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"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."
I merely indicate, by way of illustration, a quite obvious method of reducing the element of coincidence in the case. The coincidence in The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, by which Ellean meets and falls in love with one of Paula's ex-lovers, has been very severely criticized.
Is Langdon Mitchell's version of "Vanity Fair" sufficiently a work of art to exist without the co-operation of Mrs. Fiske? When Duse electrified her audiences in such plays as The Second Mrs. Tanqueray and Fedora, were the dramatists responsible for the effect?
Tanqueray the English acted drama ceased to be a merely insular product, and took rank in the literature of Europe. Here was a play which, whatever its faults, was ...an epoch-marking play." One great service of Pinero and Jones to the twentieth-century drama has been excellent craftsmanship.
Tanqueray," and you will see it played exactly according to Mr. Pinero'a intention, and played brilliantly enough to distract 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.
The incident is perfectly natural and probable; all one can say of it is that it is perhaps an over-simplification of the dramatist's task. The Second Mrs. Tanqueray requires an unusual amount of preliminary retrospect. We have to learn the history of Aubrey Tanqueray's first marriage, with the mother of Ellean, as well as the history of Paula Ray's past life.
For some reason his end always reminds me of the closing line of Pinero's play, when the adventuress, Mrs. Tanqueray, kills herself, and her virtuous stepchild says: "If we had only been kinder!" IN the strict sense of the phrase, a soldier of fortune is a man who for pay, or for the love of adventure, fights under the flag of any country.
Tanqueray, tragedies, both of them, of a purifying pathos that Aristotle would have understood. In fact, there would be no great difficulty in showing how near Aristotle came to an explicit assertion that in the drama "literary merit" is almost a by-product valuable, no doubt, like many another by-product, but not the chief thing to be sought. Mr.
Tanqueray"! No, the thing is as impossible in England as the combination of roles in Jokai himself. The idea of letting a man be at once man of letters and man of action! Why, we scarcely allow that a man of letters may occupy more than one pigeonhole! If he is a poet, we will not admit he can write prose forgetting that is just what most poets do.
Paula Tanqueray and her husband might have lived and died unhappily together without offering any materials to the playwright, and so indeed might any of the characters in any of the plays by the brilliant author. Only when facts exterior to them begin to play upon the characters dramatically is there room for drama. There is an enormous amount of plot, psychological or physical, in every play.
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