re not uneasy.

Signora Duse has this immunity, but she has a far nobler deliverance from
vanities, in her own peculiar distance and dignity. She lets her
beautiful voice speak, unwatched and unchecked, from the very life of the
moment. It runs up into the high notes of indifference, or, higher
still, into those of _ennui_, as in the earlier scenes of _Divorcons_; or
it grows sweet as summer with joy, or cracks and breaks outright, out of
all music, and out of all control. Passion breaks it so for her.

As for her inarticulate sounds, which are the more intimate and the truer
words of her meaning, they, too, are Italian and natural. English women,
for instance, do not make them. They are sounds _a bouche fermee_,
at once private and irrepressible. They are not demonstrations intended
for the ears of others; they are her own. Other actresses, even English,
and even American, know how to make inarticulate cries, with open mouth;
Signora Duse's noise is not a cry; it is her very thought audible--the
thought of the woman she is playing, who does not at every moment give
exact words to her thought, but does give it significant sound.

When _la femme de Claude_ is trapped by the man who has come in
search of the husband's secret, and when she is obliged to sit and listen
to her own evil history as he tells it her, she does not interrupt the
telling with the outcries that might be imagined by a lesser actress, she
accompanies it. Her lips are close, but her throat is vocal. None who
heard it can forget the speech-within-speech of one of these
comprehensive noises. It was when the man spoke, for her further
confusion, of the slavery to which she had reduced her lovers; she
followed him, aloof, with a twang of triumph.

If Parisians say, as they do, that she makes a bad Parisienne, it is
because she can be too nearly a woman untamed. They have accused her of
lack of elegance--in that supper scene of _La Dame aux Camelias_,
for instance; taking for ill-breeding, in her Marguerite, that which is
Italian merely and simple. Whether, again, Cyprienne, in _Divorcons_,
can at all be considered a lady may be a question; but this is quite
unquestionable--that she is rather more a lady, and not less, when
Signora Duse makes her a savage. But really the result is not at all
Parisian.

It seems possible that the French sense does not well distinguish, and
has no fine perception of that affinity with the peasant which remain