Dumas fils has put his best work into the novel of "La Dame aux
Camélias," which is a kind of slighter, more superficial, more
sentimental, more modern, but less universal "Manon Lescaut." There is a
certain artificial, genuinely artificial, kind of nature in it: if not
"true to life," it is true to certain lives. But the play lets go this
hold, such as it is, on reality, and becomes a mere stage convention as
it crosses the footlights; a convention which is touching, indeed, far
too full of pathos, human in its exaggerated way, but no longer to be
mistaken, by the least sensitive of hearers, for great or even fine
literature. And the sentiment in it is not so much human as French, a
factitious idealism in depravity which one associates peculiarly with
Paris. Marguerite Gautier is the type of the nice woman who sins and
loves, and becomes regenerated by an unnatural kind of self-sacrifice,
done for French family reasons. She is the Parisian whom Sarah Bernhardt
impersonates perfectly in that hysterical and yet deliberate manner
which is made for such impersonations. Duse, as she does always, turns
her into quite another kind of woman; not the light woman, to whom love
has come suddenly, as a new sentiment coming suddenly into her life, but
the simple, instinctively loving woman, in whom we see nothing of the
demi-monde, only the natural woman in love. Throughout the play she has
moments, whole scenes, of absolute greatness, as fine as anything she
has ever done: but there are other moments when she seems to carry
repression too far. Her pathos, as in the final scene, and at the end of
the scene of the reception, where she repeats the one word "Armando"
over and over again, in an amazed and agonising reproachfulness, is of
the finest order of pathos. She appeals to us by a kind of goodness,
much deeper than the sentimental goodness intended by Dumas. It is love
itself that she gives us, love utterly unconscious of anything but
itself, uncontaminated, unspoilt. She is Mlle. de Lespinasse rather than
Marguerite Gautier; a creature in whom ardour is as simple as breath,
and devotion a part of ardour. Her physical suffering is scarcely to be
noticed; it is the suffering of her soul that Duse gives us. And she
gives us this as if nature itself came upon the boards, and spoke to us
without even the ordinary disguise of human beings in their intercourse
with one another. Once more an artificial play becomes sincere; once
more the personality of a great impersonal artist dominates the poverty
of her part; we get one more revelation of a particular phase of Duse.
And it would be unreasonable to complain that "La Dame aux Camélias" is
really something quite different, something much inferior; here we have
at least a great emotion, a desperate sincerity, with all the
thoughtfulness which can possibly accompany passion.
V
Dumas, in a preface better than his play, tells us that "La Princesse
Georges" is "a Soul in conflict with Instincts." But no, as he has drawn
her, as he has placed her, she is only the theory of a woman in conflict
with the mechanical devices of a plot. All these characters talk as
they have been taught, and act according to the tradition of the stage.
It is a double piece of mechanism, that is all; there is no creation of
character, there is a kind of worldly wisdom throughout, but not a
glimmer of imagination; argument drifts into sentiment, and sentiment
returns into argument, without conviction; the end is no conclusion, but
an arbitrary break in an action which we see continuing, after the
curtain has fallen. And, as in "Fédora," Duse comes into the play
resolved to do what the author has not done. Does she deliberately
choose the plays most obviously not written for her in order to extort a
triumph out of her enemies? Once more she acts consciously, openly,
making every moment of an unreal thing real, by concentrating herself
upon every moment as if it were the only one. The result is a
performance miraculous in detail, and, if detail were everything, it
would be a great part. With powdered hair, she is beautiful and a great
lady; as the domesticated princess, she has all the virtues, and
honesty itself, in her face and in her movements; she gives herself with
a kind of really unreflecting thoughtfulness to every sentiment which is
half her emotion. If such a woman could exist, and she could not, she
would be that, precisely that. But just as we are beginning to believe,
not only in her but in the play itself, in comes the spying lady's maid,
or the valet who spies on the lady's maid, and we are in melodrama
again, and among the strings of the marionettes. Where are the three
stages, truth, philosophy, conscience, which Dumas offers to us in his
preface as the three stages by which a work of dramatic art reaches
perfection? Shown us by Duse, from moment to moment, yes; but in the
piece, no, scarcely more than in "Fédora." So fatal is it to write for
our instruction, as fatal as to write for our amusement. A work of art
must suggest everything, but it must prove nothing. Bad imaginative work
like "La Gioconda" is really, in its way, better than this unimaginative
and theoretical falseness to life; for it at least shows us beauty,
even though it degrades that beauty before our eyes. And Duse, of all
actresses the nearest to nature, was born to create beauty, that beauty
which is the deepest truth of natural things. Why does she after all
only tantalise us, showing us little fragments of her soul under many
disguises, but never giving us her whole self through the revealing
medium of a masterpiece?