he will not choose; she is content with whatever
form emotion snatches for itself as it struggles into speech out of an
untrained and unconscious body. In "Sapho" she is the everyday "Venus
toute entiere a sa proie attachee," and she has all the brutality and
all the clinging warmth of the flesh; vice, if you will, but serious
vice, vice plus passion. Her sordid, gluttonous, instructed eyes, in
which all the passions and all the vices have found a nest, speak their
own language, almost without the need of words, throughout the play; the
whole face suffers, exults, lies, despairs, with a homely sincerity
which cuts more sharply than any stage emphasis. She seems at every
moment to throw away her chances of effect, of ordinary stage-effect;
then, when the moment seems to have gone, and she has done nothing, you
will find that the moment itself has penetrated you, that she has done
nothing with genius.

Rejane can be vulgar, as nature is vulgar: she has all the instincts of
the human animal, of the animal woman, whom man will never quite
civilise. There is no doubt of it, nature lacks taste; and woman, who is
so near to nature, lacks taste in the emotions. Rejane, in "Sapho" or in
"Zaza" for instance, is woman naked and shameless, loving and suffering
with all her nerves and muscles, a gross, pitiable, horribly human
thing, whose direct appeal, like that of a sick animal, seizes you by
the throat at the instant in which it reaches your eyes and ears. More
than any actress she is the human animal without disguise or evasion;
with all the instincts, all the natural cries and movements. In "Sapho"
or "Zaza" she speaks the language of the senses, no more; and her acting
reminds you of all that you may possibly have forgotten of how the
senses speak when they speak through an ignorant woman in love. It is
like an accusing confirmation of some of one's guesses at truth, before
the realities of the flesh and of the affections of the flesh.
Scepticism is no longer possible: here, in "Sapho," is a woman who
flagellates herself before her lover as the penitent flagellates himself
before God. In the scene where her lover repulses her last attempt to
win him back, there is a convulsive movement of the body, as she lets
herself sink to the ground at his feet, which is like the movement of
one who is going to be sick: it renders, with a ghastly truth to
nature, the abject collapse of the body under overpowering emotion.
Here, as elsewhe