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hurst. Nothing stops him except his conscience. That conscience may be unenlightened, but of its potency in causing Irish Catholics to reject the means of instruction there can be no doubt whatever. Perhaps of all mankind the Irish Catholic is most desirous The Spectator.

of education, if only because it will help him up in the world, and he craves to rise; yet of three million two hundred thousand Irish Catholics only three hundred have become graduates. Is not that proof sufficient that he demands a different university?

EDMOND ROSTAND'S "L'AIGLON."

Pope:

Monsieur Rostand, owing to his rapid erally belong to a class alluded to by and brilliant career and the colossal success of "Cyrano de Bergerac," is certainly the French author of the

So much they scorn the crowd, that if the throng

present day who attracts the greatest By chance go right, they purposely go

amount of attention in France, whose talent is the most keenly debated, whose claims are supported and disputed with the greatest amount of vehemence. His popularity in France is as great as that of Mr. Kipling in England; and in France, as is the case with Mr. Kipling in England, there are not wanting many, and determined, advocates of the devil. Some deny to M. Rostand the title of poet, while admitting that he is a clever playwright; some say that he has no talent whatsoever. In the case of poetical plays the public is probably, in the long run, the only judge. Never in the world's history has it been seen that the really magnificent play has proved a lasting failure, or a really bad play a perennial success. Of course, there have been plays which, like other works of art which have come before their season, the public have taken some years to appreciate; while, on the other hand, the public have often patronized plays of surprising mediocrity and vulgarity; these works, however, have never resisted the hand of time. But in the main the public has been right, and those who take the opposite view gen

wrong.

Certainly, in M. Rostand's case, whatever may be the exact "place" of his plays in the evolution of the world's poetical drama, one thing is quite certain, and that is that his plays are triumphantly successful. This for a play is a merit in itself. After the triumph of "Cyrano" it was difficult to believe that "L'Aiglon" would attain the same level of merit and success; and never was a success more discounted beforehand. For weeks before, "L'Aiglon" was the main topic of conversation in Paris, and provided endless copy for the newspapers. One thing is again certain: whatever the æsthetic value of "L'Aiglon" may be considered to be in the future, it constitutes for the present another gigantic success success which will extend and increase even SO wide a popularity as M. Rostand's. Never did a play come at a more opportune moment. At the time when the French are thinking that their country has, for a long time, been playing too insignificant in European politics, when it is still convalescent and suffering from the vague dis

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It

comfort subsequent on a feverish crisis, and fretting and chafing under the colorless mediocrity of a régime and a representative which fall short of their flamboyant ideal, M. Rostand comes skilfully leading a martial orchestra and sets their pulses throbbing and their ears tingling and their hearts beating with the inspiriting tunes of Imperial France. M. Rostand has written a play which certainly constitutes an advance in his poetical career. has the same color and vitality as "Cyrano," the same incomparable instinct for stage effect, the same skill and dexterity in the manipulation of words which amounts to jugglery, the same fertility in poetical images and felicitous couplets that we find in his earlier works; but, besides this, it has something that they have not-a higher atmosphere, a larger outlook, a deeper note; the fabric, though the builder's skill is the same, is less perfect as a whole, and more irregular; but in it we hear mysterious echoes, and the footfall of the Epic Muse, which compensate for the unevenness of the carpentry.

In "L'Aiglon" we breathe the atmosphere of the epic of Napoleon. Although the scenes which M. Rostand presents to us deal only with the sunset of that period, the glories and the vicissitudes of that epoch are suggested to us; we do not see the things themselves, but we are conscious of their spirit, their poetic existence and essence. M. Rostand evokes them, not by means of palpable shapes, but, like a wizard, in the images of his phrases and the sound of his verse, and thus we see them more clearly than if they had been presented to us in the form of elaborate tableaux and spectacular battle-pieces.

The existence of Napoleon II was in itself a tragic fact. Yet more tragic if, as Metternich is reported to have said of him, he had "a head of iron and a

body of glass." And a degree more tragic still is M. Rostand's creation of a prince whose frail tenement of clay is consumed by ambition and aspiration and who is conscious at times of the vanity of his aspiration and the hopelessness of his ambition. Thus tossed to and fro from ecstasy to despair, he is another Hamlet born not to avenge a crime committed against his father, but to atone for his father's crimes. And perhaps the most poetical moment of the play is that in which the Prince realized, on the plain of Wagram, that he himself is the atonement; that he is a white wafer of sacrifice offered as an expiation for so many oceans of blood. M. Rostand has chosen this theme, pregnant with intense pathos, as his principal leit-motiv, and has brought into relief the pity and the sadness of it by weaving round it music instinct with military ardor and patriotic fire and "all the pride, pomp, circumstance of glorious war." It is needless at this time in the day to relate the play in detail. The first two acts are the most stirring and vigorous -full of rousing speeches, telling lines, and dramatic scenes, such as the Prince's history lesson, when, after his professors had told him that nothing of importance occurred in the years 1805-7, in burning words he relates to them the campaign of Austerlitz.

