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"First we know you'll be saying we'll all be smashed in a train wreck going to the coast; or, if not, that we'll be carried off by a tidal wave as soon as we get there." "It might happen," spoke the gloomy comedian, as though both accidents were possible at the same time. "And it may rain but not to-day," put in Miss Shay, with a look at the hot, cloudless sky.
The audience fairly screamed; but poor and stranded as that company was, the comedian was an artist, for he accepted the fried cakes, ate them ravenously to the last crumb, and so kept well within the character he was playing, without hurting the feelings of the kind-hearted, little old woman.
At the end of the very first lesson George Morley saw that all the elocution masters to whose skill he had been consigned were blunderers in comparison with the basketmaker. Waife did not puzzle him with scientific theories. All that the great comedian required of him was to observe and to imitate. Observation, imitation, lo! the groundwork of all art! the primal elements of all genius!
"In the musical contest it is only the perverted idea of Classicism which is treated with contumely and routed; the glorification of the triumph of Romanticism is found in the stupendously pompous and brilliant setting given to the mastersingers' music at the end. You see already in this prelude that Wagner is a true comedian.
It was the kind of frown they would have loved to force away with kisses. All the gentlemen yearned toward her. She was capital. At last, the chief comedian, singing in the center of the stage, noticed a giggle where it was not expected. Then another and another. When the place came for loud applause it was only moderate. What could be the trouble? He realized that something was up.
Hill, proprietor of the Monthly Mirror; but at his house at Sydenham I used to meet his editor, Mr. Dubois, Mr. Campbell, who was his neighbour, and the two Smiths, authors of The Rejected Addresses. Once or twice I saw also Mr. Theodore Hook, and Mr. Matthews, the comedian.
The coarse suggestiveness of the words, the cheap passions which they implied, the leer and pomposity with which they had been uttered by the comedian, the unhealthy, narrow-chested, pavement-bred audience by which the effort had been greeted with applause, the total uncleanness and unnaturalness of city-life, came vividly home to him.
It is Jocquelet, the future comedian, with his turned-up nose, which cuts the air like the prow of a first-class ironclad, superb, triumphant, dressed like a Brazilian, shaved to the quick, the dearest hope of Regnier's class at the Conservatoire-Jocquelet, who has made an enormous success in an act from the "Precieuses," at the last quarter's examination he says so himself, without any useless modesty Jocquelet, who will certainly have the first comedy prize at the next examination, and will make his debut with out delay at the Comedie Francaise!
But perhaps the most remarkable illustration of this way of regarding poetry is the passage in the "Frogs" of Aristophanes, where the comedian has introduced a controversy between Aeschylus and Euripides as to the relative merit of their works, and has made the decision turn almost entirely on moral considerations, the question being really whether or no Euripides is to be regarded as a corrupter of his countrymen.
Do you think you are more virtuous than we, less of a comedian, less greedy, less liable to fall under some temptation, less conceited than those we have been making dance for you like puppets?" "Try me!" "Poor lad!" said Leon, shrugging his shoulders, "haven't you already promised Rastignac your electoral influence?" "Yes, because he was the only one who ridiculed himself."
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