ain artificial, genuinely artificial, kind of nature in it: if not
"true to life," it is true to certain lives. But the play lets go this
hold, such as it is, on reality, and becomes a mere stage convention as
it crosses the footlights; a convention which is touching, indeed, far
too full of pathos, human in its exaggerated way, but no longer to be
mistaken, by the least sensitive of hearers, for great or even fine
literature. And the sentiment in it is not so much human as French, a
factitious idealism in depravity which one associates peculiarly with
Paris. Marguerite Gautier is the type of the nice woman who sins and
loves, and becomes regenerated by an unnatural kind of self-sacrifice,
done for French family reasons. She is the Parisian whom Sarah Bernhardt
impersonates perfectly in that hysterical and yet deliberate manner
which is made for such impersonations. Duse, as she does always, turns
her into quite another kind of woman; not the light woman, to whom love
has come suddenly, as a new sentiment coming suddenly into her life, but
the simple, instinctively loving woman, in whom we see nothing of the
demi-monde, only the natural woman in love. Throughout the play she has
moments, whole scenes, of absolute greatness, as fine as anything she
has ever done: but there are other moments when she seems to carry
repression too far. Her pathos, as in the final scene, and at the end of
the scene of the reception, where she repeats the one word "Armando"
over and over again, in an amazed and agonising reproachfulness, is of
the finest order of pathos. She appeals to us by a kind of goodness,
much deeper than the sentimental goodness intended by Dumas. It is love
itself that she gives us, love utterly unconscious of anything but
itself, uncontaminated, unspoilt. She is Mlle. de Lespinasse rather than
Marguerite Gautier; a creature in whom ardour is as simple as breath,
and devotion a part of ardour. Her physical suffering is scarcely to be
noticed; it is the suffering of her soul that Duse gives us. And she
gives us this as if nature itself came upon the boards, and spoke to us
without even the ordinary disguise of human beings in their intercourse
with one another. Once more an artificial play becomes sincere; once
more the personality of a great impersonal artist dominates the poverty
of her part; we get one more revelation of a particular phase of Duse.
And it would be unreasonable to complain that "La Dame aux Camelias" i