In the third act there is a charming |

scene between the old Emperor of Austria and his grandson; it closes with an intensely dramatic scene where Metternich, wishing to work on the moral weakness of the Prince, drags him, unnerved and terrified, to the looking-glass and defies him to trace one lineament of Napoleon in his delicate Hapsburg countenance. The fourth act is an interlude which might be cut without loss. The close of the fifth act is, perhaps, the finest in conception of the whole play; in it we see Napoleon, after the failure of an attempted escape

to France, alone on the battlefield of Wagram, pale in his white uniform on the great, green, moonlit plain, with the body of the faithful soldier of the Old Guard, who had killed himself rather than be taken by the Austrians, lying before him. Gradually, in the sighing winds, Napoleon imagines he hears the moan of the soldiers who once strewed the plain, until the fancy grows into hallucination; until he fancies he is surrounded by regiments of ghosts, and that he hears the groans, the call and the clamor of phantom armies growing louder and louder till they culminate in the cry of "Vive l'Empereur, vive l'Empereur." He hears the tramping of men and the champing and neighing of chargers, and the music of the band; he thinks "the Grande Armée" has come to life, and rushes joyfully to meet it; the vision is then dispelled, and the irony of the reality is made plain to him, for it is the white uniforms of the Austrian regiment (of which he is colonel) that appear in the plain. The scene is almost Shakespearean in its -effect of beauty and terror. Finally, in the last act, we see the Roi de Rome dying in his gilded cage while he listens to the account of the pomp of his baptism in Paris, which is read out to him as he dies-he who as a child "eut pour hochet la couronne de Rome," is now an obscure and insignificant Hapsburg princeling, dying, forgotten by the world, without a friend, and under the eye of his implacable enemy.

The play has already been accused of incoherence, lengthiness and inequality; of too rapid transitions, and of a clashing in style of preciosity and brutality; of affectation and noise. It has been compared unfavorably with "Cyrano," but it must be said that if it is less finished and coherent than the former,

The Speaker.

less compact and artistic, it is also more human, it has more epische Breite, and it is less like a marionette show. Fault is found now, as it was before, with the form of M. Rostand's verses; they are, no doubt, better heard on the stage than read in the study, and this surely shows that they fulfil their conditions. His verses are not the verses. of Racine, of Alfred de Vigny, of Leconte de Lisle (just as Mr. Kipling's verses are not the verses of Milton, Keats or Tennyson); but they have a poetical quality and a poetical value of their own; and while their clarion music is still ringing in my ears I should think it foolish to quarrel with them, and to criticise them in a captious spirit; possibly on reading "L'Aiglon" the impression produced may be different. For the present, still under the spell of the enthusiasm and shouts of applause which his stirring couplets inspired on the memorable first night of the performance, I can but thank the author, who brought before my eyes, with the skilful and clamorous music of his harps and his horns, his trumpets and fifes and drums, the vision of a heroic epoch and the shadows of Homeric battles-the red sun and the cannon balls shivering the ice at Austerlitz, the Pope crowning another Cæsar in Notre Dame, Moscow in flames and the Great Army scattered on the steppes of Russia, and the lapping of the invisible tide round St. Helena. I also thank Madame Sarah Bernhardt for her intelligence, her charm, her grace, her power, her astounding vitality and energy; in short, for her miraculous genius, which seems to grow richer and riper, even as her personality grows fresher and younger with the advancing years.

M. B.

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MAY 5, 1900.

READINGS FROM NEW BOOKS.

A NEW EARTH IN THE OLD EARTH'S ARMS.*

I have made the discovery of new heavens and a new earth. Who has not felt the need of them? Who has not said to himself, "I have seen this whole thing over and over again. This world, which is 'round like an orange,' has, like an orange, now been effectually squeezed. Give me new worlds, not to conquer, but to live in." When the impulse to turn over a new leaf, to break with the past, to begin life all over again, is strong upon us, we look around in vain for "fresh woods and pastures new" in which to begin it. How put a new soul of existence into an old body of circumstances? But we are no longer driven to this dilemma. I do not mind making public, at least to all those choice spirits who read a certain magazine, the chart of my newly-discovered world.

It is the world of dawn. "Oh, that!" cries my young friend, scornfully, and is about to turn away. But let me ask you, in confidence, When have you seen the dawn, the whole of it, from silvery beginning to golden end? It was not long ago that an ingenuous maid asked me, looking up from her favorite poet, "Is the sunrise so much, anyway?" No, I might have said; not if you burst in on it rudely, jumping out of bed, or sleepily fumbling aside a curtain. You only get, in that case, the flash of an angry glare. But go quietly at very daybreak, steal to some rock or hill,

From "The Prose of Edward Rowland Sill." Copyright, 1900, by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Price, $1.25.

or only to some housetop, and lie in wait for its delicate first footsteps in the eastern sky. You must stalk your sunrise.

How often do we hear somebody say, "I had to get up early this morning, and I wondered why we don't always do it!" But the chances are it was a very inadequate experience. There was some invalid to be tended, or some owl train to be caught. Taken deliberately, and provided for beforehand by a full night's sleep, the wonder why we do not always do it would be vastly increased. Why we do not, however, is plain enough. It is because we cannot afford to burn our candle at both ends. "Early to bed and early to • rise," the whole prescription reads. It does not do to take half of it alone. If we are to see the morning star properly, the evening star must draw on our night-cap with its own.

The dawn, then, is protected from the throng of sacrilegious sight-seers by a great barrier. That barrier is the difficulty of going to bed. Our civilization has become a gaslight civilization. We try to turn night into day, and only succeed in turning night wrong side out; getting the harsh and wiry side that rasps the jaded nerves, in place of the gentle touches of "the welcome, the thrice prayed for," mantle of peaceful dreams.

It is diverting, to say the least, to take now and then a point of view outside of all our most cherished cus

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