are in which there were two great actors, that
"it seemed to embody and realise conceptions which had hitherto assumed
no distinct shape," but that, "when the novelty is past, we find to our
cost that instead of realising an idea, we have only materialised and
brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood." If that
is true of Shakespeare, the greatest of dramatic poets, how far is it
from the impression which I have described in speaking of d'Annunzio.
What fine vision was there to bring down? what poetry hid in thought or
passion was lost to us in its passage across the stage?

And now let us consider the play in which these actors have found their
finest opportunity for abandoning themselves to those instincts out of
which they have made their art. "Malia," a Sicilian play of Capuana, is
an exhibition of the witchcraft of desire, and it is justified against
all accusation by that thrill with which something in us responds to it,
admitting: This is I, myself, so it has been given to me to sin and to
suffer. And so, if we think deeply enough we shall find, in these
sinning, suffering, insatiable beings, who present themselves as if
naked before us, the image of our own souls, visible for once, and
unashamed, in the mirror of these bodies. It is we, who shudder before
them, and maybe laugh at the extravagance of their gestures, it is
ourselves whom they are showing to us, caught unawares and set in
symbolical action. Let not the base word realism be used for this
spontaneous energy by which we are shown the devastating inner forces,
by which nature creates and destroys us. Here is one part of life, the
source of its existence: and here it is shown us crude as nature,
absolute as art. This new, living art of the body, which we see
struggling in the clay of Rodin, concentrates itself for once in this
woman who expresses, without reticence and without offence, all that the
poets have ever said of the supreme witchcraft, animal desire, without
passion, carnal, its own self-devouring agony. Art has for once
justified itself by being mere nature.

And, here again, this play is no masterpiece in itself, only the
occasion for a masterpiece of acting. The whole company, Sig. Grasso and
the others, acted with perfect unanimity, singly and in crowds. What
stage-crowd of a hundred drilled and dumpish people, as we see it at our
big theatres, has ever given us that sense of a real, surging crowd as
the dozen or so su