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Updated: May 11, 2025
An' I open it up and, boy! There plain as the nose on your face is a card among the flowers readin', 'to a fellow artist, from Sarah Bernhardt. And whilst we are, so to speak, on the subjeck you can put in likewise what Eleanora Duse said o' me. You know who she is, I suppose, the very most superlative genius o' the stage, suh. Yes, suh, the very most.
The great Italian tragedienne, Duse, told me that one of her greatest pleasures was to wander about the streets incognito watching the types of people, following them round, observing them in their daily lives and remembering all the small details of action, gesture or expression which she could some day embody into a rôle.
The matinée given in my honor at Drury Lane by the theatrical profession was a wonderful sight. The two things about it which touched me most deeply were my reception by the crowd who were waiting to get into the gallery when I visited them at two in the morning, and the presence of Eleonora Duse, who came all the way from Florence just to honor me.
I gazed at that Duse and felt overcome with misery at the thought that we have to educate our temperaments and tastes on such wooden actresses as N. and her like, whom we call great because we have seen nothing better. Looking at Duse I understood why it is that the Russian theatre is so dull. I sent three hundred roubles to-day, did you get them? And these are the students the devil take them!
Where are the three stages, truth, philosophy, conscience, which Dumas offers to us in his preface as the three stages by which a work of dramatic art reaches perfection? Shown us by Duse, from moment to moment, yes; but in the piece, no, scarcely more than in "Fédora." So fatal is it to write for our instruction, as fatal as to write for our amusement.
"Consider yourself wholly free," Monsieur le Malouet tells me every morning; "go up to your hermitage; work at your ease." An hour later he is knocking at my door: "Well! are we hard at work?" "Why, yes, I am beginning to get into it." "What! the duse! You have been at it more than two hours! You are killing yourself, my friend. However, you are free.
Like his predecessors in confinement, he fell into the hands of the veritable Dunn, without the assistance of his friend Duse, as he called him; but had it not been for the timely appearance of a clerk in the French consul's office, who explained the nature of the arrest, in his native tongue, Mr. Dunn would have found some trouble in making the arrest.
Her walk is the walk of the peasant, fine and free. She has the superb carriage of the head which goes with that fearless movement from the hips and her face! There is nothing like it, nothing! But it is as the real woman, a particular woman, that Duse triumphs most. Her Cleopatra was insignificant compared with Sarah's she is not so pictorial. How futile it is to make comparisons!
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. The acting of Duse is a criticism; poor work dissolves away under it, as under a solvent acid.
Duse is the soul made flesh, Réjane the flesh made Parisian, Sarah Bernhardt the flesh and the devil; but Julia Marlowe is the joy of life, the plenitude of sap in the tree. The personal appeal of Mr. Sothern and of Miss Marlowe is very different.
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