Face within, ever serenely smiling. Behind Life there is that which Life is not: there is the living God. Hidden by the mists of our apparent disorder, he divines a crystal sphere—an indivisible, unalterable, absolute Existence—where right is always right, where wrong is always wrong, to all eternity. This religious idealism brings a sense of rest and peace to minds unconsciously fatigued by Bergson’s theories of incessant evolution. And then, also, the principle of perpetual change is a solvent of energy; Faith is a school of energy; and energy is what France chiefly prizes among her many spiritual gifts:—