MUSINGS WITHOUT METHOD. THE DEATH OF COQUELIN-CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC-COQUELIN -THE CAMERON HIGHLANDERS-THEIR FOUNDER-THE -AND AFTER. The first quality of Classicism THE death of Constant Coquelin has removed from among us an actor who belonged not to France only but to the world. For half a century he had dominated the French stage. He had set an example too rarely followed on either side the Channel. Breaking down the barriers of politics, he had appeared triumphantly in Berlin. In a series of victorious progresses he had added to his Empire the two Americas. And though, with the aid of the press, it is easy to exaggerate the importance of the actor, Coquelin might boast an intelligence and an artistry which made him a great interpreter of the drama, and which claim from the whole world the meed of with mere statement, it memory and respect. In all the arts, in sculpture and painting, in poetry and the theatre, there is a constant conflict of Classicism and Romance. These two methods of understanding and presentation do not belong to this or that nation, this or that age. They have existed always side by side and under every sky. They correspond to different temperaments, different talents. must trick itself out with the ruffs and frills of fancy. In its desire to appear elaborate, it too often conceals its purpose, and runs to the extreme of decorative absurdity. In no other art are the differences of classical and romantic so clearly defined as in the art of acting; and Coquelin was able to keep the conquests which he made, because his method was severe, because at his best he never in a classic mould, who could got a hand of applause by affectation or trickery. interpret surely and calmly the emotions of others. He is the best comedian, said Molière, who can represent a personage opposite to himself in temper. And it is true of the great actor who is just dead, that though he showed you Coquelin the actor in all his personations, he never permitted Coquelin the man to emerge upon the scene. Two of his contemporaries have been his complete antitheses, and to recall them is to understand his mastery. Madame Bernhardt and Henry Irving will be remembered as great romantic actors, whose object was to turn their art into an excuse for ornament. They have represented themselves with a kind of pas In other words, he was by sympathy and training on the side of the classics. He recognised that the actor's art was an art of interpretation. Himself, with all his resources of voice, gait, and gesture, was the means of expression. He worked upon the qualities of his mind and body as a sculptor models his clay, as a poet handles his words. He did not pretend that he suffered with his characters or rose with them to the pinnacle of power and fame. He was neither king nor valet: it was enough for him to represent them, and many others, with a perfect skill and intelligence. He made no attempt to identify himself with his part, which sion. he regarded as something external to his own feelings. And thus his effects were always closely studied, his selfcontrol was always perfect. He would have seen no incongruity in Edmund Kean's demanding a tankard of porter at the highest moment of tragedy, because he did not confuse the misery of his subject, or the impression he was producing on his audience, with his his own performance. He could swagger as Mascarille, play the hypocrite as Tartufe, be the trickster as Scapin, go through all the antics demanded of Cyrano de Bergerac, and never once lose hold of himself and his equipment. In brief, he was not an emotional amateur, not an experimenter in romance, but an artist cast Whatever the excuse, it has always been Madame Bernhardt and Henry Irving who have trod the boards. Neither the one nor the other has seen in a play anything else than a chance for the expression of self, for the showing off of familiar effects and personal antics. Coquelin was a stranger to such an ill-considered ambition, and if we compare his method with Henry Irving's-and comparison is easy, since they essayed the same parts-we shall best arrive at his excellence. Irving thought of himself, Coquelin of his play. When Irving undertook new role, he asked himself first, How will this role suit Irving? Coquelin, on the other hand, forgot himself in reflecting how best he should interpret the 8 author's meaning. The one Coquelin, understanding his part, like the clairvoyant that put the actor above the drama. The other, in acknowledging himself the servant of the poet, won the greater victory. He stooped to conquer. And thus it follows that Irving was Irving was always at his best in a bad play. A masterpiece interfered with the freedom of exaggera- could Mathias be presented tion which he demanded. Coquelin rose with his occasion. A bad play did not give his talent free scope. Aiming at interpretation, he wished to have something worthy his insight; and to see him wandering through such a piece of confectionery as "L'Abbé Constantin," for instance, was a sorry sight. He played his part with the perfection of ease and lightness. But it was no part for him; it was as though a blacksmith were breaking a nut on an anvil. ---- a In one play, at least, the two actors won a vast success, and each therein so frankly revealed his method that it was difficult to believe they were pretending to represent the same personage. As Mathias in "Le Juif Polonais,' Coquelin put before his audience the perfectly realised portrait of a country mayorsimple soul, kindly, debonair, prosperous, even jovial. The remorse for a murder committed long ago comes to him almost as a surprise. Tortured though he be by the sound of the sleigh-bells, he cannot pose as the villain of a melodrama, because such a pose would not be consonant with the character of a good bourgeois. And to you, and you agreed with the people on the stage that the bourgeois died a victim not to the reverberation of spectral bells but to le petit vin blanc. Widely different in intention and effect was Irving's rendering. He kept the name of Mathias on his programme, and that was all. The haunted man was always Irving himself. The actor made no attempt to show you the effect of remorse upon a middle-class Frenchman. He explained to you how a man of his own temperament might behave in the distressing circumstances of persecution. It