WHILE. The Last Night of Don Juan was not written until the World War and its author died in 1918, Edmond Rostand belongs to the romantic tradition of the nineteenth century and is its last and highest French representative. A generation before the birth of Rostand, Victor Hugo stormed the French theater with his hectic dramas about love, honor, and liberty, and with Hernani ( 1831) set the new fashion for romanticism. But his dramas have dated and his celebrated preface to Cromwell survives them. The poetic gifts of Rostand may not compare with Hugo's in the library, but they served a finer purpose in the theater. Although there are boring scenes in Cyrano de Bergerac and the drama never fulfills the magnificent first act, Cyrano himself remains a superb figure and the revelation of seventeenth-century France a tour de force. Produced in 1897, in Rostand's thirtieth year, it was preceded by the charming comedy, The Romancers, which owes a good deal to Romeo and Juliet and to Alfred de Musset, and by The Faraway Princess. L'Aiglon ( 1900) is a better drama than most contemporary critics bellieve it to be. Despite the incursion of Rostand's love of the sentimental, many scenes still breathe with energy, wit, poetry, and dramatic effectiveness. In Chantecler, the poet dramatized the tragic comedy of an idealist who feels that his crowing ushers forth the dawn. On a day when the rooster wakens too late and the sun has risen, he accepts his shattered kingdom by henceforth serving the common barnyard. Because of declining health, Rostand gave up Paris for the Pyrenees and there wrote and did not quite complete his Don Juan. Here again we are confronted with self-delusion through the person of the immortal lover who, given an extra night to review the great past before his death, discovers he has conquered and possessed nothing whatsoever. It is a play within a puppet play and the Devil the puppet master. Don Juan, stripped of his remaining pride and vanity, is turned into a squeaking doll for the public to laugh at--a tragic denouement. The romance has a realistic basis and an unerring psychologic insight. It belongs to the dawn of the twentieth century and among the discoveries of Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis.
____________________-702-
