When "Cyrano de Bergerac" was published, it bore the subordinate title
of a heroic comedy. We have no tradition in English literature which
would justify us in calling a comedy heroic, though there was once a
poet who called a comedy divine. By the current modern conception, the
hero has his place in a tragedy, and the one kind of strength which is
systematically denied to him is the strength to succeed. That the power
of a man's spirit might possibly go to the length of turning a tragedy
into a comedy is not admitted; nevertheless, almost all the primitive
legends of the world are comedies, not only in the sense that they have
a happy ending, but in the sense that they are based upon a certain
optimistic assumption that the hero is destined to be the destroyer of
the monster. Singularly enough, this modern idea of the essential
disastrous character of life, when seriously considered, connects itself
with a hyper-æsthetic view of tragedy and comedy which is largely due
to the influence of modern France, from which the great heroic comedies
of Monsieur Rostand have come. The French genius has an instinct for
remedying its own evil work, and France gives always the best cure for
"Frenchiness." The idea of comedy which is held in England by the school
which pays most attention to the technical niceties of art is a view
which renders such an idea as that of heroic comedy quite impossible.
The fundamental conception in the minds of the majority of our younger
writers is that comedy is, _par excellence_, a fragile thing. It is
conceived to be a conventional world of the most absolutely delicate and
gimcrack description. Such stories as Mr. Max Beerbohm's "Happy
Hypocrite" are conceptions which would vanish or fall into utter
nonsense if viewed by one single degree too seriously. But great comedy,
the comedy of Shakespeare or Sterne, not only can be, but must be, taken
seriously. There is nothing to which a man must give himself up with
more faith and self-abandonment than to genuine laughter. In such
comedies one laughs with the heroes, and not at them. The humour which
steeps the stories of Falstaff and Uncle Toby is a cosmic and
philosophic humour, a geniality which goes down to the depths. It is not
superficial reading, it is not even, strictly speaking, light reading.
Our sympathies are as much committed to the characters as if they were
the predestined victims in a Greek tragedy. The modern writer of
comedies may be said to boast of the brittleness of his characters. He
seems always on the eve of knocking his puppets to pieces. When John
Oliver Hobbes wrote for the first time a comedy of serious emotions, she
named it, with a thinly-disguised contempt for her own work, "A
Sentimental Comedy." The ground of this conception of the artificiality
of comedy is a profound pessimism. Life in the eyes of these mournful
buffoons is itself an utterly tragic thing; comedy must be as hollow as
a grinning mask. It is a refuge from the world, and not even, properly
speaking, a part of it. Their wit is a thin sheet of shining ice over
the eternal waters of bitterness.
"Cyrano de Bergerac" came to us as the new decoration of an old truth,
that merriment was one of the world's natural flowers, and not one of
its exotics. The gigantesque levity, the flamboyant eloquence, the
Rabelaisian puns and digressions were seen to be once more what they had
been in Rabelais, the mere outbursts of a human sympathy and bravado as
old and solid as the stars. The human spirit demanded wit as headlong
and haughty as its will. All was expressed in the words of Cyrano at his
highest moment of happiness, _Il me faut des géants_. An essential
aspect of this question of heroic comedy is the question of drama in
rhyme. There is nothing that affords so easy a point of attack for the
dramatic realist as the conduct of a play in verse. According to his
canons, it is indeed absurd to represent a number of characters facing
some terrible crisis in their lives by capping rhymes like a party
playing _bouts rimés_. In his eyes it must appear somewhat ridiculous
that two enemies taunting each other with insupportable insults should
obligingly provide each other with metrical spacing and neat and
convenient rhymes. But the whole of this view rests finally upon the
fact that few persons, if any, to-day understand what is meant by a
poetical play. It is a singular thing that those poetical plays which
are now written in England by the most advanced students of the drama
follow exclusively the lines of Maeterlinck, and use verse and rhyme for
the adornment of a profoundly tragic theme. But rhyme has a supreme
appropriateness for the treatment of the higher comedy. The land of
heroic comedy is, as it were, a paradise of lovers, in which it is not
difficult to imagine that men could talk poetry all day long. It is far
more conceivable that men's speech should flower naturally into these
harmonious forms, when they are filled with the essential spirit of
youth, than when they are sitting gloomily in the presence of immemorial
destiny. The great error consists in supposing that poetry is an
unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the
moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak, it is because we have
an impediment in our speech. It is not song that is the narrow or
artificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken and stammering
attempt at song. When we see men in a spiritual extravaganza, like
"Cyrano de Bergerac," speaking in rhyme, it is not our language
disguised or distorted, but our language rounded and made whole. Rhymes
answer each other as the sexes in flowers and in humanity answer each
other. Men do not speak so, it is true. Even when they are inspired or
in love they talk inanities. But the poetic comedy does not misrepresent
the speech one half so much as the speech misrepresents the soul.
