But how different all this acting to what I find in France!  Here the theatre is living; you see something really good, and good throughout.  Not one touch of that stage strut and vulgar bombast of tone, which the English actor fancies indispensable to scenic illusion, is tolerated here.  For the first time in my life I saw something represented in a style uniformly good, and should have found sufficient proof, if I had needed any, that all men will prefer what is good to what is bad, if only a fair opportunity for choice be allowed.  When I came here, my first thought was to go and see Mademoiselle Rachel.  I was sure that in her I should find a true genius, absolutely the diamond, and so it proved.  I went to see her seven or eight times, always in parts that required great force of soul and purity of taste even to conceive them, and only once had reason to find fault with her.  On one single occasion I saw her violate the harmony of the character to produce effect at a particular moment; but almost invariably I found her a true artist, worthy Greece, and worthy at many moments to have her conceptions immortalized in marble.

Her range even in high tragedy is limited.  She can only express the darker passions, and grief in its most desolate aspects.  Nature has not gifted her with those softer and more flowery attributes that lend to pathos its utmost tenderness.  She does not melt to tears, or calm or elevate the heart by the presence of that tragic beauty that needs all the assaults of Fate to make it show its immortal sweetness.  Her noblest aspect is when sometimes she expresses truth in some severe shape, and rises, simple and austere, above the mixed elements around her.  On the dark side, she is very great in hatred and revenge.  I admired her more in Phedre than in any other part in which I saw her.  The guilty love inspired by the hatred of a goddess was expressed in all its symptoms with a force and terrible naturalness that almost suffocated the beholder.  After she had taken the poison, the exhaustion and paralysis of the system, the sad, cold, calm submission to Fate, were still more grand.

I had heard so much about the power of her eye in one fixed look, and the expression she could concentrate in a single word, that the utmost results could only satisfy my expectations.  It is, indeed, something magnificent to see the dark cloud give out such sparks, each one fit to deal a separate death; but it was not that I admired most in her:  it was the grandeur, truth, and depth of her conception of each part, and the sustained purity with which she represented it.

For the rest, I shall write somewhere a detailed critique upon the parts in which I saw her.  It is she who has made me acquainted with the true way of viewing French tragedy.  I had no idea of its powers and symmetry till now, and have received from the revelation high pleasure and a crowd of thoughts.