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Other actresses, even English, and even American, know how to make inarticulate cries, with open mouth; Signora Duse's noise is not a cry; it is her very thought audible the thought of the woman she is playing, who does not at every moment give exact words to her thought, but does give it significant sound.
They were smoke-gray, with long, dark lashes, and they did not seem to focus perfectly at least there was enough deflection to make their expression odd, withal interesting, like the slow droop of Eleonora Duse's magic eye. Though her features were rigid, the woman's glance spoke to Baldur, spoke eloquently.
Directly she came on I knew how she was going to do the part. She had such shy, demure fun. She understood, like all great comedians, that you must not pretend to be serious so sincerely that no one in the audience sees through it! As a woman off the stage Ada Rehan was even more wonderful than as a shrew on. She had a touch of dignity, of nobility, of beauty, rather like Eleonora Duse's.
Harmonies are more beautiful than contrasts in acting as in other things and more difficult, too. Henry Irving was immensely funny as Doricourt. We had sort of Beatrice and Benedick scenes together, and I began to notice what a lot his face did for him. There have only been two faces on the stage in my time his and Duse's.
After the Rio del Formase is a common little house, and then the Palazzo Volkoff, once Eleonora Duse's Venetian home. Next is the splendid fifteenth-century Palazzo Dario, to my eyes perhaps the most satisfying of all, with its rich colouring, leaning walls, ancient chimneys and porphyry decorations.
It was during the silence after those two lines that Henry Irving as Romeo had one of those sublime moments which an actor only achieves once or twice in his life. The only thing that I ever saw to compare with it was Duse's moment when she took Kellner's card in "Magda."
But to see her after the Santuzza of Duse, in Verga's "Cavalleria Rusticana," is to realise the difference between this art of the animal and Duse's art of the soul. And if one thinks of Réjane's "Sapho," the difference is hardly less, though of another kind.
I just took me by the shoulders. "Nancy Olden, you little thief!" I cried to me inside of me. "How dare you! I'd rather you'd steal the silver on this woman's dressing-table than cheat her out of what she expects and what's coming to her." Nance really didn't dare. So she began. The first one was bad. I gave 'em Duse's Francesca.
As a piece of technical skill, Duse's acting in "Fédora" is as fine as anything she has done. It completes our admiration of her genius, as it proves to us that she can act to perfection a part in which the soul is left out of the question, in which nothing happens according to nature, and in which life is figured as a long attack of nerves, relieved by the occasional interval of an uneasy sleep.
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 loathing 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.
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