Chapter 14

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 hisPrincesse Lointaine, playing herself the part of the Lady of Tripoli. Sarah Bernhardt again, in the Easter week of 1896, brought outLa 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 Iemploy 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 ofCyrano. 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 ofCyrano; 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 inCyrano, a love of life, a generosity, an activity, amovement, 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 hisL’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 inimitableCyrano.

For there is a deeper tenderness, a loftier poetry, a more impassioned patriotism inL’Aiglonthan 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, EdmondRostand 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 ofCyrano. 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 inimitableFables; and only a few years ago in London the public, expectant of morePlain Tales from the Hills, gave a hesitating reception to thatJungle Bookof 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:—

‘Et quant à moi, Madame, il y a bien longtempsQu’un râteau dans un coin, une fleur dans un vase.M’ont fait tomber dans une inguérissable extase,Et que j’ai contracté devant un liseronCet émerveillement dont mon œil reste rond!’

This was Rostand’s attitude during the first two acts, the two acts in which he showed himself a poet. There is a humour, a tenderness, a charm which recall Hans Andersen’s inimitable stories in his vision of a world where none of our thoughts, none of our knowledge, but perhaps most of our feelings have free play. Man is absent.

‘Malebranche dirait qu’il n’y a plus une âme;Nous pensons humblement qu’il reste encore des cœurs.’

The Cock’s Hymn to the Sun is so devoid of all our cosmic ideas that I have heard more than onecritic deride it on this account; but how wise, how truly a seer, is the poet in showing the wonder of the sun as it appears to an animal who sees no further than the almond trees at the end of the valley! The Infinite is the Infinite, though we look at it through a keyhole, and to an animal or an infant the sun is still the sun. The poet has chosen just those aspects and effects which may appeal to a mind deprived of reason no less than to ourselves. The sun dries the dew from the grass, and lends a grace even to the faded almond flowers; the sun shining on a pane of glass or the soapy water in a tub makes of them a glory; the sun turns the sunflower westward in his course, and makes the tin cock on the church tower a dazzling chanticleer; the sun shining through the boughs of the lime-walk sheds on the gravel trembling pools of light which wobble so lovely that one scarcely dares to walk there; the sun makes a banner of the clout that dries on the hedge; and gilds with a wonderful lustre the varnished earthenware crock in the farm-yard; thanks to the sun the hayrick has gold on his hat and the hive has gold on her hood:—

‘Gloire à toi sur les prés! Gloire à toi dans les vignes!Sois béni parmi l’herbe et contre les portails!Dans les yeux des lézards et sur l’aile des cygnes!Ô toi qui fais les grandes lignesEt qui fais les petits détails!‘C’est toi qui, découpant la sœur jumelle et sombreQui se couche et s’allonge au pied de ce qui luit,De tout ce qui nous charme as tu doubler le nombre,À chaque objet donnant une ombreSouvent plus charmante qui lui!‘Je t’adore, Soleil! Tu mets dans l’air des roses,Des flammes dans la source, un dieu dans le buisson!Tu prends un arbre obscur et tu l’apothéoses!Ô Soleil! toi sans qui les chosesNe seraient que ce qu’elles sont!’

‘C’est toi qui, découpant la sœur jumelle et sombreQui se couche et s’allonge au pied de ce qui luit,De tout ce qui nous charme as tu doubler le nombre,À chaque objet donnant une ombreSouvent plus charmante qui lui!

‘Je t’adore, Soleil! Tu mets dans l’air des roses,Des flammes dans la source, un dieu dans le buisson!Tu prends un arbre obscur et tu l’apothéoses!Ô Soleil! toi sans qui les chosesNe seraient que ce qu’elles sont!’

In this beautiful ode, Edmond Rostand really enriched French literature with an image of the greatest thing in the universe as it may appear to the humblest living being; and, despite here and there an ugly, trivial turn of phrase (we shudder attu l’apothéoses), despite the hard, happy-go-lucky lilt of the verse, its simplicity is full of a natural magic.

No less than man, just as naturally, and (owing to his more limited imagination) even more fervently, Chantecler considers himself the centre of the universe. In a recent letter to Jean Coquelin about the scene-painting and staging of his play Rostand has put his point of view:—

‘L’idée de mon décor est ceci: donner la sensation qu’une petite allée de jardin est, pour les volailles, une voie immense, une Via Appia.’

They live no less than us in the middle of immensities, only, from their lower standpoint, they remark (even less than we do) the disproportion between the world they inhabit, and the unthinkable Infinity they leave unmodified.

‘Très peu de ciel dans ce décor; c’est important de donner l’impression qu’étant très bas, à hauteur de poule, on en voit moins.’

Knowing so little about it, Chantecler is convinced that the magic of his cock-a-doodle-doo! makes the sun rise every morning! The pearl of the poem is the scene in the second act, where Chantecler confides this marvellous secret to thegloriosa donna delta sua mente, the Hen-Pheasant, who has taken refuge in the poultry-yard. A pheasant sees more of the world than a cock, flies and rockets up in the sky, dwells in the forest, and therefore, half-sceptical, half-scandalised, she listens while Chantecler, manlike, expatiates on the necessity of his existence.

So far at least the myth is charming in its quaint philosophy, the characters appear full of humour each of them as French as French can be; for why should not animals as well as human beings, have a nationality and racial qualities of their own? Chantecler is a coxcombed Don Quixote, chimerical, infatuate, peremptory, and brave; but he is, we have said, aFrenchDon Quixote, and so he represents not only chivalry, but also order andauthority; he is not only generous but masterful; loyal to his subordinates, vain of his beauty and prone to vaunt it; and he thinks himself the natural sultan of every female fowl. Chantecler, like Don Quixote, is absurd; and yet not merely lovable, but honourable in his absurdity. If his adventure proves anything, it is that an illusion and a chimera are necessary to prevent us from lapsing into scepticism or savagery.

Chantecler, with his valiance, his vain-glory, and his optimism, is one type of French character (a noble or military sort of type); another French fowl is the blackbird, the ‘Merle.’ Le Merle is a French Mephistopheles—aGeist der stets verneinet—paralysing all effort by his scepticism, his criticism, his pitiless raillery, his pitiableblague, which is often merely,—

‘Une prudence, un art de rester vague,Un élégant moyen de n’avoir pas d’avis.’

He is

‘Le petit croque-mort de la Foi.’

The blackbird is at once aboulevardierand anintellectuel. He is the ‘Chat Noir,’ he is Montmartre; alas, he is the pretext for many bad verses, execrable conceits, and parlous puns. Not that a poet, I repeat, is obliged to have good taste; but there are moments when the pun kills the poem. When the Blackbird says to the philosophicfowl, ‘Fichez le Kant!’ (camp); when he interrupts, ‘C’est vieux œufs!’ (vieux jeu)—surely he outdistances the most trivial dialogues of Moth and Armado; and we answer with old Chaucer,—

‘Allas! conceytes stronge!’

and exclaim with Shakespeare’s Troilus,—

‘He would pun thee unto shivers!’

Chanteclertook 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 ofJean-Christophe, inLa 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 familycircle. 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 inLa 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 newFaust. 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 newFaust? 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 aTitus et Bérénice? It would be interesting to read theFaustof 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!

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