ELEONORA DUSE
When the American papers announced, in the spring of 1914, that Eleonora Duse had recovered her health and was contemplating a return to the stage, the news had a curious effect, somewhat as if the New York press had casually said that “Ada Rehan and Mr. Daly’s company are to play The Taming of the Shrew next Monday.” A little later the cable brought the announcement that Bernhardt was thinking of coming again to America, and though Mme. Sarah is almost old enough to be Duse’s mother, the news of her coming had not the same effect of turning the clock backward. For Bernhardt is apparently one of the earth’s permanent phenomena, like the return of vegetation in the spring; while the tragic figure of Duse, though she played in America only a dozen years ago, seems somehow to belong to the last generation.
ELEONORA DUSE
She is, however, not yet really an old woman, for she was born October 3, 1859. The genius of strange and hard experience, which has attended her all her life, was present even at her birth, for it occurred in a third-class carriage of a railway train, near Vigevano, while her parents, the members of a band of actors, were on their way from Venice to Milan. A troubled life then began.
For two generations, at least, her forebears had been player-folk, of a rather humble station, most of them. An uncle was a player differing greatly in kind from his famous niece, for he was known throughout Northern Italy as an uproariously funny comedian.[106] Her grandfather, Luigi Duse, was of a somewhat more serious turn, and of a more important rank in the profession, for he is said to have founded the Garibaldi Theatre at Padua. He founded also a troupe of Venetian dialect comedians which was famous for many years. His four sons were all actors, and one of them, Eleonora Duse’s father, was a painter as well. Ultimately he left the stage to devote himself to that art. Duse’s mother, too, was an actress, and, after her child was baptized[107] and had attained the age of ten days, resumed her place in the company, which now had another prospective member added to its roster. Literally Duse knew the theatre and its people from the first day of her life, and was forced into its service as a matter of course.
The father and mother were humble strolling players who wandered about, often on foot, making a scanty living. The young Eleonora’s childhood was thus filled on the one hand with poverty, often hunger, and on the other hand, with the actor’s trade under her observation and a part of her daily instruction.[108] Hers was really not a childhood at all, a fact that helps to explain the note of melancholy and tragedy that has pervaded her whole life.
A career as a stage child, however, seems to be the thing that produces the notable actress,—the Siddons, the Terry, the Mrs. Fiske,—if only the added something is present to endow the unconsciously absorbed technique with the significance of personality and high intelligence.
At seven Eleonora was the prompter of the company. But she soon began to absorb the words and something of the meaning of certain rôles. At ten she was playing Cosette in Les Misérables. By the time she was twelve she was regularly appearing on the rustic stages, often impersonating characters far older than herself. There was much in the old life of the strolling players that made for joyousness—witness Modjeska’s tribute to her early experience of such life—and the young Duse was not without her gay moods, in those days, but responsibility, hard work and the impersonation of adult and much-troubled women, while she was still in her middle ’teens, inclined her toward the seriousness that has characterized her life. When she was fourteen her mother died, and her duties as tragédienne were supplemented by the care of younger children. Is it any wonder that she soon seemed to be “walking through life like a somnambulist”?[109]
Before she was sixteen she had acted a round of tragic parts, among them Doña Sol, Francesca da Rimini (in the play by Pellico) and Caverina, the heroine of Victor Hugo’s Angelo. When she was just over sixteen she played Juliet, in Verona itself. The theatre—it was the “Arena,” an open-air theatre—was crowded, and the actress roused the assembly to enthusiasm by a Juliet that was girlish, beautiful and natural.
But her term of what we would call “barnstorming” was not to end yet. The vagabondage continued, varied first with a tour of Dalmatia, and then by an occasional engagement, in small rôles, apart from the family company.
In 1879, when she was twenty, the company she had joined was playing in Naples. Here, for some reason, its leading actress was lost to it, on the eve of the presentation of Thérèse Raquin. To Duse, in the emergency, was assigned the part of Thérèse. The stage—that of the old Florentine Theatre—was a famous one; Salvini and Ristori had often trod its boards. And she was to face the most discerning public that had yet seen her. The result was in the way of recompense to Duse for her years of struggle and poverty. Cesare Rossi, one of the distinguished men of the theatre in the Italy of his day, was present. Immediately he offered to place her under his own management. Duse’s years of apprenticeship may be said to end at this point, for from now on her progress was steadily upward.
