as “La Tosca” tears at them.  “La Tosca” is not a fine play in itself, though it is a much better play than “The Heel of Achilles.”  But it is the vivid, sensational acting of Sarah Bernhardt which gives one all the shudders.  “The Heel of Achilles” did not give me a single shudder, not because it was not packed with the raw material of sensation, but because Miss Julia Neilson went through so many trying experiences with nerves of marble.

I cannot help wondering at the curious lack of self-knowledge in actors.  Here is a play, which depends for a great deal of its effect on a scene in which Lady Leslie, a young Englishwoman in Russia, promises to marry a Russian prince whom she hates, in order to save her betrothed lover from being sent to Siberia.  The lover is shut in between two doors, unable to get out; he is the bearer of a State secret, and everything depends on his being able to catch the eleven P.M. train for Berlin.  The Russian prince stands before the young Englishwoman, offering her the key of the door, the safety of her lover, and his own hand in marriage.  Now, she has to express by her face and her movements all the feelings of astonishment, horror, suspense, love, hatred, distraction, which such a situation would call up in her.  If she does not express them the scene goes for nothing.  The actress stakes all on this scene.  Now, is it possible that Miss Julia Neilson really imagined herself to be capable of rendering this scene as it should be rendered?  It is a scene that requires no brains, no subtle emotional quality, none of the more intellectual merits of acting.  It requires simply a great passivity to feeling, the mere skill of letting horrors sweep over the face and the body like drenching waves.  The actress need not know how she does it; she may do it without an effort, or she may obtain her spontaneity by an elaborate calculation.  But to do it at all she must be the actress in every fibre of her body; she must be able to vibrate freely.  If the emotion does not seize her in its own grasp, and then seize us through her, it will all go for nothing.  Well, Miss Neilson sat, and walked, and started, and became rigid, and glanced at the clock, and knelt, and fell against the wall, and cast her eyes about, and threw her arms out, and made her voice husky; and it all went for nothing.  Never for an instant did she suggest what she was trying to suggest, and after the first moment of disappointment the mind was left calmly free to watch her attempt as if it were speculating round a problem.

How many English actresses, I wonder, would have been capable of dealing adequately with such a scene as that?  I take it, not because it is a good scene, but because it affords so rudimentary a test of the capacity for acting.  The test of the capacity for acting begins where words end; it is independent of words; you may take poor words as well as fine words; it is all the same.  The embodying power, the power to throw open one’s whole nature to an overcoming sensation, the power to render this sensation in so inevitable a way that others shall feel it:  that is the one thing needful.  It is not art, it is not even the beginning of art; but it is the foundation on which alone art can be built.