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 elsewhere, she gives you merely the thing itself, without a disturbing atom of self-consciousness; she is grotesque, she is what you will:  it is no matter.  The emotion she is acting possesses her like a blind force; she is Sapho, and Sapho could only move and speak and think in one way.  Where Sarah Bernhardt would arrange the emotion for some thrilling effect of art, where Duse would purge the emotion of all its attributes but some fundamental nobility, Rejane takes the big, foolish, dirty thing just as it is.  And is not that, perhaps, the supreme merit of acting?

YVETTE GUILBERT

I

She is tall, thin, a little angular, most winningly and girlishly awkward, as she wanders on to the stage with an air of vague distraction.  Her shoulders droop, her arms hang limply.  She doubles forward in an automatic bow in response to the thunders of applause, and that curious smile breaks out along her lips and rises and dances in her bright light-blue eyes, wide open in a sort of child-like astonishment.  Her hair, a bright auburn, rises in soft masses above a large, pure forehead.  She wears a trailing dress, striped yellow and pink, without ornament.  Her arms are covered with long black gloves.  The applause stops suddenly; there is a hush of suspense; she is beginning to sing.

And with the first note you realise the difference between Yvette Guilbert and all the rest of the world.  A sonnet by Mr. Andre Raffalovich states just that difference so subtly that I must quote it to help out my interpretation: 

  If you want hearty laughter, country mirth—­
    Or frantic gestures of an acrobat,
  Heels over head—­or floating lace skirts worth
    I know not what, a large eccentric hat
  And diamonds, the gift of some dull boy—­
    Then when you see her do not wrong Yvette,
  Because Yvette is not a clever toy,
    A tawdry doll in fairy limelight set ... 
  And should her song sound cynical and base
    At first, herself ungainly, or her smile
  Monotonous—­wait, listen, watch her face: 
    The sufferings of those the world calls vile
  She sings, and as you watch Yvette Guilbert,
  You too will shiver, seeing their despair.

Now to me Yvette Guilbert was exquisite from the first moment.  “Exquisite!” I said under my breath, as I first saw her come upon the stage.  But it is not merely by her personal charm that she thrills you, though that is strange, perverse, unaccountable.