COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary a series of questions seeks to filter Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

COMMENTS

Gertrude Hall

 

Cyrano is so comprehensible! To Cyrano the world he lives in must be filled with striking generous deeds and sounding generous phrases. The world is slow in performing the first, so he performs them himself. Then, the care of exalting them cannot be left with the world, afflicted with dullness as with slowness, so he talks about them. I am sure Cyrano cares very little that himself should be in question. He merely wishes fine deeds and fine sentiments to be, and to make surest and shortest work, furnishes them himself. It is very innocent.

On the other hand, I fancy it impossible to follow the whole play and not get the contagion of Cyrano’s generosity.... When that night he entered God’s house, and, in saluting, broadly swept the azure threshold with his very clean plume, what eloquent and touching tirade must he have made to Gascony Cadets in bliss, at the sure vision of his fighting not having been in vain, of his having inspired others—(remote audiences in America, among them)—to detest and fight the ancient enemies that were his: Lies, Compromises, Prejudices, base Expedients,—the whole multitude of things ugly and petty!

—from her Introduction to Cyrano de Bergerac (1910 )

 

 

T. S. Eliot

 

In plays of realism we often find parts which are never allowed to be consciously dramatic, for fear, perhaps, of their appearing less real. But in actual life, in many of those situations in actual life which we enjoy consciously and keenly, we are at times aware of ourselves in this way, and these moments are of very great usefulness to dramatic verse. A very small part of acting is that which takes place on the stage! Rostand had—whether he had anything else or not—this dramatic sense, and it is what gives life to Cyrano. It is a sense which is almost a sense of humour (for when anyone is conscious of himself as acting, something like a sense of humour is present). It gives Rostand’s characters—Cyrano at least—a gusto which is uncommon on the modern stage. No doubt Rostand’s people play up to this too steadily. We recognize that in the love scenes of Cyrano in the garden, for in Romeo and Juliet the profounder dramatist shows his lovers melting into incoherent unconsciousness of their isolated selves, shows the human soul in the process of forgetting itself. Rostand could not do that; but in the particular case of Cyrano on Noses, the character, the situation, the occasion were perfectly suited and combined. The tirade generated by this combination is not only genuinely and highly dramatic: it is possibly poetry also. If a writer is incapable of composing such a scene as this, so much the worse for his poetic drama.

Cyrano satisfies, as far as scenes like this can satisfy, the requirements of poetic drama. It must take genuine and substantial human emotions, such emotions as observation can confirm, typical emotions, and give them artistic form; the degree of abstraction is a question for the method of each author. In Shakespeare the form is determined in the unity of the whole, as well as single scenes; it is something to attain this unity, as Rostand does, in scenes if not the whole play.

—from The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920)

The Nation

Rostand is preeminently a poet of sentiment. He has fancy rather than imagination; delicacy and charm rather than passion. He belongs to that great band of lesser French geniuses, such as Charles d’ Orleans, Du Bellay, Voiture, and, among the moderns, Banville, Coppee, and Régnier—the poets of a silver rather than golden Latinity. For him sunlight and shadow flit across the earth’s rough surface, and the playful, optimistic mood of the poet is admirably attuned to express them.

On the other hand, what Rostand lacks in originality and depth of thought he possesses in brilliancy and mastery of style. Except for Cyrano, he can scarcely be said to have created a real character; but he can spin a dramatic situation out of a mere physical or moral detail, he can lift his audiences out of themselves by a succession of scintillating images, and in one respect his style is a continuous creation—namely, in the “cliquetis des mots” or the humorous portrayal of moods through the mere clash and jingle of words.

—May 17, 1922

QUESTIONS

1. In literature, improbabilities (such as Polyphemous, the one-eyed giant in the Odyssey) often serve as metaphors or allegories for something metaphysical or psychological or moral. What are the improbabilities in Cyrano—certainly the character’s nose is one—and do you think they work? Why? And what purpose do they serve?

2. One often hears of great men and women whose accomplishments seem to be compensations for some lack or defect: a failed father, an unloving mother, short stature, poverty. Cyrano’s panache is his great achievement. Do you think he has developed this quality in compensation for his unattractive nose? If so, what sort of clues does the play provide?

3. What can be made of the friendship between Christian and Cyrano? Without the goal of wooing Roxane, would they be friends at all? Are they alter egos—that is, is there any Christian in Cyrano or Cyrano in Christian?

4. Is Roxane worth the fuss made over her? Is she a heroic character in any way?

5. Would it be possible for a man like Cyrano to exist and flourish today—with his panache intact? What are some of the things he might set out to do in today’s world?