The French Plays are coming merrily to a close. M.
Arnal, the last of the celebrities, is the Keeley of the French stage. His drolleries are more particularly calculated to tickle the fancies of Parisian playgoers; but his quiet humour, and a roguish twinkle of the eye with which he points the pleasantries of the dialogue, soon made his London audience enter into the spirit of the fun. Arnal's style of acting is broad and free without vul- garity; and his low comedy is rich and unctuous. He succeeds best in characters of the bourgeois class; but his forte is not individual persona- tion—the part is merely a vehicle for the display of his peculiar comicality. In L'Homme Blase—the original of Used Up—which he played for a hun- dred successive nights in Paris, he does not look either the man of fashion or the sated voluptuary; he appears rather a listless actor than an impas- sive ennuyd seeking an " emotion." And when he assumes the guise of ,a peasant, he does not look like a gentleman in masquerade, but appears a rustic born and bred: his figure, faoe, and style, are all well suited to low life. So little intensity is there in his acting, that when he appears with his hair whitened through terror at having seen what he took for the ap- parition of his supposed victim, it seemed like a good joke; and one almost expected he would pull off his gray wig and laugh outright at the bur- lesque. But though Charles Mathews is preferable in this character to the artist who "created " it, still M. Arnal is so amusing, whatever the part he plays, that the critical mood is exchanged for the merrier one of enjoyment. Whoever wants to have a hearty laugh should gp to the St. James's and see ArnaL
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