A leanfigure, peculiarly attractive, though scarcely to be called beautiful; a melancholy face with a strangely sweet expression, no longer young, yet possessed of a pale, wistful charm;la femme de trente ans, who has lived and suffered, and who knows that life is full of suffering; a woman without any aggressive self-confidence, yet queenly, gentle, and subdued in manner, with a pathetic voice,—such is Eleonora Duse as she appeared in the parts which she created for herself out of modern pieces. When first I saw her, I tried to think of some one with whom to compare her; I turned over in my mind the names of all the greatest actresses in the last ten years or more, and wondered whether any of them could be said to be her equal, or to have surpassed her. But neither Wolter nor Bernhardt, neither Ellmenreich nor the best actresses of theThéâtre Français, could be compared with her. The French and German actresses were entirely different; they seemed to stand apart, each complete in themselves—while she too stood apart, complete in herself. They represented a world of their own and a perfected civilization; and she, thoughlike them in some ways, seemed to represent the genesis of a world, and a civilization in embryo. This was not merely the result of comparing an Italian with French and German, and one school with another,—it was the woman’s temperament compared to that of others, her acute susceptibility, compared to which her celebrated predecessors impressed one as being too massive, almost too crude, and one might be tempted to add, less womanly. Many of them have possessed a more versatile genius than hers, and nearly all have had greater advantages at their disposal; but the moment that we compare them to Duse, their loud, convulsive art suddenly assumes the appearance of one of those gigantic pictures by Makart, once so fiery colored and now so faded; and if we compare the famous dramatic artists of the seventies and eighties with Duse, we might as well compare a splendid festal march played with many instruments to a Violin solo floating on the still night air.
The pieces acted by Eleonora Duse at Berlin, where I saw her, were mainly chosen to suit the public taste, and they differed in nothing from the usual virtuosa programme. These consisted of Sarah Bernhardt’s favorite parts, such as “Fédora,” “La Dame aux Camélias,” and pieces taken from therépertoireof theThéâtre Français, such as “Francillon” and “Divorçons,” varied with “Cavalleria Rusticana,” and such well-known plays as “Locandiera,” “Fernande,” and“The Doll’s House.” She did not act Shakespeare, and there she was wise; for what can Duse’s pale face have in common with the exuberant spirits and muscular strength of the women of theRenaissance, whose own rich life-blood shone red before their eyes and drove them to deeds of love and vengeance, which it makes the ladies of our time ill to hear described. But she also neglected some pieces which must have suited her better than her Frenchrépertoire. She did not give us Marco Praga’s “Modest Girls,” where Paulina’s part seems expressly created for her, nor his “Ideal Wife,” into which she might have introduced some of her own instinctive philosophy. Neither did she act the “Tristi Amori” of her celebrated fellow-countryman, Giuseppe Giacosa.
And yet, in the parts which she did act, she opened to us a new world, which had no existence before, because it was her own. It was the world of her own soul, the ever-changing woman’s world, which no one before her has ever expressed on the stage; she gave us the secret, inner life of woman, which no poet can wholly fathom, and which only woman herself can reveal, which with more refined nerves and more sensitive and varied feelings has emerged bleeding from the older, coarser, narrower forms of art, to newer, brighter forms, which, though more powerful, are also more wistful and more hopeless.
Eleonora Dusehas a strangely wearied look. It is not the weariness of exhaustion or apathy, nor is it the weariness natural to an overworked actress, although there are times when she suffers from that to so great an extent that she acts indifferently the whole evening, and makes the part a failure. Neither is it the weariness of despondency which gives the voice a hollow, artificial sound, which is noticeable in all virtuosas when they are over-tired. Neither is it the utter prostration resulting from passion, like the drowsiness of beasts of prey, which our tragic actors and actresses delight in. Passion, the so-called great passion, which, according to an old legend recounted in one of the Greek tragedies, comes like the whirlwind, and leaves nothing behind but death and dried bones—passion such as that is unknown to Duse. Brunhild, Medea, Messalina, and all the ambitious, imperious princesses of historic drama are nothing to her; she is no princess or martyr of ancient history, but a princess in her own right, and a martyr of circumstances. Throughout her acting there is a feeling of surprise that she should suffer and be martyred, accompanied by the dim knowledge that it must be so—and it is that which gives her soul its weary melancholy. For it is not her body, nor her senses, nor her mind which givethe appearance of having just awoke from a deep lethargy; the weariness is all in her soul, and it is that which gives her a soft, caressing, trustful manner, as though she felt lonely, and yearned for a little sympathy. Love is full of sympathy, and that is why Eleonora Duse acts love. Not greedy love, which asks more than it gives, like Walter’s and Bernhardt’s; not sensual love, nor yet imperious love, like the big woman who takes pity on the little man, whom it pleases her to make happy. When Duse is in love, even in “Fédora,” it is always she who is the little woman, and the man is for her the big man, the giver, who holds her happiness in his hands, to whose side she steals anxiously, almost timidly, and looks up at him with her serious, wearied, almost child-like smile. She comes to him for protection and shelter, just as travelers are wont to gather round a warm fire, and she clings to him caressingly with her thin little hands,—the hands of a child and mother. Never has woman been represented in a more womanly way than by Eleonora Duse; and more than that, I take it upon myself to maintain that woman has never been represented upon the stage until now—by Eleonora Duse.
