Little Poems in Prose

Signor Fanciullo excelled above all in silent parts, or those of few words, which are often the principal parts in those fairy dramas whose object is to represent symbolically the mystery of life. He came upon the scenes lightly and perfectly at his ease; a fact which tended to confirm in the mind of the public the idea of grace and pardon. When one says of a comedian, “There is a good comedian,” one employs a formula which implies that beneath the person represented the comedian may still be found; that is to say, there is art, effort, will. Now, if a comedian succeeded in being, relatively to the character which it is his duty to express, that which the best statues of antiquity (miraculously ani- mated, living, walking, seeing, as they are,) are relatively to our general confused idea of beauty; that would doubtless be a singular and altogether unexpected case. Fanciullo was that evening a perfect ideali- zation, which it was impossible not to suppose living, possible, real. The buffoon went and came, laughed and wept, gesticulated, with an indestructible aureole about his head, an aure- ole invisible for all except for myself, where mingled in a strange amalgam the rays of art with the halo of the martyr. Fanciullo, by I know not what particular grace, introduced the