Rostand, the romantic dramatist of France, and a very national poet, died almost on the day of the great national triumph. He had lived, to use his own imaginative heraldry, to see the golden eagles of Gaul and Rome drive back the black eagles of Prussia and Austria. He was too much of an earlier generation to take the precise part of Pequy or Claudel in the process which banished the birds of barbaric night from the land of the Eagles of the sun. But the part he had played in that earlier time might well merit the use of a kindred metaphor, drawn from his own fairyland of ornithology. He had a special claim to use as one of his titles the noble mediÆval name of Chantecler. He might well be called the Gallic cock in that earlier twilight of vultures and bats. The end of the nineteenth century was a time of pessimism for Europe, and especially of pessimism for France; for pessimism was the shadow of Prussianism. Rostand was really a cock that crowed before the coming of sunrise. When it came it was red as blood; but the sun rose.

But that mediÆval nickname of the cock contains a still more appropriate criticism. The word “clear” is always a clue to Rostand’s country, and to Rostand’s work. He suffered in the decadent days, he suffers to some extent still, from a strange blunder which supposes that what is clear must be shallow. It is chiefly founded on false figures of speech; and is akin to the mysteriously meaningless saying that still waters run deep. It is repeated without the least reference to the evident fact that the stillest of all waters do not run at all. They lie about in puddles, which are none the less shallow because they are covered with scum. Such were the North German philosophies fashionable at the end of the nineteenth century; men believed in the puddle’s profundity solely because of its opacity. When the decadent critics sneered at Rostand’s popularity, they were simply sneering at his lucidity. They were protesting against his power of conveying what he meant in the most direct and telling fashion. They were complaining bitterly because he did not think with a German accent, which is nearly the same thing as an impediment in the speech. The wit with which all his dialogues blazed was also a positive disadvantage in that muddle-headed modern world, which even now will only begin to realize gradually the greatness of France. Nothing has been so senselessly underrated as wit, even when it seems to be the mere wit of words. It is dismissed as merely verbal; but, in fact, it is more solemn writing that is merely verbal, or rather merely verbose. A joke is always a thought; it is grave and formal writing that can be quite literally thoughtless. This applies to jokes when they are not only quite verbal but quite vulgar. A good pun, or even a bad pun, is more intellectual than mere polysyllables. The man, the presumably prehistoric man, who invented the phrase, “When is a door not a door; when it’s ajar,” made a serious and successful mental effort of selection and combination. But a Prussian professor might begin on the same problem, “When is a door not a door; when its doorishness is a becoming rather than a being, and when the relativity of doorishness is co-ordinated with the evolution of doors from windows and skylights, of which approximation to new function, etc. etc.”—and the Prussian professor might go on like that for ever, and never come to the end because he would never come to the point. A pun or a riddle can never be in that sense a fraud. Real wisdom may be better than real wit, but there is much more sham wisdom than there is sham wit.

This is the immediate point about Rostand, who had very real wit, but wit of a very poetic and sometimes epic order. It is very characteristic of him, and very puzzling to his critics, that he was witty even in repudiating wit. In the scene of Cyrano de Bergerac, in which the hero pleads in his friend’s name against the preciosity of the heroine, he quite naturally uses the phrase touching the evaporation of truth in artificial terminology, “Et que le fin du fin ne soit la fin des fins.” That involves a pun and also involves a point; and it is a subject on which it would be quite easy to be earnest and pointless. A philosopher need never come to an end in talking about ends; precisely because he is not required to amuse anybody, he is not really required to mean anything. Every page, every paragraph, almost every line of Rostand’s plays bristles with these points, which are both verbal and vital. If any critic thinks it was easy to produce them by the hundred, there is an exceedingly easy test; let him try to produce one. In attempting to joke in this fashion, he will probably find himself thinking for the first time. For that matter, merely to make one of the better puns of Punch or Hood’s Annual would be enough to stump most of the sceptics who have been taught in the Teutonic schools to think a thing creative because it is chaotic, and vast because it is vague. A modern “thinker” will find it easier to make up a hundred problems than to make up one riddle. For in the case of the riddle he has to make up the answer.

The drama of Rostand was full of answers, if they seem to the superficial merely to be ringing repartees. In the ballade of the duel the hero says that the sword-thrust shall come at the end of the envoi, but something like it seems to come continually at the end of the line. But these retorts are really much more than superficial, because they have the ring of dogma, of affirmation and certainty, and therefore of triumph. The wit is heroic wit; and his sub-title was strictly correct when he called Cyrano a heroic comedy. It was written in a literary period which was far too pessimistic to rise even to heroic Tragedy. It will grow in value in a more virile time, when the air has been cleared by a great crusade. Rostand’s poetry will certainly remain. It may not remain among the very greatest poetry, for the very reason that he fulfilled the office rather of the trumpet than the lyre. But he himself may well have shared the spirited taste of his own hero, and have preferred that something even more noble than the laurel should remain as a feather in his cap.