it and flung back, intensified, upon itself, as it encountered the
single, insatiable, indomitable nervous force of the woman. And so, in
its way, this very artificial acting seemed the mere instinctive,
irresistible expression of a temperament; it mesmerised one, awakening
the senses and sending the intelligence to sleep.

After all, though Réjane skins emotions alive, and Duse serves them up
to you on golden dishes, it is Sarah Bernhardt who prepares the supreme
feast. In "La Dame aux Camélias," still, she shows herself, as an
actress, the greatest actress in the world. It is all sheer acting;
there is no suggestion, as with Duse, there is no canaille
attractiveness, as with Réjane; the thing is plastic, a modelling of
emotion before you, with every vein visible; she leaves nothing to the
imagination, gives you every motion, all the physical signs of death,
all the fierce abandonment to every mood, to grief, to delight, to
lassitude. When she suffers, in the scene, for instance, where Armand
insults her, she is like a trapped wild beast which some one is
torturing, and she wakes just that harrowing pity. One's whole flesh
suffers with her flesh; her voice caresses and excites like a touch; it
has a throbbing, monotonous music, which breaks deliciously, which
pauses suspended, and then resolves itself in a perfect chord. Her
voice is like a thing detachable from herself, a thing which she takes
in her hands like a musical instrument, playing on the stops cunningly
with her fingers. Prose, when she speaks it, becomes a kind of verse,
with all the rhythms, the vocal harmonies, of a kind of human poetry.
Her whisper is heard across the whole theatre, every syllable distinct,
and yet it is really a whisper. She comes on the stage like a miraculous
painted idol, all nerves; she runs through the gamut of the sex, and
ends a child, when the approach of death brings Marguerite back to that
deep infantile part of woman. She plays the part now with the accustomed