COQUELIN AND MOLIERE:  SOME ASPECTS

To see Coquelin in Moliere is to see the greatest of comic actors at his best, and to realise that here is not a temperament, or a student, or anything apart from the art of the actor.  His art may be compared with that of Sarah Bernhardt for its infinite care in the training of nature.  They have an equal perfection, but it may be said that Coquelin, with his ripe, mellow art, his passion of humour, his touching vehemence, makes himself seem less a divine machine, more a delightfully faulty person.  His voice is firm, sonorous, flexible, a human, expressive, amusing voice, not the elaborate musical instrument of Sarah, which seems to go by itself, caline, cooing, lamenting, raging, or in that wonderful swift chatter which she uses with such instant and deliberate effect.  And, unlike her, his face is the face of his part, always a disguise, never a revelation.

I have been seeing the three Coquelins and their company at the Garrick Theatre.  They did “Tartuffe,” “L’Avare,” “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,” “Les Precieuses Ridicules,” and a condensed version of “Le Depit Amoureux,” in which the four acts of the original were cut down into two.  Of these five plays only two are in verse, “Tartuffe” and “Le Depit Amoureux,” and I could not help wishing that the fashion of Moliere’s day had allowed him to write all his plays in prose.  Moliere was not a poet, and he knew that he was not a poet.  When he ventured to write the most Shakespearean of his comedies, “L’Avare,” in prose, “le meme prejuge,” Voltaire tells us, “qui avait fait tomber ’le Festin de Pierre,’ parce qu’il etait en prose, nuisit au succes de ‘l’Avare.’  Cependant le public qui, a la longue, se rend toujours au bon, finit par donner a cet ouvrage les applaudissements qu’il merite.  On comprit alors qu’il peut y avoir de fort bonnes comedies en prose.”  How infinitely finer, as prose, is the prose of “L’Avare” than the verse of “Tartuffe” as verse!  In “Tartuffe” all the art of the actor is required to carry you over the artificial jangle of the alexandrines without allowing you to perceive too clearly that this man, who is certainly not speaking poetry, is speaking in rhyme.  Moliere was a great prose writer, but I do not remember a line of poetry in the whole of his work in verse.  The temper of his mind was the temper of mind of the prose-writer.  His worldly wisdom, his active philosophy, the very mainspring of his plots, are found, characteristically, in his valets and his servant-maids.  He satirises the miser, the hypocrite, the bas-bleu, but he chuckles over Frosine and Gros-Rene; he loves them for their freedom of speech and their elastic minds, ready in words or deeds.  They are his chorus, if the chorus might be imagined as directing the action.