“Monsieur Rostand, thanks to his rapid and brilliant career, and the colossal success of Cyrano de Bergerac, is certainly the French author of the present day who attracts the greatest amount of public attention in France, whose talent is the most keenly debated, whose claims are supported and disputed with the greatest vehemence. His popularity in France is as great as that of Mr. Kipling in England; and in France, as is the case with Mr. Kipling in England, there are not wanting many and determined advocates of the devil. Some deny to M. Rostand the title of poet, while admitting that he is a clever playwright; some say that he has no poetical talent whatsoever. In the case of poetical plays the public is probably in the long run the only judge. Never in the world’s history has it been seen that the really magnificent poetical play has proved a lasting failure, or a really bad poetical play a perennial success. Of course there have been plays which, like other works that have come before their season, the public have taken years to appreciate; while, on the other hand, the public have patronised plays of surprising mediocrity and vulgarity; these works, however, have never resisted the hand of time. But in the main the public has been right, and those who take the opposite view generally belong to a class alluded to by Pope:
‘So much they scorn the crowd, that if the throng
By chance go right, they purposely go wrong.’
Certainly in M. Rostand’s case, whatever may be the exact ‘place’ of his plays in the evolution of the world’s poetical drama, one thing is quite certain: his plays are triumphantly successful. This for a play is a merit in itself. After the triumph of Cyrano it was difficult to believe that L’Aiglon would attain the same level of merit and success, and never was a success more discounted beforehand. For weeks L’Aiglon was the main topic of conversation in Paris, and provided endless copy for the newspapers. Another thing is certain: however the æsthetic value of L’Aiglon may be rated in the future, it constitutes for the present another gigantic success. Never did a play come at a more opportune moment. At a time when the French are thinking that their country has for a long time been playing too insignificant a part in European politics, when the country is still convalescent and suffering from the vague discomfort subsequent on a feverish crisis, fretting and chafing under the colourless mediocrity of a régime that falls short of their flamboyant ideal, M. Rostand comes skilfully leading a martial orchestra, and sets their pulses throbbing, their ears tingling, and their hearts beating to the inspiring tunes of Imperial France.
“M. Rostand’s play is certainly a forward step in his poetical career. It has the same colour and vitality as Cyrano; the same incomparable instinct for stage effect, the same skill and dexterity in the manipulation of words which amounts to jugglery, the same fertility in poetical images and felicitous couplets that we find in his earlier works; but, besides this, it has something that they have not—a graver atmosphere, a larger outlook, a deeper note; the fabric, though the builder’s skill is the same, is less perfect as a whole, more irregular, but in it we hear mysterious echoes, and the footfall of the Epic Muse, which compensates for the unevenness of the carpentry.
“In L’Aiglon we breathe the atmosphere of the epic of Napoleon. Although the scenes which M. Rostand presents to us deal only with the sunset of that period, the glories and vicissitudes of that epoch are suggested to us; we do not see the things themselves, but we are conscious of their spirit, their poetic existence and essence. M. Rostand evokes them, not by means of palpable shapes, but, like a wizard, in the images of his phrases and the sound of his verse, and thus we see them more clearly than if they had been presented to us in the form of elaborate tableaux or spectacular battle-pieces.
“The existence of Napoleon II. was in itself a tragic fact. Yet more tragic if, as Metternich is reported to have said of him, he had ‘a head of iron and a body of glass.’ And a degree more tragic still is M. Rostand’s creation of a prince whose frail tenement of clay is consumed by ambition and aspiration, and who is conscious, at times, of the vanity of his aspiration and the hopelessness of his ambition. Thus tossed to and fro, from ecstasy to despair, he is another Hamlet, born, not to avenge a crime against his father, but to atone for his father’s crimes. Perhaps the most poetical moment of the play is when the prince realises, on the plain of Wagram, that he himself is the atonement; that he is the white wafer of sacrifice offered as an expiation for so many oceans of blood. M. Rostand has chosen this theme, pregnant with pathos, as his principal motif. It is needless to relate the play… The close of the Fifth Act is perhaps the finest thing in conception of the whole; in it we see Napoleon, after the failure of an attempted escape to France, alone on the battlefield of Wagram, pale in his white uniform on the great green moonlit plain, with the body of the faithful soldier of the Old Guard, who killed himself rather than be taken by the Austrians, lying before him. Gradually in the sighing winds Napoleon imagines he hears the moans of the soldiers who once strewed the plain, until the fancy grows into hallucination, until he sees himself surrounded by regiments of ghosts, and hears the groans, the call, and the clamour of phantom armies growing louder and louder till they culminate in the cry of ‘Vive l’empereur.’ He hears the tramping of men, the champing and neighing of chargers, and the music of the band; he thinks the ‘Grande Armée’ has come to life, and rushes joyfully to meet it; the vision is then dispelled, and the irony of the reality is made plain, for it is the white uniforms of the Austrian regiment (of which he is Colonel) that appear in the plain. The scene is almost Shakespearean in its effect of beauty and terror.
“Finally, in the last Act, we see the Roi de Rome dying in his gilded cage while he listens to the account of his baptism in Paris, which is read out to him as he dies. He who as a child ‘eut pour hochet la couronne de Rome’ is now an obscure and insignificant Hapsburg princeling, dying forgotten by the world, without a friend, and under the eye of his imperturbable enemy.
“The play has already been accused of incoherence, lengthiness, and inequality; of too rapid transitions, of a clash in style between preciosity and brutality. It has been compared unfavourably with Cyrano… Fault is found now, as it was before, with the form of M. Rostand’s verses; they are no doubt better heard on the stage than read in the study, and this surely shows that they fulfil their conditions. His verses are not those of Racine, of Alfred de Vigny, or of Lecomte de Lisle … but they have a poetic quality and a value of their own; and while their clarion music is still ringing in my ears I should think it foolish to quarrel with them and to criticise them in a captious spirit; possibly on reading L’Aiglon the impression may be different. For the present, still under the spell of the enthusiasm and shouts of applause which his couplets inspired on the memorable first night of the play, I can but thank the author who brought before my eyes, with the skilful and clamorous music of his harps and horns, his trumpets and fifes and drums, the vision of an heroic epoch and the shadows of Homeric battles—the red sun and the cannon balls shivering the ice at Austerlitz, the Pope crowning another Cæsar at Notre Dame, Moscow in flames and the Great Army scattered on the plains of Russia, and the lapping of the tideless sea round St. Helena.”
Many of those who had been most enthusiastic at the first night of L’Aiglon lost no time in saying they had been mistaken, and that it was after all but a poor affair. Someone said that Rostand’s verse was made en caoutchouc. I heard someone ask Robert de Montesquieu his opinion soon after the play was produced. He said he thought the verse was in the best Victor Hugo tradition; some of it, Metternich’s monologue on Napoleon’s hat, very fine. Somebody mentioned the more sentimental verses on La Petite Source: “Cela doit être,” said Montesquiou, “de Madame Rostand.”