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I must give you the comment of another foreigner on this subject. Seeing five masks laid ready—that being the number of parts in the piece— and only one pantomime, he asked who were going to play the other parts. He was informed that the whole piece would be performed by a single actor. ‘Your humble servant, sir,’ cries our foreigner to the artist; ‘I observe that you have but one body: it had escaped me, that you possessed several souls.’
The term ‘pantomime,’ which was introduced by the Italian Greeks, is an apt one, and scarcely exaggerates the artist’s versatility. ‘Oh boy,’ cries the poet, in a beautiful passage, As that sea-beast, whose hue With each new rock doth suffer change, So let thy mind free range Through ev’ry land, shaping herself anew.
Most necessary advice, this, for the pantomime, whose task it is to identify himself with his subject, and make himself part and parcel of the scene that he enacts. It is his profession to show forth human character and passion in all their variety; to depict love and anger, frenzy and grief, each in its due measure. Wondrous art!—on the same day, he is mad Athamas and shrinking Ino; he is Atreus, and again he is Thyestes, and next Aegisthus or Aérope; all one man’s work.