Monsieur Rostand showed even more than his usual insight when he called
"Cyrano de Bergerac" a comedy, despite the fact that, strictly speaking,
it ends with disappointment and death. The essence of tragedy is a
spiritual breakdown or decline, and in the great French play the
spiritual sentiment mounts unceasingly until the last line. It is not
the facts themselves, but our feeling about them, that makes tragedy and
comedy, and death is more joyful in Rostand than life in Maeterlinck.
The same apparent contradiction holds good in the case of the drama of
"L'Aiglon," now being performed with so much success. Although the hero
is a weakling, the subject a fiasco, the end a premature death and a
personal disillusionment, yet, in spite of this theme, which might have
been chosen for its depressing qualities, the unconquerable pæan of the
praise of things, the ungovernable gaiety of the poet's song swells so
high that at the end it seems to drown all the weak voices of the
characters in one crashing chorus of great things and great men. A
multitude of mottoes might be taken from the play to indicate and
illustrate, not only its own spirit, but much of the spirit of modern
life. When in the vision of the field of Wagram the horrible voices of
the wounded cry out, _Les corbeaux, les corbeaux_, the Duke, overwhelmed
with a nightmare of hideous trivialities, cries out, _Où, où, sont les
aigles?_ That antithesis might stand alone as an invocation at the
beginning of the twentieth century to the spirit of heroic comedy. When
an ex-General of Napoleon is asked his reason for having betrayed the
Emperor, he replies, _La fatigue_, and at that a veteran private of the
Great Army rushes forward, and crying passionately, _Et nous?_ pours out
a terrible description of the life lived by the commoner soldier.
To-day, when pessimism is almost as much a symbol of wealth and fashion
as jewels or cigars, when the pampered heirs of the ages can sum up life
in few other words but _la fatigue_, there might surely come a cry from
the vast mass of common humanity from the beginning--_et nous?_ It is
this potentiality for enthusiasm among the mass of men that makes the
function of comedy at once common and sublime. Shakespeare's "Much Ado
About Nothing" is a great comedy, because behind it is the whole
pressure of that love of love which is the youth of the world, which is
common to all the young, especially to those who swear they will die
bachelors and old maids. "Love's Labour's Lost" is filled with the same
energy, and there it falls even more definitely into the scope of our
subject, since it is a comedy in rhyme in which all men speak lyrically
as naturally as the birds sing in pairing time. What the love of love
is to the Shakespearean comedies, that other and more mysterious human
passion, the love of death, is to "L'Aiglon." Whether we shall ever have
in England a new tradition of poetic comedy it is difficult at present
to say, but we shall assuredly never have it until we realise that
comedy is built upon everlasting foundations in the nature of things,
that it is not a thing too light to capture, but too deep to plumb.
Monsieur Rostand, in his description of the Battle of Wagram, does not
shrink from bringing about the Duke's ears the frightful voices of
actual battle, of men torn by crows, and suffocated with blood, but when
the Duke, terrified at these dreadful appeals, asks them for their final
word, they all cry together _Vive l'Empereur!_ Monsieur Rostand,
perhaps, did not know that he was writing an allegory. To me that field
of Wagram is the field of the modern war of literature. We hear nothing
but the voices of pain; the whole is one phonograph of horror. It is
right that we should hear these things, it is right that not one of
them should be silenced; but these cries of distress are not in life, as
they are in modern art, the only voices; they are the voices of men, but
not the voice of man. When questioned finally and seriously as to their
conception of their destiny, men have from the beginning of time
answered in a thousand philosophies and religions with a single voice
and in a sense most sacred and tremendous, _Vive l'Empereur_.