He would not have been afraid even of the
nightmares of cosmogony, for he had no fear in him. To him the world
was small, not because he had any views as to its size, but for the
reason that gossiping ladies find it small, because so many relatives
were to be found in it. If you had taken him to the loneliest star that
the madness of an astronomer can conceive, he would have only beheld in
it the features of a new friend.
ROSTAND
When "Cyrano de Bergerac" was published, it bore the subordinate title
of a heroic comedy. We have no tradition in English literature which
would justify us in calling a comedy heroic, though there was once a
poet who called a comedy divine. By the current modern conception, the
hero has his place in a tragedy, and the one kind of strength which is
systematically denied to him is the strength to succeed. That the power
of a man's spirit might possibly go to the length of turning a tragedy
into a comedy is not admitted; nevertheless, almost all the primitive
legends of the world are comedies, not only in the sense that they have
a happy ending, but in the sense that they are based upon a certain
optimistic assumption that the hero is destined to be the destroyer of
the monster. Singularly enough, this modern idea of the essential
disastrous character of life, when seriously considered, connects itself
with a hyper-aesthetic 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.
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