When she met Claude’s young pupil in the first act, she gave, while she deliberately bewitched him, the impression that she was herself the victim of an ingenuous and involuntary passion. In the second act her appeal to her husband would have deceived any jury and most judges. The notes rang out with the authentic indignation of sincerity, with the seemingly unmistakable agony of a victim of unjust circumstance and outrageous fortune; in that long and arduous scene, in that tense duel, fought inch by inch between the desperate woman and the unrelenting man, she was a gallant, a glorious fighter in a losing battle; and at the last, when she saw the game was lost, and she allowed her true nature to show, the spectacle was not that of a savage beast that can do nothing but snarl and howl, but of a gentle animal that suddenly shows ferocious teeth and reveals a hellish hate.
The finest moment of the play came after this, when she sets about her final capture of the young man and makes him deliver her husband’s secret. When she triumphed and said the word “Vieni,” it was as if one were watching some demi-goddess, some Circe, swoop gracefully but with terrible accuracy of aim on to her prey; swift and calm in the deadly certainty of her stroke and of her triumph. Nobody can ever have acted better than Duse did at that moment.
Duse’s performance as Césarine was the finest complete creative work I ever saw her do—finer, in my opinion, than her Magda, because in Magda she was too noble for the part, and rendered none of the cabotine side of the character.
The most charming of Duse’s parts was Mirandolina in Goldoni’s comedy, La Locandiera, in which she gaily twisted all men round her fingers and played on their weaknesses as a harper on his strings. On the same day she gave this exhibition of gaiety, charm, rippling fun, and sly humour, the whole as easy and spontaneous and as fresh as a melody by Mozart, she played Lydie in Alexandre Dumas’ terrible little masterpiece in one act, La Visite de Noces, and showed with unflinching truth not realism but a Tolstoy-like reality how a woman with despair in her soul can calmly and deliberately unravel the skein of man’s weakness, cowardice, and infamy, and then spit out her disgust at it.
In Scribe and Legouvé’s tinsel and lifeless melodrama, Adrienne Lecouvreur, she was wasting her talent, and indeed in her hands the greater part of the play fell flat as far as there is anything in it to fall flat. But in the death scene she revealed new phases of her genius:
“Silver lights and darks undreamed of.”
She turned the tinsel of the play into gold by her bewilderment, when she felt the first effects of the poison, her delirium, when she imagined herself on the lighted stage, and by her final battle with Death, when she recovered her senses once more, in the last moments of her agony. One gasped for breath when she felt the first throes of the poison; and when she became delirious, the surroundings seemed to fade; we were face to face with a ghost; we felt the icy wind blowing from the dark river.
In D’Annunzio’s play, La Gioconda, she might have been De Quincey’s Our Lady of Sorrows. In Sardou’s Fédora not all her technical skill could supply the acid necessary to make that particular and peculiarly constructed engine work. The engine was made for Sarah Bernhardt, and nobody else has ever succeeded in making it deliver the strong electric shock, the infectious thrill that it produced when Sarah Bernhardt dealt with it. It may not have been worth doing; but only she could do it.
Looking back on all the plays in which I saw Duse act, and on all the striking moments and scenes in those plays—her confusion when she recognised the man who had seduced her in Magda, the pathos of her death scene in La Dame aux Camélias, her withering scorn in Sardou’s Odette, her irony in Ibsen’s Doll’s House, her fiendish leer of seduction and triumph in La Femme de Claude—there was one moment in one play which impressed me more than everything else. This was in the last act of Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, when she looks at herself in a hand-glass and realises that when she loses her looks she will have lost all. Duse looked in the glass, and she passed her hand over her face. It was only a flash, a flicker; it only lasted a second, and yet in that second her face reminded me of the title of one of Kipling’s stories, The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows. She looked suddenly, and for a second, fifty years older, and one felt that the act of suicide with which the play ends was not improbable, whatever else it might be—was, in fact, inevitable.
Sarah Bernhardt, Duse, and Chaliapine were the three greatest artists I have seen on the stage; for Chaliapine, in addition to his glorious voice and his consummate singing, is a great actor, and his range is prodigious. He can sing one night in Ivan the Terrible and freeze you to the marrow by his interpretation of the grim, half-insane, majestic, and frenzied King; and the next night give you a picture of calm and serene saintliness in the part of the old Believer in Khovantincha; or in the Barbier de Seville he can be comic with a rollicking gusto. Perhaps his finest part is that of Mephistopheles in Boito’s opera. When he comes on to the stage in the first act disguised as a monk you feel that the devil is there, the Prince of Darkness, and not a fancy-dress ball Mephistopheles; and in the scene on the Brocken, he looks and plays as if he were Milton’s Satan. There is a titanic grandeur about him. He wears the pall of tragedy as easily as if it were a dressing-gown. Like all great actors, he gives you the impression that his acting is quite simple, an easy thing which anyone could do. If you watch him closely, it is impossible to detect how and when he makes a gesture or gives a look or an intonation. It is done before you have time to see it done. He told me once that his great desire and ambition was to play in Shakespeare; and his Boris Godounov, in which he gave so ineffaceable a picture of sombre ambition, brooding fear, and eating remorse, indicated that he would have been magnificent as Othello, Richard III., or Lear. The finest acting I ever saw on the English stage were Irving’s Becket with its sublimely dignified and impressive death-scene in the Cathedral; Ellen Terry’s Beatrice with its inspiring pace and rippling diction—indeed, Ellen Terry in any part, Portia, Imogen, Nance Oldfield—Sir John Hare in A Pair of Spectacles and the Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith; Mrs. Kendal in The Likeness of the Night, and, for imaginative character acting, Tree as Svengali. Hare had the same seeming simplicity in his art, the same concealment of all artifice, the same undetectable conjury that struck one in the work of Duse, Chaliapine, Sarah Bernhardt, and all great actors.