I
The acting of Duse is a criticism; poor work dissolves away under it, as
under a solvent acid. Not one of the plays which she has brought with
her is a play on the level of her intelligence and of her capacity for
expressing deep human emotion. Take "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray." It is a
very able play, it is quite an interesting glimpse into a particular
kind of character, but it is only able, and it is only a glimpse. Paula,
as conceived by Mr. Pinero, is a thoroughly English type of woman, the
nice, slightly morbid, somewhat unintelligently capricious woman who has
"gone wrong," and who finds it quite easy, though a little dull, to go
right when the chance is offered to her. She is observed from the
outside, very keenly observed; her ways, her surface tricks of emotion,
are caught; she is a person whom we know or remember. But what is
skin-deep in Paula as conceived by Mr. Pinero becomes a real human
being, a human being with a soul, in the Paula conceived by Duse. Paula
as played by Duse is sad and sincere, where the Englishwoman is only
irritable; she has the Italian simplicity and directness in place of
that terrible English capacity for uncertainty in emotion and huffiness
in manner. She brings profound tragedy, the tragedy of a soul which has
sinned and suffered, and tries vainly to free itself from the
consequences of its deeds, into a study of circumstances in their ruin
of material happiness. And, frankly, the play cannot stand it. When this
woman bows down under her fate in so terrible a spiritual loneliness,
realising that we cannot fight against Fate, and that Fate is only the
inevitable choice of our own natures, we wait for the splendid words
which shall render so great a situation; and no splendid words come. The
situation, to the dramatist, has been only a dramatic situation. Here is
Duse, a chalice for the wine of imagination, but the chalice remains
empty. It is almost painful to see her waiting for the words that do
not come, offering tragedy to us in her eyes, and with her hands, and in
her voice, only not in the words that she says or in the details of the
action which she is condemned to follow.
See Mrs. Patrick Campbell playing "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray," and you
will see it played exactly according to Mr. Pinero'a intention, and
played brilliantly enough to distract our notice from what is lacking in
the character. A fantastic and delightful contradiction, half gamine,
half Burne-Jones, she confuses our judgment, as a Paula in real life
might, and leaves us attracted and repelled, and, above all, interested.
But Duse has no resources outside simple human nature. If she cannot
convince you by the thing in itself, she cannot disconcert you by a
paradox about it. Well, this passionately sincere acting, this one real
person moving about among the dolls of the piece, shows up all that is
mechanical, forced, and unnatural in the construction of a play never
meant to withstand the searchlight of this woman's creative
intelligence. Whatever is theatrical and obvious starts out into sight.
The good things are transfigured, the bad things merely discovered. And
so, by a kind of naïveté in the acceptance of emotion for all it might
be, instead of for the little that it is, by an almost perverse
simplicity and sincerity in the treatment of a superficial and insincere
character, Duse plays "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray" in the grand manner,
destroying the illusion of the play as she proves over again the
supremacy of her own genius.