The Return of Eleonora Duse

The Sensational Success of the Great Tragedienne's Recent Season in London

MAURICE BARING

Author of "Dead Letters", Etc.

GREAT acting, really great acting, of the first and most fulsome magnitude, is a rare phenomenon, and nothing receives more abundant lip-service from the world. And yet the artistic career of the great actor or actress, like that of most artists, is one long calvary, and tangible recognition often comes when the artist's career is almost over. Eleonora Duse played in London in 1893; she played in La Dame aux Camelias, in La Locandiera, and other plays, and the world agreed that she was a very great artist, but they did not crowd the theater.

In 1895, she was with us for another season; she played Magda, and the critics praised her to the skies. In 1905 she came back again and revealed new facets of her genius; she played in D'Annunzio, she played Adrienne Lecouvreur, Fedora, Odette, La Visile dc Noces, and La Femme de Claude. Never had her art been greater. She was in the full force of her powers; she had achieved the ripeness of experience without having lost the buoyancy of youth; but she played for the most part to empty or semi-empty houses. She came back again later; she played Paula Tanqueray and her art seemed to be greater than ever: the critics were as loud as ever in her praise, but the theater was seldom full.

A Tardy Triumph

OF course, there was the barrier of language. It is only fair to remember that it is a great deal to expect an audience to follow a play in a language that they do not understand, and in certain parts the greatness and point of the acting depends often on the intonation that is given to certain phrases, the way a single word is given a special value, the inflection that charges a word with a world of feeling, power, pathos, irony, or fun.

These things are lost upon those who cannot follow a play in the original. But the fact remains that before the summer Duse received, in England, lip-service in plenty, but little else. And now, fifteen years later, she comes back to us, playing the parts of old women, such as Mrs. Alving in Ghosts, and the theater is so crowded that the theatrical agencies have waiting lists for "returns" and people advertise seats for sale at five pounds each in the Agony Column of the "Times"; the audience so enthusiastic that they rise, as one person, after the plays, and cheer and weep and insist upon remaining until the weary actress can hardly bear the strain of it all. And yet she is still playing in the Italian language. Such are the vicissitudes of the career of the artist.

The younger generation, who knew of Duse only by hearsay, were, of course, anxious to see her and to know whether they agreed with the dithyrambs they had read by an older generation of critics. They were not disappointed. "She can never," I heard one of the youngest and most brilliant of Oxford undergraduates say, "have been as beautiful as she is now." Duse appeared in three plays: The Lady from the Sea and Ghosts by Ibsen, and in CosiSia (Thy Will Be Done), an Italian mystery play by Gallarti Scotti. The first play she appeared in was the Lady from the Sea, and she had not been on the stage a minute before all doubts were at an end.

Yes, she looked older, considerably older; her face seemed to have been ravaged by sorrow, but she seemed to be more, instead of less, beautiful, and time, which had whitened her hair and hollowed her cheeks, had added, it seemed, further mystery to the depth of her eyes, and had enlarged and enriched the range and the tone of her voice. The movements, the grace, the supersubtle skill with which every point was made, were as wonderful as ever, and there was something more: a greater depth, a greater width, something, perhaps, that only the years can give.

Duse as She Is Today

AFTER Duse had been on the stage talking and moving for a few minutes, you no more bothered to think whether she was young or old than you questioned the presence of the footlights or the stage properties. What she was doing was right, inevitably, and she held the whole great audience in the hollow of her hand. And yet, the play itself was tedious enough, if you knew Italian, and must have been insufferable to those who looked on at it through the mosquito net of non-comprehension. But it gave her great opportunities. You forgot about Ibsen. What did he mean when he wrote this play about the enigmatic lady who is the victim of a sea-change, who is haunted by the thoughts of the sea? Was he laughing at himself, at his own heroines, his Rebeccas, his Norahs? Did he mean his Ellida to be pilloried as a warning to show how absurdly people could behave in Norway; or was he preaching a sermon on liberty or writing a dramatic poem? Or, was he expressing the reaction that he felt after writing Rosmersholm?

"The Lady from the Sea" is the daughter of an inspector of Lighthouses; she married Doctor Wangel, who is twenty-five or thirty years older than she, and the father of two grown-up daughters. It was not a love marriage; she feels sincere friendship for her husband and nothing more. Her heart belongs to another, to a mysterious sailor, whom she had met by chance. He had to leave the country in a hurry, as he was (justly) suspected of having stabbed the captain of his ship, but before going, he had taken a ring from Ellida and a ring from his own finger, slipped them on a large ring and flung them both into the sea, saying that he and Ellida now were both wedded to the sea.

The Dramatic Situation

THE sailor went away, but Ellida heard from him later and he told her that she must wait for him. He would let her know when he was ready, and then she must come to him at once. Forever after this Ellida is haunted by the thbught of the sea and tormented by the desire for it. She feels herself suffocated in the landlocked fjords. One day, the stranger comes back and recalls her promise and claims its redemption. He will come back in twenty-four hours, he says, to fetch her, only if she is to go away with him, it must be of her own free-will. He comes, and Wangel, her husband, gives her back her liberty—she is to choose as she pleases; the moment that Ellida feels that she is free to choose, the spell is broken, and she no longer wants to go. She will never leave her husband now. The moral of the play is, perhaps, that nothing is so sacred as liberty, that laws become binding only when we have accepted them of our own free will.

