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.