She shows us the everlasting child in woman,—in the full-grown, experienced woman, who is possessed of an erotic yearning for fulness of life. Woman is not, and cannot be, happy by herself, nor is the sacrifice of a moment enough for her;it is not enough for her to live by the side of the man; a husband’s tenderness is as necessary to her as the air she breathes. His passion, lit by her, is her life and happiness. He gives her the love in which her life can blossom into a fair and beautiful flower. And she accepts him, not with the silly innocence of a child, not with the ignorance of girlhood, not with the ungoverned passion of a mistress, not with the condescending forbearance of the “superior woman,” not with the brotherly affection of the manly woman,—we have had ample opportunity of seeing and benefiting by such representations as those in every theatre, and in every tongue, since first we began to see and to think. They include every type of womanhood as understood and represented by actresses great and small. But into all this, Duse introduces a new element, something which was formerly only a matter of secondary importance on the stage, which, by the “highest art,” was judged in the light of a juggler’s trick, and was considered by the lower art as little more than a valuable ingredient. She makes it the main-string on which her acting vibrates, the keynote without which her art would have no meaning. She accepts the man with the whole-hearted sincerity of an experienced woman, who shrinks from the loneliness of life, and longs to lose herself in the “loved one”. She has the dreadful sensation that a human being has nothing but minutes, minutes; that there is nothing lasting to rely on;that we swim across dark waters from yesterday until to-morrow, and our unfulfilled desires are less terrible than the feverish anxiety with which we anticipate the future in times of prosperity.
Eleonora Duse’s acting tells of infinite suspense.
Her entire art rests on this one note,—Suspense: which means that we know nothing, possess nothing, can do nothing; that everything is ruled by chance, and the whole of life is one great uncertainty. This terrible insecurity stands as a perfect contrast to the “cause and effect” theory of the schools, which trust in God and logic, and offer a secure refuge to the playwright’s art. This mysterious darkness, from whence she steps forward like a sleep-walker, gives a sickly coloring to her actions. There is something timid about her; she seems to have an almost superstitious dislike of a shrill sound, or a brilliant color; and this peculiarity of hers finds expression not only in her acting, but also in her dress.
We seldom see toilets on the stage which reveal a more individual taste. Just as Duse never acted anything but what was in her own soul, she never attempted any disguise of her body. Her own face was the only mask she wore when I saw her act. The expression of her features, the deep lines on her cheeks, the melancholy mouth, the sunken eyes with their large heavy lids, were all characteristic of the part. She always had the same black, broad, arched eyebrows, the same wavy, shiny black Italian hair, which was alwaysdone up in a modest knot, sometimes high, sometimes a little lower, from which two curls always escaped during the course of her acting, because she had a habit of brushing her forehead with a white and rather bony hand, as though every violent emotion made her head ache.
No jewel glittered against her sallow skin, and she wore no ornament on her dress; there was something pathetic in the unconcealed thinness of her neck and throat. She was of medium height, a slender body with broad hips, without any signs of the rounded waist which belongs to the fashionable figure of the drama. She wore no stays, and there was nothing to hinder the slow, graceful, musical movements of her somewhat scanty figure. She made frequent gestures with her arms which were perfectly natural in her, although her Italian vivacity sometimes gave them a grotesque appearance. But it was the grace of her form, rather than her gestures, which called attention to the natural stateliness of her person. As to her dresses, they were not in the least fashionable, there was nothing of the French fashion-plate style about them; but then she never made any attempt to follow the fashion,—she set it. There was an antique look about the long soft folds of her dress, also something suggestive of theRenaissancein the velvet bodices and low lace collars.