Her marriage, which came at this time, when she was about twenty, was only a brief interruption. It was another touch of tragedy in Duse’s life. With her, “it has been difficult to choose the point when the make believe of the theatre ended and the reality of life began.” Her husband was a Signor Checchi, an actor of mediocre ability. A daughter was born, but the marriage was to Duse a great disappointment.
Back to the stage she went, after this time of trial, with little heart for her work, though Rossi had given her a good contract. Then, in 1880, while she was in Turin, she saw Bernhardt in La Princesse de Bagdad, one of the plays by which the younger Dumas was making inroads on the old-fashioned classical repertoire. Duse at once announced her intention to play in the same piece. The resulting negotiations with Dumas served not only to introduce some of his plays—of course translated into Italian—into the theatre in Italy, but to begin a warm though curiously impersonal friendship between the author and the rising young actress. She conceived the most ardent admiration for the man and his work, and it was not long before he was urging her to try her fortunes in Paris. Many years were to elapse before she was to make that venture, for very good reasons, as will later appear.[110]
Dumas, it would appear, and the success with which she made his plays, La Princesse de Bagdad[111] and La Femme de Claude, understood and liked in Italy, had a large share in restoring her interest in life and her work, and in increasing her fame. She was rapidly becoming known throughout Italy. By the time of her first venture outside of Italy—which took her to faraway South America[112]—she had achieved success in Turin, in Rome and in Milan.
As yet there was little thought of her as other than an Italian for the Italians. Dumas’ appeals to act in Paris had always been in vain. If reports of her acting had been carried home by visitors from the great capitals, she was not thought of, as yet, as a world’s actress. To carry plays to Moscow, to Vienna, to Berlin, and act them there effectively in a foreign tongue, an actress must needs be of great power, must have a genius that makes itself felt above all differences of speech. In 1892 she went to Vienna, comparatively unheralded, and from there word went forth that a new and great actress had come from her native Italy and blazed into a sudden glory. Francisque Sarcey, the distinguished French critic, had followed the company of the Comédie Française to Vienna, and from there wrote to the Temps accounts of her display of versatility in playing equally well Antony and Cleopatra, La Dame aux Camélias (“Camille”) and Divorçons. Sworn admirer of Bernhardt that he was, he easily found faults in Duse, but he praised her justly too: “She is not handsome, but has an intelligent and expressive face and wonderful mobility of features. Her voice is not particularly musical, but its occasional metallic vibrations produce thrilling effects. Her diction, like Mme. Bernhardt’s, is distinct and clear, each syllable coming out with well-rounded edges.” Though Sarcey thought her, as Cleopatra, to have “the air of a crowned grisette,” (in contrast to Sarah, who was “always the Queen of Egypt”) he confessed that “La Duse carried the house by storm with her alternate explosions of fury and sudden tones of touching tenderness.” Sarcey’s early sympathy for Duse was, as we shall see, to be of benefit to her later. During this transalpine tour Duse acted in Russia and Germany, as well as in Austria; and now was to come her first venture in an English-speaking country.
In 1893 Americans interested in the European stage knew that Duse had achieved fame in her own country and had succeeded notably in Austria and Germany. The average American theatregoer knew little of her. Even those who had heard of her had little notion that she really was an actress of the first rank, fully worthy of comparison with Bernhardt and Modjeska.
