d, the mechanism, and it is that which alone
one can study, as one can study the mechanism of the body, not the
principle of life itself. What is done mechanically, after the heat of
the blood has cooled, and the divine accidents have ceased to happen, is
precisely all that was consciously skilful in the performance of an art.
To see all this mechanism left bare, as the form of the skeleton is left
bare when age thins the flesh upon it, is to learn more easily all that
is to be learnt of structure, the art which not art but nature has
hitherto concealed with its merciful covering.

The art of Sarah Bernhardt has always been a very conscious art, but it
spoke to us, once, with so electrical a shock, as if nerve touched
nerve, or the mere "contour subtil" of the voice were laid tinglingly on
one's spinal cord, that it was difficult to analyse it coldly. She was
Phedre or Marguerite Gautier, she was Adrienne Lecouvreur, Fedora, La
Tosca, the actual woman, and she was also that other actual woman, Sarah
Bernhardt. Two magics met and united, in the artist and the woman, each
alone of its kind. There was an excitement in going to the theatre;
one's pulses beat feverishly before the curtain had risen; there was
almost a kind of obscure sensation of peril, such as one feels when the
lioness leaps into the cage, on the other side of the bars. And the
acting was like a passionate declaration, offered to some one unknown;
it was as if the whole nervous force of the audience were sucked out of
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 Rejane 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 Camelias," 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 Rejane; 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