To see Coquelin in Molière 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, câline, 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 Précieuses Ridicules," and a condensed version of "Le Dépit
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 Dépit
Amoureux," and I could not help wishing that the fashion of Molière's
day had allowed him to write all his plays in prose. Molière 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 même
préjugé," Voltaire tells us, "qui avait fait tomber 'le Festin de
Pierre,' parce qu'il était en prose, nuisit au succès de 'l'Avare.'
Cependant le public qui, à la longue, se rend toujours au bon, finit par
donner à cet ouvrage les applaudissements qu'il mérite. On comprit alors
qu'il peut y avoir de fort bonnes comédies 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. Molière 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-René; 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.
But Molière has a weakness, too, for the bourgeois, and he has made M.
Jourdain immortally delightful. There is not a really cruel touch in the
whole character; we laugh at him so freely because Molière lets us
laugh with such kindliness. M. Jourdain has a robust joy in life; he
carries off his absurdities by the simple good faith which he puts into
them. When I speak of M. Jourdain I hardly know whether I am speaking of
the character of Molière or of the character of Coquelin. Probably there
is no difference. We get Molière's vast, succulent farce of the
intellect rendered with an art like his own. If this, in every detail,
is not what Molière meant, then so much the worse for Molière.
Molière is kind to his bourgeois, envelops him softly in satire as in
cotton-wool, dandles him like a great baby; and Coquelin is without
bitterness, stoops to make stupidity heroic, a distinguished stupidity.
A study in comedy so profound, so convincing, so full of human nature
and of the art-concealing art of the stage, has not been seen in our
time. As Mascarille, in "Les Précieuses Ridicules," Coquelin becomes
delicate and extravagant, a scented whirlwind; his parody is more
splendid than the thing itself which he parodies, more full of fine
show and nimble bravery. There is beauty in this broadly comic acting,
the beauty of subtle detail. Words can do little to define a performance
which is a constant series of little movements of the face, little
intonations of the voice, a way of lolling in the chair, a way of
speaking, of singing, of preserving the gravity of burlesque. In
"Tartuffe" we get a form of comedy which is almost tragic, the horribly
serious comedy of the hypocrite. Coquelin, who remakes his face, as by a
prolonged effort of the muscles, for every part, makes, for this part, a
great fish's face, heavy, suppressed, with lowered eyelids and a secret
mouth, out of which steals at times some stealthy avowal. He has the
movements of a great slug, or of a snail, if you will, 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 Maître 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 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.