On an evening of January, 1893, when a large and brilliant audience assembled at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York to see her in Camille, the prevailing atmosphere was therefore one of curiosity.[113] Duse had not long to wait before striking fire. One who was present said: “Her power over an audience was manifested in a very striking manner before she had been on the stage five minutes. The actress had scarcely made her appearance and given her careless nod of recognition to De Varville before everybody was in an attitude of strained attention. Already the old and hackneyed character had been revivified by the power of genius. Signora Duse does not attempt to make a Frenchwoman of Camille, but fills her with the fire and passion of her own Italian temperament. But both the fire and passion, except at very rare intervals, are kept under complete control. Their glow is apparent in all the love scenes, and breaks into flame at one or two critical moments, but it is by the suggestion of force in reserve that she makes her most striking effects. Only an artist of the highest type could create so profound an impression with so little apparent effort or forethought, by some light and seemingly spontaneous gesture, by a sudden change of facial expression, or by some subtle inflection of the voice. The chief beauties of her impersonation are to be found in its lesser and, to the inexperienced eye, insignificant details. All her by-play, although it appears to be due only to the impulse of the moment, is dearly the result of the most deliberate design, and changes with every variety of mood or condition which it is meant to illustrate. The impetuous, audacious, bored and querulous Camille of the first act becomes quite another creature beneath the softening influence of the love passages with Armand—such love passages as have not been witnessed in a New York theatre half a dozen times in this generation—and is transformed into a type of placid and contented womanhood in the country home of Armand. She played the whole of this act with perfect skill and profoundest pathos, and in the scene of parting with her lover, she suggested the heart-breaking under a smile, with a simplicity so true and so poignant that her own suppressed sob found many an echo in the audience.”[114] In the many accounts of Duse’s Camille there is constant reference to a simple and telling interpolation that she made in the scene in which Armand publicly denounces her. Where other actresses have sought to express Marguérite’s feelings only through facial expression and pantomime, Duse spoke at intervals during his tirade her lover’s name—“Armand!”—at first in simple incredulity, then in fright, then in deeply hurt pride, then in heart-breaking anguish[115]. Sarcey, however, severely condemned her for making this emendation, which, he thought, ruined the naturalness and effectiveness of the scene.
Duse had come unheralded, but her few weeks in New York proved a genuine “sensation.” She followed Camille with Fédora, in which she again demonstrated her strange power of creating a stirring dramatic effect by the simplest and apparently the most unstudied means. As Clotilde in Fernande she presented another type: “The change wrought in her by the dispatch that proved her lover’s perfidy was an extraordinary illustration of suppressed emotion, and the remorseless deliberation of her manner while beguiling the faithless Andre into the net which she had spread for him was intensely eloquent of a woman scorned. Not until after the marriage had been accomplished did she give vent to the rage which she had restrained so long; but when the floodgates of passion were once opened, the torrent of her wrath and hate and scorn might almost be called appalling. This one revelation of her power would place her instantly in the front rank of emotional actresses.”[116] Another jealous woman was revealed in Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana. Astonishing in this part was the complete sinking of her own personality in that of a peasant woman. By voice, walk, subtle suggestions of gesture and pose, she achieved a masterpiece in what the French call “getting within the skin” of a character. When to the other impersonations she added her Mirandolina in La Locandiera, a part calling for a charming archness and humor, and as sure a touch in comedy as Santuzza in tragedy, her wide range was astonishingly revealed.[117]
After visiting a few other American cities, Duse’s company arrived in London, and opened an engagement there in May (1893). She was the first Italian since Salvini to claim London’s serious attention. She was at least as unknown there to “the general” as she had been in New York, though of course there were many who had either seen her on the continent or had read glowing accounts of her. But there were many, at first, to ask: “Who is she?” When she made her presence felt, as she promptly did, there arose a fine critical storm with her as the center. Bernhardt was idolized in London, appeared there in the same season, and naturally comparison was rife. As a matter of fact, comparison between Duse and Bernhardt, both of whom were well within their prime in the early nineties, was one of the favorite intellectual amusements of the day, with both professional and amateur critics. Duse succeeded in London, however, as she had succeeded elsewhere.[118]
Thus had she swung about the world, making known her great gifts, and firmly establishing a genuine, honestly won fame. Only Paris remained to be conquered, and before she attempted that formidable task, she visited America again.[119]
Now, at last, came Duse’s invasion of Paris. Why was it delayed so long? What were the circumstances of her going? And how did she fare there? The answers to these questions form a curious chapter in her history, and in that of a great sister artist. Duse’s few weeks in Paris in the early summer of 1897 mark the climax of her career, and may well be described in some detail.
It is an established tenet of Parisian faith that nothing in the artistic world can really be said to have won the stamp of authentic achievement until it has been seen and approved by Paris. With much justification, surely, the French are likely to consider themselves final arbiters, and they do not go out of their way to discover merit in a foreigner who has not yet shown his art in “the home of art.”
Paris had heard the echoes of Duse’s achievements, then, with the comfortable feeling that if she really amounted to anything she would come to Paris and prove it. Until then Parisians could wait. Duse was known to be the best Italian actress, Dumas’ interest in her had been evidenced years before, and her success in the large European cities and in America and England was by no means unknown. But the occasional whisper that Duse was comparable to Bernhardt herself brought only indulgent smiles. The lady evidently avoided the test.
