Among the proverbs of Spanish folk-lore there is a saying that
good wine retains its flavor in spite of rude bottles and cracked
cups. The success of M. Rostand’s brilliant drama,
Cyrano de Bergerac, in its English dress proves once more
the truth of this adage. The fun and pathos, the wit and
satire, of the original pierce through the halting, feeble
translation like light through a ragged curtain, dazzling the
spectators and setting their enthusiasm ablaze.
Those who love the theatre at its best, when it appeals to our
finer instincts and moves us to healthy laughter and tears, owe a
debt of gratitude to Richard Mansfield for his courage in giving
us, as far as the difference of language and rhythm would allow,
this chef d’œuvre unchanged, free from the
mutilations of the adapter, with the author’s wishes and
the stage decorations followed into the smallest detail. 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. By the time spring
came, there were few cultivated people who had not read the new
work and discussed its original language and daring
treatment.
On arriving in Paris, my first evening was passed at the Porte
St. Martin. After the piece was over, I dropped into
Coquelin’s dressing-room to shake this old acquaintance by
the hand and give him news of his many friends in America.
Coquelin in his dressing-room is one of the most delightful of
mortals. The effort of playing sets his blood in motion and
his wit sparkling. He seemed as fresh and gay that evening
as though there were not five killing acts behind him and the
fatigue of a two-hundred-night run, uninterrupted even by
Sundays, added to his “record.”
After the operation of removing his historic nose had been
performed and the actor had resumed his own clothes and features,
we got into his carriage and were driven to his apartment in the
Place de l’Etoile, a cosy museum full of comfortable chairs
and priceless bric-à-brac. The conversation
naturally turned during supper on the piece and this new author
who had sprung in a night from obscurity to a globe-embracing
fame. How, I asked, did you come across the play, and what
decided you to produce it?
Coquelin’s reply was so interesting that it will be
better to repeat the actor’s own words as he told his tale
over the dismantled table in the tranquil midnight hours.
“I had, like most Parisians, known Rostand for some time
as the author of a few graceful verses and a play (Les
Romanesques) which passed almost unnoticed at the
Français.
“About four years ago Sarah Bernhardt asked me to her
‘hôtel’ to hear M. Rostand read a play he had
just completed for her. I accepted reluctantly, as at that
moment we were busy at the theatre. I also doubted if there
could be much in the new play to interest me. It was La
Princesse Lointaine. I shall remember that afternoon as
long as I live! From the first line my attention was
riveted and my senses were charmed. What struck me as even
more remarkable than the piece was the masterly power and finish
with which the boyish author delivered his lines. Where, I
asked myself, had he learned that difficult art? The great
actress, always quick to respond to the voice of art, accepted
the play then and there.
“After the reading was over I walked home with M.
Rostand, and had a long talk with him about his work and
ambitions. When we parted at his door, I said: ‘In my
opinion, you are destined to become the greatest dramatic poet of
the age; I bind myself here and now to take any play you write
(in which there is a part for me) without reading it, to cancel
any engagements I may have on hand, and produce your piece with
the least possible delay.’ An offer I don’t imagine
many young poets have ever received, and which I certainly never
before made to any author.
“About six weeks later my new acquaintance dropped in
one morning to read me the sketch he had worked out for a drama,
the title rôle of which he thought would please me. I
was delighted with the idea, and told him to go ahead. A
month later we met in the street. On asking him how the
play was progressing, to my astonishment he answered that he had
abandoned that idea and hit upon something entirely
different. Chance had thrown in his way an old volume of
Cyrano de Bergerac’s poems, which so delighted him that he
had been reading up the life and death of that unfortunate
poet. From this reading had sprung the idea of making
Cyrano the central figure of a drama laid in the city of
Richelieu, d’Artagnan, and the Précieuses
Ridicules, a seventeenth-century Paris of love and
duelling.
“At first this idea struck me as unfortunate. The
elder Dumas had worked that vein so well and so completely, I
doubted if any literary gold remained for another author.
It seemed foolhardy to resuscitate the Three Guardsmen
epoch—and I doubted if it were possible to carry out his
idea and play an intense and pathetic rôle disguised with a
burlesque nose.
“This contrasting of the grotesque and the sentimental
was of course not new. Victor Hugo had broken away from
classic tradition when he made a hunchback the hero of a
drama. 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. We sat where we had met, under
the trees of the Champs Elysées, for a couple of hours,
turning the subject about and looking at the question from every
point of view. Before we parted the poet had convinced
me. The role, as he conceived it, was certainly original,
and therefore tempting, opening vast possibilities before my
dazzled eyes.
“I found out later that Rostand had gone straight home
after that conversation and worked for nearly twenty hours
without leaving the study, where his wife found him at daybreak,
fast asleep with his head on a pile of manuscript. He was
at my rooms the next day before I was up, sitting on the side of
my bed, reading the result of his labor. As the story
unfolded itself I was more and more delighted. His idea of
resuscitating the quaint interior of the Hôtel de Bourgogne
Theatre was original, and the balcony scene, even in outline,
enchanting. After the reading Rostand dashed off as he had
come, and for many weeks I saw no more of him.
“La Princesse Lointaine was, in the meantime,
produced by Sarah, first in London and then in Paris. In
the English capital it was a failure; with us it gained a
succès d’estime, the fantastic grace and
lightness of the piece saving it from absolute shipwreck in the
eyes of the literary public.
“Between ourselves,” continued Coquelin, pushing
aside his plate, a twinkle in his small eyes, “is the
reason of this lack of success very difficult to discover?
