one likes it to have added. This freedom and naturalness of choice and this absence of the academic are almost the first quality in the aspect of Italian towns. And this labour and unity and apparent ease are the first quality in the aspect of Duse's art; which draws from many regions but lives always in one; and which uses its culture for ends so immediate and necessary that it cannot be pedantic or highly schooled. In June last I saw Duse again, and in November, after twelve years and more. The pressure of poverty after the war is no doubt one cause that drew her from her long retirement. But I have heard too that she expressed a desire that the young actors of this generation might see before she died the nature of the art she followed. When the curtain rose I saw her there by the cradle, leaning over the dying child. A face almost too beautiful with the intense life in it, eyes almost unbearable with what they knew. She had almost no make-up; there was no particular illusion of youth, no interest in being anything but her own idea. In her movements there on the stage, as the play went on from scene to scene, and in the transitions in feeling and thought, there was established from the very start a rhythm that detached itself from imitation and from all mere representation of the actual, and became in itself a pure medium of idea precisely as music does. Something appeared in it that was complete in itself, as music is complete. What Duse did could not be taken as mere acting, however great, but only as a kind of terrible revelation. There were no tricks, no efforts to attract or pique or impress, but only the desire to exist in the life she had given herself to for those two hours on the stage, the desire to convey to us and to confirm for herself the infinity of living within the woman she portrayed; and this detachment and intense absorption with the truth she endured and expressed gave Duse's art an extraordinary purity, free of all exterior considerations and effects. And this purity, this beautiful singleness of mood, was combined with a strange fascination and elusive vitality and magnetism. Duse has never been an overpowering actress in the ordinary She could not have recited as Bernhardt was able to do, in an elaborate, heroic diction and with that incomparable vocal spell that Bernhardt knew how to weave. Duse is not the equal sense. mimic in any and all styles that Garrick is reported to have been. She never had the magnificent raging power that Rachel had. She could not have lifted her rôle ever to any classical fatality and splendour as Mounet Sully could do in Edipus. She had not a certain golden lustre that Ellen Terry had. She could not have exhibited that wild animality, speed, passion and impetus that Mimi Aguglia at her best moments seems to exercise without effort; she had nothing of that romantic epic style that Chaliapin has in Boris. She has none of the gusto and bravura of an actor like Coquelin, or even Rejane. Some of these qualities and accomplishments Duse obviously might have had, if her nature and idea had led her to the classical, heroic or seductive, or highly veneered, stylized, violent, brilliantly farcical or superbly epical. On the contrary when we come to Duse in the art of acting this must be said: from time to time in every art great artists appear who tend to break down the long and painfully built structure of the art they profess. To them their mere craft is only a clutter of old boards, rags, a necessary but obstructing shell. Their passion is truth, an immediate and urgent truth in them. These artists by their great gifts master the domain of the art with a security and completeness that few artists professing it can ever hope to approach. But whatever craft one of these artists masters he smashes, restates, forces to vanish, scorns save only as a means to an end; in acting Duse will have nothing of acting for itself; she is like those who despise their bodies save only as the body disappears before the spirit within that is to be revealed. And so it happens that people watching such an artist as Duse on the stage tend to forget that there has been a craft to be learned; and they forget acting entirely and receive only the matter to be received. What draws artists to Duse then is not only her purity of mood, her truth, her instinctive independence, the intense poetry of her presence, but also the culture they perceive as having gone into her technical equipment. The eyes of artists can see in Duse's art the fruits of music, of great painting and sculpture and poetry and of hard labour in the plain craft of acting; but all this delights them by its having passed long since into one single art, one quality, one almost invisible medium for the expression of this one artist's soul. And this in Duse's acting satisfies and feeds them, because it partakes of the nature and function of all arts and of every single art. And for all people for whom Duse's art is a power and a new impulse of life, Duse's supreme quality is what lies behind no art in particular but behind all art, the response to life. The poet, the musician, the painter and architect and actor or dancer, and the saint also, whose life and ways possess the continuity and creative passion of art, all draw life to them by their capacity for it. In them life is gathered, it refracts, simplifies, finds out its essential and eternal principle or idea and a new body for it, and so goes on. And in Duse of all artists people most feel the thing they most respond to in all living, an infinity of tragic wonder and tenderness. STARK YOUNG. And forever our tongues shall be dry I will lock my hot lips on lament, I have that she has given not, nor taketh, Like a star in black waters, the gleam Of the light that lies drowned in her darkness, The dream that is more than a dream. THE CHARITY OF FROST BY JOSEPH AUSLANDER Love came to me as came to me So quietly-as quietly As water when it stands. It cannot end as all things end, Grow old and sicken and be lost; |