"La Gioconda" is the first play in which Duse has had beautiful words to
speak, and a poetical conception of character to render; and her acting
in it is more beautiful and more poetical than it was possible for it to
be in "Magda," or in "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray." But the play is not a
good play; at its best it is lyrical rather than dramatic, and at its
worst it is horrible with a vulgar material horror. The end of "Titus
Andronicus" is not so revolting as the end of "La Gioconda." D'Annunzio
has put as a motto on his title-page the sentence of Leonardo da Vinci:
"Cosa bella mortal passa, e non d'arte," and the action of the play is
intended as a symbol of the possessing and destroying mastery of art and
of beauty. But the idea is materialised into a form of grotesque horror,
and all the charm of the atmosphere and the grace of the words cannot
redeem a conclusion so inartistic in its painfulness. But, all the same,
the play is the work of a poet, it brings imagination upon the stage,
and it gives Duse an opportunity of being her finest self. All the words
she speaks are sensitive words, she moves in the midst of beautiful
things, her whole life seems to flow into a more harmonious rhythm, for
all the violence of its sorrow and suffering. Her acting at the end, all
through the inexcusable brutality of the scene in which she appears
before us with her mutilated hands covered under long hanging sleeves,
is, in the dignity, intensity, and humanity of its pathos, a thing of
beauty, of a profound kind of beauty, made up of pain, endurance, and
the irony of pitiable things done in vain. Here she is no longer
transforming a foreign conception of character into her own conception
of what character should be; she is embodying the creation of an
Italian, of an artist, and a creation made in her honour. D'Annunzio's
tragedy is, in the final result, bad tragedy, but it is a failure of a
far higher order than such successes as Mr. Pinero's. It is written with
a consciousness of beauty, with a feverish energy which is still energy,
with a sense of what is imaginative in the facts of actual life. It is
written in Italian which is a continual delight to the ear, prose which
sounds as melodious as verse, prose to which, indeed, all dramatic
probability is sacrificed. And Duse seems to acquire a new subtlety, as
she speaks at last words in themselves worthy of her speaking. It is as
if she at last spoke her own language.