An We need not criticize the verse as verse. Englishman would have something to say in the one case; it is even possible a Frenchman might have in the other. Nor, it is clear, is there any need for blank verse to lead one into such morasses of English as "I do not lull me with illusions"; nor need one yield to the temptation of— "At times I'm weak in evening hours dim .. (Why should a simple sunset take all the marrow out of a man's language?) But will not any blank verse, which gives us " drive " rather than " lift," inevitably falsify the main, the comprehensive effect that Rostand is making? In his alexandrines ideas glitter; blank verse seems, at best, but to make them glow. Rhyme plus strict metre presents grave dramatic difficulties no doubt (Shakespeare abandoned it after a little). But note the effect of the English couplet with which this passage winds up. Does it not give the whole affair a most desirable fillip? A few pages earlier, the translators, Gladys Thomas and Mary Guillemard, have found courage for forty couplets running. The passage is too long for quotation; one would need besides to quote the eighty lines before and the eighty after for full evidence of the exhilaration the rhyming brings. And if exhilaration is what we want for the fantastic moments-it is Cyrano's own description of his nose that I have just been referring to how much more do we need it as a safeguard against "evening hours dim" and the like. Compare the famous passage in the last act Cyrano: Non, non, mon cher amour, je ne vous aimais pas ! Roxane: The voice that thrilled the night—you, you! Roxane : Cyrano: No, my sweet love, I never loved you. All other question apart, can anyone fail to see that the chief dramatic effect of the French lies in the Ah! Cyrano: Non, non, mon cher amour, je ne vous aimais pas ! with its finality made perfect by the rhyme? Time and again Rostand marks his point on his rhyme and in his rhyme. Vicomte: Attendez! Je vais lui lancer un de ces traits! . . Vous vous avez un nez-heu-un nez-très-grand. Cyrano: And, for the play's very end, Très. Cyrano: ... Quelque chose que, sans un pli, sans une tâche, J'emporte malgré vous, est c'est . . Roxane : Cyrano: C'est ? Mon panache. He uses it, most effectively, nost needfully-to weld together the scattered dialogue which gives such a charming lightness to the scenes. We have Ragueneau among his cooks, the four of them sharing a couplet : Ragueneau: Vous, veuillez m'allonger cette sauce-elle est courte ! It is the rhyme alone that keeps this in unity with the more regular writing. Without the rhyme all sense of verse would be dissipated. I hope I do not underrate the inevitable difficulties of transferring Cyrano from the French to the English stage, nor do I mean to depreciate unduly the present translation. Its particular relevancy to my theme lies partly in the fact that, whatever the play's final place in French literature, it is certainly written most effectively for the stage, partly in its being, most markedly, a play for the translator to appraise--as Maeterlinck did "Macbeth"-for its dominant and individual dramatic qualities. It is a play in which manner is so fused with matter that if we lack the right equivalent for both we shall have on our hands little more than the disintegrated material of a play. And to turn automatically to blank verse as the one possible poetic medium is absurd. But if the conservatism of the French theatre clings too desperately to the alexandrine, it is neglect of tradition in the English that obscures what other resources we have. In Shakespeare's early work rhymed couplets abound, but our actors and producers are apt to shirk them whenever possible. But for the sporadic enthusiasm of the Phoenix Society Dryden's rhymed tragedies would be totally neglected. Mr. John Masefield has done Racine into the same metre, and has made other interesting experiments in one or two plays of his own, but the regular stage has no present room for them. Professor Gilbert Murray uses rhymed verse for his translations from Euripides, but this influence is limited. My own view is that experiment is needed. Actors and audiences both need jerking from the rut of the acceptance of blank verse as the only poetic medium, the one possible dramatic alternative to plain prose. And if the regular stage is too occupied earning its living, here surely is an opportunity for schools, for producing societies and especially, perhaps, for those multiplying congregations of young men and women drawn together at the universities by their lively interest in living dramatic art. They should be particularly responsive to anything of the sort, for they are upon the spring tide of interest in literature and its forms. Happening upon their acting of plays I have often been struck by the beauty and flexibility of the speech. Further, the poetic drama in all its variety-folk plays, mystery, masque, plays written for university and school, Latin comedies, Greek tragedy is of old tradition in England, though the current has been thin and intermittent, and its channel more often than not apart from the professional theatre. In poetic drama, if its aspect could but be widened and its bonds loosened, our native genius, creative and interpretative both, might still find its most genuine expression. "Realism" and "the well-made play" were imports. And if a young dramatist wants to experiment with metre and the like, translation, paradoxically enough, gives him good opportunity. He comes to a play with its content and structure already fixed. He is on a firm foundation. If one new way doesn't do, it is no such great matter to try another, and the worst error need not mean utter disaster. Then there are the plays whose content, whose sheer meaning, is the obviously important thing, the modern, so-called "realistic plays " of conversational dialogue, their conventions roughly the same whatever their country of origin. Nothing to be done, it |