nious 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 paean 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, _Ou, ou, sont les
aigles?_ That antithesis might stand alone as an invocation at the
beginning of the twentieth century