Here was a new art, made up of a new
mixing of the arts, in one subtly intoxicating elixir. To Mallarme it
was the more exquisite because there was in it none of the broad general
appeal of opera, of the gross recognised proportions of things.
This dramatisation of song, done by any one less subtly, less
completely, and less sincerely an artist, would lead us, I am afraid,
into something more disastrous than even the official concert, with its
rigid persons in evening dress holding sheets of music in their
tremulous hands, and singing the notes set down for them to the best of
their vocal ability. Madame Georgette Leblanc is an exceptional artist,
and she has made an art after her own likeness, which exists because it
is the expression of herself, of a strong nature always in vibration.
What she feels as a woman she can render as an artist; she is at once
instinctive and deliberate, deliberate because it is her natural
instinct, the natural instinct of a woman who is essentially a woman, to
be so. I imagine her always singing in front of a mirror, always
recognising her own shadow there, and the more absolutely abandoned to
what the song is saying through her because of that uninterrupted
communion with herself.
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