was Irving who passed the window in the first act, who shook with impressive deliberation the snow from his coat, and who removed his jack-boots with a sepulchral ceremony. Every jingle of the bells was a fresh opportunity, not for Mathias but for Irving, until at last you wondered why this highly sensitive, picturesque, and tormented Englishman was surrounded with countryfolk who had no link of sympathy or resemblance with him. It would be difficult to find a better contrast of classic and romantic. Coquelin built up before your eyes, with a convincing solidity, the portrait of a plain man who was haunted by the one crime of an otherwise blameless life. Irving took Mathias as an easy excuse for adorning his own personality, and wasted no thought upon the part which he was playing, or the expressed intention of his author. But we do not mean that Coquelin was deficient in what is known as temperament. If he was fine enough an artist always to keep in the frame of his picture, he nevertheless took an instinctive control of his audience. He could do what he liked with it. He dominated it as vividly as Irving once dominated the Lyceum, and he achieved a yet greater triumph: he dominated himself. He has been called ugly-why, we know not. It is truer to say that he had the ideal actor's face, a face which he could change at will, and fit with the expressions of joy and sorrow, of victory and defeat. His gesture was large and never restless. His voice was of a wide compass and the quick interpreter of various emotions. And he never came upon the stage without impressing you with his mastery-the mastery not of an antic expert of melodrama but of an artist. Above all, it was his good fortune to be bred in the House of Molière. He had served a long and wise apprenticeship. He was the end of a long tradition, the summing-up of two centuries' artistic enterprise. The Classicism of Molière was, like the Classicism of Sophocles, guided by Nature,-by Nature represented not with crude fidelity but within the limits of a delicate art. And Coquelin humbly acquiesced in Molière's worship of simplicity. He had no greater love of the excesses of the grand manner, which are the vice of overblown Classicism, than cism, than Molière himself. He did not think that a king must always be "tall and fat like four." Indeed, to see him was to come face to face with Molière himself. In "Les Précieuses Ridicules," in "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme," in "Le Tartufe," he revealed all his wonderful gifts of interpretation. His Mascarille carried you straight out of your own century into the past. There stood before you the ruffler of the seventeenth century. The exuberant gaiety of the disguised valet is an imperishable memory, though, alas! the master will never revive it. Who that has once seen it can forget the splendid gesture, the magnificent sweep of the actor? The plumed hat, the lace frills, the full wig, will always live in our mind's eye because he wore them. And despite the extravagance which the part demanded, Coquelin never overstepped the boundaries of his art and method. The immortal swagger was Mascarille's, not his own, and from beginning to end there was no note of the exaggeration which would have deformed an English performance of the play. Then, in accord with his theory that a perfect actor could play any part, and could so securely hide his personality as to represent brave man or coward, young or old, rascal or sentimentalist, he turned lightly from Mascarille to Tartufe. Never was the unctuous hypo- has half-a-dozen merits. It is crite more unctuously displayed. flamboyant; it is packed with The villain created by Molière change and surprise ; its was by Coquelin made manifest, bravura is at times irresistible; and he will ever remain a and it easily aroused the enbrilliant memory, the greatest thusiasm of those who had read of all the masterpieces which the elder Dumas and delighted hang in the actor's gallery of in the "Cadets de Gascogne." masterpieces. But it is so obviously unreal that it could be presented only with a brutal inconsistency. Coquelin, accustomed to the delineation of character, was asked to represent an abstraction It was Coquelin's good fortune, as we have said, to be bred in the House of Molière. By another stroke of good fortune he did not desert that House until he had matured his style and perfected his method. The many years which he spent in wandering did but tend to exaggeration. The custom, long sustained, of playing to audiences which had an indifferent knowledge of French persuaded him at times to elaborate his gesture and to forget the moderation which was his first distinction. A greater injury was done him by the overwhelming success of M. Rostand's "Cyrano de Bergerac." Now this play is an admirable machine. Nothing better has ever been contrived for the exposition of a multifarious talent. Cyrano, indeed, as imagined by the dramatist, is not one man but three or four. A braggart in the first act, he presently trembles before the beautiful Roxane, and thinks it no shame to play the go-between. He does not scruple to lend his voice to his rival, or to deceive the lady whom he has known and loved from his boyhood. In the last act of all he dies, to an accompaniment of falling leaves, with a deliberation which belongs only to the theatre. The play on which half 8 dozen characters were grafted. It gave him an opportunity of showing-off which he was quick to seize. It permitted him to speak more lines than ever before had been allotted to one player. And it changed him from an actor of subtlety and perfection to an amazing mountebank doing half a dozen turns at a music-hall. The very fact that he took a real pleasure in his triumph is a proof that his touch was losing its sureness, that his art was less scrupulous than of yore. But it remains the one great mistake in a finished career, and the wonder is that Coquelin was loyal so long to the tradition of his craft. Esteem no man happy, said an ancient wiseacre, until he be dead. Esteem no actor a perfect artist until he has played his last part. All are lawless, especially when they assume the reins of management. Ah, les étranges animaux à conduire que les comédiens ! " Thus wrote Molière, who knew them well, and it is due to Coquelin's refusal to govern himself in his last years that in the |