But her arrangement of color was new; it was not copied either from the antique or theRenaissance, and it was certainly not in accordance with the present-day fashion. She never wore red,—with the exception of Nora’s shabby blouse,—nor bright yellow, nor blue; never, in fact, any strong, deep color. The hues which she affected most were black and white in all materials, whether for dresses or cloaks. She always wore pale, cream-colored lace, closely folded across her breast, from whence her dress fell loosely to the ground; she never wore a waist-band of any kind whatever.
She sometimes wore pale bronze, faded violet, and quiet myrtle green in soft materials of velvet and silk. There was an air of mourning about her dresses which might have suited any age except merry youth, and that note was entirely absent from her art, for she was never merry. She had a happy look sometimes, but she was never merry or noisy on the stage. I have twice seen her in a hat; and they were sober hats, such as a widow might wear.
I sawDuse for the first time as “Nora.”[2]I was sorry for it, as I did not think that an Italian could act the part of a heroine with such an essentially northern temperament. I have never had an opportunity of seeing Frau Ramlo, who isconsidered the best Nora on the German stage, but I have seen Ibsen’s Nora, Fru Hennings of the Royal Theatre of Copenhagen, and I retained a vivid picture of her acting in my mind. Fru Hennings’ Nora was a nervous little creature, with fair hair and sharp features, very neat andpiquante, but dressed cheaply and not always with the best taste; she was the regular tradesman’s daughter, with meagre purse and many pretensions, whose knowledge of life was bounded by the narrow prejudices of the parlor. There was something undeveloped about this Nora, with her senseless chatter, something almost pitiable in her admiration for the self-important Helmer, and something childish in her conception of his hidden heroism. There was also a natural, and perhaps inherited tendency for dishonest dealings, and a well-bred, forced cheerfulness which took the form of hopping and jumping in a coquettish manner, because she knew that it became her. When the time comes that she is obliged to face life with its realities, her feeble brain becomes quite confused, and she hops round the room in her tight stays, with her fringe and high-heeled boots, till, nervous and void of self-control as she is, she excites herself into the wildest apprehensions. This apprehension was the masterpiece of Fru Hennings’ masterly acting. She kept the mind fixed on a single point, which had all the more powerful effect in that it was so characteristically depicted,—she showedus the way by which a respectable tradesman’s daughter may be driven to the madhouse or to suicide. But when the change takes place, and a fully developed, argumentative, woman’s rights woman jumps down upon the little goose, then even Fru Hennings’ undoubted art was not equal to the occasion. The part fell to pieces, and two Noras remained, connected only by a little thread,—the miraculous. Fru Hennings disappears with an unspokenau revoir!
When Eleonora Duse comes upon the stage as Nora, she is a pale, unhealthy-looking woman, with a very quiet manner. She examines her purse thoughtfully, and before paying the servant she pauses involuntarily, as poor people usually do before they spend money. And when she throws off her shabby fur cloak and fur cap, she appears as a thin, black-haired Italian woman, clad in an old, ill-fitting red blouse. She plays with the children, without any real gayety, as grown-up people are in the habit of playing when their thoughts are otherwise occupied. Fru Linden enters, and to her she tells her whole history with true Italian volubility, but in an absent manner, like a person who is not thinking of what she is saying. She likes best to sit on the floor—very unlike women of her class—and to busy herself with the Christmas things. In the scene with Helmer an expression of submissive tenderness comes over her, she likes to be with him, she feels as though his presenceafforded her protection, and she nestles to his side, more like a sick person than a child.
The scenes which are impressed with Nora’s modern nervousness come and go, but Duse never becomes nervous. The many emotional and sudden changes which take place, the unreasonable actions and other minor peculiarities of a child of thebourgeois décadence,—these do not concern her. Duse never acts the nervous woman, either here or elsewhere. She does not act it, because she has too true and delicate a nervous susceptibility. She can act the most passionate feelings, and she often does so; but she never acts a capricious, nervous disposition. She has too refined a taste for that, and her soul is too full of harmony.