That she had avoided the test was true. Duse had been really afraid to go to Paris. Later, after she had won the day, she admitted as much. A failure in Paris would be, she recognized, a fatal blow to her prestige and ambitions.
When Dumas had urged her to try her fortunes in the French capital, he assumed that she would act in French. But Duse knew how sensitive were French ears to the niceties of the language, how dependent on purity and beauty of speech was much of the drama to which they were accustomed, and how, she would be placing herself under a heavy handicap in acting in a strange medium.
It was not, then, until in Austria, Russia, England and the United States she had been warmly received while acting in her native tongue, that the conquest of Paris began to seem possible.
Enter now, Sarah Bernhardt. Mme. Sarah, unlike most Parisians, had seen Duse and knew her quality. She knew the truth of the growing impression that Duse was really a worthy rival. Therefore, if Duse was really coming to Paris, Sarah wished to involve herself in the proceedings, and protect her position. It was announced that where others had failed to induce Duse to come to Paris, Bernhardt had succeeded. More, she had offered Duse the use of her own theatre. Thus Duse was put at once in the position of protégée, and the press resounded with praises of Sarah’s magnanimity.
Duse chose Magda for her first appearance. It was a part well suited to her, and in it she had less to fear in comparison with Bernhardt, who had never scored so heavily with it as with her other rôles. Bernhardt forthwith called on Duse, and the announcement at once followed that the opening performance was to be changed to La Dame aux Camélias (Camille). Whatever the honesty of Bernhardt’s motives, she had succeeded in inducing Duse to appear first in a part that was one of Sarah’s own triumphs. One can imagine the new security that Bernhardt felt.
The house was crowded with the most brilliant audience that Paris could muster. Word had gone forth that one was to appear who had been mentioned in the same breath with the idolized Bernhardt. Rochefort was there, and so was Halévy, and Got, the doyen of the Française, and a throng of the distinguished men and women of the Paris of the day. For the critics, Lemaître was there, and Catulle Mendes, and, most important, Francisque Sarcey. Sarah herself was there, holding court, and serene and smiling in her rôle of protecting friend.
The story of that first performance is soon told. It was a disappointment. During the first act Duse was almost painfully nervous; in the second she showed flashes of power, and won some mild enthusiasm; in the third she was listened to only with patience; in the fourth the audience took more pleasure in Ando, her “leading man,” than in Duse herself; in the fifth she played the death scene beautifully, but it was too late. “If someone had triumphed it was not Duse.”
Already Paris thought that it had taken Duse’s measure, and now that the alleged comparison with Bernhardt was disposed of settled back to enjoy her, if possible, for her own sake. Magda followed. The critics were a little more impressed. Sarcey in particular—his criticism always appeared after a few days’ interval—poured balm on Duse’s feelings. He began to see that all had not yet been told. “Everyone,” he wrote, “was delighted to see so much naturalness combined with such great force of feeling.... I think I am beginning to distinguish the characteristic traits of her peculiar talent.”
After the first performance of Magda, Duse had been suddenly taken ill. Immediately after Sarcey’s encouraging article—whether or not it was the cause,[120]—she recovered and was ready for the lists again.
Bernhardt grew apprehensive. She proposed a gala performance in aid of the fund for a memorial to Dumas. She announced that she would give the last two acts of La Dame aux Camélias, and that Duse had been asked to give the second and third acts of the same play. Now the third act was the point where Duse had most signally failed to please Paris on that memorable first night. She was by now wary of Bernhardt’s “friendship,” and said that while she was eager to appear in honor of Dumas, she would substitute the second act of La Femme de Claude. And on this substitution she insisted in spite of all Mme. Sarah could say.
The audience had anticipated a rare feast of acting and was not disappointed. It applauded both actresses to the echo. But notice how Sarah worked into this occasion an element that had reference not so much to the glorification of Dumas as to the glorification of herself: “The curtain rises to disclose the celebrated bust of Dumas, by Carpeaux, which occupies the center of the stage. Grouped about, at a respectful distance, are all the artists who have taken part in the performance, while in advance of all, face to face with the bust itself, stands Sarah Bernhardt. She still wears the costume of Marguérite Gauthier, and is there as the accepted symbol, the unrivaled personification of Dumas’ immortal creation. Duse is in the background along with the others.
