Eleonora Duse

(Otago Witness [NZ], 3rd August, 1893)
ELEONORA DUSE

Few persons know Eleonora Duse - in her public capacity - better than myself. I was indeed - at least I think so - the first to write her name to the English-speaking public, and it was I who urged an American manager to sign a contract with her, which he did not do - and now repents. Whilst, then, she is in the first flush of her triumph with you, let me say just a couple of words on her first appearance on the stage in Italy. Years have passed since then - years which now seem hours, notwithstanding the cares and troubles of this much abused life of ours. Duse's first appearance took place without a word of introduction to the public. She appeared in a little one-act piece. The theatre was almost empty, and the few people in it were yawning.

By-and-bye, a young girl, a child, came on the stage. She wore a simple white dress, and her long hair was tied with a blue ribbon. In her hand she held a flower. She spoke, and her voice was so young and fresh, that the sleepy pit started from its lethargy, and almost before it knew what it was doing burst into applause. That young face could already express the agony of human passion, and that thin, pale child could already sob and tremble with human suffering and life's tragedy. Yes. Already the woman shone through those child's tears, and mimic woe. The public felt that a vision of some great future was before them in that poor and modest-looking little actress. At the end of the play the habitues of the wings crowded round the girl with compliment on compliment. She stared as if incredulous at them, and ran into her dressing room to exchange her poor little white dress to a still poorer-looking black one; and with a little grey shawl thrown over her shoulders and a shabby hat on her head, she left the theatre already a celebrity. The next date of note in the actress's life is her first appearance as Desdemona. To tell you how the poor girl was dressed for this part is not possible. And yet, in the midst of patches and skabbiness, a certain artistic taste was visible. The actress had done her best even with the few rags that were at her disposal.

The last act was a curiosity in its way. A large crucifix figured on the wall, at Othello's express desire. This crucifix, it seems, was indispensable to the actor every time he had a great emotional part to play. Here Desdemona wore a long white loose robe, and her splendid hair fell over her shoulders like a veil. That night Duse came out as a great artist. Her long arms were twined nervously above her head, and her voice was, in turns, sweet, gentle reader, sincere, beseeching, sobbing, loving, and true in each. She wept real tears that night, as also did the public. Never did Othello seem such a brute as he did when he smothered Duse-Desdemona on her couch. The public shouted and yelled again in their frantic delight. Duse is the best Desdemona on the Italian stage.

Therese Raquin was her next success; Pezzana, who was then the greatest actress on the Italian stage, though growing too old for juvenile parts, played the mother. But all the public's attention was directed to Duse, who, as Therese, sat leaning by the window, in a common brown gown, but with her unholy love trembling in her eyes. How could such a child in years, as Duse then was, go through all the emotions of that horrible, terrible part! The innocent child of her first appearance had disappeared - disappeared also, was gentle Desdemona - and in their place was a woman in all the fury of sensual passion. She made herself less than woman - she made herself an animal. All the fibres of her artist soul burst forth in this part. Nothing like it had ever been seen before. The following day the press was as frantic in praise as the public had been with cheers. Zola wrote to thank her.

Duse has played many parts since that, but she has never played any so terribly realistic as that one! I wonder if she ever thinks of that first season of hers, when with each part she took a greater hold of the public's heart, and when each part was a fresh conquest for her. She is a world-wide celebrity now. She has roused to frenzy the greatest critics in Russia, Germany, Austria, America, and now she bids fair to storm the heart of London. But will she ever taste again the supreme voluptuousness of her first triumphs, when, as a frail-looking girl, she held some of Italy's greatest men spellbound on her lips? I doubt it.

