THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES PLAYS, ACTING, AND MUSIC. PLAYS, ACTING, AND MUSIC : BY ARTHUR SYMONS. NEW YORK : E. P. BUTTON ftf CO. To Maurice Maeterlinck, in friendship and admiration. College Library Pf\) 021 1 395393 Most of these chapters, not quite in their present form, appeared in the Academy during 1902 ; some in the Star, during 1901 and 1902 ; and a few elsewhere. They express some of my ideas about the theatre and about music, and are not intended as a record of events. Thus I have not arranged them in chronological order, because the dates of particular performances have no longer any significance ; but I have frankly left all references to " last week," and the like, as I found them, because that will help to show that I am speaking of a particular thing, immediately under my eyes. That particular thing is sometimes of no interest in itself ; but it is my peg, and I wish it to stand rmly in its place. The book is intended to form part of a series, on which I have been engaged for many years. I am gradually working my way towards the concrete expression of a theory, or system of aesthetics, of all the arts. In my book on " The Symbolist Movement in Literature " I made a first attempt to deal in this way with literature ; other volumes, now in preparation, are to follow. The present volume deals mainly with the stage, and, secondarily, with music ; it is to be followed by a volume called " Studies in the Seven Arts," in which music will be dealt with in greater detail, side by side with painting, sculpture, architecture, handicraft, dancing, and the various arts of the stage. And, as life too is a form of art, and the visible world the chief storehouse of beauty, I try to indulge my curiosity by the study of places and of people. A book on " Cities " is now in the press, and a book of " imaginary portraits " is to follow, under the title of " Spiritual Adventures." Side by side with these studies in the arts I have my own art, that of verse, which is, after all, my chief concern. In all my critical and theoretical writing I wish to be as little abstract as possible, and to study first principles, not so much as they exist in the brain of the theorist, but as they may be discovered, alive and in effective action, in every achieved form of art. I do not understand the limitation by which so many writers on aesthetics choose to confine them- selves to the study of artistic principles as they are seen in this or that separate form of art. Each art has its own laws, its own capacities, its own limits ; these it is the business of the critic jealously to distinguish. Yet, in the study of art as art, it should be his endeavour to master the universal science of beauty. July 1903. A Paradox on Art : p. i . Technique and the Artist: p. 5. Nietzsche on Tragedy : p. 9. A Reflection at a Dolmetsch Concert: p. 13. The Dramatisation of Song: p. 18. The Speaking of Verse: p. 23. Sarah Bernhardt: p. 27. Rostand, Sarah, and Coquelin: p. 34. Coquelin and Moliere: p. 39. Rejane and Jane Hading : p. 44. Sir Henry Irving: p. 48. Duse in some of her Parts: p. 53. Pachmann, "Parsifal," and the Pathetic Symphony: p. 64. Pachmann and the Piano: p. 68. Maeterlinck, " Everyman," and the Japanese Players: p. 72. Music, Staging, and some Acting: p. 78. The Test of the Actor : p. 84. Tolstoi and the Others: p. 88. Literary Drama: p. 94. Mr. Stephen Phillips and a Lecture: p. 99. Some Plays and the Public: p. 105. "Ben Hur" on the Stage: p. 109. " Faust " at the Lyceum : p. 113. Yvette Guilbert: p. 117. The Paris Music Hall : p. 123. An Actress and a Play: p. 127. A Comedy of Fine Shades: p. 130. Drama: Professional and Unprofessional: p. 134. M. Capus in England: p. 138. A Double Enigma: p. 142. Three Problem Plays: p. 146. " Monna Vanna " : p. 153. The Question of Censorship : p. 157. Music in the Theatre: p. 160. On Crossing Stage to Right: p. 165. Suggestions to Managers: p. 169. The Price of Realism : p. 173. On Musical Criticism: p. 177. The Meiningen Orchestra: p. 181. The New Bayreuth: p. 185. Mozart in the Mirabell-Garten : p. 189. An Apology for Puppets: p. 193. Eleonora Duse at 22. From a photograph by Bettini, Leghorn : frontispiece. Ysaye. From a lithograph by Emil Fuchs : to face p. 5. Georgette Leblanc. From a photograph by Gerschel, Paris : to face p. 1 8. Sarah Bernhardt. From a photograph : to face p. 27. Coquelin ain6. From a lithograph by W. Rothenstein : to face p. 39. Rejane. From a photograph by Reutlinger : to face p. 44. Jane Hading. From a photograph by Chalot, Paris : to face p. 46. Wladimir von Pachmann. From a photograph by Paul Gericke, Berlin : to face p. 68. Sada Yacco. From a photograph by George Hooper, London : to face p. 76. Yvette Guilbert. From a photograph by Chalot, Paris : to face p. 117. A Paradox on Art. Is it not part of the pedantry of letters to limit the word art, a little narrowly, to certain manifestations of the artistic spirit, or, at all events, to set up a comparative estimate of the values of the several arts, a little unnecessarily ? Litera- ture, painting, sculpture, music, these we admit as art, and the persons who work in them as artists ; but dancing, for instance, in which the performer is at once creator and inter- preter, and those methods of interpretion, such as the playing of musical instruments, or the conducting of an orchestra, or acting, have we scrupulously considered the degree to which these also are art, and their executants, in a strict sense, artists ? If we may be allowed to look upon art as something essentially independent of its material, however dependent upon its own material each art may be, in a secondary sense, it will scarcely be logical to contend that the motionless and permanent creation of the sculptor in marble is, as art, more perfect than the same sculptor's modelling in snow, which, motionless one moment, melts the next, or than the dancer's harmonious succession of movements which we have not even time to realise individually before one is succeeded by another, and the whole has vanished from before our eyes. Art is the creation of beauty in form, visible or audible, and the artist is the creator of beauty in visible or audible form. But beauty is infinitely various, and as truly beauty in the voice of Sarah Bernhardt or the silence of Duse as in a face painted by Leonardo or a poem written by Blake. A dance, performed faultlessly and by a dancer of temperament, is as A Paradox on Art. beautiful, in its own way, as a performance on the violin by Ysaye or the effect of an orchestra conducted by Richter. In each case the beauty is different, but, once we have really attained beauty, there can be no question of superiority. Beauty is always equally beautiful ; the degrees exist only when we have not yet attained beauty. And thus the old prejudice against the artist to whom interpretation in his own special form of creation is really based upon a misunderstanding. Take the art of music. Bach writes a composition for the violin : that composition exists, in the abstract, the moment it is written down upon paper, but, even to those trained musicians who are able to read at sight, it exists in a state at best but half alive ; to all the rest of the world it is silent. Ysaye plays it on his violin, and the thing begins to breathe, has found a voice perhaps more exquisite than the sound which Bach heard in his brain when he wrote down the notes. Take the instrument out of Ysaye's hands, and put it into the hands of the first violin in the orchestra behind him ; every note will be the same, the same general scheme of expression may be followed, but the thing that we shall hear will be another thing, just as much Bach, perhaps, but, because Ysaye is wanting, not the work of art, the creation, to which we have just listened. That such art should be fragile, evanescent, leaving only a memory which can never be realised again, is as pathetic and as natural as that a beautiful woman should die young. To the actor, the dancer, the same fate is reserved. They work for the instant, and for the memory of the living, with a supremely prodigal magnanimity. Old people tell us that A Paradox on Art. they have seen Descl6e, Taglioni ; soon, no one will be old enough to remember those great artists. Then, if their renown becomes a matter of charity, of credulity, if you will, it will be but equal with the renown of all those poets and painters who are only names to us, or whose masterpieces have perished. Beauty is infinitely various, always equally beautiful, and can never be repeated. Gautier, in a famous poem, has wisely praised the artist who works in durable material : Oui, 1'ceuvre sort plus belle D'une forme au travail Rebelle, Vers, marbre, onyx, email. No, not more beautiful ; only more lasting. Tout passe. L'art robuste Seul a 1'eternite'. Le buste Survit a la cite. Well, after all, is there not, to one who regards it curiously, a certain selfishness, even, in this desire to per- petuate oneself or the work of one's hands ; as the most austere saints have found selfishness at the root of the soul's too conscious, or too exclusive, longing after eternal life ? To have created beauty for an instant is to have achieved an equal result in art with one who has created beauty which will last many thousands of years. Art is concerned only with accomplishment, not with duration. The rest is a question partly of vanity, partly of business. An artist to 3 A Paradox on Art. whom posterity means anything very definite, and the admiration of those who will live after him can seem to promise much warmth in the grave, may indeed refuse to waste his time, as it seems to him, over temporary successes. Or he may shrink from the continuing ardour of one to whom art has to be made over again with the same energy, the same sureness, every time that he acts on the stage or draws music out of his instrument. One may indeed be listless enough to prefer to have finished one's work, and to be able to point to it, as it stands on its pedestal, or comes to meet all the world, with the democratic freedom of the book. All that is a natural feeling in the artist, but it has nothing to do with art. Art has to do only with the creation of beauty, whether it be in words, or sounds, or colour, or outline, or rhythmical movement; and the man who writes music is no more truly an artist than the man who plays that music, the poet who composes rhythms in words no more truly an artist than the dancer who composes rhythms with the body, and the one is no more to be preferred to the other, than the painter is to be preferred to the sculptor, or the musician to the poet, in those forms of art which we have agreed to recognise as of equal value. Technique and the Artist. TECHNIQUE and the artist : that is a question, of interest to the student of every art, which was brought home to me with unusual emphasis the other afternoon, as I sat in the Queen's Hall, and listened to Ysaye and Busoni. Are we always quite certain what we mean when we speak of an artist ? Have we quite realised in our own minds the extent to which technique must go to the making of an artist, and the point at