V

Dumas, in a preface better than his play, tells us that “La Princesse Georges” is “a Soul in conflict with Instincts.”  But no, as he has drawn her, as he has placed her, she is only the theory of a woman in conflict with the mechanical devices of a plot.  All these characters talk as they have been taught, and act according to the tradition of the stage.  It is a double piece of mechanism, that is all; there is no creation of character, there is a kind of worldly wisdom throughout, but not a glimmer of imagination; argument drifts into sentiment, and sentiment returns into argument, without conviction; the end is no conclusion, but an arbitrary break in an action which we see continuing, after the curtain has fallen.  And, as in “Fedora,” Duse comes into the play resolved to do what the author has not done.  Does she deliberately choose the plays most obviously not written for her in order to extort a triumph out of her enemies?  Once more she acts consciously, openly, making every moment of an unreal thing real, by concentrating herself upon every moment as if it were the only one.  The result is a performance miraculous in detail, and, if detail were everything, it would be a great part.  With powdered hair, she is beautiful and a great lady; as the domesticated princess, she has all the virtues, and honesty itself, in her face and in her movements; she gives herself with a kind of really unreflecting thoughtfulness to every sentiment which is half her emotion.  If such a woman could exist, and she could not, she would be that, precisely that.  But just as we are beginning to believe, not only in her but in the play itself, in comes the spying lady’s maid, or the valet who spies on the lady’s maid, and we are in melodrama again, and among the strings of the marionettes.  Where are the three stages, truth, philosophy, conscience, which Dumas offers to us in his preface as the three stages by which a work of dramatic art reaches perfection?  Shown us by Duse, from moment to moment, yes; but in the piece, no, scarcely more than in “Fedora.”  So fatal is it to write for our instruction, as fatal as to write for our amusement.  A work of art must suggest everything, but it must prove nothing.  Bad imaginative work like “La Gioconda” is really, 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