As soon as "Cyrano" appeared it seemed to the French that this was just what they had been waiting for. Two things especially appealed to them, one of a purely literary nature, the other one a part of the basis of moral feelings and ideas upon which the play is built. First of all, it was a clear play, full of light and sunshine. Edmond Rostand hails from the South of France, and the atmosphere of his play is as translucid as the atmosphere of his native Provence. It is as far removed from symbolism and mysticism as the shores of the Mediterranean are from the fogs of Scandinavia. Every incident in the play rests upon some trait of character or combination of circumstances which has been explained at some previous moment. Every one of the leading characters, and "Cyrano" most of all, stands out in bold relief, and there is no mistaking what they stand for. But this clearness is mainly for the countrymen of the author. It depends partly upon the previous possession by the audience of a number of notions which are part of the intellectual inheritance of the race. The play, although quite modern in its style and construction, is in some respects for the French a resurrection of a portion of their glorious past. For them the _Hôtel de Bourgogne, les Précieuses_, Cardinal de Richelieu, etc., are more than mere names. The earlier part of the Seventeenth Century was for France a period of wonderful national energy. It is then, and not later, that France acquired that supremacy over the European Continent which is usually associated with the name of Louis XIV, but which was already established when that monarch assumed the reins of government. The timeliness of Rostand's great play was shown exactly in this, that it called the attention of the French back to a time when the nation was full of youthful and vigourous ambition, when a Frenchman would hardly believe that there was anything that he could not do if he set his mind to it, when it became the fashion to say that "Impossible was not a French word." Ever since the war of 1870 the pall of defeat had hung over the French. The stage showed this in a striking manner. The plays that were produced presented on the whole a stern or a pessimistic conception of life. The great periods of history, especially, in which French valour carried everything before it, remained neglected, for fear of the painful contrast which they would present with the humiliated condition of a vanquished country. The men who wrote these plays belonged to a generation in which, using the words of a French academician, "the mainspring of joy had been broken."