which something else must be superadded ? That is a matter which I often doubt, and the old doubt came back to my mind the other afternoon, as I listened to Ysaye and Busoni, and next day, as I turned over the newspapers. I read, in the first paper I happen to take up, that the violinist and the pianist are " a perfectly matched pair " ; the applause, at the concert, was even more enthusiastic for Busoni than for Ysaye. I hear both spoken of as artists, as great artists ; and yet, if words have any meaning, it seems to me that only one of the two is an artist at all, and the other, with all his ability, only an executant. Admit, for a moment, that the technique of the two is equal, though it is not quite possible to admit even that, in the strictest sense. So far, we have made only a beginning. Without technique, perfect of its kind, no one is worth consideration in any art. The rope-dancer or the acrobat must be perfect in technique before he appears on the stage at all ; in his case, a lapse from perfection brings its own penalty, death perhaps ; his art begins when his technique is already per- fect. Artists who deal in materials less fragile than human Technique and the Artist. life should have no less undeviating a sense of responsibility to themselves and to art. But the performance comes afterwards, and it is the performance with which we are concerned. Of two acrobats, each equally skilful, one will be individual and an artist, the other will remain consummately skilful and uninteresting; the one having begun where the other leaves off. Now Busoni can do, on the pianoforte, whatever he can conceive ; the question is, what can he conceive ? As he sat at the piano playing Chopin, I thought of Busoni, of the Bech- stein piano, of what fingers can do, of many other extraneous things, never of Chopin. I saw the pianist with the Christ-like head, the carefully negligent elegance of his appearance, and I heard wonderful sounds coming out of the Bechstein piano ; but, try as hard as I liked, I could not feel the contact of soul and instrument, I could not feel that a human being was expressing himself in sound. A task was magnificently accomplished, but a new beauty had not come into the world. Then the Kreutzer Sonata began, and I looked at Ysaye, as he stood, an almost shapeless mass of flesh, holding the violin between his fat fingers, and looking vaguely into the air. He put the violin to his shoulder. The face had been like a mass of clay, waiting the sculptor's thumb. As the music came, an invisible touch seemed to pass over it ; the heavy mouth and chin remained firm, pressed down on the violin ; but the eyelids and the eyebrows began to move, as if the eyes saw the sound, and were drawing it in luxuriously, with a kind of sleepy ecstasy, as one draws in perfume out of a flower. Then, in that 6 Technique and the Artist. instant, a beauty which had never been in the world came into the world ; a new thing was created, lived, died, having revealed itself to all those who were capable of receiving it. That thing was neither Beethoven nor Ysaye, it was made out of their meeting ; it was music, not abstract, but embodied in sound ; and just that miracle could never occur again, though others like it might be repeated for ever. When the sound stopped, the face returned to its blind and deaf waiting ; the interval, like all the rest of life probably, not counting in the existence of that particular soul, which came and went with the music. And Ysaye seems to me the type of the artist, not because he is faultless in technique, but because he begins to create his art at the point where faultless technique leaves off. With him, every faculty is in harmony ; he has not even too much of any good thing. There are times when Busoni astonishes one ; Ysaye never astonishes one, it seems natural that he should do everything that he does, just as he does it. Art, as Aristotle has said finally, should always have "a continual slight novelty"; it should never astonish, for we are astonished only by some excess or default, never by a thing being what it ought to be. It is a fashion of the moment to prize extravagance and to be timid of perfection. That is why we give the name of artist to those who can startle us most. We have come to value technique for the violence which it gives into the hands of those who possess it, in their assault upon our nerves. We have come to look upon technique as an end in itself, rather than as a means to an end. We have but Technique and the Artist. one word of praise, and we use that one word lavishly. An Ysaye and a Busoni are the same to us, and it is to our credit if we are even aware that Ysaye is the equal of Busoni. Nietzsche on Tragedy. I HAVE been reading Nietzsche on the Origin of Tragedy, in the admirable French translation published under the care of M. Henri Albert by the " Mercure de France " : " L'Origine de la Tragedie, ou, Hellnisme et Pessimisme." The book was written at the age of twenty-eight, and we have Nietzsche's "criticism of himself" by way of preface, sixteen years later, and an autobiographical fragment, written two years later still, which M. Albert has extracted from one of the posthumous volumes. I have been reading all that with the delight of one who discovers a new world, which he has seen already in a dream. I never take up Nietzsche without the surprise of finding something familiar. Sometimes it is the answer to a question which I have only asked ; sometimes it seems to me that I have guessed at the answer. And, in his restless energy, his hallucinatory vision, the agility of this climbing mind of the mountains, I find that invigoration which only a "tragic philosopher'* can .give. "A sort of mystic soul," as he says of himself, " almost the soul of a Maenad, who, troubled, capricious, and half irresolute whether to cede or fly, stammers out something in a foreign tongue." The book is a study in the origin of tragedy among the Greeks, as it arose out of music through the medium of the chorus. We are apt to look on the chorus in Greek plays as almost a negligible part of the structure ; as, in fact, hardly more than the comments of that " ideal spectator " whom Schlegel called up out of the depths of the German consciousness. We know, however, that the chorus was the Nietzsche on Tragedy. original nucleus of the play, that the action on which it seems only to comment is no more than a development of the chorus. Here is the problem to which Nietzsche endeavours to find an answer. He finds it, unlike the learned persons who study Greek texts, among the roots of things, in the very making of the universe. Art arises, he tells us, from the conflict of the two creative spirits, symbolised by the Greeks in the two gods, Apollo and Dionysus ; and he names the one the Apollonian spirit, which we see in plastic art, and the other the Dionysiac spirit, which we see in music. Apollo is the god of dreams, Dionysus the god of intoxication ; the one represents for us the world of appearances, the other is, as it were, the voice of things in themselves. The chorus, then, which arose out of the hymns to Dionysus, is the "lyric cry," the vital ecstasy ; the drama is the projection into vision, into a picture, of the exterior, temporary world of forms. " We now see that the stage and the action are conceived only as vision : that the sole ' reality ' is precisely the chorus, which itself produces the vision, and expresses it by the aid of the whole symbolism of dance, sound, and word." In the admirable phrase of Schiller, the chorus is " a living ram- part against reality," against that false reality of daily life which is a mere drapery of civilisation, and has nothing to do with the primitive reality of nature. The realistic drama begins with Euripides ; and Euripides, the casuist, the friend of Socrates (whom Nietzsche qualifies as the true decadent, an " instrument of decomposition," the slayer of art, the father of modern science), brings tragedy to an end, as he substitutes pathos for action, thought for contempla- 10 Nietzsche on Tragedy. tion, and passionate sentiments for the primitive ecstasy. " Armed with the scourge of its syllogisms, an optimist dialectic drives the music out of tragedy : that is to say, destroys the very essence of tragedy, an essence which can be interpreted only as a manifestation and objectivation of Dionysiac states, as a visible symbol of music, as the dream- world of a Dionysiac intoxication." There are many pages, scattered throughout his work, in which Pater has dealt with some of the Greek problems very much in the spirit of Nietzsche ; with that problem, for instance, of the " blitheness and serenity " of the Greek spirt, and of the gulf of horror over which it seems to rest, suspended as on the wings of the condor. That myth of Dionysus Zagreus, " a Bacchus who had been in hell,'* which is the foundation of the marvellous new myth of " Denys 1'Auxerrois," seems always to be in the mind of Nietzsche, though indeed he refers to it but once, and passingly. Pater has shown, as Nietzsche shows in greater detail and with a more rigorous logic, that this " serenity " was but an accepted illusion, and all Olympus itself but " intermediary," an escape, through the aesthetics of religion, from the trouble at the heart of things ; art, with its tragic illusions of life, being another form of escape. To Nietzsche the world and existence justify themselves only as an aesthetic phenomenon, the work of a god wholly the artist; "and in this sense the object of the tragic myth is precisely to convince us that even the horrible and the monstrous are no more than an aesthetic game, played with itself by the Will in the eternal plenitude of its joy." " The Will " is Schopenhauer's " Will," the vital principle. n Nietzsche on Tragedy. " If it were possible," says Nietzsche, in one of his astonish- ing figures of speech, " to imagine a dissonance becoming a human being (and what is man but that ?), in order to endure life, this dissonance would need some admirable illusion to hide from itself its true nature, under a veil of beauty. " This is the aim of art, as it calls up pictures of the visible world and of the little, temporary actions of men on its surface. The hoofed satyr of Dionysus, as he leaps into the midst of these gracious appearances, drunk with the young wine of nature, surly with the old wisdom of Silenus, brings the real, excessive, disturbing truth of things suddenly into the illusion ; and is gone again, with a shrill laugh, without forcing on us more of his presence than we can bear. I have but touched on a few points in an argument which has itself the ecstatic quality of which it speaks. A good deal of the book is concerned with the latest development of music, and especially with Wagner. Nietzsche, after his change of sides, tells us not to take this part too seriously : " what I fancied I heard in the Wagnerian music has nothing to do with Wagner." Few better things have been said about music than these pages; some of them might be quoted against the " programme " music which has been written since that time, and against the false theory on which