Coquelin
My friendship for Coquelin was one of many years. No stage-struck youth perhaps was more unlikely to succeed; but his teacher at the Conservatoire—the great Regnier—always argued that to make a really fine actor a man should have to fight against some physical drawback.
Coquelin was the most outspoken admirer of my wife's acting. He said: "her splendid vitality was contagious: her winning magnetism would fill the largest stage." If my saying so does not detract from this praise, I may add that he showered encomiums in a Parisian journal on my performance in The Dead Heart, when I acted with Irving. He once wrote to me:
"CHER BANCROFT,—Vous avez un excellent théâtre que vous dirigez en maître—et en maître artiste—que pouvez-vous désirer de plus? Ah, cette fois-ci, Bravo, et sans restriction. Cet orchestre qu'on ne voit pas, cette rampe presque imperceptible, cette absence du manteau d'Arlequin, ce cadre contournant la scène! Le spectateur est devant un tableau dont les personnages parlent et agissent. C'est parfait pour l'illusion et pour le plaisir artistique. Votre ami,—C. COQUELIN."
I have a valued souvenir of him in his autographed portrait as Cyrano.
In his home his gaiety was delightful, while his love for his simple old mother was enshrined in his heart as it would seem always to be in that of a good Frenchman.
The farewell words of Jules Claretie, the accomplished director of the Théâtre français, spoken by his grave, were indeed a tribute: "Coquelin was more than a stage king, he was a king of the stage, and has left a luminous trail in the heaven of art."
I was one of the group of English actors who went to Paris with our sculptured offering to his genius which is enshrined in the historic foyer, where, at a luncheon, I had the temerity to make a short speech in indifferent French, urged to do so by Madame Bartet, a brilliant actress, who helped me to frame some of its sentences.
And his poor brother. It is painful to think of cadet's bright nature being quenched by incurable melancholia: distressing indeed to imagine what his sufferings must have been before the evening when, in the middle of the play, he rushed through the stage door, clad as an abbé, to be seen no more at his beloved Comédie française. In an amusing account published in a leading Paris paper of a visit to see Robertson's comedy, School, he wrote:
"Les décors sont executés de main de maître. C'est le triomphe de l'exactitude. Les comédiens sont excellents. M. Bancroft joue dans la pièce un rôle de grand gommeux à monocle, et rien n'égale son élégance et sa stupidité. Madame Bancroft joue la pensionnaire gaie: cette petite femme est un mélange d'Alphonsine et de Chaumont—gaie, pimpante, mordante et d'une adresse! ... C'est la great attraction du Théâtre de Haymarket.