Ibsen’s Nora is hysterical, and only half a woman; and that is what he, with his poetic intuition, intended her to be. Eleonora Duse’s Nora is a complete woman. Crushed by want and living in narrow surroundings, there is a certain obtuseness about her which renders her willing to subject herself to new misfortunes. There is also something of the child in her, as there is in every true woman; but even in her child-like moments she is a sad child. Then the misfortune happens! But, strange to say, she makes no desperate attempt to resist it; she gives no hysterical cry of fear, as a meaner soul would do in the struggle for life. There is something pitiable in a struggle such as that, where powerand will are so disproportionately unlike. Duse’s Nora hastily suppresses the first suggestion of fear; but she does not admire her muff meanwhile, like Fru Hennings. She merely repeats to herself over and over again in answer to her thoughts: “No, no!” I never heard any one say “no” like her; it contains a whole world of human feeling. But all through the night she hears fate say “Yes, yes!” and the next day, which is Christmas Day, she is overcome with a fatalistic feeling. She dresses herself for the festival, but not with cheap rags like Nora; she wears an expensive dark green dress, which hangs down in rich graceful folds. It is her only best dress, and sets off her figure to perfection; it makes her look tall and slender, but also very weary. And as the play goes on, she becomes even more weary and more resigned, and when death comes, there is no help for it. Then, after the rehearsal of the tarantella, when Helmer calls to her from the dining-room and she knows that fate can no longer be averted, she leaps through the air into his arms with a cry of joy,—to look at her one would think that she was one of those thin, wild, joyless Bacchantes whose bas-reliefs have come down to us from the later period of Grecian art.
The third act:—Nora and Helmer return from the mask ball. She is absent-minded and quite indifferent to everything that goes on around her. That which she knows is going to happen, is toher already a thing of the past, since she has endured it all in anticipation; her actions in the matter are only mechanical.
When Helmer goes to empty the letter-box, she does not try to stop him with a hundred excuses, she scarcely makes a weak movement to hold him back; she knows that it must come, nothing that she can do will prevent it. While Helmer reads the letter, she stands pale and motionless, and when he rushes at her, she throws on her mantle and leaves the room without another word.
He drags her back and overwhelms her with reproaches, in which the pitiful meanness of his soul is laid bare. Now Duse’s acting begins in earnest, now the dramatic moment has come—the only moment in the drama—for the sake of which she took the part.
She stands by the fireplace, with her face towards the audience, and does not move a muscle until he has finished speaking. She says nothing, she never interrupts him. Only her eyes speak. He runs backwards and forwards, up and down the room, while she follows him with her large, suffering eyes, which have an unnatural look in them, follows him backwards and forwards in unutterable surprise,—a surprise which seems to have fallen from heaven, and which changes little by little into an unutterable, inconceivable disappointment, and that again into an indescribably bitter, sickening contempt. And into her eyes comes at last the question: “Whoare you? What have you got to do with me? What do you want here? What are you talking about?”
The other letter drops into the letter-box, and Helmer loads her with tender, patronizing words. But she does not hear him. She is no longer looking at him. What does the chattering creature want now? She does not know him at all. She has never loved him. There was once a man whose sympathy she possessed, and who was her protector. That man is no more, and she has never loved any one!
She turns away with a gesture of displeasure, and goes to change her clothes, anxious to get away as quickly as possible. He stops her. What then? The woman is awake in her. She is a woman in the moment of a woman’s greatest ignominy,—when she discovers that she does not love. What does he want with her? Why does he raise objections? He——?Tant de bruit pour une omelette!She throws him a few indifferent words, shrugs her shoulders, turns her back upon him, and goes quickly out at the door. Presently we hear the front door close with a bang. There is no mention at all about the “miracle.”
That is how Duse united Nora’s double personality. Make it up! There is no making it up between the man and wife, except the kiss and the shrug of the shoulders. She ignores Ibsen’s principal argument. Reason, indeed? Reason hasnever settled anything in stern reality, least of all as regards the relationship between husband and wife. One day Nora wakes up and finds that Helmer has become loathsome to her, and she runs away from him with the instinctive horror of a living person for a decomposed corpse. Of course nothing “miraculous” can happen, for that would mean that the living person should go mad and return to the corpse.