musicians have attempted to harness music in the shafts of literature. The whole book is awakening ; in Nietzsche's own words, " a prodigious hope speaks in it." 12 A Reflection at a Dolmetsch Concert. THE interpreter of ancient music, Arnold Dolmetsch, is one of those rare magicians who are able to make roses blossom in mid-winter. While music has been modernising itself until the piano becomes an orchestra, and Berlioz requires four orchestras to obtain a pianissimo, this strange man of genius has quietly gone back a few centuries and discovered for himself an exquisite lost world, which was disappearing like a fresco peeling off a wall. He has burrowed in libraries and found unknown manuscripts like a savant, he has worked at misunderstood notations and found out a way of reading them like a cryptogrammatist, he has first found out how to restore and then how to make over again harpsichord, and virginals, and clavichord, and all those instruments which had become silent curiosities in museums. It is only beginning to be realised, even by musical people, that the clavecin music of, for instance, Bach, loses at least half its charm, almost its identity, when played on the modern grand piano ; that the exquisite music of Rameau and Couperin, the brilliant and beautiful music of Scarlatti, is almost inaudible on everything but the harpsi- chord and the viols ; and that there exists, far earlier than these writers, a mass of English and Italian music of extreme beauty, which has never been spoiled on the piano because it has never been played on it. To any one who has once touched a spinet, harpsichord, or clavichord, the piano must always remain a somewhat inadequate instrument ; lacking in the precision, the penetrating charm, the infinite definite 13 A Reflection at a Dolmetsch Concert. reasons for existence of those instruments of wires and jacks and quills which its metallic rumble has been supposed so entirely to have superseded. As for the clavichord, to have once touched it, feeling the softness with which one's fingers make their own music, like wind among the reeds, is to have lost something of one's relish even for the music of the violin, which is also a windy music, but the music of wind blowing sharply among the trees. It is on such instruments that Mr. Dolmetsch plays to us ; and he plays to us also on the lute, the theorbo, the viola da gamba, the viola d' amore, and I know not how many varieties of those stringed instruments which are most familiar to most of us from the early Italian pictures in which whimsical little angels with crossed legs hold them to their chins. Mr. Dolmetsch is, I suppose, the only living man who can read lute-music and play on the lute, an instrument of extraordinary beauty, which was once as common in England as the guitar still is in Spain. And, having made with his own hands the materials of the music which he has recovered from oblivion, he has taught himself and he has taught others to play this music on these instruments and to sing it to their accompaniment. In a music room, which is really the living room of a house, with viols hanging on the walls, a chamber-organ in one corner, a harpsichord in another, a clavichord laid across the arms of a chair, this music seems to carry one out of the world, and shut one in upon a house of dreams, full of intimate and ghostly voices. It is a house of peace, where music is still that refreshment which it was before it took fever, and became 14 A Reflection at a Dolmetsch Concert. accomplice and not minister to the nerves, and brought the clamour of the world into its seclusion. Go from a concert at Dolmetsch's to a Tschaikowsky concert at the Queen's Hall. Tschaikowsky is a debauch, not so much passionate as feverish. The rushing of his violins, like the rushing of an army of large winged birds ; the thud, snap, and tingle of his strange orchestra ; the riotous image of Russian peasants leaping and hopping in their country dances, which his dance measures call up before one ; those sweet solid harmonies in which (if I may quote the voluptuous phrase of a woman) one sets one's teeth as into nougat ; all this is like a very material kind of pleasure, in which the senses for a moment forget the soul. For a moment only, for is it not the soul, a kind of discontented crying out against pleasure and pain, which comes back distressingly into this after all pathetic music ? All modern music is pathetic ; discontent (so much idealism as that !) has come into all modern music, that it may be sharpened and disturbed enough to fix our attention. And Tschaikowsky speaks straight to the nerves, with that touch of unmanliness which is another characteristic of modern art. There is a vehement and mighty sorrow in the Passion Music of Bach, by the side of which the grief of Tschaikowsky is like the whimpering of a child. He is unconscious of reticence, unconscious of self-control. He is unhappy, and he weeps floods of tears, beats his breast, curses the daylight ; he sees only the misery of the moment, and he sees the misery of the moment as a thing endless and overwhelming. The child who has broken his toy can realise nothing in the future but a passionate regret for the toy. 15 A Reflection at a Dolmetsch Concert. In Tschaikowsky there is none of the quieting of thought. The only healing for our nerves lies in abstract thought, and he can never get far enough from his nerves to look calmly at his own discontent. All those wild, broken rhythms, rushing this way and that, are letting out his secret all the time : " I am unhappy, and I know not why I am unhappy ; I want, but I know not what I want." In the most passionate and the most questioning music of Wagner there is always air ; Tschaikowsky is suffocating. It is himself that he pities so much, and not himself because he shares in the general sorrow of the world. To Tristan and Isolde the whole universe is an exultant and martyred sharer in their love ; they know only the absolute. Even suffering does not bring nobility to Tschaikowsky. I speak of Wagner because it seems to me that Wagner, alone among quite modern musicians, and though indeed he appeals to our nerves more forcibly than any of them, has that breadth and universality by which emotion ceases to be merely personal and becomes elemental. To the musicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, music was an art which had to be carefully guarded from the too disturbing presence of emotion ; emotion is there always, whenever the music is fine music ; but the music is some- thing much more than a means for the expression of emotion. It is a pattern, its beauty lies in its obedience to a law, it is music made for music's sake, with what might be called a more exclusive devotion to art than that of our modern musicians. This music aims at the creation of beauty in sound ; it conceives of beautiful sound as a thing which cannot exist outside order and measure ; it has not yet come 16 A Reflection at a Dolmetsch Concert. to look upon transgression as an essential part of liberty. It does not even desire liberty, but is content with loving obedience. It can express emotion, but it will never express an emotion carried to that excess at which the modern idea of emotion begins. Thus, for all its sugges- tions of pain, grief, melancholy, it will remain, for us at least, happy music, voices of a house of peace. Is there, in the future of music, after it has expressed for us all our emotions, and we are tired of our emotions, and weary enough to be content with a little rest, any likelihood of a return to this happy music, into which beauty shall come without the selfishness of desire ? The Dramatisation of Song. ALL art is a compromise, in which the choice of what is to be foregone must be left somewhat to the discretion of nature. When the sculptor foregoes colour, when the painter foregoes relief, when the poet foregoes the music which soars beyond words and the musician that precise meaning which lies in words alone, he follows a kind of necessity in things, and the compromise seems to be ready- made for him. But there will always be those who are discontented with no matter what fixed limits, who dream, like Wagner, of a possible, or, like Mallarme, of an impos- sible, fusion of the arts. These would invent for them- selves a compromise which has not yet come into the world, a gain without loss, a re-adjustment in which the scales shall bear so much additional weight without trembling. But nature is not always obedient to this too autocratic com- mand. Take the art of the voice. In its essence, the art of the voice is the same in the nightingale and in Melba. The same note is produced in the same way ; the expression given to that note, the syllable which that note renders, are quite different things. Song does not in itself require words in order to realise even the utmost of its capacities. The voice is an instrument like the violin, and no more in need of words for its expression than the violin. Perhaps the ideal of singing would be attained when a marvellous voice, which had absorbed into itself all that temperament and training had to give it, sang inarticulate music, like a violin which could play itself. There is nothing which such an 18 The Dramatisation of Song. instrument could not express, nothing which exists as pure music; and, in this way, we should have the art of the voice, with the least possible compromise. The compromise is already far on its way when words begin to come into the song. Here are two arts helping one another; something is gained, but how much is lost? Undoubtedly the words lose, and does not the voice lose something also, in its directness of appeal ? Add acting to voice and words, and you get the ultimate compromise, opera, in which other arts as well have their share, and in which Wagner would have us see the supreme form of art. Again something is lost; we lose more and more, perhaps for a greater gain. Tristan sings lying on his back, ,in order to represent a sick man; the actual notes which he sings are written partly in order to indicate the voice of a sick man. For the sake of what we gain in dramatic and even theatrical expressiveness, we have lost a two-fold means of producing vocal beauty. Let us rejoice in the gain, by all means ; but not without some consciousness of the loss, not with too ready a belief that the final solution of the problem has been found. I have just been seeing and hearing in Paris a very curious experiment in the combination of the arts, about which I am the more anxious to say a few words as it is quite likely that we may, one of these days, have an opportunity of seeing and hearing it in London. Madame Georgette Leblanc, a singer who is known for her creations of Carmen and of Charlotte Corday, at the Opera-Comique, has developed a method of her own for singing and acting at the same time, not as a character in an opera, but in the '9 The Dramatisation of Song. interpretation of separate songs, the songs of Schumann and Schubert, for instance, and of songs written for the words of Verlaine, Maeterlinck, and others, by Gabriel Faure, Gabriel Fabre, and other musicians. If