"Fédora" is a play written for Sarah Bernhardt by the writer of plays
for Sarah Bernhardt, and it contains the usual ingredients of that
particular kind of sorcery: a Russian tigress, an assassination, a
suicide, exotic people with impulses in conflict with their intentions,
good working evil and evil working good, not according to a
philosophical idea, but for the convenience of a melodramatic plot. As
artificial, as far from life on the one hand and poetry on the other, as
a jig of marionettes at the end of a string, it has the absorbing
momentary interest of a problem in events. Character does not exist,
only impulse and event. And Duse comes into this play with a desperate
resolve to fill it with honest emotion, to be what a woman would really
perhaps be if life turned melodramatic with her. Visibly, deliberately,
she acts: "Fédora" is not to be transformed unawares into life. But her
acting is like that finest kind of acting which we meet with in real
life, when we are able to watch some choice scene of the human comedy
being played before us. She becomes the impossible thing that Fédora is,
and, in that tour de force, she does some almost impossible things by
the way. There is a scene in which the blood fades out of her cheeks
until they seem to turn to dry earth furrowed with wrinkles. She makes
triumphant point after triumphant point (her intelligence being free to
act consciously on this unintelligent matter), and we notice, more than
in her finer parts, individual movements, gestures, tones: the attitude
of her open hand upon a door, certain blind caresses with her fingers as
they cling for the last time to her lover's cheeks, her face as she
reads a letter, the art of her voice as she almost deliberately takes us
in with these emotional artifices of Sardou. When it is all over, and we
think of the Silvia of "La Gioconda," of the woman we divine under Magda
and under Paula Tanqueray, it is with a certain sense of waste; for even
Paula can be made to seem something which Fédora can never be made to
seem. In "Fédora" we have a sheer, undisguised piece of stagecraft,
without even the amount of psychological intention of Mr. Pinero, much
less of Sudermann. It is a detective story with horrors, and it is far
too positive and finished a thing to be transformed into something not
itself. Sardou is a hard taskmaster; he chains his slaves. Without
nobility or even coherence of conception, without inner life or even a
recognisable semblance of exterior life, the piece goes by clockwork;
you cannot make the hands go faster or slower, or bring its mid-day into
agreement with the sun. A great actress, who is also a great
intelligence, is seen accepting it, for its purpose, with contempt, as a
thing to exercise her technical skill upon. As a piece of technical
skill, Duse's acting in "Fédora" is as fine as anything she has done. It
completes our admiration of her genius, as it proves to us that she can
act to perfection a part in which the soul is left out of the question,
in which nothing happens according to nature, and in which life is
figured as a long attack of nerves, relieved by the occasional interval
of an uneasy sleep.