By the way, you are a bad, bad boy to have given a present to those kurumaya. You spoil them. Talk again to me about ruining the morals of your “boy”! Won’t I be revenged! Affectionately,
Lafcadio.
Boy sends love to Ojisan McDonald.
TO MITCHELL McDONALD
Tōkyō, March, 1899.
Dear McDonald,—I don’t know what to say about “Cyrano de Bergerac” as a poem, except that as for fine workmanship, it is what we should expect the best dramatic French prosody of this sort to be. The verse-smith is certainly a great craftsman. But was the subject worth the labour spent upon it? I have no doubt that upon the French stage the effect would be glorious,—exciting,—splendid: all that sort of thing; and the story is “Frenchy,”—wrap-me-up-in-the-flag-of-honour style of extravagance. It isn’t natural—that is a great fault. Why it should please English and American readers I can’t quite see: I don’t believe the approbation is quite genuine,—any more than the admiration for Bernhardt was genuine on the part of those who went to see her without knowing a word of her language. I can understand why Frenchmen should enthusiastically praise the book, but not why Americans should. The heroine is a selfish, uninteresting little “chit;” the other characters are without any sympathetic quality that I can find. Cyrano wanting to fight with everybody about his nose—to impose his nose on the world at the point of the sword, while perpetrating rhymes the while—surely is not a very grand person. No poet could make such a nose attractive. We can forget the nose of Mephistopheles because his wit and force dazzle us; but Mephistopheles has no weaknesses,—not at least in the first part of “Faust.” Cyrano has many; and one even suspects that his virtues are the outgrowth of his despair about his nose. But I am glad to have read the wonderful thing; and I shall prize the book as long as I live,—because it came up here in your coat-pocket, and was given me with a smile and a twinkle of the eye that were (in my poor judgement) incomparably more beautiful than the writer’s best lines; for these latter are not quite out of the heart, you know.
Speaking of an ugly subject for heroic treatment, I was thinking to-day about something that you would have done better than the man who did it,—the ugly subject being a hairy caterpillar in a salad at a banquet. The lady of the palace had ladled the salad and the caterpillar into the plate of some admiral or commodore, and saw what she had done when it was too late. The seaman caught her horrified eye, held it, and, smiling, swallowed the caterpillar unseen by the other guests. After the banquet, the beauty came to thank him—out of the innermost rosy chamber of her heart—when he is reported to have said: “Why, Madam, did you think that I would permit your pleasure of the evening to be spoiled by a miserable G—d d—d caterpillar!” Yes, you would have consumed the caterpillar; but you would not have “cussed” in the closing scene—though that was a lovable profanity in a man of the older school. Well, I think that commodore, or whatever his title may have been, a better man out and out than Cyrano. He would have done just as much, and made no fuss at all about it. Affectionately,
Lafcadio.