she comes to London she will take one of the smaller halls, where the effect at which she aims could be best realised ; when I heard her in Paris, it was in a private house, with the accompaniment on the piano of M. Fabre, the composer of a good many of the songs. Imagine a woman who suggests at the same time Sarah Bernhardt and Mrs. Brown-Potter, without being really like either ; she is small, exuberantly blonde, her head is sur- rounded by masses of loosely twisted blonde hair ; she has large grey eyes, that can be grave, or mocking, or passionate, or cruel, or watchful ; a large nose, an intent, eloquent mouth. She wears a trailing dress that follows the lines of the figure vaguely, supple to every movement. When she sings, she has an old, high-backed chair in which she can sit, or on which she can lean. When I heard her, there was a mirror on the other side of the room, opposite to her ; she saw no one else in the room, once she had surrendered her- self to the possession of the song, but she was always con- scious of that image of herself which came back to her out of the mirror : it was herself watching herself, in a kind of delight at the beauty which she was evoking out of words, notes, and expressive movement. Her voice is strong and rich, imperfectly trained, but the voice of a born singer ; her acting is even more the acting of a born actress; but it is the temperament of the woman that flames into her voice and gestures, and sets her whole being 20 The Dramatisation of Song. violently and delicately before you. She makes a drama of each song, and she re-creates that drama over again, in her rendering of the intentions of the words and of the music. It is as much with her eyes and her hands, as with her voice, that she evokes the melody of a picture ; it is a picture that sings, and that sings in all its lines. There is something in her aspect, what shall I call it ? tenacious ; it is a woman who is an artist because she is a woman, who takes in energy at all her senses and give out energy at all her senses. She sang some tragic songs of Schumann, some mysterious songs of Maeterlinck, some delicate love -songs of Charles van Lerberghe. As one looked and listened it was impossible to think more of the words than of the music or of the music than of the words. One took them simultaneously, as one feels at once the softness and the perfume of a flower. I understood why Mallarme had seemed to see in her the realisation of one of his dreams. Here was a new art, made up of a new mixing of the arts, in one subtly intoxicating elixir. To Mallarm it was the more exquisite because there was in it none of the broad general appeal of opera, of the gross recognised proportions of things. This dramatisation of song, done by any one less subtly, less completely, and less sincerely an artist, would lead us, I am afraid, into something more disastrous than even the official concert, with its rigid persons in evening dress hold- ing sheets of music in their tremulous hands, and singing the notes set down for them to the best of their vocal ability. Madame Georgette Leblanc is an exceptional artist, and she has made an art after her own likeness, which exists because 21 The Dramatisation of Song. it is the expression of herself, of a strong nature always in vibration. What she feels as a woman she can render as an artist ; she is at once instinctive and deliberate, deliberate because it is her natural instinct, the natural instinct of a woman who is essentially a woman, to be so. I imagine her always singing in front of a mirror, always recognising her own shadow there, and the more absolutely abandoned to what the song is saying through her because of that uninter- rupted communion with herself. 22 The Speaking of Verse A VERY interesting lecture was given on Thursday, May 22, at the Coronet Theatre, by M. Silvain, of the Comedie Franchise, on the art of speaking, or, as it might more correctly have been called, on the art of speaking verse. I had just been to a small private gathering in the committee- room of Clifford's Inn, to hear some verse spoken to the psaltery by Miss Florence Farr. Mr. Yeats has written, in the May number of the Monthly Ifjview, on this attempt, made by him with the assistance of Mr. Dolmetsch, at the revival of an old art : the art of speaking verse to a pitch sounded by a musical instrument. He has also lectured on the subject in public, and talked much about it in private, and has found disciples, and had psalteries made for him by Mr. Dolmetsch, and found persons with voices to chant verse to the accompaniment of the psaltery. I have heard some of these performances, but in these pages I must limit myself to what I heard at the rehearsal in Clifford's Inn, and to Mr. Yeats' contentions in his article in the Monthly Review. The method of M. Silvain (who, besides being an actor, is Professor of Declamation at the Conservatoire) is the method of the elocutionist, but of the elocutionist at his best. He has a large, round, vibrating voice, over which he has perfect command. " M. Silvain," says M. Catulle Mendes, " est de ceux, bien rares au Theatre Fran^ais, qu'on entend me'me lorsqu'ils parlent bas." He has trained his voice to do everything that he wants it to do ; his whole body is full of life, energy, sensitiveness to the emotion of every word ; his gestures seem to be at once spontaneous 23 The Speaking of Verse. and calculated. He adores verse, for its own sake, as a brilliant executant adores his violin ; he has an excellent con- tempt for prose, as an inferior form. In all his renderings of verse, he never forgot that it was at the same time speech, the direct expression of character, and also poetry, a thing with its own reasons for existence. He gave La Fontaine in one way, Moliere in another, Victor Hugo in another, some poor modern verse in yet another. But in all there was the same attempt : to treat verse in the spirit of rhetoric, that is to say, to over-emphasise it consistently and for effect. In a tirade from Corneille's " Cinna," he followed the angry reasoning of the lines by counting on his fingers : one, two, three, as if he were underlining the important words of each clause. The danger of this method is that it is apt to turn poetry into a kind of bad logic. There, precisely, is the danger of the French conception of poetry, and M. Silvain's method brings out the worst faults of that conception. Now in speaking verse to musical notes, as Mr. Yeats would have us do, we are at least safe from this danger. Mr. Yeats, being a poet, knows that verse is first of all song. In purely lyrical verse, with which he is at present chiefly concerned, the verse itself has a melody which demands expression by the voice, not only when it is "set to music," but when it is said aloud. Every poet, when he reads his own verse, reads it with certain inflections of the voice, in what is often called a " sing-song " way, quite different from the way in which he would read prose. Most poets aim rather at giving the musical effect, and the atmosphere, the vocal atmosphere, of the poem, than at 24 The Speaking of Verse. emphasising individual meanings. They give, in the musician's sense, a " reading " of the poem, an interpretation of the poem as a composition. Mr. Yeats thinks that this kind of reading can be stereotyped, so to speak, the pitch noted down in musical notes, and reproduced with the help of a simple stringed instrument. By way of proof, Miss Farr repeated one of Mr. Yeats' lyrics, as nearly as possible in the way in which Mr. Yeats himself is accustomed to say it. She took the pitch from certain notes which she had written down, and which she struck on Mr. Dolmetsch's psaltery. Now Miss Farr has a beautiful voice, and a genuine feeling for the beauty of verse. She said the lines better than most people would have said them, but, to be quite frank, did she say them so as to produce the effect Mr. Yeats himself produces whenever he repeats those lines ? The difference was fundamental. The one was a spontaneous thing, pro- foundly felt ; the other, a deliberate imitation, in which the fixing of the notes made any personal interpretation, good or bad, impossible. I admit that the way in which most actors speak verse is so deplorable that there is much to be said for a purely mechanical method, even if it should turn actors into little more than human phonographs. Many actors treat verse as a slightly more stilted kind of prose, and their main aim in saying it is to conceal from the audience the fact that it is not prose. They think of nothing but what they take to be the expression, and when they come to a passage of purely lyric quality they give it as if it were a quotation, having nothing to do with the rest of the speech. Anything is better than this haphazard way of misdoing things, either 25 The Speaking of Verse. M. Silvain's oratory or the intoning into which Mr. Yeats' method would almost certainly drift. But I cannot feel that it is possible to do much good by a ready-made method of any kind. Let the actor be taught how to breathe, how to articulate, let his voice be trained to express what he wants to express, and then let him be made to feel some- thing of what verse means by being verse. Let him, by all means, study one of Mr. Yeats' readings, interpreted to him by means of the notes ; it will teach him to unlearn some- thing and to learn something more. But then let him forget his notes and Mr. Yeats' method, if he is to make verse live on the stage. 