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.”