While I watch Duse's Magda, I can conceive, for the time, of no other.
Realising the singer as being just such an artist as herself, she plays
the part with hardly a suggestion of the stage, except the natural
woman's intermittent loathing for it. She has been a great artist; yes,
but that is nothing to her. "I am I," as she says, and she has lived.
And we see before us, all through the play, a woman who has lived with
all her capacity for joy and sorrow, who has thought with all her
capacity for seeing clearly what she is unable, perhaps, to help doing.
She does not act, that is, explain herself to us, emphasise herself for
us. She lets us overlook her, with a supreme unconsciousness, a supreme
affectation of unconsciousness, which is of course very conscious art,
an art so perfect as to be almost literally deceptive. I do not know if
she plays with exactly the same gestures night after night, but I can
quite imagine it. She has certain little caresses, the half awkward
caresses of real people, not the elegant curves and convolutions of the
stage, which always enchant me beyond any mimetic movements I have ever
seen. She has a way of letting her voice apparently get beyond her own
control, and of looking as if emotion has left her face expressionless,
as it often leaves the faces of real people, thus carrying the illusion
of reality almost further than it is possible to carry it, only never
quite.
I was looking this afternoon at Whistler's portrait of Carlyle at the
Guildhall, and I find in both the same final art: that art of perfect
expression, perfect suppression, perfect balance of every quality, so
that a kind of negative thing becomes a thing of the highest
achievement. Name every fault to which the art of the actor is liable,
and you will have named every fault which is lacking in Duse. And the
art of the actor is in itself so much a compound of false emphasis and
every kind of wilful exaggeration, that to have any negative merit is to
have already a merit very positive. Having cleared away all that is not
wanted, Duse begins to create. And she creates out of life itself an art
which no one before her had ever imagined: not realism, not a copy, but
the thing itself, the evocation of thoughtful life, the creation of the
world over again, as actual and beautiful a thing as if the world had
never existed.