Out of this rather uneven drama, which, in the Italian version, was rendered still more uneven by half of the play being left out, Duse fashioned a wonderful poem of dream, yearning, sorrow and fear. She showed us a woman who had suffered greatly, perhaps, and who lived in a world of dreams which had once been delicious but which had become terrible, not only through its tyranny but through its unknown possibilities. She is forever haunted by the obsession of the sea, and she does not know what this dream will lead her to. She wants to be saved from herself, from her dream. When a stranger from the sea actually appears in the flesh, her first movement is one of perfectly natural joy at the arrival of a long expected friend, and the manner in which this involuntary expression of joyful recognition escaped from the lips of Duse, the way she said the words, "Ecco-ti!" was an unforgettable piece of the very rarest acting. It had about it the stamp of divine simplicity.

This fleeting moment of joy is immediately succeeded by the shadow of terror, and Duse, as she cowered behind her husband imploring him to save her, cast one of those spells over the audience that seem to be almost palpable. But before this moment the climax of the play was reached, and indeed from the first moment she came on the stage, she conveyed a sense of suffering, and of suffering deep down in the soul; suffering, too, from an intangible unearthly cause in so poignant a fashion that it was almost unbearable to watch her and listen to her.

Duse as Mrs. Alving in "Ghosts"

IN Ghosts Duse transfigured the part of Mrs. Alving, and she changed the middle class Norwegian "highbrow" woman, who had so painfully thought out for herself perplexing questions of conduct and morality, into an imperial figure. The great effects of her acting in this play, like all her great effects, differ from those of other great actors and actresses in this: that when they happen they seem to transcend limits or limitations of the stage and to reach what belongs only to the innermost regions of real life. In real life human beings, when faced by catastrophe, are dramatic not by what they do and say, but by what they do not do and do not say; by their silence, their reticence, the way in which they go on with whatever has to be done.

That is a difficult thing for an actor to express on the stage, which demands, as a rule, a certain amount of exaggeration and where, if a point is to be made, it must be made clearly. Duse achieves this very thing. At the end of the first act of Ghosts, when Mrs. Alving hears through the door her husband's history repeating itself and the hidden sins of the father blossoming in a terrible fashion in the son, a look comes over Duse's face, as though she had received the crowning and final blow of calamity; and yet there came into her eyes also and in the lines of her mouth, a set expression of determination, a courage to go on. and to face whatever had to be faced, and not to show it, not to betray what she was feeling and suffering, not to reveal for one second the torture of the hidden wound; and this experience which she conveyed, Heaven knows how, although common enough in. real life, needs for its presentation and manifestation on the stage, and in front of the footlights, a command of consummate craftsmanship, and an infallible certainty of instinct: a divine authority.

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The Subtle Progress of Duse s Effects

DUSE'S art in this way, and indeed in everything she plays, is a gradual process of preparation, which begins from the first moment she walks on to the stage: she phrases every leit-motif and theme subtly and progressively with divine economy of effort until she reaches a culminating point, so that when the culminating point, the climax, comes, it seems to make itself. All style, at these moments in Duse's acting, disappears; she gets beyond style and nature. She reminds one of Matthew Arnold's saying about Wordsworth's poetry, that Nature seemed at times to take the pen from him and write for him. Duse becomes at these moments—Nature herself.

Cosa Sia, the mystery play, was the only Italian work in which Duse appeared, It is not a great work of art, and I do not think it is a work of art at all. It exploits some of the qualities of the Italian artist just as Sardou's melodramas exploited the electric shocks which the genius of Sarah Bernhardt was capable of giving, But those who saw Madame Duse in the part will never forget it. They may even hesitate before seeing it a second time, as it is an experience that harrows the feelings beyond all bounds.

During the whole first act we see a mother watching over the sick bed of her little boy, her little boy who is dying, and when the father comes in, and makes unreasonable remarks, she tells him to go away and to leave her alone. I saw two of the performances of this play, and in the first performance, Madame Duse, when she played that scene, dismissed the husband with a sudden authoritative gesture and an imperative accent that one felt came from the Holy of Holies of Motherhood. The second time I saw her she played the scene and said the words "Go away" in a different fashion. She said them to herself without looking up, too deeply drowned andsubmerged in her misery to rise to the surface; too far away to listen, almost too sad to mourn, out of reach of all consideration, and reason, and attention, only wanting to be left alone like a wounded animal,

I do not know which of these two renderings was the finer. Both of them seemed to be sublime. In both of them she revealed what Anatole France, in talking of Marie Antoinette during her trial, calls, "La majeste d'une mere". In Ghosts, Duse had already shown what she could do when dealing with motherhood, but in this Italian play she revealed fresh aspects of the theme and new facets of her genius. In Ghosts she gave us the infinite sympathy, the profound suffering, the tigerish courage, of motherhood; ready to do everything for a suffering son, capable of understanding everything, ready to face and to dare all, however impossible, however dreadful,

The Supreme Ecstasy of Great Art

IN the Italian play she showed us motherhood au grand complet, over the cradle when the mother whispers and argues with the Mother of God; motherhood outraged in its dignity, when her son thinks she is begging, and offers her broken heart, that is crying for the balm of one word of love, a purse of gold, and, finally, broken motherhood, imploring God that her son may not be punished for the wrong he had done her and taking the blame upon herself and offering all she has left of her life,

It is a terrible spectacle, and were it not for the great beauty of Madame Duse's acting, it would not be bearable,

I am told that the Italian public did not bear it. In seeing it I felt more, what I have so often felt in looking at Duse's acting, that one was looking through a key-hole at things too sacred and too intimate for mortal inspection, and that her acting made one feel like a cad.

One had no right to be there; one was violating the sanctuary of sacred things and listening at the curtain of a forbidden confessional. So tremendous, so intimate and so rare is the artless art of Eleonora Duse, thus brought to the British stage.