eels and clasps her knees with
both arms. There, in the corner, she waits in twenty several anguishes,
while the foul old man tempts her, crawling like a worm, nearer and
nearer to her on the ground, with gestures of appeal that she repels
time after time, with some shudder aside of her crouched body, hopping
as if on all fours closer into the corner. The scene is terrible in its
scarcely thinkable distress, but it is not horrible, as some would have
it to be. Here, with her means, this actress creates; it is no mean copy
of reality, but fear brought to a kind of greatness, so completely has
the whole being passed into its possession.

And there is another scene in which she is absolute in a nobler
catastrophe. In her last cry before she is dragged to the stake, "La
fiamma e bella! la fiamma e bella!" d'Annunzio, I have no doubt, meant
no more than the obvious rhetoric suited to a situation of heroism. Out
of his rhetoric this woman has created the horror and beauty of a
supreme irony of anguish. She has given up her life for her lover, he
has denied and cursed her in the oblivion of the draught that should
have been his death-drink, her hands have been clasped with the wooden
fetters taken off from his hands, and her face covered with the dark
veil he had worn, and the vile howling crowd draws her backward towards
her martyrdom. Ornella has saluted her sister in Christ; she, the one
who knows the truth, silent, helping her to die nobly. And now the
woman, having willed beyond the power of mortal flesh to endure an
anguish that now flames before her in its supreme reality, strains in
the irrationality of utter fear backward into the midst of those
clutching hands that are holding her up in the attitude of her death,
and, with a shiver in which the soul, succumbing to the body, wrings its
last triumph out of an ignominious glory, she cries, shrieking, feeling
the flames eternally upon her: "La fiamma e bella! la fiamma e bella!"
and thereat all evil seems to have been judged suddenly, and
obliterated, as if God had laughed once, and wiped out the world.

II

Since Charles Lamb's essay "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, considered
with reference to their fitness for stage representation," there has
been a great deal of argument as to whether the beauty of words,
especially in verse, is necessarily lost on the stage, and whether a
well-constructed play cannot exist by itself, either in dumb show or
with words in