Never shall I forget the last time she played "Claud's Wife"("La Femme de Claude") in Rome. As I have already stated in a previous letter, Duse is the only Italian actress who dares play this part in Italy. The theatre was crowded, and the excitement of the public knew no bounds. At the end of the play Duse was recalled 15 times. Then, as if it had been previously planned, the entire audience lined the road through which Duse was to pass. Not a single lady, even of the highest aristocracy, went to her carriage. All stood on foot, awaiting the actress, to give her one more cheer; and when Eleanora Duse did appear, wrapped in her mantle, and leaning on poor Marquis d'Arcais's arm, she was surrounded by all this noble, aristocratic, and admiring throng, who accompanied her in triumph to her hotel. By some unexplainable process, also known only to Italians, as soon as she appeared coloured lanterns, torches, and Bengal fires were lit and carried by the throng, whilst Bengal lights and torches lit up all the houses on each side of the way.

Rome correspondent Figaro.

(The Musical Courier [UK], 19th March, 1896)
IN NEW YORK - ELEONORA DUSE

Duse! - a cruel, short name, subtly curt and full of strange beckonings. Her limitations are admirable. They sharply define her extraordinary talent. Duse's is a tempered realism; a realism which, while it keenly feels the nearness of our daily environment, also takes on the spiritual impress of the mystery of motives. She has added a new shudder to the stage. In her great ineluctable eyes, with their careless, drooping lids, are sombre memories of mediaeval tragedies. Lucrezia Borgia, slender hipped, low browed, girlish in profile, goes by, and the horrid hush of poison doomed is in the air.

She is an intimate, psychologic actress, and the processes of her mind are almost audible. The fine, crafty, Italian brain works well within modern conditions, and says the most when saying the least. The tact of omission she has developed abnormally, and the things she leaves unsaid would furnish forth the repertory of a hundred actors.

This negation of gesture, frugality of line and lip, make her work sometimes gray and monotone, and sometimes implacable, and as hard as carved bronze. But observe how eloquent the play of hands, the disposition of draperies! How curved her gait, her shuddering, gliding, inevitable walk! Her best point is her figure; it is lithe and graceful by intention, and lends itself to the mood of the moment as does a finely attuned instrument. A oneness in control enables her to evoke all shades of emotion by a mere pressure of the cerebral switchboard. The tornadic outbreak in "Fernande," the fillip of fun in "La Locandiera," are at her beck. Her nervous equipment allows her to play upon the nerve pulp of her auditory as does the pianist his keys.

It is soft, subtle sounding and sinister music we get. She is seldom tigerish, and she can be very tender. Yet, inseparable from her acting is the taint of morbidity. Her brain is naturally morbid. She excels in the portrayal of recondite emotions. She never will split in the ear of the groundlings, but watch her in "Fedora," and shiver you will as she reads "Vladimir's " letters. I can see her now aging at the internal rage, her cheek bones protruding, her mouth widened by a cruel smile, the smile of a woman who waits!

It is wondrous, her presentation of evil, of hate, and the lurking fear of death. Even her blithe moments are tinged with the grief that destroys. She is the fore-doomed woman of her age. About her cradle the three Ladies of Evil, written of by De Quincey, clustered and cursed. Her tragic and vision-haunted eyes reproach across the footlights the frivolous sterilities of her generation. She is most poetic, and her emotion is never staccato, theatric, or futile.

To trace to its roots her art is all but impossible. The mechanism is absolutely buried. Matter and manner are imperceptibly welded; and she constantly gives you the full-pitched impression of immitigable sincerity. She is a prime illusionist, but just where her art begins and nature retires is difficult to determine. Hence her hostile, cryptic attitude toward archaic criticism.

She has not yet given us her full measure, and possibly never will. It remains for her to prove if her powerful imagination can lift her to the interpretation of cleaner, saner types of dramatic life. Her soul is the stagnant fen on the borders of which Poe dwelt. There is a profound sense of reserve power in her acting. She is a young woman, yet does not give the impression of youth. She never suggests the elastic, brimming over and delicious young life of Shakespeare. I fear me greatly that she is a decadent by natal election. She is intensive in a morbid fashion. Her odic force is enormous and her pictures are not limned with the broad brush and glowing pigments of her histrionic contemporary.

