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 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.

REJANE

The genius of Rejane 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 wicked ease and mastery of charm.  It speaks to the senses through the brain, as much as to the brain through the senses.  It is the feminine equivalent of intellect.  It “magnetises our poor vertebrae,” in Verlaine’s phrase, because it is sex and yet not instinct.  It is sex civilised, under direction, playing a part, as we say of others than those on the stage.  It calculates, and is unerring.  It has none of the vulgar warmth of mere passion, none of its health or simplicity.  It leaves a little red sting where