26 Sarah Bernhardt. I AM not sure that the best moment to study an artist is not the moment of what is called decadence. The first energy of inspiration is gone ; what remains is the method, the mechanism, and it is that which alone one can study, as one can study the mechanism of the body, not the principle of life itself. What is done mechanically, after the heat of the blood has cooled, and the divine accidents have ceased to happen, is precisely all that was consciously skilful in the performance of an art. To see all this mechanism left bare, as the form of the skeleton is left bare when age thins the flesh upon it, is to learn more easily all that is to be learnt of structure, the art which not art but nature has hitherto concealed with its merciful covering. The art of Sarah Bernhardt has always been a very conscious art, but it spoke to us, once, with so electrical a shock, as if nerve touched nerve, or the mere " contour subtil " of the voice were laid tinglingly on one's spinal cord, that it was difficult to analyse it coldly. She was Phedre or Marguerite Gautier, she was Adrienne Lecouvreur, Fedora, La Tosca, the actual woman, and she was also that other actual woman, Sarah Bernhardt. Two magics met and united, in the artist and the woman, each alone of its kind. There was an excitement in going to the theatre ; one's pulses beat feverishly before the curtain had risen ; there was almost a kind of obscure sensation of peril, such as one feels when the lioness leaps into the cage, on the other side of the bars. And the acting was like a passionate declaration, offered to some one unknown ; it was as if the 27 Sarah Bernhardt. whole nervous force of the audience were sucked out of it and flung back, intensified, upon itself, as it encountered the single, insatiable, indomitable nervous force of the woman. And so, in its way, this very artificial acting seemed the mere instinctive, irresistible expression of a temperament ; it mesmerised one, awakening the senses and sending the intelligence to sleep. After all, though Rejane skins emotions alive, and Duse serves them up to you on golden dishes, it is Sarah Bernhardt who prepares the supreme feast. In " La Dame aux Camelias," still, she shows herself, as an actress, the greatest actress in the world. It is all sheer acting ; there is no suggestion, as with Duse, there is no canaille attrac- tiveness, as with Rejane; the thing is plastic, a modelling of emotion before you, with every vein visible ; she leaves nothing to the imagination, gives you every motion, all the physical signs of death, all the fierce abandonment to every mood, to grief, to delight, to lassitude. When she suffers, in the scene, for instance, where Armand insults her, she is like a trapped wild beast which some one is torturing, and she wakes just that harrowing pity. One's whole flesh suffers with her flesh ; her voice caresses and excites like a touch ; it has a throbbing, monotonous music, which breaks deliciously, which pauses suspended, and then resolves itself in a perfect chord. Her voice is like a thing detachable from herself, a thing which she takes in her hands like a musical instrument, playing on the stops cunningly with her fingers. Prose, when she speaks it, becomes a kind of verse, with all the rhythms, the vocal harmonies, of a kind of human poetry. Her whisper is heard across the whole 28 Sarah Bernhardt. theatre, every syllable distinct, and yet it is really a whisper. She comes on the stage like a miraculous painted idol, all nerves ; she runs through the gamut of the sex, and ends a child, when the approach of death brings Marguerite back to that deep infantile part of woman. She plays the part now with the accustomed ease of one who puts on and off an old shoe. It is almost a part of her ; she knows it through all her senses. And she moved me as much last night as she moved me when I first saw her play the part eleven or twelve years ago. To me, sitting where I was, not too near the stage, she might have been five-and-twenty. I saw none of the mechanism of the art, as I saw it in " L'Aiglon " ; here art still concealed art. Her vitality was equal to the vitality of Rejane ; it is differently ex- pressed, that is all. With Rejane the vitality is direct ; it is the appeal of Gavroche, the sharp, impudent urchin of the streets ; Sarah Bernhardt's vitality is electrical, and shoots its currents through all manner of winding ways. In form it belongs to an older period, just as the writing of Dumas fi Is belongs to an earlier period than the writing of Meilhac. It comes to us with the tradition to which it has given life ; it does not spring into our midst, unruly as nature. But it is in " Phedre " that Sarah Bernhardt must be seen, if we are to realise all that her art is capable of. In writing " Phedre," Racine anticipated Sarah Bernhardt. If the part had been made for her by a poet of our own days, it could not have been brought more perfectly within her limits, nor could it have more perfectly filled those limits to their utmost edge. It is one of the greatest parts in poetical drama, and it is written with a sense of the stage 29 Sarah Bernhardt. not less sure than its sense of dramatic poetry. There was a time when Racine was looked upon as old-fashioned, as conventional, as frigid. It is realised nowadays that his verse has cadences like the cadences of Verlaine, that his language is as simple and direct as prose, and that he is one of the most passionate of poets. Of the character of Phedre Racine tells us that it is " ce que j'ai peut-etre mis de plus raisonnable sur le theatre." The word strikes oddly on our ears, but every stage of the passion of Phedre is indeed reasonable, logical, as only a French poet, since the Greeks themselves, could make it. The passion itself is an abnormal, an insane thing, and that passion comes to us with all its force and all its perversity ; but the words in which it is expressed are never extravagant, they are always clear, simple, temperate, perfectly precise and explicit. The art is an art exquisitely balanced between the conventional and the realistic, and the art of Sarah Bernhardt, when she plays the part, is balanced with just the same unerring skill. She seems to abandon herself wholly, at times, to her " fureurs " ; she tears the words with her teeth, and spits them out of her mouth, like a wild beast ravening upon prey ; but there is always dignity, restraint, a certain re- moteness of soul, and there is always the verse, and her miraculous rendering of the verse, to keep Racine in the right atmosphere. Of what we call acting there is little, little change in the expression of the face. The part is a part for the voice, and it is only in " Phedre " that one can hear that orchestra, her voice, in all its variety of beauty. In her modern plays, plays in prose, she is condemned to use only a few of the instruments of the orchestra : an 30 Sarah Bernhardt. actress must, in such parts, be conversational, and for how much beauty or variety is there room in modern conversa- tion ? But here she has Racine's verse, along with Racine's psychology, and the language has nothing more to offer the voice of a tragic actress. She seems to speak her words, her lines, with a kind of joyful satisfaction ; all the artist in her delights in the task. Her nerves are in it, as well as her intelligence ; but everything is coloured by the poetry, everything is subordinate to beauty. Well, and she seems still to be the same Phedre that she was eleven or twelve years ago, as she is the same " Dame aux Camelias." Is it reality, is it illusion ? Illu- sion, perhaps, but an illusion which makes itself into a very effectual kind of reality. She has played these pieces until she has got them, not only by heart, but by every nerve and by every vein, and now the ghost of the real thing is so like the real thing that there is hardly any telling the one from the other. It is the living on of a mastery once absolutely achieved, without so much as the need of a new effort. The test of the artist, the test which decides how far the artist is still living, as more than a force of memory, lies in the power to create a new part, to bring new material to life. Last year, in " L'Aiglon," it seemed to me that Sarah Bernhardt showed how little she still possessed that power, and this year I see the same failure in "Francesca da Rimini.'* The play, it must be admitted, is hopelessly poor, common, melodramatic, without atmosphere, without nobility, subtlety, or passion ; it degrades the story which we owe to Dante and not to history (for, in itself, the story is a quite ordinary story of adultery : Dante and the Sarah Bernhardt. flames of his hell purged it), it degrades it almost out of all recognition. These middle-aged people, who wrangle shrewishly behind the just turned back of the husband and almost in the hearing of the child, are people in whom it is impossible to be interested, apart from any fine meanings put into them in the acting. And yet, since M. de Max has made hardly less than a creation out of the part of Giovanni, filling it, as he has, with his own nervous force and passionately restrained art, might it not have been possible once for Sarah Bernhardt to have thrilled us even as this Francesca of Mr. Marion Crawford ? I think so ; she has taken bad plays as willingly as good plays, to turn them to her own purpose, and she has been as triumphant, if not as fine, in bad plays as in good ones. Now her Francesca is lifeless, a melodious image, making meaningless music. She says over the words, cooingly, chantingly, or frantically, as the expression-marks, to which she seems to act, demand. The interest is in following her expression- marks. The first thing one notices in her acting, when one is free to watch it coolly, is the way in which she subordinates effects to effect. She has her crescendos, of course, and it is these which people are most apt to remember, but the extraordinary force of these crescendos comes from the smooth and level manner in which the main part of the speaking is done. She is not anxious to make points at every moment, to put all the possible emphasis into every separate phrase ; I have heard her glide over really signifi- cant phrases which, taken by themselves, would seem to deserve more consideration, but which she has wisely 32 Sarah Bernhardt. subordinated to an overpowering effect of ensemble. Sarah Bernhardt's acting always reminds me of a musical per- formance. Her voice is itself an instrument of music, and she plays upon it as a conductor plays upon an orchestra. The movements of her body, her gestures, the expression of her face, are all harmonious, are all parts of a single harmony. It is not reality which she aims at giving us, it is reality transposed into another atmosphere, as if seen in a mirror, in which all its outlines become more gracious. The plea- sure which we get from seeing her as Francesca or as Marguerite Gautier is doubled by that other pleasure, never completely out of our minds, that she is also Sarah Bern- hardt. One sometimes forgets that Rejane is acting at all ; it is the real woman of the part, Sapho, or Zaza, or Yanetta, who lives before us. Also one sometimes forgets that Duse is acting, that she is even pretending to be Magda or Silvia ; it is Duse herself who lives there, on the stage. But Sarah Bernhardt is always the actress as well as the part; when she is at her best, she is both equally, and our consciousness of the one does not disturb our possession by the other. When she is not at her best, we see only the actress, the incomparable craftswoman openly labouring at her work. 33 Rostand, Sarah, and Coquelin. M. ROSTAND is one of the cleverest of contemporary writers. He appeals to the readers and audiences of to- day as a millionaire appeals to society. He enters every door. Critics praise him, the Academy elects him, he sells by the thousand ; French actors make fortunes by him at home, and take him over the world in one long triumph. He is translated, and played in all the native languages of the countries where he has already been played in French. The greatest living French actress and the greatest living French actor join together to increase his fame and their own. At this moment Sarah Bernhardt and Coquelin are in London, at Her Majesty's, and they have come chiefly in order to act " L'Aiglon," his latest success, and, we are assured, his latest masterpiece. Well, a fame of this kind, the conquering, on whatever terms, of so much of the world, means something. It means that M. Rostand has known exactly what he wanted to do, and has done it. With an exquisite agility of mind he has run between many dangers: he has been poetic, but not too poetic ; extravagant, but not too extravagant ; humorous, but not too