“A poem has been composed especially for the occasion by Edmond Rostand, in which Bernhardt is allowed to address Dumas in a tone of familiar grandeur, as befits one genius in the presence of another. After one expressive pause, therefore, she changes her attitude and begins.
“‘She recites these exquisite verses [the account in the Gaulois said] with a charm of tenderness, an intensity of feeling, that arouse new transports of enthusiasm. The whole audience is on its feet, quivering, with arms outstretched toward the prodigious artiste, who makes an effort to bow, but is overcome by the force of her emotion. The curtain rises and falls an incalculable number of times, disclosing the great tragédienne in her gracious attitude of homage to the great dramatist. And then, with a movement of touching spontaneity, Sarah goes to La Duse, seizes her hand, and both incline before the bust of the master. The spectacle is one that will never be forgotten.’”[121]
How very Gallic! And how extremely effective as an apotheosis of Bernhardt! With Duse triumphantly subordinated by means of Bernhardt’s apparently magnanimous demonstrations of friendship, and with the Paris season practically at an end, Mme. Sarah left town and repaired to England.
In spite of all, Duse went on. In rapid succession she played La Locandiera, Sogno di un Mattino di Primavera (a new play by d’Annunzio), La Femme de Claude, and Cavalleria Rusticana.
A curious thing happened. Her great first-night audience Duse had not been able to overwhelm. Now, by the slow-working influence of her very genuine art, she gained a cumulative hold on the imagination and affection of the Paris public. An open letter to her, signed “Sganarelle,” appeared in Le Temps, appealing to her to give a final matinée especially for her brother and sister artists to whom “her methods had opened new horizons.” “Sganarelle” proved to be Sarcey. His project was taken up with an enthusiasm that told how effective, after all, had been Duse’s unobtrusive art. Lavrouniet, in Figaro, speaking of Bernhardt and Duse, in a few sentences admirably characterized the art of both. The former, he says, “from a constant desire to be unique, supplies all the highest and rarest expressions of art, except one—simplicity. In La Duse, we have seen on the stage a woman’s nature and that of an artiste completing each other—the artiste playing with all the sensitiveness of a woman, and the woman allowing herself to be entirely absorbed in the artiste.” Lemaître also wrote sympathetically: “She came to us, preceded by a European reputation a rival sister of the great Sarah. We were not deceived, for Duse is a dramatic artiste, original to the core, and of the first rank. We were told she was beyond everything an astonishing realist; that she lived her parts rather than played them, and in this way took her audience by storm. And that statement is doubtless exact.... What seems to me incontestably Mme. Duse’s is her singular charm and grace, her sweetness and tenderness. On that account her search for the truth, her solicitude to avoid the exhibition of any artifice, her realism, so very minute and so very sincere, reach even to poetry. Hers is the unique charm of a matured woman,—impassioned, bruised, suffering, nervous,—in whom, however, survives a young and ingenuous grace, almost that of a young girl, of a strange young girl.”
Duse promptly and gladly accepted the invitation to give the special matinée. Her lease of Bernhardt’s theatre had expired and it was necessary to write to England to ask the use of the house. Bernhardt tendered it gratuitously, but, wishing still to have a share in all that was going on, requested that the invitations bear her name and Duse’s side by side. Duse saw difficulties. “I could not invite my companions in France to come and admire me. That would be too presumptuous.” When Sarah could not have her way, she suggested that the performance be abandoned. Instead, the Porte St. Martin was secured. The newspapers got wind of the negotiations that Duse’s manager and Bernhardt had been carrying on by telegraph, and when the latter’s motives became apparent, there was another reaction in favor of Duse. There was room in the Porte St. Martin for only one-tenth of the applicants for seats, and, when the day arrived, the audience seemed to Sarcey “like a violin whose strings are tightened and ready to vibrate under the bow.” “It was the first time,” he wrote, “I have seen an audience thus formed and in such a frame of mind. There was no artificial commotion; it was expectation, full of security and joy.” Of what followed Jules Huret wrote in Figaro: “I am afraid of my incompetence to describe the powerful, the profound emotion of those three hours, where an entire audience composed of the flower of French comedians, of well-known writers, great painters and celebrated sculptors, honored a foreign artiste with the most vibrating, the most enthusiastic, the most poignant manifestation that it is possible to witness.”
