and he feels that the ideal which attains any extent of material accomplishment is to that extent shorn of its glory: it is almost the same spirit which, exaggerated in religion, led to Quietism, the gentle heresy that set its ideal in the love of God, pure and undefiled by any thought of reward or punishment, only to end in the annihilation of all conscious effort and the denial of life itself. or, as it has been well expressed, in 'l'oraison du dormir.' M. Rostand's idealism, however, with all its contempt for success, offers no effortless paradise to his heroes; on the contrary, each inevitable failure calls for fresh effort, and when Chantecler learns that his song does not create the day, as he had fondly believed, and that the sun rises even when he has been faithless to his vil he has learnt the lesson that Celui qui voit son rêve mort Doit mourir tout de suite ou se dresser plus fort. Life is suddenly deprived of its meaning and high purpose, he cries: Mon destin est plus sûr que le jour que je vois ! His faith seeks and finds new reasons on which to rebuild the shattered palace of illusion: C'est que je suis le Coq d'un soleil plus lointain ! LA FAISANE: Quand ? CHANTECLER: Un Jour ! In the same spirit, earlier in the play, Chantecler, challenged by the steel-spurred fighting Cock, the champion of the evil night-birds must needs add to the ignominy of the defeat which seems certai since he has never killed a rival, only Quelquefois secouru, défend: protégé,' by doing something brave' before he dies, and, courti the scorn that the confession of his faith will cause, cries out the jeering poultry ; . . . Je tiens à mourir sous les rires! . . . C'est moi qui, de mon chant, vous rallume les cieux ! This lofty idealism bewitches all the humble familiar things M. Rostand's play; like the Sun, without which 'les choses seraient que ce qu'elles sont,' it throws a glamour over the birds and beasts of the farmyard and forest, and lends a strange enchantment to all the common-place objects, the old wooden shoe bursting with straw, the wooden rake with a wisp or two of grass still entangled in its teeth, the old fork set aside like a naughty child in the corner, which are the sole riches of Chantecler's domain. M. Rostand finds in the farm a lesson in that local patriotism so dear to Mr. G. K. Chesterton. Mr. Chesterton accuses the globe-trotter of living in a smaller world than the peasant, since, a wanderer in many lands, he is blind to all those deep realities of life that can only be felt instinctively by one with the long familiar habit of his native soil. The Ant in Chantecler's yard, who lives on an old worm-eaten skittle-ball and Qui fait, avec l'orgeuil des parcoureurs de mondes, has learnt all and more than all that cosmopolitanism has to teach. Quand on sait regarder et souffrir, on sait tout. Dans une mort d'insecte on voit tous les désastres. When vainglorious man has departed, in the poet's dream life goes on as busily as ever behind the farm-wall where the cat lies dozing'; the fly goes buzzing about his business, the hens go gaily to their work, and even the snail' tâche à lui tout seul d'argenter un fagot.' Malebranche dirait qu'il n'y a plus une âme : Nous pensons humblement qu'il reste encor des cœurs. For English readers, this idealisation of the humble beings that live and suffer in the shadow of man will be Chantecler's greatest charm; but, apart from this, it has a special interest as a daring, if not entirely successful, experiment which marks a new stage in the development of M. Rostand's work. Previously M. Rostand's idealism had set its scene in the dim romantic past, and its message, beautiful as it was, seemed to have but little relation to the life of the prosaic present; for it is-perhaps it always has been-the curse of the present that it is blind to the poetry and romance of its environment. M. Rostand has himself explained his motive in writing Chantecler: he wished, he said, to write a modern play; and since modern dress and modern manners lend themselves ill to the exigencies of verse and the poet's yearning for beauty, he hit on the idea of disguising his dramatis persona as birds and animals. It would seem that the poet must let down a veil of unreality between the audience and his play, and M. Rostand believed that the fairyland of the farmyard and forest would be nearer to his audience than the world of conventional romance, and that the magnificence of his verse would be less incongruous with the fur and feathers of beasts and birds than with the sordid ugliness which fashion to-day imposes on mankind. From beginning to end M. Rostand's play is (to use an unpleasant but inevitable phrase) up to date; the tragedy of Chantecler's life, with its transparent allegory, is played in an age of motor-cars and telephones. When Chantecler sends out his hens to the fields across the road on their daily task of ridding the flowers of inst enemies, the horn of a motor-car is heard in the road outside, and when it has passed with a rush and roar the Houdan Hen remarks with comic disgust: Comme c'est amusant ! Tout ce qu'on va manger va sentir le pétrole ! No discovery of science has any terror for the poet, and Cyrano de Bergerac, who, by some prophetic freak of the imagination, has given us in his Histoire comique des Etats et Empires de la Lune a detailed description of the phonograph,' would have revelled in the scene where Chantecler, anxious for news of the farmyard, that he has deserted for the forest of the Hen Pheasant, carries on an animated conversation with the Blackbird, pressing the bell of a convolvulus into service as a telephone: its roots, he explains, are connected underground with those of another convolvulus entwined about the Blackbird's cage; while a friendly Bee who sleeps in the flower 'rings up' with a buzz when communication is established. 1 Chantecler courts comparison with The Birds; the pedantic ... Cyrano gives the following description of the box-like books used in the Moon: 'A l'ouverture de la boîte, je trouvai un je ne sais quoi de métail presqu semblable à nos horloges, plein de je ne sais quelques petits ressorts et de machine imperceptibles. . . . C'est un livre où, pour apprendre, les yeux sont inutiles on n'a besoin que des oreilles. Quand quelqu'un donc souhaite lire, il bande, avee grande quantité de toutes sortes de petits nerfs, cette machine; puis il tourne l'aiguille sur le chapitre qu'il désire écouter, et au même temps il en sort, comme de la bouche d'un homme, ou d'un instrument de musique, tous les so distincts et différents qui servent, entre les grands Lunaires, à l'expression du langage.' Woodpecker is always talking of Aristophanes-even the Nightingale's song reminds him of the Greek comedian-while in his references to contemporary topics and his satire on the ephemeral fashions of the day M. Rostand has imitated the methods of the Old Comedy. How far these topical allusions and the methods of Aristophanes are justifiable in a whimsical heroic comedy is a question for the taste of the individual reader; on this point the critics have been very severe. Justice, however, should be done to the courage of a dramatist who, certain of popular favour had he been content to cast the story of Chantecler in the mould he had used for Cyrano de Bergerac, ventured to attempt a new and original genre. In any case the study of Chantecler has a value of its own for the appreciation of Aristophanes, and schoolmasters reading any of the comedies with an upper form might well do worse than provide themselves with a stock of parallels from M. Rostand's play. The Old Comedy attacked new things in politics and ideas, and its principal weapons were the pun and à peu près, and broad burlesque; with almost the same weapons M. Rostand attacks the spirit of the day in which he finds the declared enemy of the idealism that is the main inspiration of Chantecler. Nevertheless there is an obvious contrast between the Parisian audience of 1910 and the Athenian audience of B.C. 414. In France politics have become divorced from the life of the people; they are, Frenchmen are never weary of saying, a more or less sordid trade by which a certain section of the nation makes a more or less honest living, and the country itself is prey to an ill-defined uneasiness that it does not attempt to conceal. Il n'y a plus que du provisoire,' say the Owls, when Chantecler's crow has announced that night is about to give place to day, and this is a sentiment that one may hear repeated again and again in French society. The old faith and the old ideals seem bankrupt, and nothing has taken their place; even the army itself, the nation in arms, and with it the idea of patriotism, has not escaped the jeer of the scoffer, and a superficial spirit of blague and persiflage which holds nothing sacred from its belittling touch is the mark of fashion. But it would be a superficial observer who concluded that the corroding irony of the boulevard had corrupted the heart of the nation; those who remember how a few months back Paris threw off the mask of carelessness and faced with calm self-confidence and courage the prospect of a war that many believed inevitable will endorse M. Rostand's eulogy of the Parisian Sparrow : Tu veux imiter le Moineau ? (says Chantecler to the Blackbird), mais sa blague N'est pas une prudence, un art de rester vague, Un élégant moyen de n'avoir pas d'avis : ... Il a toujours des yeux furieux ou ravis. . . In B.C. 414 the glory of Imperial Athens was at its zenith. Seven years earlier the Peace of Nicias had consolidated her position as the leading State in Greece, and the greatest armament ever fitted out by an Hellenic Power had just started on its way to Sicily. Ambition was at its highest; the Sicilian expedition to the dreams of Alcibiades no more than a starting-point towards the conquest of a Mediterranean empire stretching from Libya to the Pillars of Hercules, and the hopes of the Athenian demos τοῦ ξύμπαντος Ἑλληνικοῦ ἄρξειν dimly reflected the dreams of the ambitious schemer, for whose recall, a few months before The Birds was acted, the State-galley, the Salaminia, had set out on the fatal voyage that was to wreck once and for all the enterprise itself and the glory of Athens. Yet both Aristophanes and M. Rostand find themselves at war with the spirit of fashion which is always new and ever the same. In the farmyard, Patou, the dog, 'un vieux barbet de QuaranteHuit' (the sturdy Mapa@wvoμáxns of Aristophanes), declares, rolling his r's in fury: Oui, chaque jour-voilà pourquoi je roule l'Rrrr— ¦ The chaffing Blackbird with the laugh and sneer that belittle all things noble, and the idiotic Peacock with his gorgeous tail and meaningless affectation of preciosity, set the fashion, and sincerity and simplicity are at a discount. The Gray Hen must needs fall in love with the Cuckoo of the cuckoo-clock, because he is Swiss, and because Il sort toujours à la même heure, comme Kant! 'Fichez le Kant' (fichez le camp, clear out), says the incorrigible Blackbird with a bad pun which Aristophanes would certainly have made his own had the Greek language and the name of Socrates lent themselves to its perpetration. |