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.