Eleonora Duse treats all her parts in the same independent manner that she treats the text of Nora. When we are able to follow her, and that is by no means always, we notice how she alters it to suit herself, how another being comes to the front,—a being who has no place in the written words, and whom the author never thought of, whom he, in most cases, could certainly not have drawn from his own views of life and his own inner consciousness. Duse’s heroine is more womanly, in the deeper sense of the word, than the society ladies in Ibsen’s and Sardou’s dramas, and she is not only more simple than they are, but also far greater. Eleonora Duse is not a dialectician like Ibsen and Sardou; their hair-splitting logic is no concern of hers, and it certainly was not written for her. She has an instinctive, unerring intuition of what the part should be, and she throws herself into it and acts accordingly. She does not vary much; she is not a realist who makes a careful note of every little peculiarity, and arranges them in a pattern ofmosaic; she is truthful to a reckless extent, but not always true to the letter; sometimes like this, sometimes like that, she differs in the different parts. She is true, because she is proud and courageous enough to show herself as she really is. There is no need for her to be otherwise. There is danger of uniformity in this great simplicity of hers, and she would not escape it if it were not for her emotional nature, and an intense, almost painful sincerity, which was perhaps never represented on the stage before her time, and which was certainly never before made the groundwork of a woman’s feelings. She comes to meet us half absorbed in her own thoughts, a complete woman,—complete in that indissoluble unity which is the basis of a healthy woman’s nature: woman-child and also woman-mother, a woman with the stamp which is the result of deep, vital experience, with a woman’s tragedy ineffaceably engraved on every feature,—this same woman’s tragedy which she reproduces upon the stage. It is the fact of her not troubling herself about anything else that imbues her acting with an air of simplicity, and because she is such a complete woman herself, there is an air of indescribable stateliness about her acting. She not only simplified all that she took in hand, but she also improved it. For all these characters which she created were the result of the completeness of her womanly nature, and that is why they never had but the one motive, for all theevil they did, and for their hate: they revenged themselves for thecrimen læsæ majestatis, which sin was committed against their womanly nature, and which a true woman never forgives, as when the priceless pearl of her womanhood has been misused. That is why they made no pathetic gestures, no noise or tragic screams, but acted quietly and silently, as we do a thing which is expected of us, with a quiet indifference, as when intact nature bows itself under and assists fate.
That is how Duse acted Nora, but she acted Clotilde in “Fernande” in the same mood, also Odette in the play, called by the same name, both by Sardou, and that was more difficult. Clotilde and Odette are a couple of vulgar people. Clotilde, a widow of distinction, revenges herself upon a young man of proud and noble family, who has been her lover for many years, but has broken his marriage vows, by encouraging his attachment for a dishonored girl, whom she persuades him to marry, and afterwards triumphantly tells him his wife’s history.
Odette’s husband finds her one night with her lover, and he turns her out of the house in the presence of witnesses. For several years she leads a dissolute life, dishonoring the name of her husband and grown-up daughter. This stain on the family makes it almost impossible for the latter to marry, and the husband offers the fallen woman a large sum of money to deprive her of his name. She agrees, on condition that she shall be allowedto see her daughter. She is prevented from making herself known to the latter, and when she comes away after the interview, she drowns herself in a fit of hysterical self-contempt. Such are the contents of the two pieces into which Duse put her greatest and best talent.
Shecomes as Clotilde into the gambling saloon, to inquire after the young girl whom she had nearly driven over. She is simply dressed, and has the appearance of a distinguished lady, with a happy and virtuous past. The manner in which she receives the girl in her own house, talks to her and puts her at her ease, was so kind and hearty that the audience, very unexpectedly in this scene, broke into a storm of applause before the curtain had gone down. Her lover returns from a journey which arouses her suspicion, and she, anxious not to deceive herself, elicits the confession that he no longer cares for her, and is in love with some one else. That some one is Fernande. He goes to look for her, finds her in the same house, and returns immediately. Clotilde thinks that he has come back to her. Her speechless delight must be seen, for it cannot be described; her whole being is suffused with a radiant joy, she trembles with excitement. When it is all made plain to her, and there is no longer any room for doubt, she bows her headover his hand for an instant, as though to kiss it, as she had so often done before, then she strokes it softly with her own.... She will never look into his face again, yet she cannot cease to love the clear, caressing hand, which calls to mind her former happiness.
She lets things take their course, and when it is over she has the scene with Pomerol, when she defends her conduct. Duse has a form of dialectic peculiar to herself, which is neither sensible nor deliberate, but impulsive. When she does wrong she does it—not because she is bad, but because she cannot help herself. A part of her nature, which was the source of her life, is wounded and sick unto death, and a gnawing, burning pain compels her to commit deeds as dark and painful as her own heart. She goes about it quietly, doing it all as a matter of course; to her they seem inevitable as the outer expression of a hidden suffering.
