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 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 common 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, be