did not think that an Italian could act the part of a heroine with such
an essentially northern temperament. I have never had an opportunity
of seeing Frau Ramlo, who is considered the best Nora on the German
stage, but I have seen Ibsen’s Nora, Fru Hennings of the Royal Theatre
of Copenhagen, and I retained a vivid picture of her acting in my mind.
Fru Hennings’ Nora was a nervous little creature, with fair hair and
sharp features, very neat and _piquante_, but dressed cheaply and not
always with the best taste; she was the regular tradesman’s daughter,
with meagre purse and many pretensions, whose knowledge of life was
bounded by the narrow prejudices of the parlor. There was something
undeveloped about this Nora, with her senseless chatter, something
almost pitiable in her admiration for the self-important Helmer, and
something childish in her conception of his hidden heroism. There was
also a natural, and perhaps inherited tendency for dishonest dealings,
and a well-bred, forced cheerfulness which took the form of hopping
and jumping in a coquettish manner, because she knew that it became
her. When the time comes that she is obliged to face life with its
realities, her feeble brain becomes quite confused, and she hops
round the room in her tight stays, with her fringe and high-heeled
boots, till, nervous and void of self-control as she is, she excites
herself into the wildest apprehensions. This apprehension was the
masterpiece of Fru Hennings’ masterly acting. She kept the mind fixed
on a single point, which had all the more powerful effect in that it
was so characteristically depicted,--she showed us the way by which
a respectable tradesman’s daughter may be driven to the madhouse or
to suicide. But when the change takes place, and a fully developed,
argumentative, woman’s rights woman jumps down upon the little goose,
then even Fru Hennings’ undoubted art was not equal to the occasion.
The part fell to pieces, and two Noras remained, connected only by
a little thread,--the miraculous. Fru Hennings disappears with an
unspoken _au revoir!_
When Eleonora Duse comes upon the stage as Nora, she is a pale,
unhealthy-looking woman, with a very quiet manner. She examines
her purse thoughtfully, and before paying the servant she pauses
involuntarily, as poor people usually do before they spend money. And
when she throws off her shabby fur cloak and fur cap, she appears
as a thin, black-haired Italian woman, clad in an old, ill-fitting
red blouse. She plays with the children, without any real gayety, as
grown-up people are in the habit of playing when their thoughts are
otherwise occupied. Fru Linden enters, and to her she tells her whole
history with true Italian volubility, but in an absent manner, like a
person who is not thinking of what she is saying. She likes best to
sit on the floor--very unlike women of her class--and to busy herself
with the Christmas things. In the scene with Helmer an expression of
submissive tenderness comes over her, she likes to be with him, she
feels as though his presence afforded her protection, and she nestles
to his side, more like a sick person than a child.
The scenes which are impressed with Nora’s modern nervousness come
and go, but Duse never becomes nervous. The many emotional and sudden
changes which take place, the unreasonable actions and other minor
peculiarities of a child of the _bourgeois décadence_,--these do
not concern her. Duse never acts the nervous woman, either here or
elsewhere. She does not act it, because she has too true and delicate
a nervous susceptibility. She can act the most passionate feelings,
and she often does so; but she never acts a capricious, nervous
disposition. She has too refined a taste for that, and her soul is too
full of harmony.
Ibsen’s Nora is hysterical, and only half a woman; and that is what he,
with his poetic intuition, intended her to be. Eleonora Duse’s Nora is
a complete woman. Crushed by want and living in narrow surroundings,
there is a certain obtuseness about her which renders her willing
to subject herself to new misfortunes. There is also something of
the child in her, as there is in every true woman; but even in her
child-like moments she is a sad child. Then the misfortune happens!
But, strange to say, she makes no desperate attempt to resist it; she
gives no hysterical cry of fear, as a meaner soul would do in the
struggle for life. There is something pitiable in a struggle such as
that, where power and will are so disproportionately unlike. Duse’s
Nora hastily suppresses the first suggestion of fear; but she does
not admire her muff meanwhile, like Fru Hennings. She merely repeats
to herself over and over again in answer to her thoughts: “No, no!”