humorous ; just sufficiently simple, precious, modern, archaic, cynical, and sentimental, to please all tastes. He has learnt declamation from Victor Hugo, the swing of sword and cape from Dumas, the art of tight-rope dancing on the cord of French verse from Banville ; he has learnt, from some business-like quality of his own mind, how to avoid Realism and Symbolism and every other good or bad poetical school of the day. He writes melodrama with so neat a finish to the flourish that it 34 Rostand, Sarah, and Coquelin. can easily be passed off as tragedy ; and he writes verse with so deceptive a glitter that it can easily be passed off as poetry. In fact, if I could get one obstinate conviction out of my head, perhaps I might enjoy " Cyrano de Bergerac." M. Rostand's play is written in verse : anything which is written in verse must, to my thinking, be poetry, or it is nothing ; M. Rostand's verse is enormously clever, but it is not poetry. Now I notice, by the enthusiasm with which " Cyrano " was received, both in France and England, when it made its first appearance, that there are a great many people who do not limit their pleasures as I do ; who disagree with me in thinking that verse need necessarily be poetry. I quite understand such people admiring " Cyrano." I also understand the feeling of those who consider that " Cyrano " is poetry of a particularly novel and a particu- larly exquisite kind. They are the people who once admired the " Love-Letters of a Violinist " and who now admire the " Love-Letters of an Englishwoman." They are the people who admire the imitation of the real thing more than the real thing. " Cyrano " is as much like poetry as the brilliants of the stage are like diamonds. It is made to flash, and to take in the ignorant. It has sentimentality for the sentimental, artificial fun for the vulgar, preciosity for the pretender to taste, clatter for the nursery delight of the juvenile-minded, rope-dancing agility for the admiration of the sportsman in art. We have been told solemnly, by critics too old to know any better, that the play marks the renaissance of the genuine French spirit ; that it is a triumphant revolt against the Northern blasts, the Decadent 35 Rostand, Sarah, and Coquelin. miasmas, the Symbolist fogs, which have been making France unfruitful. If to possess the French spirit is to be lacking in ideas, in the sense of reality, in sincerity, in passion, in poetry ; if it is to be rhetorical, frigidly artificial, cheap in effect, spendthrift in display ; then, and then only, can " Cyrano " be accepted on the terms of its admirers. With Coquelin and Sarah Bernhardt it receives a splendid illumination. The part of Roxane is a secondary part, and Sarah for once is secondary in the play in which she acts. She is young, beautiful, and a little ordinary ; amazingly young, and condemned by her part to be a little ordinary. In a piece all charades and stage directions she has no chance to be any one of her finer selves, and to see her in " Cyrano " immediately after seeing her in " Phedre " is to realise the ability of the artist, and how much the artist is at the command of the actress. She gives one no creation ; there is no creative material in the play ; but all there is to do she does exquisitely. As for Coquelin, what a lesson he was to our gasconading actors ! Here, in a piece infinitely cleverer than the sword and cape pieces in which Mr. Lewis Waller and other clever English actors do their best to be humorously heroic, one saw the blusterer of resource, the sad wit, the tender-hearted spadassin. Coquelin has the voice, the manner, the mimicry, everything that is needed to carry such a part through with a rush ; it is a part for the elocutionist, and Coquelin is an incomparable elocutionist. On the night on which I saw it, " L'Aiglon " went on until after midnight, which was not entirely the fault of the play. It was a fatiguing performance, which was not 36 Rostand, Sarah, and Coquelin. entirely the fault of the intervals. Once more I admired M. Rostand's cleverness, as I saw how skilfully it had been written to be acted, and to be acted by just these two people. Scrutinise even the first act, and you will see that it has been composed like a piece of music, to be played by one per- former, Sarah Bernhardt. To Sarah Bernhardt acting is a performance on a musical instrument. One seems to see the expression marks : piano, pianissimo, allargando, and just where the tempo rubato comes in. She never forgets that art is not nature, and that when one is speaking verse one is not talking prose. She speaks with a liquid articulation of every syllable, like one who loves the savor of words on the tongue, giving them a beauty and an expressiveness often not in them themselves. Her face changes less than you might expect ; it is not over-possessed by detail, it gives always the synthesis. The smile of the artist, a wonderful smile which has never aged with jher, pierces through the passion or languor of the part. It is often accompanied by a suave, voluptuous tossing of the head, and is like the smile of one who inhales some delicious perfume, with half- closed eyes. All through the level perfection of her acting there are little sharp snaps of the nerves ; and these are but one indication of .^that perfect mechanism which her art really is. Her finger is always upon the spring ; it touches or releases it, and the effect follows instantaneously. Coquelin, in his equal perfection, his ripe, mellow art, his passion of humour, his touching vehemence, makes himself seem less a divine machine, more a delightfully faulty person. His voice is firm, sonorous, flexible, a human, expressive, amusing voice, not the elaborate musical instru- 37 Rostand, Sarah, and Coquelin. ment of Sarah, which seems to go by itself, caline, cooing, lamenting, raging, or in that wonderful swift chatter which she uses with such instant and deliberate effect. His face is the face of his part, always a disguise, never a revelation. He is not a temperament, nor a student, nor anything apart from the art of the actor ; he is the actor, consummately master of his metier. And how much the master of them- selves are all these French actors, whom it is so instructive for us to see ! Movement, gesture, excitement, are natural to them, and, so far from needing to be forced, can be vividly and temperately repressed. With most of them acting is a kind of second nature, and a nature capable of training. With Sarah and with Coquelin also, nature has been trained with infinite care ; but then nature, with them, happens to be genius. Coquelin and Moliere: Some Aspects. I SPENT nearly all the evenings of last week at the Garrick Theatre, where the three Coquelins and their company were acting in Moliere and in some famous modern pieces. Of Moliere I saw " Tartuffe," "L'Avare," " Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme," " Les Precieuses Ridicules," and a condensed version of "Le Depit Amoureux," in which the four acts of the original were cut down into two. Of these five plays only two are in verse, " Tartuffe " and " Le Depit Amoureux," and I could not help wishing that the fashion of Moliere's day had allowed him to write all his plays in prose. Moliere was not a poet, and he knew that he was not a poet. When he ventured to write the most Shakes- pearean of his comedies, " L'Avare," in prose, " le meme prejuge," Voltaire tells us, " qui avait fait tomber 4 le Festin de Pierre,' parcequ'il etait en prose, nuisit au succes de * FAvare.' Cependant le public qui, a la longue, se rend toujours au bon, finit par donner a cet ouvrage les applau- dissements qu'il merite. On comprit alors qu'il peut y avoir de forts bonnes comedies en prose." How infinitely finer, as prose, is the prose of " L'Avare " than the verse of "Tartuffe" as verse! In "Tartuffe" all the art of the actor is required to carry you over the artificial jangle of the alexandrines without allowing you to perceive too clearly that this man, who is certainly not speaking poetry, is speaking in rhyme. Moliere was a great prose writer, but I do not remember a line of poetry in the whole of his work in verse. The whole temper of his mind was the temper of mind of the prose-writer. His wordly wisdom, his active 39 Coquelin and Moliere: Some Aspects. philosophy, the very mainspring of his plots, are found, characteristically, in his valets and his servant-maids. He satirises the miser, the hypocrite, the bas-bleu, but he chuckles over Frosine and Gros-Ren6 ; he loves them for their freedom of speech and their elastic minds, ready in words or deeds. They are his chorus, if the chorus might be imagined as directing the action. But Moliere has a weakness, too, for the bourgeois, and he has made M. Jourdain immortally delightful. There is not a really cruel touch in the whole character ; we laugh at him so freely because Moliere lets us laugh with such kindliness. M. Jourdain has a robust joy in life ; he carries off his absurdities by the simple good faith which he puts into them. When I speak of M. Jourdain I hardly know whether I am speaking of the character in Moliere or of the character in Goquelin. Probably there is no difference. We get Moliere's vast, succulent farce of the intellect rendered with an art like his own. If this, in every detail, is not what Moliere meant, then so much the worse for Moliere. Moliere is kind to his bourgeois, envelops him softly in satire as in cotton-wool, dandles him like a great baby ; and Coquelin is without bitterness, stoops to make stupidity heroic, a distinguished stupidity. A study in comedy so profound, so convincing, so full of human nature and of the art-concealing art of the stage, has not been seen in our time. As Mascarille, in " Les PreVieuses Ridicules," Coquelin becomes delicate and extravagant, a scented whirlwind ; his parody is more splendid than the thing itself which he parodies, more full of fine show and nimble 40 Coquelin and Moliere : Some Aspects. bravery. There is beauty in this broadly comic acting, the beauty of subtle (detail. Words can do little to define a performance which is a constant series of little movements of the face, little intonations of the voice, a way of lolling in the chair, a way of speaking, of singing, of preserving the gravity of burlesque. In " Tartuffe " we get a form of comedy which is almost tragic, the horribly serious comedy of the hypocrite. Coquelin, who remakes his face, as by a prolonged effort of the muscles, for every part, makes, for this part, a great fish's face, heavy, suppressed, with lowered eyelids and a secret mouth, out of which steals at times some stealthy avowal. He has the movements of a great slug, or of a snail, if you will, putting out itsjhead and drawing it back into its shell. The face waits and plots, with a sleepy immobility, covering a hard, indomitable will. It is like a drawing of Daumier, if you can imagine a drawing which renews itself at every instant, in a series of poses to which it is hardly necessary to add words. I am told that Coquelin, in the creation of a part, makes his way slowly, surely, inwards, for the first few weeks of his performance, and