pers in that last struggle which ends the play? But
the play really existed for Aguglia, and was made by her. Rejane has
done greater things in her own way, in her own way she is a greater
artist. But not even Rejane has given us the whole animal, in its
self-martyrdom, as this woman has given it to us. Such knowledge and
command of the body, and so frank an abandonment to its instinctive
motions, has never been seen on our stage, not even in Sada Yacco and
the Japanese. They could outdo Sarah in a death-scene, but not Aguglia
in the scene in which she betrays her secret. Done by anyone else, it
would have been an imitation of a woman in hysterics, a thing
meaningless and disgusting. Done by her, it was the visible contest
between will and desire, a battle, a shipwreck, in which you watch
helplessly from the shore every plank as the sea tears if off and
swallows it. "I feel as if I had died," said the friend who was with me
in the theatre, speaking out of an uncontrollable sympathy; died with
the woman, she meant, or in the woman's place.

Our critics here have for the most part seen fit, like the French critic
whom I quoted at the beginning, to qualify their natural admiration by a
hesitating consciousness that "la passion parait decidement avoir
partout ses inconvenients." But the critic who sets himself against a
magnetic current can do no more than accept the shock which has cast him
gently aside. All art is magnetism. The greatest art is a magnetism
through which the soul reaches the soul. There is another, terrible,
authentic art through which the body communicates its thrilling secrets.
And against all these currents there is no barrier and no appeal.

MUSIC

ON WRITING ABOUT MUSIC

The reason why music is so much more difficult to write about than any
other art, is because music is the one absolutely disembodied art, when
it is heard, and no more than a proposition of Euclid, when it is
written. It is wholly useless, to the student no less than to the
general reader, to write about music in the style of the programmes for
which we pay sixpence at the concerts. "Repeated by flute and oboe, with
accompaniment for clarionet (in triplets) and strings _pizzicato_, and
then worked up by the full orchestra, this melody is eventually allotted
to the 'cellos, its accompaniment now taking the form of chromatic
passages," and so forth. Not less useless is it to write a rhapsody
which has nothing to do wit