ourselves in _Jean-Christophe_. Romain Rolland is the great spectator
of our times. Will this quality of moralising criticism, this tendency
to preach as well as to paint, and to hold the mirror up to Nature in
a mood of violent irony--will this gift of satire keep its savour when
the generation whom M. Rolland alternately objurgates and encourages
shall have passed away? It is difficult to say. He is perhaps one of a
race who exist rather because of a certain flame of life, a force of
personality, than because of the perfection of their work. Tolstoi, Dr
Johnson, Rousseau, are the great names of this fraternity. _We_ are
their characters, they mould _us_, they move _us_, no less than their
puppets. And we treasure their lessons. But do we often open _The
Rambler_ or _La Nouvelle Héloise_? Will our children know, as we know,
all the ins and outs of _War and Peace_? And have we, finally, the
right to include M. Romain Rolland in this great category of artists
who were something more than artists? It is too soon to say. We are
still lost in the multiplicity of detail, the immense succession of
portraits (not only of persons but of generations and nations and
societies) which fill the vast canvas of _Jean-Christophe_.
EDMOND ROSTAND
When, in 1886, at eighteen years of age, Edmond Rostand, carried off
the Prize for Eloquence at the Academy of Marseilles, the bent of his
genius was already plain. For in praising Honoré d’Urfé and his great
romance, _Astrée_, the young poet pleaded the cause of a form of art as
far removed as possible from the Naturalist formulas which were still
the fashion of the hour. And his praise appeared a programme; and the
young apologist of Urfé discovered himself to be the apostle of an
idealist and sentimental revival.
Despite his amusing originality, and notwithstanding the real nobility
of his ideas, Edmond Rostand is not a poet for poets. He was too clever
by half--never was a clearer case of the wisdom of the ancients whose
proverb ran that ‘the half is more than the whole!’ His poems are like
a brilliant display of fireworks, whose flowers and fusees, whose
flashing greens, and blues, and carmines, confuse our sight and prevent
our seeing the quiet radiance of the stars behind, above.
And this is not saying that there are no stars in Rostand’s poems,
no ideas, that is to say, eternally calm and bright. Although not
primarily a thinker, yet our poet thinks: there are as many ideas
in Rostand as, for instance, in Swinburne. But too often he uses
his unrivalled virtuosity to obscure his plain meaning, as, in some
modern music, the importance of the accompaniment drowns the voice.
Contrasting the simple nobility of his intention with the quips and the
quirks, the puns and the periods, of his rhapsodies, his rhetoric and
his rodomontade (the style is catching), shall I say that he reminds
us of that mediæval acrobat who, not knowing how to express all his
adoration of the Virgin Mary, turned a somersault before her altar? It
is amusing to discover that the ideas of Rostand, when we get at them,
are not so very different from the ideas of Paul Claudel, who stands at
the other extreme of the political and literary horizon.
‘Ungefähr sagt das der Pfarrer auch,
Nur mit ein Bisschen andern Worten.’
Rostand, too, believes that order is rooted in self-sacrifice. His
heroes, like Claudel’s, strike free of the sterile introspection
which marred the art of the Fin-de-Siècle. They make for action, and
aim at an end outside themselves (in which they always fail), but
Rostand amalgamates his modern Anti-Individualism with the old Liberal
romantic, idealist enthusiasm, perfectly sincere so far as it goes. If
not devout, he is at least devoted. His plays have generally for their
subject some sort of a burnt-offering. For instance in _La Princesse
Lointaine_, Bertrand and the Princess sacrifice their passion to the
peace of mind of the dying Rudel:--
‘Oui, les grandes amours travaillent pour le Ciel!’
even as in _Cyrano_ the poet renounces his love in favour of his
friend. And that friend again ... _Cyrano_ is a veritable vertigo of
self-sacrifice!
The tragedy of _L’Aiglon_ is the oblation of a young man’s life to a
great idea. Chantecler also is a man--or rather a cock--with a mission
to which he is willing to immolate all personal delight. The plays of
Edmond Rostand are a sort of serum against selfishness! Despite their
rodomontade and their buffoonery, they are nobly moral.
But how they irritate a fastidious taste, with their perpetual
posturing, their gesticulations, their pirouettes, and their
impertinence! Was ever a real poet and a sincere knight-errant so
quaintly disguised as an acrobat, and sometimes, alas! even as a
commercial ‘gent’! Is it possible to be at once quite sincere and
yet so appallingly clever? He moves us when he expresses the sense
of patriotism or the praise of courage. He had a peculiar gift for
expressing admiration blent with pity. He had, in fact, a chivalrous
soul, an instinct for all that is gracious or grand, a sensibility that
was sincere but shallow. Had he but lived a few months longer, how
admirably he would have celebrated the Fêtes of Victory!
Was he a great poet? It is perhaps too soon to say. Bad taste never yet
prevented any one from being a great poet. This is a point on which I
cannot insist too strongly. When Juliet says:--
‘Give me my Romeo and when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he shall make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world shall be in love with night.’
