I
I have been seeing the Sicilian actors in London. They came here from
Paris, where, I read, "la passion paraît décidement," to a dramatic
critic, "avoir partout ses inconvenients," especially on the stage. We
are supposed to think so here, but for once London has applauded an
acting which is more primitively passionate than anything we are
accustomed to on our moderate stage. Some of it was spoken in Italian,
some in the Sicilian dialect, and not many in the English part of the
audience could follow very closely the words as they were spoken. Yet so
marvellously real were these stage peasants, so clear and poignant their
gestures and actions, that words seemed a hardly needless accompaniment
to so evident, exciting, and absorbing a form of drama. It was a new
intoxication, and people went, I am afraid, as to a wild-beast show.
It was really nothing of the kind, though the melodrama was often very
crude; sometimes, in a simple way, horrible. But it was a fierce living
thing, a life unknown to us in the North; it smouldered like the
volcanoes of the South. And so we were seeing a new thing on the stage,
rendered by actors who seemed, for the most part, scarcely actors at
all, but the real peasants; and, above all, there was a woman of genius,
the leader of the company, who was much more real than reality.
Mimi Aguglia has studied Duse, for her tones, for some of her attitudes;
her art is more nearly the art of Réjane. While both of these are great
artists, she is an improviser, a creature of wild moods, of animal
energies, uncontrolled, spontaneous. She catches you in a fierce caress,
like a tiger-cat. She gives you, as in "Malia," the whole animal,
snarling, striking, suffering, all the pangs of the flesh, the emotions
of fear and hate, but for the most part no more. In "La Folfaa" she can
be piquant, passing from the naughty girl of the first act, with her
delicious airs and angers, her tricks, gambols, petulances, to the
soured wife of the second, in whom a kind of bad blood comes out,
turning her to treacheries of mere spite, until her husband thrusts her
brutally out of the house, where, if she will, she may follow her lover.
Here, where there is no profound passion but mean quarrels among
miserable workers in salt-mines, she is a noticeable figure, standing
out from the others, and setting her prim, soubrette figure in motion
with a genuine art, quite personal to her. But to see her after the
Santuzza of Duse, in Verga's "Cavalleria Rusticana," is to realise the
difference between this art of the animal and Duse's art of the soul.
And if one thinks of Réjane's "Sapho," the difference is hardly less,
though of another kind. I saw Duse for the first time in the part of
Santuzza, and I remember to this day a certain gentle and pathetic
gesture of her apparently unconscious hand, turning back the sleeve of
her lover's coat over his wrist, while her eyes fasten on his eyes in a
great thirst for what is to be found in them. The Santuzza of Mimi
Aguglia is a stinging thing that bites when it is stepped on. There is
no love in her heart, only love of possession, jealousy, an unreasonable
hate; and she is not truly pathetic or tragic in her furious wrestle
with her lover on the church steps or in her plot against him which
sends an unanticipated knife into his heart.
Yet, in the Mila di Codra of d'Annunzio's "Figlia di Jorio" she has
moments of absolute greatness. Her fear in the cave, before Lazaro di
Roio, is the most ghastly and accurate rendering of that sensation that,
I am sure, has been seen on any stage. She flings herself upright
against a frame of wood on which the woodcarver has left his tools, and
as one new shudder after another sets her body visibly quaking, some of
the tools drop on the floor, with an astonishing effect on the nerves.
Her face contracts into a staring, hopeless grimace, as if about to
utter shrieks which cannot get past her lips. She shivers slowly
downwards until she sinks on her rigid heels and clasps her knees with
both arms. There, in the corner, she waits in twenty several anguishes,
while the foul old man tempts her, crawling like a worm, nearer and
nearer to her on the ground, with gestures of appeal that she repels
time after time, with some shudder aside of her crouched body, hopping
as if on all fours closer into the corner. The scene is terrible in its
scarcely thinkable distress, but it is not horrible, as some would have
it to be. Here, with her means, this actress creates; it is no mean copy
of reality, but fear brought to a kind of greatness, so completely has
the whole being passed into its possession.
And there is another scene in which she is absolute in a nobler
catastrophe. In her last cry before she is dragged to the stake, "La
fiamma e bella! la fiamma e bella!" d'Annunzio, I have no doubt, meant
no more than the obvious rhetoric suited to a situation of heroism. Out
of his rhetoric this woman has created the horror and beauty of a
supreme irony of anguish. She has given up her life for her lover, he
has denied and cursed her in the oblivion of the draught that should
have been his death-drink, her hands have been clasped with the wooden
fetters taken off from his hands, and her face covered with the dark
veil he had worn, and the vile howling crowd draws her backward towards
her martyrdom. Ornella has saluted her sister in Christ; she, the one
who knows the truth, silent, helping her to die nobly. And now the
woman, having willed beyond the power of mortal flesh to endure an
anguish that now flames before her in its supreme reality, strains in
the irrationality of utter fear backward into the midst of those
clutching hands that are holding her up in the attitude of her death,
and, with a shiver in which the soul, succumbing to the body, wrings its
last triumph out of an ignominious glory, she cries, shrieking, feeling
the flames eternally upon her: "La fiamma e bella! la fiamma e bella!"
and thereat all evil seems to have been judged suddenly, and
obliterated, as if God had laughed once, and wiped out the world.