Was he a great poet? It is perhaps too soon to say. Bad taste never yet prevented any one from being a great poet. This is a point on which I cannot insist too strongly. When Juliet says:-- ‘Give me my Romeo and when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he shall make the face of heaven so fine That all the world shall be in love with night.’ Shakespeare is writing Rostand with a vengeance. When in Victor Hugo’s _La Forêt Mouillée_ the sparrow makes believe his woodland glade is the court of Louis XIV., and says in a series of puns, first of all, to a tuft of heather (bruyère):-- ‘Bonjour, La Bruyère! (à une branche d’arbre) Bonjour, Rameau! (à une corneille sur le rocher) Bonjour, Corneille! (au nénufar) Bonjour, Boileau!’ let us admit at once that Victor Hugo wallows (and not in this instance only) in the very slough of that bad taste so dear to Rostand. How pleased Rostand would have been to call the water-lily, say, John Drinkwater! But then Shakespeare and Victor Hugo have amazing qualities wherewith to counter-balance these conceits. In art, that is everything. The smallest chip of pure gold compensates for a bag full of pebbles: a work of art must be estimated by the degree of its merits and not by the quantity of its defects. If there is dross along with the gold--even though there be much more dross than gold--let us be thankful if the gold itself is pure and unaffected by the presence of the baser residue. There is the question. I borrow from a book, recently published in French by a Hungarian Professor, M. Haraszti, some details of the youth and origin of Rostand. In 1868, he was born at Marseilles of a wealthy family of merchants and bankers, long established there. For a hundred years, at least, they had all been lovers of the arts. Early in the Nineteenth Century, the quatuors of Beethoven were performed, for the first time in France, in the Rostands’ salon. In 1844, a Mademoiselle Victorine Rostand--a great-aunt of the poet’s--published a volume of lyrics in the manner of Lamartine. Edmond’s uncle, the banker, Alexis Rostand, has composed an opera and more than one oratorio; and his father, the economist Eugène Rostand, is himself a poet. A volume of verse, _Les Sentiers Unis_, published in 1876, celebrates the precocity and charm of the child, Edmond, at that time eight years old; and it is interesting to learn that, even at that early date, he was remarkable for his original grace of words and flow of language:-- ‘Cette petite langue exquise, Un vrai jargon de Paradis, De mots qu’il façonne à sa guise. De diminutifs inédits; D’inimitables tours de phrases....’