[224]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 supers in that last struggle which ends the play? But the play really existed for Aguglia, and was made by her. Réjane has done greater things in her own way, in her own way she is a greater artist. But not even Réjane 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
[225]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 paraît 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 with the notes, and to present this as an interpretation of what the notes have said in an unknown language. Yet what method is there besides
[230]these two methods? None, indeed, that can ever be wholly satisfactory; at the best, no more than a compromise.
In writing about poetry, while precisely that quality which makes it poetry must always evade expression, there yet remain the whole definite meaning of the words, and the whole easily explicable technique of the verse, which can be made clear to every reader. In painting, you have the subject of the picture, and you have the colour, handling, and the like, which can be expressed hardly less precisely in words. But music has no subject, outside itself; no meaning, outside its meaning as music; and, to understand anything of what is meant by its technique, a certain definite technical knowledge is necessary in the reader. What subterfuges are required, in order to give the vaguest suggestion of what a piece of music is like, and how little has been said, after all, beyond generalisations, which would apply equally to half a dozen different pieces! The composer himself, if you ask him, will tell you that you may be quite correct in