She is at her best in the passionate “Fédora,” when she represents this state of blank amazement, mingled with despair, taking the place of what has been love. If she afterwards comes across the French cynic, she reasons with him too—but like a woman,i.e., she drowns his arguments in an extraordinary number of interjections, with or without words. She never crosses the threshold of her life as an actress, she never once attains to the consciousness of objective judgment.
When the man whom she loves is married to the dishonored girl, Clotilde comes to bring him the information which she has reserved until now. Suddenly she stands in the doorway, and sees that he is alone, and there comes over her an indescribable expression of dumb, suppressed love. She seems to be making a frantic appeal to the past to be as though it had never taken place, and in the emotion of the moment she has forgotten what brought her there. Not until he has unceremoniously shown her the door, and opened the old wound, does she tell him who his wife is.
The same with “Odette.” She is in love, and she receives her lover. At that moment her husband comes home. (Andó, Duse’s partner, is almost as good an actor as she is.) He is a shallow, restless, hot-tempered little man, who seizes her by the shoulders as she is about to throw herself into the other man’s arms. She collapses altogether, and stands before him stammering and ashamed. He thrusts her out of the house, although it is the middle of the night, and she is lightly clad. In a moment she has drawn herself up to her full height,—a woman deprived of home and child, on whom the deadliest injury has been inflicted in the most barbarous manner; in the presence of such cruelty, her own fault sinks to nothing, and with a voice as hoarse as that of an animal at bay, she cries, “Coward!” and leaves him.
Many years have gone by, and we meet Odette once more, this time as a courtesan in a gambling saloon. She is very much aged,—a thin, disillusioned woman, for whom her husband is searching everywhere, with the intention of depriving her of his name. There is still something about her which bears the impress of the injured woman. She recalls the past as clearly as though it happened only yesterday; for she can never forget it, and time has not lessened the disgrace. She treats him with wearied indifference, and her voice is harsh like an animal’s, and she chokes as though she were trying to smother her indignation.
Then follows the last act, when she meets her daughter. She comes in, dressed like an unhappy old widow, shaking with emotion, and scarcely able to contain herself. Her eyes are aglow with excitement, as she rushes forward, ready to cast herself into her daughter’s arms. But when she sees the fresh, innocent girl, she is overcome with a feeling of shyness, and shrinks from her with an awkward, anxious gesture. She speaks hesitatingly, like one who is ill at ease; she raises her shoulders and stoops, and holds her thin, restless hands clasped together, lest they should touch her daughter. The girl displays the various little souvenirs that belonged to her mother, and plays the piece which was her favorite, and talks about her “dead mother.” Then this man and woman are stirred with a deep feeling, which is the simple keynote of humanity, which theynever experienced before in the days when they were together. And they sit and cry, each buried in their own sorrow, and far apart from one another. After that she puts her trembling arms round the girl, and kisses her with an expression in her face which it is impossible to simulate, and which cannot be imitated,—which no one understands except the woman who is herself a mother. She gazes at her daughter as though she could never see enough of her; she strokes her with feverish hands, arranges the lace on her dress, and you feel the joy that it is to her to touch the girl, and to know that she is really there. Then she becomes very quiet, as though she had suffered all that it was possible for her to suffer. As she passes her husband, she catches hold of his outstretched hand, and tries to kiss it. Then she tears herself away, overcome with the feeling that she can endure it no longer.
Eleonora Duse prefers difficult parts. She was nothing more than an ordinary actress in “La Locandiera,” and the witty dialogue in “Cyprienne” and “Francillon” had little in common with her nature. Even the part of “La Dame aux Camélias” was an effort to her. The silly, frivolous cocotte, with her consumptive longing to be loved, was too exaggerated a part for Eleonora Duse. A superabundance of good spirits is foreign to her nature, which is sad as life itself. Pride and arrogance she cannot act, nor yet the trustfulness which comes from inexperience.She gave the impression of not feeling young enough for “La Dame aux Camélias’” happy and unhappy moods. Eleonora Duse’s art is most at home where life’s great enigma begins:—Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going to? We are tossed to and fro on the waters in a dense fog; we suffer wrong, and we do wrong, and we know not why. Fate! fate! We are powerless in the hands of Fate! When Duse can act the blindness of fatalism, then she is content.
She was able to do so in “Fédora.”
