And now let us consider the play in which these actors have found their finest opportunity for abandoning themselves to those instincts out of which they have made their art.  “Malia,” a Sicilian play of Capuana, is an exhibition of the witchcraft of desire, and it is justified against all accusation by that thrill with which something in us responds to it, admitting:  This is I, myself, so it has been given to me to sin and to suffer.  And so, if we think deeply enough we shall find, in these sinning, suffering, insatiable beings, who present themselves as if naked before us, the image of our own souls, visible for once, and unashamed, in the mirror of these bodies.  It is we, who shudder before them, and maybe laugh at the extravagance of their gestures, it is ourselves whom they are showing to us, caught unawares and set in symbolical action.  Let not the base word realism be used for this spontaneous energy by which we are shown the devastating inner forces, by which nature creates and destroys us.  Here is one part of life, the source of its existence:  and here it is shown us crude as nature, absolute as art.  This new, living art of the body, which we see struggling in the clay of Rodin, concentrates itself for once in this woman who expresses, without reticence and without offence, all that the poets have ever said of the supreme witchcraft, animal desire, without passion, carnal, its own self-devouring agony.  Art has for once justified itself by being mere nature.

And, here again, this play is no masterpiece in itself, only the occasion for a masterpiece of acting.  The whole company, Sig.  Grasso and the others, acted 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.  Rejane has done greater things in her own way, in her own way she is a greater artist.  But not even Rejane 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 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.