that then the thing is finished, to the least intonation or gesture, and can be laid down and taken up at will, without a shade of difference in the interpreta- tion. The part of Maitre Jacques in " L'Avare," for instance, which he performed with such gusto and such certainty on Friday night, had not been acted by him for twenty years, and it was done, without rehearsal, in the midst of a company that required prompting at every moment. I suppose this method of moulding a part, as if 41 Coquelin and Moliere : Some Aspects. in wet clay, and then allowing it to take hard, final form, is the method natural to the comedian, his right method. I can hardly think that the tragic actor should ever allow himself to become so much at home with his material ; that he dare ever allow his clay to become quite hard. He has to deal with the continually shifting stuff of the soul and of the passions, with nature at its least generalised moments. The comic actor deals with nature for the most part generalised, with things palpably absurd, with characteristics that strike the intelligence, not with emotions that touch the heart or the senses. He comes to more definite and to more definable results, on which he may rest, confident that what has made an audience laugh once will make it laugh always, laughter being a physiological thing, wholly inde- pendent of mood. In thinking of some excellent comic actors of our own, I am struck by the much greater effort which they seem to make in order to drive their points home, and in order to get what they think variety. Sir Charles Wyndham is the only English actor I can think of at the moment who does not make unnecessary grimaces, who does not insist on acting when the difficult thing is not to act. In " Tartuffe " Coquelin stands motionless for five minutes at a time, without change of expression, and yet nothing can be more expressive than his face at those moments. In Chopin's G Minor Nocturne, Op. 15, there is an F held for three bars, and when Rubinstein played the Nocturne, says Mr. Huneker in his instructive and delightful book on Chopin, he prolonged the tone, " by some miraculous means," so that " it swelled and diminished, and went 42 Coquelin and Moliere : Some Aspects. singing into D, as if the instrument were an organ." It is that power of sustaining an expression, unchanged, and yet always full of living significance, that I find in Coquelin. It is part of his economy, the economy of the artist. The improviser disdains economy, as much as the artist cherishes it. Coquelin has some half-dozen complete variations of the face he has composed for Tartuffe ; no more than that, with no insignificances of expression thrown away ; but each variation is a new point of view, from which we see the whole character. 43 Rejane and Jane Hading. THE genius of Rejane is a kind of finesse : it is a flavour, and all the ingredients of the dish may be named without denning it. The thing is Parisian, but that is only to say that it unites nervous force with a wicked ease and mastery of charm. It speaks to the senses through the brain, as much as to the brain through the senses. It is the feminine equivalent of intellect. It " magnetises our poor vertebrae," in Baudelaire's phrase, because it is sex and yet not instinct. It is sex civilised, under direction, playing a part, as we say of others than those on the stage. It calculates, and is unerring. It has none of the vulgar warmth of mere passion, none of its health or simplicity. It leaves a little red sting where it has kissed. And it intoxicates us by its appeal to so many sides of our nature at once. We are thrilled, and we admire, and are almost coldly appreciative, and yet aglow with the response of the blood. I have found myself applauding with tears in my eyes. The feeling and the critical approval came together, hand in hand : neither counteracted the other. Rejane can be vulgar, as nature is vulgar : she has all the instincts of the human animal, of the animal woman, whom man will never quite civilise. There is no doubt of it, nature lacks taste ; and woman, who is so near to nature, lacks taste in the emotions. Rejane, in " Sapho " or in " Zaza " for instance, is woman naked and shameless, loving and suffering with all her nerves and muscles, a gross, pitiable, horribly human thing, whose direct appeal, like that of a sick animal, seizes you by the throat at the instant in 44 Rejane and Jane Hading. which it reaches your eyes and ears. More than any actress she is the human animal without disguise or evasion ; with all the instincts, all the natural cries and movements. In " Sapho " or "Zaza" she speaks the language of the senses, no more ; and her acting reminds you of all that you may possibly have forgotten of how the senses speak when they speak through an ignorant woman in Idve. It is like an accusing confirmation of some of one's guesses at truth, before the realities of the flesh and of the affections of the flesh. Scepticism is no longer possible : the thing is before you, abominably real, a disquieting and irrefutable thing, which speaks with its own voice, as it has never spoken on the stage through any other actress. In " Zaza," a play made for Rejane by two playwrights who had set themselves humbly to a task, the task of fitting her with a part, she is seen doing " Sapho " over again, with a difference. Zaza is a vulgar woman, a woman without instruction or experience ; she has not known poets and been the model of a great sculptor ; she comes straight from the boards of a cafe-concert to the kept woman's house in the country. She has caught her lover vulgarly, to win a bet ; and, to the end, you realise that she is, well, a woman who would do that. She has no depth of passion, none of Sapho's roots in the earth ; she has a " beguin " for Dufresne, she will drop everything else for it, such as it is, and she is capable of good, hearty suffering. Rejane gives her to us as she is, in all her commonness. The picture is full of humour ; it is, as I so often feel with Rejane, a Forain. Like Forain, she uses her material without ever being absorbed by it, without relaxing her impersonal artistic energy. In being 45 Rejane and Jane Hading. Zaza, she is so far from being herself (what is the self of a great actress ?) that she has invented a new way of walking, as well as new tones and grimaces. There is not an effect in the play which she has not calculated ; only, she has calcu- lated every effect so exactly that the calculation is not seen. When you watch Mme. Jane Hading, you see her effects coming, several seconds before they are there ; when they come, they come neatly, but with no surprise in them, and therefore with no conviction. There lies all the difference between the actress who is an actress equally by her tempera- ment and by her brain and the actress who has only the brain (and, with Mme. Hading, beauty) to rely on. Every- thing that Rejane can think of she can do ; thought translates itself instantly into feeling, and the embodied impulse is before you. Mme. Hading knows so well how everything should be done ; she knows just how Sarah Bernhardt, if not nature, would do it ; and she gives you a series of the most admirable lifeless studies, in which only her eyes live with a vehement personal life of their own. In watching Mme. Hading I am sometimes reminded of Mrs. Kendal. Mme. Hading is a woman of strange, attrac- tive beauty. There is the mass of bronze hair, there are the square lines of the face, the level eyebrows, and sullen, suppressed eyes, the square shoulders, the fine, heavy lines of the neck and chin. And it is no empty or expression- less beauty, it is a beauty full of some enigmatical meaning. But Mrs. Kendal is the better actress, because she is able to persuade a greater number of people that her deliberation is instinctive, although in both there is the same essential 46 Rejane and Jane Hading. artificiality. Both try to do by a careful method what can only be done, as Rejane does it, by a method plus something else. That something else is genius, perhaps ; but if the word genius sounds a little vague, let me say that it is vitality, temperament, sincerity. When Mme. Hading is perfectly quiet, when she is thinking, making up her mind, she is often admirable ; but see her when she has to show acute emotion. There is, first, the contraction of the cat about to spring, and there is a very splutter of simulated energy, with the elegant collapse at the end. Now she turns on her voice, now she turns it off; she seems to be doing just what an excited woman would do, and yet you are never sorry, never even interested. You say : " Yes, that was really very well done," but you say it coldly ; the actress has only acted. When Rejane is Zaza, she acts, and is the woman she acts ; and you have to think, before you remember how elaborate a science goes to the making of that thrill which you are almost cruelly enjoying. 47 Sir Henry Irving. As I watched, at the Lyceum, the sad and eager face of Duse, leaning forward out of a box, and gazing at the eager and gentle face of Irving, I could not help contrasting the two kinds of acting summed up in those two faces. The play was " Olivia," W. G. Wills' poor and stagey version of " The Vicar of Wakefield," in which, however, not even the lean intelligence of a modern playwright could quite banish the homely and gracious and tender charm of Gold- smith. As Dr. Primrose, Irving was almost at his best ; that is to say, not at his greatest, but at his most equable level of good acting. All his distinction was there, his nobility, his restraint, his fine convention. For Irving re- presents the old school of acting, just as Duse represents the new school. To Duse, acting is a thing almost wholly apart from action ; she thinks on the stage, scarcely moves there ; when she feels emotion, it is her chief care not to express it with emphasis, but to press it down into her soul, until only the pained reflection of it glimmers out of her eyes and trembles in the hollows of her cheeks. To Irving, on the contrary, acting is all that the word literally means ; it is an art of sharp, detached, yet always delicate, move- ment ; he crosses the stage with intention, as he intentionally adopts a fine, crabbed, personal, highly conventional elocution of his own ; he is an actor, and he acts, keeping nature, or the too close resemblance of nature, carefully out of his composition. With Miss Terry there is only the personal charm of a very natural nature, which has become deliciously sophisti- 48 Sir Henry Irving. cated. She is the eternal girl, and she can never grow old ; one might say, she can never grow up. She learns her part, taking it quite artificially, as a part to be learnt ; and then, at her frequent moments of forgetfulness, charms us into delight, though never into conviction, by a gay abandon- ment to the self of a passing moment. Irving's acting is almost a science, and it is a science founded on tradition. It is in one sense his personality that makes him what he is, the only actor on the English stage who has a touch of genius. But he has not gone to himself to invent an art wholly