Duse played for them Cavalleria Rusticana, the last act of La Dame aux Camélias, and the second act of La Femme de Claude. Never had she acted better. When the curtain fell “the whole audience rose to its feet, bravas and vivats thundered through the house, handkerchiefs and hats were waving, flowers flew from boxes,—‘Au revoir! Au revoir! Au revoir!’—and ten times the curtain had to be raised before the smiling actress, who did not attempt to conceal her joy. Then the stage was immediately invaded by the crowd. Some wished only to see her once again; some must embrace her; others asked for a flower from the bunch she held in her hand. During one whole hour the procession did not cease. I saw there young actresses and rising actors, with tears in their eyes, not daring to approach her. Coquelin wishes to act with her just once and begs her to play in French.... Mme. Laurent comes also, and slowly, with sober words, expresses her admiration. The Ambassador of Italy and his wife arrive in their turn, and congratulate her with happy faces. And her troupe, who leave to-day for Italy, wait to say good-by.... She kisses them, much moved.” Next day Duse was fêted by the Comédie Française. What a change was this in a few short weeks! The ending was a fine outburst, of a sort possible only to the Latin races, and it marked the very zenith of Duse’s career.
Such was Duse’s progress from a poverty-stricken, obscure childhood to a place, at the age of thirty-eight, equal, to say the least, that of any actress of her day.
Duse could not fail to find deep satisfaction in her progress from triumph to triumph. But in her case one feels that biographical detail, the accidents of place and date, matter comparatively little. She was a curiously detached spirit. “If I had my will,” she once told Arthur Symons, “I would live in a ship in the sea, and never come nearer to humanity than that.” As it was, she lived only in the realm of her art. She was of infinite natural dignity, a shy, proud woman, always far removed from the petty publicities of theatrical life, like some patrician living her isolated life on a country estate. An utter simplicity and sincerity, the fruits of a fine nature and of “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” attended her always.[122] Her face, pale and typically Italian, at once sad and ardent, is the face of a woman who has thoroughly lived, but whose soul is equal to great trials. Her health was never robust,[123] and bodily weakness has often interrupted her work. Her voice was sad, her habit silence, though on rare occasions she is said to talk merrily. Although Duse as an actress and as a woman gives the impression of an all-pervading sadness, of a profound thoughtfulness, “the thoughtfulness of one who comes toward us from a sanctuary of brooding on life’s eternal questions,” the more amiable and human traits are not wholly lacking in her. She is said to be quick to grasp a joke and to be fond of humorous books. She is extravagant in her delight in flowers. At her country place in Tuscany she has literally thousands of rose bushes.
Of only medium height, she somehow on the stage suggested tallness. Her hair was once of typical Italian jet-blackness, but long ago it turned quite white, and she was forced on the stage to wear wigs; off the stage, she is said to have taken pride in her white hair. For many years she appeared on the stage without “make-up” of any kind, but after about 1900 she found it necessary as a means to the appearance of youth. Among the Italians she was known as “dalle belle mani,” for her hands were, perhaps, her chief beauty, small and beautifully wrought; and like the Italian she was, she used them expressively and gracefully. Her reticent nature showed itself in her personal tastes. Off stage and on she dressed with great simplicity, and she disliked jewelry.[124]
She became a great reader, and though she never acquired English, Shakespeare was one of her enthusiasms. Maeterlinck was another. Cryptic sciences fascinated her. In modern art, her sympathies were with the symbolists and impressionists. It was not strange that d’Annunzio, the poet-dramatist-novelist who was making his presence felt in Italy about the time of her Paris triumph, should appeal to her as a kindred spirit. His fiery exaltation of human passions, his undoubted poetic gifts, she took for real genius, and about 1900 the world heard that Duse had forsworn all dramatists else and would act henceforth nothing but d’Annunzio’s plays. The poet and the actress formed an association that was plainly more than that of friendship or professional coöperation. That she was passionately devoted to d’Annunzio for some years, and that their friendship was broken by the publication of one of his novels—in which he made literary use of what she considered their sacred alliance—was the talk of Europe. The resulting separation she is said to have taken, as she had her earlier love affair, with tragic seriousness. How much her retirement from the stage was due to this disappointment, and how much merely to advancing age, it is difficult to say.