The pretty, fashionable heroine does not change into a fury when the man whom she loves is brought home murdered. When we meet her again she is quite quiet,—a calm, cold woman of the world, with only one object in life, which is to punish the murderer. It is a task like any other, but it is inevitable, and must be undertaken as a matter of course. She makes no display of anger, and takes no perverse pleasure in thoughts of vengeance. The murderer is nothing to her,—he is a stranger. But she has been rendered desolate in the flower of her youth; the table of life, which is never spread more than once, has been upset before her eyes at the very moment of her anticipated happiness, and this is an injury which she is going to repay. She is proud, and has no illusions; she is a just judge, who recompenses evil with evil and good with good. This “Fédora” is reserved and unreasoning.
The scene changes. She loves the man whom she has been pursuing, and she discovers that the dead man has been false to both of them, and she realizes that now for the first time life’s table is spread for her, while the secret police, to whom she has betrayed him, are waiting outside, and she clings to him terrified, showers caresses upon him, kisses him with unspeakable tenderness. There is something in her of the helplessness of a little child, mingled with a mother’s protecting care, as she implores him to remain, and entices him to love, and seeks refuge in his love, as a terrified animal seeks refuge in its hole.
There are two other features of Eleonora Duse’s art which deserve notice. These are, the way in which she tells a lie, and the way she acts death. As I have said already, she is not a realist, and she frames her characters from her inner consciousness, not from details gathered from the outward features of life. Her representation of death is also the outcome of her instinct. A death scene has no meaning for her unless it reflects the inner life. As a process of physical dissolution, she takes no interest in it. She has not studied death from the side of the sick-bed, and she makes short work of it in “Fédora,” as also in “La Dame aux Camélias.” In the first piece, the point which she emphasizes is the sudden determination to take the poison; in the second, it is her joy at having the man whom she loves near her at the last.
Then her manner of lying. When Duse tells a lie, she does it as if it were the simplest and most natural thing in the world. Her lies and deceptions are as engaging, persuasive, and fantastic as a child’s. Lying is an important factor in the character of a woman who has much to fight against, and it is a weapon which she delights to use, and the use of it renders her unusually fascinating and affectionate. Even those who do not understand the words of the play, know when Duse is telling a lie, because she becomes so unusually lively and talkative, and her large eyes have an irresistible sparkle in them.
“Cavalleria Rusticana” was the only good Italian play that Duse acted. She was more of a realist in this piece than in any other, because she reproduced what she had seen daily before her eyes,—her native surroundings, her fellow-countrymen,—instead of that which she had learned by listening to her own soul. Her Santuzza—the poor, forsaken girl with the raw, melancholy, guttural accents of despair—was life-like and convincing, but the barbaric wildness of the exponent was something which was as startling in this stupid, pale weakly creature as a roar from the throat of a roe deer.
Andnow to sum up:—Eleonora Duse goes touring all round the world. She is going to America,and she is certain to go back to Berlin and St. Petersburg and Vienna, and other places where she may or may not have been before. She will have to travel and act, travel and act, as all popular actresses have done before her. She will grow tired of it, unspeakably tired,—we can see that already,—but she will be obliged to go on, till she becomes stereotyped, like all the others.
When we see her again, will she be the same as she is now? Her technical power is extraordinary, but her art is simple; melancholy and dignity are its chief ingredients. Will Duse’s womanly nature be able to bear the strain of never-ending repetition? This fear has been the cause of my endeavor to accentuate her individuality as it appeared to me when I saw her. Hers is not one of those powerful natures which always regain their strength, and are able to fight through all difficulties. Her entire acting is tuned upon one note, which is usually nothing more than an accompaniment in the art of acting; that note is sincerity. In my opinion she is the greatest woman genius on the stage.
Nowadays we are either too lavish or too sparing in our use of the word genius; we either brandish it abroad with every trumpet, or else avoid it altogether. We are willing to allow that there are geniuses amongst actors and actresses, and that such have existed, and may perhaps continue to exist, but I have never observed that any attempt is made to distinguish between the genius ofman and woman on the stage. This may possibly be accounted for by the fact that the difference was not great. The hero was manly, the heroine womanly, and the old people, whether men or women, were either comic or tearful, and the characters of both sexes were usually bad. The difference lay chiefly in the dress, the general comportment, and the voice: one could see which was the woman, and she of course acted a woman’s feelings; tradition ruled, and in accordance with it the actress imitated the man, declaimed her part like him, and even went as far as to imitate the well-known tragic step. Types, not individuals, were represented on the stage, and I have seldom seen even the greatest actresses of the older school deviate from this rule.
