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 in his
instructive and delightful book on Chopin, he prolonged the tone, "by
some miraculous means," so that "it swelled and diminished, and went
singing into D, as if the instrument were an organ." It is that power of
sustaining an expression, unchanged, and yet always full of living
significance, that I find in Coquelin. It is a part of his economy, the
economy of the artist. The improviser disdains economy, as much as the
artist cherishes it. Coquelin has some half-dozen complete variations of
the face he has composed for Tartuffe; no more than that, with no
insignificances of expression thrown away; but each variation is a new
point of view, from which we see the whole character.




RÉJANE


The genius of Réjane is a kind of finesse: it is a flavour, and all the
ingredients of the dish may be named without defining it. The thing is
Parisian, but that is only to say that it unites nervous force with a