she carried them off with a pace and an intensity that went through the large theatre like an electric shock. People were crying everywhere in the audience, and I remember Reggie Lister saying to me in the _entr’acte_ that what moved him at a play or in a book was hardly ever the pathetic, but when people did or said splendid things.
The rest of the play, from that moment until the end, was a triumphant progression of cunningly administered electric thrills which were deliriously received by a quivering audience.
When it was all over and people talked of it the next and the following days in drawing-rooms and in the press, the enthusiasm began to cool down.
The following extracts from an article which I wrote in the _Speaker_ about it, immediately after the performance, give an idea of the impression the play made at the time:
“Monsieur Rostand, thanks to his rapid and brilliant career, and the colossal success of _Cyrano de Bergerac_, is certainly the French author of the present day who attracts the greatest amount of public attention in France, whose talent is the most keenly debated, whose claims are supported and disputed with the greatest vehemence. His popularity in France is as great as that of Mr. Kipling in England; and in France, as is the case with Mr. Kipling in England, there are not wanting many and determined advocates of the devil. Some deny to M. Rostand the title of poet, while admitting that he is a clever playwright; some say that he has no poetical talent whatsoever. In the case of poetical plays the public is probably in the long run the only judge. Never in the world’s history has it been seen that the really magnificent poetical play has proved a lasting failure, or a really bad poetical play a perennial success. Of course there have been plays which, like other works that have come before their season, the public have taken years to appreciate; while, on the other hand, the public have patronised plays of surprising mediocrity and vulgarity; these works, however, have never resisted the hand of time. But in the main the public has been right, and those who take the opposite view generally belong to a class alluded to by Pope:
‘So much they scorn the crowd, that if the throng By chance go right, they purposely go wrong.’