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Updated: June 25, 2025
Singularly enough, this modern idea of the essential disastrous character of life, when seriously considered, connects itself with a hyper-æsthetic view of tragedy and comedy which is largely due to the influence of modern France, from which the great heroic comedies of Monsieur Rostand have come.
To be frank, cultivated people are no fonder of art than the Philistines; but they like to get thrills, and they like to see old faces under new bonnets. They admire Mr. Lavery's seductive banalities and the literary and erudite novelettes of M. Rostand. They go silly over Reinhardt and Bakst.
Only a few days ago Brian learned by heart a poem I read aloud, a poem called "Les Arbres Coupés," by Edmond Rostand. Teaching Brian, I found I had learned it myself. Chacun de nos soldats eut son cri de souffrance Devant ces arbres morts qui jonchaient les terrains: "Les pêchers!" criaient ceux de l'Île-de-France; "Et les mirabelliers!" crièrent les Lorrains.
As a matter of fact, they happen nowhere more often than in France. If some one should ask you suddenly for a list of the important playwrights of France today, what names would you let roll off your tongue, primed by the best punditic and docile French critics? Henry Bataille, Paul Hervieu, and Henry Bernstein. Possibly Rostand.
Milton and Mantegna were intellectual artists: it may be doubted whether Caravaggio and Rostand were artists at all. An intellectual artist is one who feels first a peculiar state of emotion being the point of departure for all works of art and goes on to think.
"Well, sir, I can't say as I understood the French of it, but I read the book in English before I come up, and it seemed to me he was pretty much of a low-down boy; yet I wanted to see how they'd make him out; hearin' it was, thought, the country over, to be such a great play; though to tell the truth all I could tell about that was that every line seemed to end in 'awze'; and 't they all talked in rhyme, and it did strike me as kind of enervatin' to be expected to believe that people could keep it up that long; and that it wasn't only the boy that never quit on the subject of himself and his folks, but pretty near any of 'em, if he'd git the chanst, did the same thing, so't almost I sort of wondered if Rostand wasn't that kind."
There remained, however, the risk of our Parisian public not accepting the new situation seriously. It seemed to me like bringing the sublime perilously near the ridiculous. “Fortunately, Rostand did not share this opinion or my doubts. He was full of enthusiasm for his piece and confident of its success.
This course was officially announced as a study of Bernard Shaw, Ibsen, Strindberg, Pinero, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Maeterlinck, D'Annunzio, and Rostand; but unofficially announced by Professor Frazer as an attempt to follow the spirit of to-day wherever it should be found in contemporary literature. Carl and the Turk were bewildered but staunchly enthusiastic disciples of the course.
In this way we profit by the vast labor and study which Rostand and Coquelin gave to the original production. Rumors of the success attained by this play in Paris soon floated across to us. The two or three French booksellers here could not import the piece fast enough to meet the ever increasing demand of our reading public.
In the United States, every one knows the contrast between the New Englander and the man from the Gulf; in Europe, the difference between the Norman and the Gascon has always been apparent how clear it is in the works of Flaubert and of Rostand!
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