“What use,” she said, “subsidy when a French actress cannot live on the salary, at even the Comédie-Française!”
On the subject of tradition in art her manner was more pronounced. She railed against tradition on the stage—as distinguished from the guiding memory and record of great effective work. Her face lit up and her eyes blazed; she smote her clenched hand heavily on the table, as, after a fierce diatribe against the cramping tendency of an artificial method relentlessly enforced, she hurled out:
“A bas la tradition!”
Then the change to her softer moods was remarkable. She was a being of incarnate grace, with a soft undertone of voice as wooing as the cooing of pigeons. As I looked at her—this was my first opportunity of seeing her close at hand—all the wondrous charm which Bastien Lepage had embodied in his picture of her seemed at full tide. This picture of Bastien Lepage—that wherein she is seated holding a distaff—was exhibited in a silver frame at the first exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery and met with universal admiration. With the original before one and the memory of her wonderful playing ever fresh in one’s mind it was not possible not to be struck with her serpentine grace. I said to Bastien Lepage in such French as I could manage:
“In that great picture you seemed to get the true Sarah. You have painted her as a serpent with all a serpent’s grace!” He seemed much interested and asked me how I made that out. Again, as well as I could I explained that all the lines of the picture were curved—there was not a single straight line in the drawing or shading. He seemed more than pleased and asked me to go on. I said that it had seemed to me that he had painted all the shadows in a scheme of yellow, shading them to represent in a subtle way the scales of the serpent skin.
He suddenly took me by both hands and shook them hard—I thought for a moment that he was going to kiss me. Then he patted me on the shoulder, and suddenly shot out the big wide cuff then in vogue in Parisian dress, and taking a pencil from his pocket drew the picture in little, showing every line as serpentine, and suggesting the shadows with little curved and shaded lines. Then he shook hands again.
I have regretted ever since that I did not ask him to cut off that cuff and give it to me! It was an artistic treasure!
In some of the discussions on art that evening he too got excited. I remember once the violent way in which he spoke of his own dominant note:
“Je suis un ré-a-liste!” As he spoke his voice rose and quivered with that “brool” that marks strong emotion. The short hair of his bulled head actually seemed to bristle like the hair of an excited cat. He rose and brought down his raised clenched fist on the table with a mighty thump. One could realise him at that moment as a possible leader of an émeute. One seemed to see him amid a whirl of drifting powder-smoke waving a red flag over the top of a barricade.
Another thing which Bastien Lepage said that night has always remained in my memory. It is so comprehensive that its meaning may be widely applied: