All my conversations with my playfellows bore upon actors, whose art,
although as yet I had no experience of it, was the first of all its
numberless forms in which Art itself allowed me to anticipate its
enjoyment. Between one actor's tricks of intonation and inflection and
another's, the most trifling differences would strike me as being of an
incalculable importance. And from what I had been told of them I would
arrange them in the order of their talent in lists which I used to murmur
to myself all day long: lists which in the end became petrified in my
brain and were a source of annoyance to it, being irremovable.
And later, in my schooldays, whenever I ventured in class, when the
master's head was turned, to communicate with some new friend, I would
always begin by asking him whether he had begun yet to go to theatres, and
if he agreed that our greatest actor was undoubtedly Got, our second
Delaunay, and so on. And if, in his judgment, Febvre came below Thiron, or
Delaunay below Coquelin, the sudden volatility which the name of Coquelin,
forsaking its stony rigidity, would engender in my mind, in which it moved
upwards to the second place, the rich vitality with which the name of
Delaunay would suddenly be furnished, to enable it to slip down to fourth,
would stimulate and fertilise my brain with a sense of bradding and
blossoming life.
Pages:
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141