The Italian woman is very near to Nature; so is true drama.
Acting is not to be judged like some other of the arts, and praised for a
"noble convention." Painting, indeed, is not praised amiss with that
word; painting is obviously an art that exists by its convention--the
convention is the art. But far otherwise is it with the art of acting,
where there is no representative material; where, that is, the man is his
own material, and there is nothing between. With the actor the style is
the man, in another, a more immediate, and a more obvious sense than was
ever intended by that saying. Therefore we may allow the critic--and not
accuse him of reaction--to speak of the division between art and Nature
in the painting of a landscape, but we cannot let him say the same things
of acting. Acting has a technique, but no convention.
Once for all, then, to say that acting reaches the point of Nature, and
touches it quick, is to say all. In other arts imitation is more or less
fatuous, illusion more or less vulgar. But acting is, at its less good,
imitation; at its best, illusion; at its worst, and when it ceases to be
an art, convention.
But the idea that acting is conventional has inevitably come about in
England. For it is, in fact, obliged, with us, to defeat and destroy
itself by taking a very full, entire, tedious, and impotent convention; a
complete body of convention; a convention of demonstrativeness--of voice
and manners intended to be expressive, and, in particular, a whole weak
and unimpulsive convention of gesture. The English manners of real life
are so negative and still as to present no visible or audible drama; and
drama is for hearing and for vision. Therefore our acting (granting that
we have any acting, which is granting much) has to create its little
different and complementary world, and to make the division of "art" from
Nature--the division which, in this one art, is fatal.
This is one simple and sufficient reason why we have no considerable
acting; though we may have more or less interesting and energetic or
graceful conventions that pass for art. But any student of international
character knows well enough that there are also supplementary reasons of
weight. For example, it is bad to make a conventional world of the
stage, but it is doubly bad to make it badly--which, it must be granted,
we do. When we are anything of the kind, we are intellectual rather than
intelligent; whereas outward-streaming intelligence makes the actor. We
are pre-occupied, and therefore never single, never wholly possessed by
the one thing at a time; and so forth.
On the other hand, Italians are expressive. They are so possessed by the
one thing at a time as never to be habitual in any lifeless sense. They
have no habits to overcome by something arbitrary and intentional.
Accordingly, you will find in the open-air theatre of many an Italian
province, away from the high roads, an art of drama that our capital
cannot show, so high is it, so fine, so simple, so complete, so direct,
so momentary and impassioned, so full of singleness and of multitudinous
impulses of passion.
Signora Duse is not different in kind from these unrenowned. What they
are, she is in a greater degree. She goes yet further, and yet closer.
She has an exceptionally large and liberal intelligence. If lesser
actors give themselves entirely to the part, and to the large moment of
the part, she, giving herself, has more to give.
Add to this nature of hers that she stages herself and her acting with
singular knowledge and ease, and has her technique so thoroughly as to be
able to forget it--for this is the one only thing that is the better for
habit, and ought to be habitual. There is but one passage of her mere
technique in which she fails so to slight it. It is in the long exchange
of stove-side talk between Nora and the other woman of "The Doll's
House." Signora Duse may have felt some misgivings as to the effect of a
dialogue having so little symmetry, such half-hearted feeling, and, in a
word, so little visible or audible drama as this. Needless to say, the
misgiving is not apparent; what is too apparent is simply the technique.
For instance, she shifts her position with evident system and notable
skill. The whole conversation becomes a dance of change and
counterchange of place.
Nowhere else does the perfect technical habit lapse, and nowhere at all
does the habit of acting exist with her.
I have spoken of this actress's nationality and of her womanhood
together. They are inseparable. Nature is the only authentic art of the
stage, and the Italian woman is natural: none other so natural and so
justified by her nature as Eleonora Duse; but all, as far as their nature
goes, natural. Moreover, they are women freer than other Europeans from
the minor vanities. Has any one yet fully understood how her liberty in
this respect gives to the art of Signora Duse room and action? Her
countrywomen have no anxious vanities, because, for one reason, they are
generally "sculpturesque," and are very little altered by mere accidents
of dress or arrangement. Such as they are, they are so once for all;
whereas, the turn of a curl makes all the difference with women of less
grave physique. Italians are not uneasy.
Signora Duse has this immunity, but she has a far nobler deliverance from
vanities, in her own peculiar distance and dignity. She lets her
beautiful voice speak, unwatched and unchecked, from the very life of the
moment. It runs up into the high notes of indifference, or, higher
still, into those of _ennui_, as in the earlier scenes of _Divorcons_; or
it grows sweet as summer with joy, or cracks and breaks outright, out of
all music, and out of all control. Passion breaks it so for her.
As for her inarticulate sounds, which are the more intimate and the truer
words of her meaning, they, too, are Italian and natural. English women,
for instance, do not make them. They are sounds _a bouche fermee_,
at once private and irrepressible. They are not demonstrations intended
for the ears of others; they are her own. Other actresses, even English,
and even American, know how to make inarticulate cries, with open mouth;
Signora Duse's noise is not a cry; it is her very thought audible--the
thought of the woman she is playing, who does not at every moment give
exact words to her thought, but does give it significant sound.
When _la femme de Claude_ is trapped by the man who has come in
search of the husband's secret, and when she is obliged to sit and listen
to her own evil history as he tells it her, she does not interrupt the
telling with the outcries that might be imagined by a lesser actress, she
accompanies it. Her lips are close, but her throat is vocal. None who
heard it can forget the speech-within-speech of one of these
comprehensive noises. It was when the man spoke, for her further
confusion, of the slavery to which she had reduced her lovers; she
followed him, aloof, with a twang of triumph.
If Parisians say, as they do, that she makes a bad Parisienne, it is
because she can be too nearly a woman untamed. They have accused her of
lack of elegance--in that supper scene of _La Dame aux Camelias_,
for instance; taking for ill-breeding, in her Marguerite, that which is
Italian merely and simple. Whether, again, Cyprienne, in _Divorcons_,
can at all be considered a lady may be a question; but this is quite
unquestionable--that she is rather more a lady, and not less, when
Signora Duse makes her a savage. But really the result is not at all
Parisian.
It seems possible that the French sense does not well distinguish, and
has no fine perception of that affinity with the peasant which remains
with the great ladies of the old civilisation of Italy, and has so long
disappeared from those of the younger civilisations of France and
England--a paradox. The peasant's gravity, directness, and
carelessness--a kind of uncouthness which is neither graceless nor, in
any intolerable English sense, vulgar--are to be found in the
unceremonious moments of every cisalpine woman, however elect her birth
and select her conditions. In Italy the lady is not a creature described
by negatives, as an author who is always right has defined the lady to be
in England. Even in France she is not that, and between the Frenchwoman
and the Italian there are the Alps. In a word, the educated Italian
_mondaine_ is, in the sense (also untranslatable) of singular, insular,
and absolutely British usage, a Native. None the less would she be
surprised to find herself accused of a lack of dignity.
As to intelligence--a little intelligence is sufficiently dramatic, if it
is single. A child doing one thing at a time and doing it completely,
produces to the eye a better impression of mental life than one receives
from--well, from a lecturer.