The Princess in the piece is supposed to be a fairy enchantress
in her sixteenth year. The play turns on her youth and
innocence. Now, honestly, is Sarah, even on the stage, any
one’s ideal of youth and innocence?” This was
asked so naïvely that I burst into a laugh, in which my host
joined me. Unfortunately, this grandmamma, like Ellen
Terry, cannot be made to understand that there are rôles
she should leave alone, that with all the illusions the stage
lends she can no longer play girlish parts with success.
“The failure of his play produced the most disastrous
effect on Rostand, who had given up a year of his life to its
composition and was profoundly chagrined by its fall. He
sank into a mild melancholy, refusing for more than eighteen
months to put pen to paper. On the rare occasions when we
met I urged him to pull himself together and rise above
disappointment. Little by little, his friends were able to
awaken his dormant interest and get him to work again on
Cyrano. As he slowly regained confidence and began
taking pleasure once more in his work, the boyish author took to
dropping in on me at impossible morning hours to read some scene
hot from his ardent brain. When seated by my bedside, he
declaimed his lines until, lit at his flame, I would jump out of
bed, and wrapping my dressing-gown hastily around me, seize the
manuscript out of his hands, and, before I knew it, find my self
addressing imaginary audiences, poker in hand, in lieu of a
sword, with any hat that came to hand doing duty for the plumed
headgear of our hero. Little by little, line upon line, the
masterpiece grew under his hands. My career as an actor has
thrown me in with many forms of literary industry and dogged
application, but the power of sustained effort and untiring,
unflagging zeal possessed by that fragile youth surpassed
anything I had seen.
“As the work began taking form, Rostand hired a place in
the country, so that no visitors or invitations might tempt him
away from his daily toil. Rich, young, handsome, married to
a woman all Paris was admiring, with every door, social or
Bohemian, wide open before his birth and talent, he voluntarily
shut himself up for over a year in a dismal suburb, allowing no
amusement to disturb his incessant toil. Mme. Rostand has
since told me that at one time she seriously feared for his
reason if not for his life, as he averaged ten hours a day steady
work, and when the spell was on him would pass night after night
at his study table, rewriting, cutting, modelling his play, never
contented, always striving after a more expressive adjective, a
more harmonious or original rhyme, casting aside a month’s
finished work without a second thought when he judged that
another form expressed his idea more perfectly.
“That no success is cheaply bought I have long known; my
profession above all others is calculated to teach one that
truth.
“If Rostand’s play is the best this century has
produced, and our greatest critics are unanimous in pronouncing
it equal, if not superior, to Victor Hugo’s masterpieces,
the young author has not stolen his laurels, but gained them leaf
by leaf during endless midnight hours of brain-wringing
effort—a price that few in a generation would be willing to
give or capable of giving for fame. The labor had been in
proportion to the success; it always is! I doubt if there
is one word in his ‘duel’ ballad that has not been
changed again and again for a more fitting expression, as one
might assort the shades of a mosaic until a harmonious whole is
produced. I have there in my desk whole scenes that he
discarded because they were not essential to the action of the
piece. They will probably never be printed, yet are as
brilliant and cost their author as much labor as any that the
public applauded to-night.
“As our rehearsals proceeded I saw another side of
Rostand’s character; the energy and endurance hidden in his
almost effeminate frame astonished us all. He almost lived
at the theatre, drilling each actor, designing each costume,
ordering the setting of each scene. There was not a dress
that he did not copy from some old print, or a passade
that he did not indicate to the humblest member of the
troop. The marvellous diction that I had noticed during the
reading at Sarah’s served him now and gave the key to the
entire performance. I have never seen him peevish or
discouraged, but always courteous and cheerful through all those
weary weeks of repetition, when even the most enthusiastic feel
their courage oozing away under the awful grind of afternoon and
evening rehearsal, the latter beginning at midnight after the
regular performance was over.
“The news was somehow spread among the theatre-loving
public that something out if the ordinary was in
preparation. The papers took up the tale and repeated it
until the whole capital was keyed up to concert pitch. The
opening night was eagerly awaited by the critics, the literary
and the artistic worlds. When the curtain rose on the first
act there was the emotion of a great event floating in the
air.” Here Coquelin’s face assumed an intense
expression I had rarely seen there before. He was back on
the stage, living over again the glorious hours of that
night’s triumph. His breath was coming quick and his
eyes aglow with the memory of that evening. “Never,
never have I lived through such an evening. Victor
Hugo’s greatest triumph, the first night of Hernani,
was the only theatrical event that can compare to it. It,
however, was injured by the enmity of a clique who persistently
hissed the new play. There is but one phrase to express the
enthusiasm at our first performance—une salle en
délire gives some idea of what took place. As
the curtain fell on each succeeding act the entire audience would
rise to its feet, shouting and cheering for ten minutes at a
time. The coulisse and the dressing-rooms were packed by
the critics and the author’s friends, beside themselves
with delight. I was trembling so I could hardly get from
one costume into another, and had to refuse my door to every
one. Amid all this confusion Rostand alone remained cool
and seemed unconscious of his victory. He continued quietly
giving last recommendations to the figurants, overseeing the
setting of the scenes, and thanking the actors as they came off
the stage, with the same self-possessed urbanity he had shown
during the rehearsals. Finally, when the play was over, and
we had time to turn and look for him, our author had disappeared,
having quietly driven off with his wife to their house in the
country, from which he never moved for a week.”
It struck two o’clock as Coquelin ended. The
sleepless city had at last gone to rest. At our feet, as we
stood by the open window, the great square around the Arc de
Triomphe lay silent and empty, its vast arch rising dimly against
the night sky.
As I turned to go, Coquelin took my hand and remarked,
smiling: “Now you have heard the story of a genius, an
actor, and a masterpiece.”