I never heard any one say “no” like her; it contains a whole world
of human feeling. But all through the night she hears fate say “Yes,
yes!” and the next day, which is Christmas Day, she is overcome with a
fatalistic feeling. She dresses herself for the festival, but not with
cheap rags like Nora; she wears an expensive dark green dress, which
hangs down in rich graceful folds. It is her only best dress, and sets
off her figure to perfection; it makes her look tall and slender, but
also very weary. And as the play goes on, she becomes even more weary
and more resigned, and when death comes, there is no help for it.
Then, after the rehearsal of the tarantella, when Helmer calls to her
from the dining-room and she knows that fate can no longer be averted,
she leaps through the air into his arms with a cry of joy,--to look
at her one would think that she was one of those thin, wild, joyless
Bacchantes whose bas-reliefs have come down to us from the later period
of Grecian art.
The third act:--Nora and Helmer return from the mask ball. She is
absent-minded and quite indifferent to everything that goes on around
her. That which she knows is going to happen, is to her already a
thing of the past, since she has endured it all in anticipation; her
actions in the matter are only mechanical.
When Helmer goes to empty the letter-box, she does not try to stop him
with a hundred excuses, she scarcely makes a weak movement to hold him
back; she knows that it must come, nothing that she can do will prevent
it. While Helmer reads the letter, she stands pale and motionless, and
when he rushes at her, she throws on her mantle and leaves the room
without another word.
He drags her back and overwhelms her with reproaches, in which the
pitiful meanness of his soul is laid bare. Now Duse’s acting begins
in earnest, now the dramatic moment has come--the only moment in the
drama--for the sake of which she took the part.
She stands by the fireplace, with her face towards the audience,
and does not move a muscle until he has finished speaking. She says
nothing, she never interrupts him. Only her eyes speak. He runs
backwards and forwards, up and down the room, while she follows him
with her large, suffering eyes, which have an unnatural look in them,
follows him backwards and forwards in unutterable surprise,--a surprise
which seems to have fallen from heaven, and which changes little by
little into an unutterable, inconceivable disappointment, and that
again into an indescribably bitter, sickening contempt. And into her
eyes comes at last the question: “Who are you? What have you got to do
with me? What do you want here? What are you talking about?”
The other letter drops into the letter-box, and Helmer loads her with
tender, patronizing words. But she does not hear him. She is no longer
looking at him. What does the chattering creature want now? She does
not know him at all. She has never loved him. There was once a man
whose sympathy she possessed, and who was her protector. That man is no
more, and she has never loved any one!
She turns away with a gesture of displeasure, and goes to change her
clothes, anxious to get away as quickly as possible. He stops her. What
then? The woman is awake in her. She is a woman in the moment of a
woman’s greatest ignominy,--when she discovers that she does not love.
What does he want with her? Why does he raise objections? He----? _Tant
de bruit pour une omelette!_ She throws him a few indifferent words,
shrugs her shoulders, turns her back upon him, and goes quickly out at
the door. Presently we hear the front door close with a bang. There is
no mention at all about the “miracle.”
That is how Duse united Nora’s double personality. Make it up! There
is no making it up between the man and wife, except the kiss and the
shrug of the shoulders. She ignores Ibsen’s principal argument. Reason,
indeed? Reason has never settled anything in stern reality, least of
all as regards the relationship between husband and wife. One day Nora
wakes up and finds that Helmer has become loathsome to her, and she
runs away from him with the instinctive horror of a living person for
a decomposed corpse. Of course nothing “miraculous” can happen, for
that would mean that the living person should go mad and return to the
corpse.
Eleonora Duse treats all her parts in the same independent manner that
she treats the text of Nora. When we are able to follow her, and that
is by no means always, we notice how she alters it to suit herself,
how another being comes to the front,--a being who has no place in
the written words, and whom the author never thought of, whom he,
in most cases, could certainly not have drawn from his own views of
life and his own inner consciousness. Duse’s heroine is more womanly,
in the deeper sense of the word, than the society ladies in Ibsen’s
and Sardou’s dramas, and she is not only more simple than they are,
but also far greater. Eleonora Duse is not a dialectician like Ibsen
and Sardou; their hair-splitting logic is no concern of hers, and it
certainly was not written for her. She has an instinctive, unerring
intuition of what the part should be, and she throws herself into it
and acts accordingly. She does not vary much; she is not a realist who
makes a careful note of every little peculiarity, and arranges them in
a pattern of mosaic; she is truthful to a reckless extent, but not
always true to the letter; sometimes like this, sometimes like that,
she differs in the different parts. She is true, because she is proud
and courageous enough to show herself as she really is. There is no
need for her to be otherwise. There is danger of uniformity in this
great simplicity of hers, and she would not escape it if it were not
for her emotional nature, and an intense, almost painful sincerity,
which was perhaps never represented on the stage before her time, and
which was certainly never before made the groundwork of a woman’s
feelings. She comes to meet us half absorbed in her own thoughts, a
complete woman,--complete in that indissoluble unity which is the
basis of a healthy woman’s nature: woman-child and also woman-mother,
a woman with the stamp which is the result of deep, vital experience,
with a woman’s tragedy ineffaceably engraved on every feature,--this
same woman’s tragedy which she reproduces upon the stage. It is the
fact of her not troubling herself about anything else that imbues her
acting with an air of simplicity, and because she is such a complete
woman herself, there is an air of indescribable stateliness about her
acting. She not only simplified all that she took in hand, but she
also improved it. For all these characters which she created were the
result of the completeness of her womanly nature, and that is why they
never had but the one motive, for all the evil they did, and for their
hate: they revenged themselves for the _crimen læsæ majestatis_, which
sin was committed against their womanly nature, and which a true woman
never forgives, as when the priceless pearl of her womanhood has been
misused. That is why they made no pathetic gestures, no noise or tragic
screams, but acted quietly and silently, as we do a thing which is
expected of us, with a quiet indifference, as when intact nature bows
itself under and assists fate.
That is how Duse acted Nora, but she acted Clotilde in “Fernande” in
the same mood, also Odette in the play, called by the same name, both
by Sardou, and that was more difficult. Clotilde and Odette are a
couple of vulgar people. Clotilde, a widow of distinction, revenges
herself upon a young man of proud and noble family, who has been her
lover for many years, but has broken his marriage vows, by encouraging
his attachment for a dishonored girl, whom she persuades him to marry,
and afterwards triumphantly tells him his wife’s history.
Odette’s husband finds her one night with her lover, and he turns
her out of the house in the presence of witnesses. For several years
she leads a dissolute life, dishonoring the name of her husband and
grown-up daughter. This stain on the family makes it almost impossible
for the latter to marry, and the husband offers the fallen woman a
large sum of money to deprive her of his name. She agrees, on condition
that she shall be allowed to see her daughter. She is prevented from
making herself known to the latter, and when she comes away after the
interview, she drowns herself in a fit of hysterical self-contempt.
Such are the contents of the two pieces into which Duse put her
greatest and best talent.
IV
She comes as Clotilde into the gambling saloon, to inquire after the
young girl whom she had nearly driven over. She is simply dressed, and
has the appearance of a distinguished lady, with a happy and virtuous
past. The manner in which she receives the girl in her own house,
talks to her and puts her at her ease, was so kind and hearty that
the audience, very unexpectedly in this scene, broke into a storm of
applause before the curtain had gone down. Her lover returns from a
journey which arouses her suspicion, and she, anxious not to deceive
herself, elicits the confession that he no longer cares for her, and is
in love with some one else. That some one is Fernande. He goes to look
for her, finds her in the same house, and returns immediately. Clotilde
thinks that he has come back to her. Her speechless delight must be
seen, for it cannot be described; her whole being is suffused with a
radiant joy, she trembles with excitement. When it is all made plain to
her, and there is no longer any room for doubt, she bows her head over
his hand for an instant, as though to kiss it, as she had so often done
before, then she strokes it softly with her own.... She will never look
into his face again, yet she cannot cease to love the clear, caressing
hand, which calls to mind her former happiness.
She lets things take their course, and when it is over she has the
scene with Pomerol, when she defends her conduct. Duse has a form
of dialectic peculiar to herself, which is neither sensible nor
deliberate, but impulsive. When she does wrong she does it--not because
she is bad, but because she cannot help herself. A part of her nature,
which was the source of her life, is wounded and sick unto death, and a
gnawing, burning pain compels her to commit deeds as dark and painful
as her own heart. She goes about it quietly, doing it all as a matter
of course; to her they seem inevitable as the outer expression of a
hidden suffering.
She is at her best in the passionate “Fédora,” when she represents this
state of blank amazement, mingled with despair, taking the place of
what has been love. If she afterwards comes across the French cynic,
she reasons with him too--but like a woman, _i.e._, she drowns his
arguments in an extraordinary number of interjections, with or without
words. She never crosses the threshold of her life as an actress, she
never once attains to the consciousness of objective judgment.
When the man whom she loves is married to the dishonored girl, Clotilde
comes to bring him the information which she has reserved until now.
Suddenly she stands in the doorway, and sees that he is alone, and
there comes over her an indescribable expression of dumb, suppressed
love. She seems to be making a frantic appeal to the past to be as
though it had never taken place, and in the emotion of the moment she
has forgotten what brought her there. Not until he has unceremoniously
shown her the door, and opened the old wound, does she tell him who his
wife is.
The same with “Odette.” She is in love, and she receives her lover. At
that moment her husband comes home. (Andó, Duse’s partner, is almost
as good an actor as she is.) He is a shallow, restless, hot-tempered
little man, who seizes her by the shoulders as she is about to throw
herself into the other man’s arms. She collapses altogether, and stands
before him stammering and ashamed. He thrusts her out of the house,
although it is the middle of the night, and she is lightly clad. In a
moment she has drawn herself up to her full height,--a woman deprived
of home and child, on whom the deadliest injury has been inflicted in
the most barbarous manner; in the presence of such cruelty, her own
fault sinks to nothing, and with a voice as hoarse as that of an animal
at bay, she cries, “Coward!” and leaves him.
Many years have gone by, and we meet Odette once more, this time as
a courtesan in a gambling saloon. She is very much aged,--a thin,
disillusioned woman, for whom her husband is searching everywhere, with
the intention of depriving her of his name. There is still something
about her which bears the impress of the injured woman. She recalls the
past as clearly as though it happened only yesterday; for she can never
forget it, and time has not lessened the disgrace. She treats him with
wearied indifference, and her voice is harsh like an animal’s, and she
chokes as though she were trying to smother her indignation.
Then follows the last act, when she meets her daughter. She comes in,
dressed like an unhappy old widow, shaking with emotion, and scarcely
able to contain herself. Her eyes are aglow with excitement, as she
rushes forward, ready to cast herself into her daughter’s arms. But
when she sees the fresh, innocent girl, she is overcome with a feeling
of shyness, and shrinks from her with an awkward, anxious gesture.
She speaks hesitatingly, like one who is ill at ease; she raises her
shoulders and stoops, and holds her thin, restless hands clasped
together, lest they should touch her daughter. The girl displays the
various little souvenirs that belonged to her mother, and plays the
piece which was her favorite, and talks about her “dead mother.” Then
this man and woman are stirred with a deep feeling, which is the
simple keynote of humanity, which they never experienced before in
the days when they were together. And they sit and cry, each buried in
their own sorrow, and far apart from one another. After that she puts
her trembling arms round the girl, and kisses her with an expression
in her face which it is impossible to simulate, and which cannot be
imitated,--which no one understands except the woman who is herself a
mother. She gazes at her daughter as though she could never see enough
of her; she strokes her with feverish hands, arranges the lace on her
dress, and you feel the joy that it is to her to touch the girl, and
to know that she is really there. Then she becomes very quiet, as
though she had suffered all that it was possible for her to suffer.
As she passes her husband, she catches hold of his outstretched hand,
and tries to kiss it. Then she tears herself away, overcome with the
feeling that she can endure it no longer.
Eleonora Duse prefers difficult parts. She was nothing more than
an ordinary actress in “La Locandiera,” and the witty dialogue in
“Cyprienne” and “Francillon” had little in common with her nature.
