Page:Poet Lore, volume 34, 1923.djvu/302

 puppet toy. And his last end is as a marionette, singing a silly song in a falsetto voice upon a puppet stage.

Thinking himself more than Faust, Don Juan is less than Tomlinson. The Devil, so Rostand and Kipling think, has no notion of wasting good pit coal on either of them.

The Devil himself is the old Showman with a puppet stage. Punch plays opposite Don Juan. Elvira and the rest are wraiths. The White Spirit herself is only Ghost of What Might have been.

Among Don Juan’s accusers at the last, our very Catholic poet shows, lowering in the shadows, the Poor Man to whom Don Juan in the old play refused a penny for the love of God and gave a gold piece in the name of humanity;—the awful, menacing figure of the poor, "robbed of resignation," and with huge, clutching fingers ready to strangle "the rake that played apostle" and "dared to soil the word that fed our hope." To him the Devil gives the task of thrusting Don Juan into the puppet stage at last.

The essence of the poem is in this: Don Juan, driven from one position to another, protests in turn that he has "known women;" "seen life;" "Shad love," and the Devil's final taunt declares

Rostand and St. James agree that "filthiness" and "superfluity of naughtiness" are one.

The thing was bravely done. One has watched a nightingale fighting an eagle and a flock of blackbirds.

Edmond Rostand died in December, 1918. After his death these lines were found in a note book that he carried: They should be read in French, but I write for English readers:

The metre lifts gallantly:

That is Edmond Rostand's last poem. Chanticleer is his last play. His bequest to us is Chanticleer's confession of faith: