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 quest