, putting out its
head and drawing it back into its shell. The face waits and plots, with
a sleepy immobility, covering a hard, indomitable will. It is like a
drawing of Daumier, if you can imagine a drawing which renews itself at
every instant, in a series of poses to which it is hardly necessary to
add words.

I am told that Coquelin, in the creation of a part, makes his way
slowly, surely, inwards, for the first few weeks of his performance, and
that then the thing is finished, to the least intonation or gesture, and
can be laid down and taken up at will, without a shade of difference in
the interpretation. The part of Maitre Jacques in "L'Avare," for
instance, which I have just seen him perform with such gusto and such
certainty, had not been acted by him for twenty years, and it was done,
without rehearsal, in the midst of a company that required prompting at
every moment. I suppose this method of moulding a part, as if in wet
clay, and then allowing it to take hard, final form, is the method
natural to the comedian, his right method. I can hardly think that the
tragic actor should ever allow himself to become so much at home with
his material; that he dare ever allow his clay to become quite hard. He
has to deal with the continually shifting stuff of the soul and of the
passions, with nature at its least generalised moments. The comic actor
deals with nature for the most part generalised, with things palpably
absurd, with characteristics that strike the intelligence, not with
emotions that touch the heart or the senses. He comes to more definite
and to more definable results, on which he may rest, confident that what
has made an audience laugh once will make it laugh always, laughter
being a physiological thing, wholly independent of mood.

In thinking of some excellent comic actors of our own, I am struck by
the much greater effort which they seem to make in order to drive their
points home, and in order to get what they think variety. Sir Charles
Wyndham is the only English actor I can think of at the moment who does
not make unnecessary grimaces, who does not insist on acting when the
difficult thing is not to act. In "Tartuffe" Coquelin stands motionless
for five minutes at a time, without change of expression, and yet
nothing can be more expressive than his face at those moments. In
Chopin's G Minor Nocturne, Op. 15, there is an F held for three bars,
and when Rubinstein played the Nocturne, says Mr. Huneker