eally, in its way, better than this unimaginative
and theoretical falseness to life; for it at least shows us beauty,
even though it degrades that beauty before our eyes. And Duse, of all
actresses the nearest to nature, was born to create beauty, that beauty
which is the deepest truth of natural things. Why does she after all
only tantalise us, showing us little fragments of her soul under many
disguises, but never giving us her whole self through the revealing
medium of a masterpiece?

VI

"Fedora" is a play written for Sarah Bernhardt by the writer of plays
for Sarah Bernhardt, and it contains the usual ingredients of that
particular kind of sorcery: a Russian tigress, an assassination, a
suicide, exotic people with impulses in conflict with their intentions,
good working evil and evil working good, not according to a
philosophical idea, but for the convenience of a melodramatic plot. As
artificial, as far from life on the one hand and poetry on the other, as
a jig of marionettes at the end of a string, it has the absorbing
momentary interest of a problem in events. Character does not exist,
only impulse and event. And Duse comes into this play with a desperate
resolve to fill it with honest emotion, to be what a woman would really
perhaps be if life turned melodramatic with her. Visibly, deliberately,
she acts: "Fedora" is not to be transformed unawares into life. But her
acting is like that finest kind of acting which we meet with in real
life, when we are able to watch some choice scene of the human comedy
being played before us. She becomes the impossible thing that Fedora is,
and, in that tour de force, she does some almost impossible things by
the way. There is a scene in which the blood fades out of her cheeks
until they seem to turn to dry earth furrowed with wrinkles. She makes
triumphant point after triumphant point (her intelligence being free to
act consciously on this unintelligent matter), and we notice, more than
in her finer parts, individual movements, gestures, tones: the attitude
of her open hand upon a door, certain blind caresses with her fingers as
they cling for the last time to her lover's cheeks, her face as she
reads a letter, the art of her voice as she almost deliberately takes us
in with these emotional artifices of Sardou. When it is all over, and we
think of the Silvia of "La Gioconda," of the woman we divine under Magda
and under Paula Tanqueray, it is with a certain sense of