Even the part of “La Dame aux Camélias” was an effort to her. The
silly, frivolous cocotte, with her consumptive longing to be loved,
was too exaggerated a part for Eleonora Duse. A superabundance of good
spirits is foreign to her nature, which is sad as life itself. Pride
and arrogance she cannot act, nor yet the trustfulness which comes from
inexperience. She gave the impression of not feeling young enough for
“La Dame aux Camélias’” happy and unhappy moods. Eleonora Duse’s art is
most at home where life’s great enigma begins:--Where do we come from?
Why are we here? Where are we going to? We are tossed to and fro on the
waters in a dense fog; we suffer wrong, and we do wrong, and we know
not why. Fate! fate! We are powerless in the hands of Fate! When Duse
can act the blindness of fatalism, then she is content.
She was able to do so in “Fédora.”
The pretty, fashionable heroine does not change into a fury when the
man whom she loves is brought home murdered. When we meet her again she
is quite quiet,--a calm, cold woman of the world, with only one object
in life, which is to punish the murderer. It is a task like any other,
but it is inevitable, and must be undertaken as a matter of course. She
makes no display of anger, and takes no perverse pleasure in thoughts
of vengeance. The murderer is nothing to her,--he is a stranger. But
she has been rendered desolate in the flower of her youth; the table of
life, which is never spread more than once, has been upset before her
eyes at the very moment of her anticipated happiness, and this is an
injury which she is going to repay. She is proud, and has no illusions;
she is a just judge, who recompenses evil with evil and good with good.
This “Fédora” is reserved and unreasoning.
The scene changes. She loves the man whom she has been pursuing, and
she discovers that the dead man has been false to both of them, and
she realizes that now for the first time life’s table is spread for
her, while the secret police, to whom she has betrayed him, are waiting
outside, and she clings to him terrified, showers caresses upon him,
kisses him with unspeakable tenderness. There is something in her of
the helplessness of a little child, mingled with a mother’s protecting
care, as she implores him to remain, and entices him to love, and seeks
refuge in his love, as a terrified animal seeks refuge in its hole.
There are two other features of Eleonora Duse’s art which deserve
notice. These are, the way in which she tells a lie, and the way she
acts death. As I have said already, she is not a realist, and she
frames her characters from her inner consciousness, not from details
gathered from the outward features of life. Her representation of death
is also the outcome of her instinct. A death scene has no meaning
for her unless it reflects the inner life. As a process of physical
dissolution, she takes no interest in it. She has not studied death
from the side of the sick-bed, and she makes short work of it in
“Fédora,” as also in “La Dame aux Camélias.” In the first piece, the
point which she emphasizes is the sudden determination to take the
poison; in the second, it is her joy at having the man whom she loves
near her at the last.
Then her manner of lying. When Duse tells a lie, she does it as if it
were the simplest and most natural thing in the world. Her lies and
deceptions are as engaging, persuasive, and fantastic as a child’s.
Lying is an important factor in the character of a woman who has much
to fight against, and it is a weapon which she delights to use, and
the use of it renders her unusually fascinating and affectionate. Even
those who do not understand the words of the play, know when Duse is
telling a lie, because she becomes so unusually lively and talkative,
and her large eyes have an irresistible sparkle in them.
“Cavalleria Rusticana” was the only good Italian play that Duse acted.
She was more of a realist in this piece than in any other, because
she reproduced what she had seen daily before her eyes,--her native
surroundings, her fellow-countrymen,--instead of that which she had
learned by listening to her own soul. Her Santuzza--the poor, forsaken
girl with the raw, melancholy, guttural accents of despair--was
life-like and convincing, but the barbaric wildness of the exponent was
something which was as startling in this stupid, pale weakly creature
as a roar from the throat of a roe deer.
V
And now to sum up:--Eleonora Duse goes touring all round the world.
She is going to America, and she is certain to go back to Berlin and
St. Petersburg and Vienna, and other places where she may or may not
have been before. She will have to travel and act, travel and act, as
all popular actresses have done before her. She will grow tired of it,
unspeakably tired,--we can see that already,--but she will be obliged
to go on, till she becomes stereotyped, like all the others.