Shakespeare is writing Rostand with a vengeance.
When in Victor Hugo’s _La Forêt Mouillée_ the sparrow makes believe
his woodland glade is the court of Louis XIV., and says in a series of
puns, first of all, to a tuft of heather (bruyère):--
‘Bonjour,
La Bruyère! (à une branche d’arbre)
Bonjour, Rameau!
(à une corneille sur le rocher)
Bonjour, Corneille!
(au nénufar) Bonjour, Boileau!’
let us admit at once that Victor Hugo wallows (and not in this instance
only) in the very slough of that bad taste so dear to Rostand. How
pleased Rostand would have been to call the water-lily, say, John
Drinkwater!
But then Shakespeare and Victor Hugo have amazing qualities wherewith
to counter-balance these conceits. In art, that is everything. The
smallest chip of pure gold compensates for a bag full of pebbles: a
work of art must be estimated by the degree of its merits and not
by the quantity of its defects. If there is dross along with the
gold--even though there be much more dross than gold--let us be
thankful if the gold itself is pure and unaffected by the presence of
the baser residue. There is the question.
I borrow from a book, recently published in French by a Hungarian
Professor, M. Haraszti, some details of the youth and origin of
Rostand. In 1868, he was born at Marseilles of a wealthy family of
merchants and bankers, long established there. For a hundred years, at
least, they had all been lovers of the arts. Early in the Nineteenth
Century, the quatuors of Beethoven were performed, for the first time
in France, in the Rostands’ salon. In 1844, a Mademoiselle Victorine
Rostand--a great-aunt of the poet’s--published a volume of lyrics in
the manner of Lamartine. Edmond’s uncle, the banker, Alexis Rostand,
has composed an opera and more than one oratorio; and his father,
the economist Eugène Rostand, is himself a poet. A volume of verse,
_Les Sentiers Unis_, published in 1876, celebrates the precocity and
charm of the child, Edmond, at that time eight years old; and it is
interesting to learn that, even at that early date, he was remarkable
for his original grace of words and flow of language:--
‘Cette petite langue exquise,
Un vrai jargon de Paradis,
De mots qu’il façonne à sa guise.
De diminutifs inédits;
D’inimitables tours de phrases....’
At eight years of age the child, Edmond Rostand, was certainly the
father of the man. As a schoolboy, at the lycée of Marseilles, his
Quixotic, pathetic temperament--his characteristic preference for the
unsuccessful--was already established. An old, drunken usher scorned
by the masters, tormented by the boys, a dreamy Bardolph whom his
pupils (on account of his shining nose) surnamed _Pif-Luisant_, was
young Rostand’s chosen companion. And in his first volume of verse, the
poet dedicates a charming poem to the tippler of genius who gave him,
perhaps, his first idea of Cyrano:--
‘Toi que j’ai tant aimé ... doux pochard ... Pif-Luisant.’
At one-and-twenty years of age, Edmond Rostand published his first
volume of verse, _Les Musardises_, and shortly afterwards married the
beautiful young poetess of _Les Pipeaux_, three years younger than
himself. I can remember Rosemonde Gérard in her nineteenth year, a
vision of loveliness, as, one evening, in the salon of the old poet,
Leconte de Lisle, she stood up, so slender, so smiling, so ravishingly
blonde and fresh, and recited a lyric as charming as herself.
Madame Rostand has a talent of her own, sincere, simple, femininely
sentimental. All the lovers in France know her _Chanson éternelle_:--
‘Car vois-tu chaque jour je t’aime davantage,
Aujourd’hui plus qu’hier, et bien moins que demain.’
_Photo: Dormac_ _To face p. 56_
[Illustration: =Edmond Rostand=]
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 his _Princesse
Lointaine_, playing herself the part of the Lady of Tripoli. Sarah
Bernhardt again, in the Easter week of 1896, brought out _La
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 I employ 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 of _Cyrano_. 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 of _Cyrano_; 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 in _Cyrano_, a love of life, a generosity, an activity,
a movement, 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 his _L’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 inimitable _Cyrano_.
For there is a deeper tenderness, a loftier poetry, a more impassioned
patriotism in _L’Aiglon_ than 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, Edmond Rostand 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
of _Cyrano_. 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 inimitable _Fables_;
and only a few years ago in London the public, expectant of more _Plain
Tales from the Hills_, gave a hesitating reception to that _Jungle
Book_ of 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 longtemps
Qu’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 liseron
Cet 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 one critic 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 lignes
Et qui fais les petits détails!
‘C’est toi qui, découpant la sœur jumelle et sombre
Qui 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 ombre
Souvent 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 choses
Ne 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 at _tu 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 the _gloriosa 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, a _French_ Don Quixote, and so he represents
not only chivalry, but also order and authority; 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--a _Geist der stets verneinet_--paralysing all effort
by his scepticism, his criticism, his pitiless raillery, his pitiable
_blague_, 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 a _boulevardier_ and an _intellectuel_. 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 philosophic fowl,
‘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!’
_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.