Duse is dangerously strange and seducing. There is a curious note to her personality. She is a latter-day Lisa Gioconda, and Whistler could paint her, as she stands in the first act of "Fedora," her funereal robes of velvet falling about her in antique folds, and her consecrated neck curved in the direction of one who expects the Silent Mother of all - Death.

(The Sydney Morning Herald [AUS], 30th July, 1894)
THE ART OF ELEONORA DUSE

A latter-day Didorot (writes the national Observer) might find in the extraordinary acting of Eleonora Duse the inspiration for a new and interesting "Paradoxe." He might cite, plausibly enough, the achievements of this most consummate, of actresses in illustration of a theory that acting is not in reality an art at all, but purely a matter of individual "knack" and personal idiosyncrasy, and he could proceed to argue, quite unanswerably, that Signora Duse's greatness as an "artist" is in proportion to the completeness with which she emancipates herself from rule and tradition, and defies all the accepted canons of what is called the histrionic art.

Nature having combined in her the essential qualifications, so rarely all found in conjunction, of abnormal imaginative power, keen and sympathetic intelligence, and exceptional faculties of facial and vocal expression, she comes upon the stage, so to say, a great actress ready-made, and produces her astonishmg effects with utter independence of any stereotyped rules of art, or, indeed, of conditions of any kind other than those which her own individuality supplies. The theory of acting undoubtedly suggested bv Signora Duse's performances is never likely to be popular on her own side of the footlights, because its acceptance would make short work of the aspirations of educated players of the new era, who are excusably anxious to secure their admission to an equality with the professors of the recognised arts. But it is one that can hardly fail to impress itself upon any careful observer of the method - to use a term that seems almost out of place in this connection - of the great Italian actress in her handling of tragedy and comedy alike.

By including the light-hearted triviality of Goldoni's coquettish landlady and the condensed passion of Giuseppe Verga's Santuzza within the limits of a single programme, she has afforded us an unique opportunity of studying the two aspects of her genius side by side. Wonderfully diverse as are these two performances - each of them absolutely perfect in its way - amazing as it is that they can be the work of one actress in the course of a single evening, there is one dominant and identical impression left upon the mind by both. It is the impression of absolute spontaneity - the conviction that the actress does what she does without study, without effort, without any other guidance than that of uncontrolled but unerring intuition. One needs but to watch her for awhile in either of these two characters and then to recall the, mind, with a severe effort, to the artificialities of stuge and scenery and theatrical appliances amid which she is actually moving to realise the width of the gulf which separates her extraordinary gift from the carefully-matured powers of the ordinary well-graced and well-practised player.

It is almost impossible, in watching her, even to conceive the idea of Signora Duse at rehearsal, and entirely so to imagine that rehearsal can be of much personal service to her. As both her Marguerite Gautier and her Cyprienne have shown us, her conception of a character may occasionally be so evolved as to accord rather with her own taste and temperament than with the obvious intentions of her author. But, such as her conception is, she has the power of embodying it with a bewildering naturalness and freedom from stage tricks or apparent effort that make it wellnigh impossible to associate her acting with any idea of studied art. Take, for example, the deliciously delicate scenes of coquetry wherein Mirandolin subjugates the woman-hating Cavalière di Ripafratta in 'La Locandiera," and the rough Sicilian peasant girl's fiery outburst of jealous passion in Vorga's familiar tragedietta.

It is easy to imagine how theatrically effective these scenes would be in the hands of the average "leading lady," intelligent, accomplished, and equipped with all the laboriously acquired resources of her art. But this Mirandolina and this Santuzza are no creatures of the stage, but actual women of real life, in whoso presence the associations of the theatre positively fade from sight as if at the touch of an enchantress's wand. It would almost seem that the supreme gift of Eleonora Duse is not the ars celare artem, but the sheer capacity of acting by the simple and unaided light of nature - a gift which few players of any country or any period can ever hopo to share.

Eleonora Duse (1858-1924)

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