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