The d’Annunzio campaign was not a success, even in Italy. His plays were not saved by patriotic interest in the author or by affection for the actress from being thought decadent and undramatic, though everywhere the richness of their poetic strain was recognized. Duse’s faith however, until the rupture with d’Annunzio, was unreasoning and unswerving. She came to the United States again in 1902, acting in his plays.[125] She did nothing with them to add to the fame she had earlier acquired, though, in spite of d’Annunzio, her acting still retained its freedom from artificiality or exaggeration.[126]
After her return to Europe her appearances became more infrequent. In 1904 she gave a “command performance” at the English court (she had always been popular in England, which received comparatively well even the d’Annunzio plays), and in 1906 she came all the way from Italy to assist in the great testimonial to Ellen Terry. Illness, which assailed her often, and weariness of her work, herself and all things else, kept her from the stage most of the time. She continued, however, to keep her company constantly under salary and at her command, and as late as 1909 it was her custom, when at rare intervals the spirit moved her, to assemble them for brief appearances in the European capitals. Of late years she has given her energy to the founding of a home for aged actors.
By means first of vivid imagining and then by the revealing power of an unobtrusive, lucid art Duse made herself the greatest artiste of her day. When the French said she had widened the horizon of her art they paid tribute to what was, after all, something akin to original genius.
“The furthest extremes of Duse’s range as an artist,” wrote Bernard Shaw, who is only one of the critics to give her the foremost place among modern actresses, “must always remain a secret between herself and a few fine observers. I should say without qualification that it is the best modern acting I have ever seen.... Duse is the first actress whom we have seen applying the method of the great school to characteristically modern parts or to characteristically modern conceptions of old parts.... In Duse you necessarily get the great school in its perfect integrity, because Duse without her genius would be a plain little woman of no use to any manager.... Duse, with her genius, is so fascinating that it is positively difficult to attend to the play, instead of attending wholly to her.... Sarah Bernhardt has nothing but her own charm.... Duse’s own private charm has not yet been given to the public. She gives you Césarine’s charm, Marguérite Gauthier’s charm, the charm of La Locandiera, the charm, in short, belonging to the character she impersonates; and you are enthralled by its reality and delighted by the magical skill of the artist without for a moment feeling any complicity either on your own part or on hers in the passion represented.” Shaw did not hesitate to enter into the once popular game of comparing Bernhardt and Duse, and in his estimate Madame Sarah is indeed a bad second. “The French artist’s stock of attitudes and facial effects could be catalogued as easily as her stock of dramatic ideas: the counting would hardly go beyond the fingers of both hands. Duse produces the illusion of being infinite in variety of beautiful pose and motion. Every idea, every shade of thought and mood, expresses itself delicately but vividly to the eye.... When it is remembered that the majority of tragic actors excel only in explosions of those passions which are common to man and brute, there will be no difficulty in understanding the indescribable distinction which Duse’s acting acquires from the fact that behind every stroke of it is a distinctively human idea.”
Duse even in her early career, when she was but little more than twenty, had already broken with dramatic traditions.[127] There was a fairly definite Italian tradition which had been made familiar by Ristori and which had been fostered by Salvini. If Duse had been French instead of Italian and if she had undergone the regular training of the Conservatoire, she would have met with another tradition, of which at the time Bernhardt was becoming an efficient missionary, imposing its standards even outside of France. Duse in some way escaped all traditions. Her training, such as it was, had been with strolling players and in provincial theatres. What this experience did succeed in giving her was the habit of dramatic expression, a habit that, by the time she had arrived at the age when the usual stage-struck girl becomes an actress, had made her mistress of self-expression, free from self-consciousness. Added to this habit of going directly to the expression of an idea or emotion there was, in Duse’s case, besides the sheer womanliness that shone through all her work, the ardent, sympathetic imagination that enabled her to project herself into another personality, sharing its emotions and divining its experiences and actions. When these emotions and these actions reached the stage of expression there was no rigid, school-taught method to hamper her. An ingrained habit of expression, coupled with an illuminating, self-effacing imagination, formed the secret of Duse’s famed “naturalness.” Most actresses interpret or “portray” a character; Duse became the character itself, transmuted into life in terms of Duse’s own mind and spirit, and, as often as not something finer, more noble, more sensitive, than the dramatist’s conception. Such a character, with her, was “a figure designed and modeled beforehand, proportioned, poised, and polished to the finger tips with a sculptor’s patient assiduity, and then, by an ever renewed miracle endowed with ‘the crowded hour of glorious life’ at the electric touch of the artist’s imagination.”[128]