III
I saw Duse 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 is considered 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 and piquante, 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 showed us 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 unspoken au 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 presence afforded 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 the bourgeois 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 power and 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 to her 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: “Who are 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 has never 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 of mosaic; 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 the evil they did, and for their hate: they revenged themselves for the crimen 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 allowed to 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.