The first thing one notices in her acting, when one is free to watch it coolly, is the way in which she subordinates effects to effect.  She has her crescendos, of course, and it is these which people are most apt to remember, but the extraordinary force of these crescendos comes from the smooth and level manner in which the main part of the speaking is done.  She is not anxious to make points at every moment, to put all the possible emphasis into every separate phrase; I have heard her glide over really significant phrases which, taken by themselves, would seem to deserve more consideration, but which she has wisely subordinated to an overpowering effect of ensemble.  Sarah Bernhardt’s acting always reminds me of a musical performance.  Her voice is itself an instrument of music, and she plays upon it as a conductor plays upon an orchestra.  One seems to see the expression marks:  piano, pianissimo, largamente, and just where the tempo rubato comes in.  She never forgets that art is not nature, and that when one is speaking verse one is not talking prose.  She speaks with a liquid articulation of every syllable, like one who loves the savour of words on the tongue, giving them a beauty and an expressiveness often not in them themselves.  Her face changes less than you might expect; it is not over-possessed by detail, it gives always the synthesis.  The smile of the artist, a wonderful smile which has never aged with her, pierces through the passion or languor of the part.  It is often accompanied by a suave, voluptuous tossing of the head, and is like the smile of one who inhales some delicious perfume, with half-closed eyes.  All through the level perfection of her acting there are little sharp snaps of the nerves; and these are but one indication of that perfect mechanism which her art really is.  Her finger is always upon the spring; it touches or releases it, and the effect follows instantaneously.  The movements of her body, her gestures, the expression of her face, are all harmonious, are all parts of a single harmony.  It is not reality which she aims at giving us, it is reality transposed into another atmosphere, as if seen in a mirror, in which all its outlines become more gracious.  The pleasure which we get from seeing her as Francesca or as Marguerite Gautier is doubled by that other pleasure, never completely out of our minds, that she is also Sarah Bernhardt.  One sometimes forgets that Rejane is acting at all; it is the real woman of the part, Sapho, or Zaza, or Yanetta, who lives before us.  Also one sometimes forgets that Duse is acting, that she is even pretending to be Magda or Silvia; it is Duse herself who lives there, on the stage.  But Sarah Bernhardt is always the actress as well as the part; when she is at her best, she is both equally, and our consciousness of the one does not disturb our possession by the other.  When she is not at her best, we see only the actress, the incomparable craftswoman openly labouring at her work.