traordinary eloquence of her shoulders
and back, and likes to exhibit distress by the play of them. There is
often excess in violent contrast of light and shade.

Yet no one can display subsiding emotion more finely than she does. Most
of our players turn off emotion as one turns off the gas. In the
Sicilian one notices a kind of aftermath; her fury may be succeeded by
rapture; her grief by joy; but for a while underneath the rapture or joy
one detects signs of the fact that physically she is recovering
gradually from the effects of fury or grief. The voice is a little
harsh, the gestures are not exactly elegant, she is always somewhat
_peuple_, and always magnificent.

In some respects, Signor Grasso is quite different; his appearance is
unpleasant, he is an ugly man, often with a fatuous air, but his grace
of movement is quite extraordinary; occasionally he gives snatches of
dance so exquisitely rhythmical that one longs for more. His pantomime
is larger in movement than hers; his passion less terrible. He too has
tricks; he is over-fond of playing with the chairs; in _Malia_ one might
say that he plays skittles with them.

There is rather an excess of gesture, of a naturalistic explanatory
gesture, apparently borrowed from pantomime; one feels that some of it
is deliberately used to aid the ignorant foreigner to understand; he
does things which make the Briton squirm; has a habit of kissing the
ugly, male members of his troupe with big, resounding smacks on both
cheeks, and in a loving fashion pats them like a Graeco-Roman wrestler;
but there is always the extraordinarily graceful, lithe movement and,
with curious exceptions, a supreme unconsciousness of the audience;
whilst the passionate volubility and the almost brutal ferocity thrill
the house.

They are a queer lot, these village players; supremely unself-conscious
when actually acting, yet guilty of taking "calls" in the middle of a
scene. If pressed, they probably would give an encore, and with a little
urging Signora Mimi would yield to a cry of "bis" and give a repetition
of her abominable, appalling, vastly clever fit in _Malia_, to please
the friendly Britons.

At the end of a scene the players come forward, hand in hand, bobbing
and bowing, grinning and smiling, in a way that suggests a troupe of
acrobats after a successful turn. It is not difficult to overrate their
work as a company, or rather--and this in a sense is the same thing--to
underrate t