‘He would pun thee unto shivers!’ _Chantecler_ took seven years in the writing. I know nothing of the mystery of its composition; but one may perhaps suppose that Rostand wrote the first two acts in a real objective vein of poetry--tender, amused, imaginative, and then shut them in a drawer, forgot them, and some time later on, resumed the task in a mood of intellectual exasperation against the literary world of Paris. In this latter part, the poultry-yard à la La Fontaine has changed to a parody of the boulevard and all the charm has vanished. This third act is a sort of bantam imitation of _Jean-Christophe_, in _La Foire Sur la Place_. There is an operatic beauty in the hymn of the owls; there is gaiety and good humour later on; and, in the episode of the Nightingale, I find a tender philosophic loveliness. And yet we cannot defend ourselves from the impression that Rostand wrote the first two acts in a sudden vein of poetry; and then, long afterwards, took up the incompleted masterpiece and finished it as best he could, with the help of his gifted family circle. We know that of the four Rostands, three were poets--Edmond Rostand, his wife, and Maurice, their elder son.... This, of course, is the mere supposition of a critic’s idle brain. We might take for the motto of all Rostand’s work, a saying of Friar Trophime in _La Princesse Lointaine_: ‘La seule vertu, c’est l’enthousiasme.’ Like Maurice Barrès, Rostand too, in his way, was a Professor of Energy. In his last years, he was writing a new _Faust_. That story of a great Intellectualist who quits the kingdom of his mind for the freshest fields and humblest pastures of the realm of instinct is well suited to the genius of Edmond Rostand. Why should he not write a new _Faust_? Did not the classic poets of antiquity all work on the same subjects? And did not Corneille and Racine (in the same year, if I remember right) each of them produce a _Titus et Bérénice_? It would be interesting to read the _Faust_ of Rostand’s eager imagination. Edmond Rostand, as I have said, is not a poet for poets. He had the same sort of reputation in France that Mr Kipling has in England--colossal, undoubtedly, but hardly literary. Either of them, perhaps, is more appreciated in Europe at large--in Europe and America--than in the salons of their own metropolis. Something inelegant, cocksure, aggressive, sometimes a little superficial, checks in either of them the natural homage of the difficult--of the delicate. They gather no violets--Athena’s, Sappho’s violets!--but what a quantity of buttercups and daisies! PAUL CLAUDEL