personal, wholly new ; his acting is no interruption of an intense inner life, but a craftsmanship into which he has put all he has to give. It is an art wholly of rhetoric, that is to say wholly external ; his emotion moves to slow music, crystallises into an attitude, dies upon a long-drawn- out word. He appeals to us, to our sense of what is expected, to our accustomed sense of the logic, not of life, but of life as we have always seen it on the stage, by his way of taking snuff; of taking out his pocket-handkerchief, of lifting his hat, of crossing his legs. He has observed life in order to make his own version of life, using the stage as his medium, and accepting the traditional aids and limita- tions of the stage. Take him in one of his typical parts, in "Louis XL' r His Louis XI. is a masterpiece of grotesque art. It is a study in senility, and it is the grotesque art of the thing which saves it from becoming painful. This shrivelled carcase, from which age, disease, and fear have picked all the flesh, leaving the bare framework of bone and the drawn and cracked covering of yellow skin, would be unendurable 49 Sir Henry Irving. in its irreverent copy of age if it were not so obviously a picture, with no more malice than there is in the delicate lines and fine colours of a picture. The figure is at once Punch and the oldest of the Chelsea pensioners ; it distracts one between pity, terror, and disgust, but is altogether absorbing ; one watches it as one would watch some feeble ancient piece of mechanism, still working, which may snap at any moment. In such a personation, make-up becomes a serious part of art. It is the picture that magnetises us, and every wrinkle seems to have been studied in movement ; the hands act almost by themselves, as if every finger were a separate actor. The passion of fear, the instinct of craft, the malady of suspicion, in a frail old man who has power over every one but himself : that is what Sir Henry Irving represents, in a performance which is half precise physiology, half palpable artifice, but altogether a unique thing in art. See him in " The Merchant of Venice." His Shylock is noble and sordid, pathetic and terrifying. It is one of his great parts, made up of pride, stealth, anger, minute and varied picturesqueness, and a diabolical subtlety. Whether he paws at his cloak, or clutches upon the handle of his stick, or splutters hatred, or cringes before his prey, or shakes with lean and wrinkled laughter, he is always the great part and the great actor. See him as Mephistopheles in " Faust." The Lyceum performance is a superb pantomime, with one overpowering figure drifting through it and in some sort directing it, the red-plumed devil Mephistopheles, who, in Sir Henry Irving's impersonation of him, becomes a kind of weary spirit, a melancholy image of unhappy 5 Sir Henry Irving. pride, holding himself up to the laughter of inferior beings, with the old acknowledgment that " the devil is an ass." A head like the head of Dante, shown up by coloured lights, and against chromo-lithographic backgrounds, while all the diabolic intelligence is set to work on the cheap triumph of wheedling a widow and screwing Rhenish and Tokay with a gimlet out of an inn table : it is partly Goethe's fault, and partly the fault of Wills, and partly the lowering trick of the stage. Mephistopheles is not really among Irving's great parts, but it is among his picturesque parts. With his restless strut, a blithe and aged tripping of the feet to some not quite human measure, he is like some spectral marionette, playing a game only partly his own. For such a part no mannerism can seem unnatural, and the image with its solemn mask lives in a kind of galvanic life of its own, seductively, with some mocking suggestion of his " cousin the snake." Here and there some of the old power is now lacking ; but whatever was once subtle and insinuating remains. Shakespeare at the Lyceum is always a magnificent spec- tacle, and " Coriolanus," the last Shakespearean revival there, was a magnificent spectacle. It is a play made up princi- pally of one character and a crowd, the crowd being a sort of moving background, treated in Shakespeare's large and scornful way. A stage crowd at the Lyceum always gives one a sense of exciting movement, and this Roman rabble did all that was needed to show off the almost solitary splendour of Coriolanus. He is the proudest man in Shakespeare, and Sir Henry Irving is at his best when he embodies pride. His conception of the part was masterly : Sir Henry Irving. it had imagination, nobility, quietude. With opportunity for ranting in every second speech, he never ranted, but played what might well have been a roaring part with a kind of gentleness. With every opportunity for extrava- gant gesture, he stood, as the play seemed to foam about him, like a rock against which the foam beats. Made up as a kind of Roman Moltke, the lean, thoughtful soldier, he spoke throughout with a slow, contemptuous enunciation, as of one only just not too lofty to sneer. Restrained in scorn, he kept throughout an attitude of disdainful pride, the face, the eyes, set, while only his mouth twitched, seeming to chew his words, with the disgust of one swallowing a painful morsel. Where other actors would have raved, he spoke with bitter humour, a humour that seemed to hurt the speaker, the concise, active humour of the soldier, putting his words rapidly into deeds. And his pride was an intellectual pride ; the weakness of a character, but the angry dignity of a temperament. I have never seen Irving' so restrained, so much an artist, so faithfully interpretative of a masterpiece. Something of energy, no doubt, was lacking ; but everything was there, except the emphasis which I most often wish away in acting. Duse in Some of Her Parts. I. THE acting of Duse is a criticism; poor work dissolves away under it, as under a solvent acid. Not one of the plays which she has brought with her is a play on the level of her intelligence and of her capacity for expressing deep human emotion. Take " The Second Mrs. Tanqueray." It is a very able play, it is quite an interesting glimpse into a particular kind of character, but it is only able, and it is only a glimpse. Paula, as conceived by Mr. Pinero, is a thoroughly English type of woman, the nice, slightly morbid, somewhat unintelligently capricious woman who has "gone wrong," and who finds it quite easy, though a little dull, to go right when the chance is offered to her. She is observed from the outside, very keenly observed ; her ways, her surface tricks of emotion, are caught; she is a person whom we know or remember. But what is skin-deep in Paula as con- ceived by Mr. Pinero becomes a real human being, a human being with a soul, in the Paula conceived by Duse. Paula as played by Duse is sad and sincere, where the English- woman is only irritable ; she has the Italian simplicity and directness in place of that terrible English capacity for uncertainty in emotion and huffiness in manner. She brings profound tragedy, the tragedy of a soul which has sinned and suffered, and tries vainly to free itself from the conse- quences of its deeds, into a study of circumstances in their ruin of material happiness. And, frankly, the play cannot stand it. When this woman bows down under her fate in 53 Duse in Some of Her Parts. so terrible a spiritual loneliness, realising that we cannot fight against Fate, and that Fate is only the inevitable choice of our own natures, we wait for the splendid words which shall render so great a situation ; and no splendid words come. The situation, to the dramatist, has been only a dramatic situation. Here is Duse, a chalice for the wine of imagination, but the chalice remains empty. It is almost painful to see her waiting for the words that do not come, offering tragedy to us in her eyes, and with her hands, and in her voice, only not in the words that she says or in the details of the action which she is condemned to follow. See Mrs. Patrick Campbell playing " The Second Mrs. Tanqueray," and you will see it played exactly according to Mr. Pinero's intention, and played brilliantly enough to dis- tract our notice from what is lacking in the character. A fantastic and delightful contradiction, half gamine, half Burne-Jones, she confuses our judgment, as a Paula in real life might, and leaves us attracted and repelled, and, above all, interested. But Duse has no resources outside simple human nature. If she cannot convince you by the thing in itself, she cannot disconcert you by a paradox about it. Well, this passionately sincere acting, this one real person moving about among the dolls of the piece, shows up all that is mechanical, forced, and unnatural in the construc- tion of a play never meant to withstand the searchlight of this woman's creative intelligence. Whatever is theatrical and obvious starts out into sight. The good things are transfigured, the bad things merely discovered. And so, by a kind of naivete in the acceptance of emotion for all it 54- Duse in Some of Her Parts. might be, instead of for the little that it is, by an almost perverse simplicity and sincerity in the treatment of a super- ficial and insincere character, Duse plays " The Second Mrs. Tanqueray " in the grand manner, destroying the illusion of the play as she proves over again the supremacy of her own genius. II. 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 loath- ing 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 con- scious art, an art so perfect as to be almost literally decep- tive. 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 move- ments 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 55 Duse in Some of Her Parts. 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 positi/e. 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. III. "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 56 Duse in Some of Her Parts. so revolting as the end of " La Gioconda." D'Annunzio has put as a motto on his title-page the sentence of Leon- ardo 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 pain- fulness. 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 beau- tiful 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 inexcus- able 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 the failure of a far higher order than such suc- cesses 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 57 Duse in Some of Her Parts. 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. IV. DUMAS fils has put his best work into the novel of " La Dame aux Camelias," 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 senti- ment 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 un- natural 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 senti- ment coming suddenly into her life, but the simple, 58 Duse in Some of Her Parts. 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 great- ness, 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 reproach- fulness, 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 Mile, 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 inter- course 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