The society pieces were supposed to represent every-day life; therefore it was necessary before all else that the actress should be a lady, and where a lady’s feelings are limited, hers were necessarily limited too. To every actress, the tragedian not excepted, the question of chief importance was how she looked.
But Duse does not care in the least how she looks. Her one desire is to find means of expressing an emotion of the soul which overwhelms her, and is one of the mysteries of her womanly nature. Her acting is not realistic; by which I mean that she does not attempt to impress her audience by making her acting true to life, which can be easily attained by means of pathological phenomena, suchas a cough, the cramp, a death-struggle, etc., which are really the most expressive, and also, in a coarse way, the most successful. She will have none of this, because it is the kind of acting common to both sexes. What she wants is to give expression to her own soul, her own womanly nature, the individual emotions of her own physical and psychical being; and she can only accomplish that by being entirely herself,i.e., perfectly natural. That is why she makes gesticulations, and speaks in a tone of voice which is never used elsewhere upon the stage; and she never tries to disguise her age, because her body is nothing more to her than an instrument for expressing her woman’s soul.
What is genius? The word has hitherto been understood to imply a superabundance of intelligence, imagination, and passion, combined with a higher order of intellect than that possessed by average persons. Genius was a masculine attribute, and when people spoke of woman’s genius, their meaning was almost identical. A finer spiritual susceptibility scarcely came under the heading of genius; it was therefore, upon the whole, a very unsatisfactory definition. There can be no doubt that there is a kind of genius peculiar to women, and it is when a woman is a genius that she is most unlike man, and most womanly; it is then that she creates through the instrumentality of her womanly nature and refined senses. This is the kind of productive facultywhich Eleonora Duse possesses to such a high degree.
A woman’s productive faculty has always shown a decided preference for authorship and acting,—the two forms of art which offer the best opportunity for the manifestation of the inner life, as being the most direct and spontaneous, and in which there are the fewest technical difficulties to overcome. A woman’s impulses are of such short duration that she feels the need for constant change of emotion. The majority of women are attracted by the stage, and there is no form of artistic production which they find more difficult to renounce. Why is this? We will leave vanity and other minor considerations out of the question, and imagine Duse shedding real tears upon the stage, enduring real mental and maybe physical sufferings, experiencing real sorrow and real joy.
And now, putting aside all question of nerves and auto-suggestion, we would ask what it is that attracts a woman to the stage?
Sensation.
A productive nature cannot endure the monotony of real life. To it, real life means uniformity. Uniformity in love, uniformity in work, uniformity in pleasures, uniformity in sorrows. To break through this uniformity—this half sleep of daily existence—is a craving felt by all persons possessed of superfluous vitality. This vitality may be more or less centred on the ego, and forsuch,—i.e., the persons who are possessed of the largest share of individual, productive vitality,—authorship and acting are the two shortest ways of escape from the uniformity of daily life. Of these two, the last-named form of artistic expression is best suited to woman, and the woman who has felt these sensations, especially the tragic ones, can never tear herself away from the stage. For she experiences them with an intensity of feeling which belongs only to the rarest moments in real life, and which cannot then be consciously enjoyed. But the artificial emotions, which can scarcely be reckoned artificial, since they cause her excited nerves to quiver,—of these she is strangely conscious in her enjoyment of them; she enjoys both spiritual and physical horror, she enjoys the thousand reflex emotions, and she also enjoys the genuine fatigue and bodily weakness which follow after. For the majority of women our life is an everlasting, half-waking expectation of something that never comes, or it may be nothing more than a hard day’s work; but life for a talented actress becomes a double existence, filled with warm colors—sorrow and gladness. She can do what other women never can or would allow themselves to do, she can express every sensation that she feels, she can enjoy the full extent of a woman’s feelings, and live them over and over again. But because this life is half reality and half fiction, and because the strain of acting is always followed by a feeling of emptiness anddissatisfaction, great actresses are always disillusioned, and that is perhaps the reason why Duse’s attractive face wears an expression of weariness and hopeless longing. But the warm colors—the colors of sorrow and passion—are always enticing, and that is why great tragedians can never forsake the stage, although gradually, little by little, the intensity of their feelings grows less, and the colors become pale and more false.