CHAPTER XVI
LONDON, MANCHURIA, RUSSIA
During the summer of 1905 I did a certain amount of dramatic criticism for the Morning Post. I wrote notices on some of the foreign plays that were being given in London during that summer. Several foreign companies were with us. Duse had a season at the Waldorf Theatre; Coquelin played in L’Abbé Constantin, rather a tiresome, goody-goody play; Sarah Bernhardt produced Victor Hugo’s Angelo, l’Aiglon, Pelléas et Mélisande (with Mrs. Patrick Campbell), Phèdre, and Adrienne Lecouvreur, not Scribe and Legouvé’s play, but a play of her own.
I saw Duse display the full range of her powers in Alexandre Dumas fils’ La Femme de Claude; Goldoni’s La Locandiera; Dumas’ Une Visite de Noces, La Dame aux Camélias, Adrienne Lecouvreur; and D’Annunzio’s Gioconda; Sardou’s Odette and Fédora.
The most interesting of these performances was, I think, her Césarine in La Femme de Claude. Duse was blamed for appearing in a repertory of such plays. She was said to complain of the repertory herself. But it is doubtful whether, apart from all booking-office questions of popularity, she would have appeared to a greater advantage in plays of a more exalted character. Duse was not a tragic actress in the sense one imagines Mrs. Siddons and Rachel were tragic. She could not enlarge a masterpiece of poetry by her interpretation, nor give you a plastic poetic creation like a piece of a Greek frieze, as Sarah Bernhardt could and did in Phèdre. She was not the incarnation of the tragic muse; the gorgeous pall overwhelmed her; when she played Cleopatra, for instance (Shakespeare’s Cleopatra much mutilated), her peculiar power seemed to melt into thin air. I once heard a celebrated French actress, and a French critic, who had both only seen her play Cleopatra, wonder what her reputation was based on. What she needed was something between high comedy and tragedy; and this was precisely what she found in certain parts of the modern repertory of Ibsen, D’Annunzio, Sardou, Dumas fils, and Pinero, in which she played during that summer.
Dumas’ play, La Femme de Claude, gave her not only an opportunity of showing her astonishing skill, her perfect technique, but it revealed unguessed-of, almost incredible, aspects of her genius. When she played parts such as Sudemann’s Magda and La Dame aux Camélias, one used to feel as if one ought not to be there; as if one were peeping through a keyhole at scenes of too intimate and too sacred a nature for the public eye. When Amando hurled money and hissed vituperation at her in the fourth act of La Dame aux Camélias, one felt as if the police ought to interfere, and save so noble a creature from outrage. One doubted whether Duse were an artist or even an actress in the true sense of the word, and whether all she gave were not glimpses of the extraordinary nobility of her personality; whether the play were not beside the question; whether she might not just as well appear on the stage in her ordinary clothes and tell us a few confidences—her joys and her sorrows.
But her performance in La Femme de Claude proved the contrary. It proved that in the subtle and objective interpretation of a definite character, a character utterly alien to her own nature, she could rival, if not surpass, any artist in the world.
La Femme de Claude was said by Théodore de Banville to be a symbolic play. Call it that if you will, or call it a melodrama. The subject is simple and dramatic, the action rapid and vigorous. An austere scientific engineer called Claude has married an evil wife, Césarine. She leaves him. He invents a new and powerful gun. She comes back. A foreign spy blackmails her. He threatens to make revelations about her to her husband, unless she obtains for him the secret of the gun. At first she defies this man. She says her husband knows all there is to be known; he then mentions incidents that her husband cannot know, for the bare knowledge of them would make him an accessory in crime. She undertakes to get the secret. She tries to win back her husband, fails, and then shows her teeth. She sets about to seduce her husband’s pupil, a young man who is already in love with her. She persuades him to give her the papers and her husband shoots her dead when they are about to elope. At first sight you would have thought that Duse’s genius was too refined and too noble to render the snake-like, feline, insinuating, feverish, treacherous, panther-like, savage nature of Dumas’ she-monster. Sarah Bernhardt is the artist who at once leaps into the mind as being suited to the part, a part that might have been written for her. I have seen Sarah Bernhardt play it and play it superbly. At certain moments she carried you right off your feet.
But Duse played on the nerves till they vibrated like strings, in the same manner as she herself was tremulously vibrating. It was a gradual process of preparation, which began from the first moment she walked on to the stage until she fell forward at the end with outstretched hands when she was shot. Her art was like that of a cunning violinist; the music with its delicately interwoven themes was phrased in subtle progress and with divine economy of effect, till she reached the catastrophe, and then Duse attained to that height where all style disappears, and only the perfection of art, in which all artifice is concealed, remains. The climax needed no effort, no strain; it was the way every note had been struck before, that made it tremendous.
Of course she transfigured Césarine, the heroine; in the modern repertory she always raised the scale of everything she touched, so that you cried out for her to play tragedy, and that was just what she could not do. She did not make Dumas’ heroine a better woman than he intended her to be; but she made her a greater woman than he can ever have hoped she would appear. Duse’s Césarine was wicked to the core; not thoughtlessly non-moral, not invincibly ignorant in her wickedness, but consciously and deliberately destructive; and the manifestation and expression of this unmitigated evil was rendered ten times more impressive by the subtlety of its expression and the delicate refinement which it was clothed with and partially disguised. Duse reminded one of Tacitus’ description of Nero’s wife, Poppæa, who, he says, professed virtue but practised vice; and whose demeanour was irreproachably modest. “Sermo comis nec absurdum ingenium: modestiam præferre et lascivia uti.”