It was really nothing of the kind, though the melodrama was often very crude; sometimes, in a simple way, horrible.  But it was a fierce living thing, a life unknown to us in the North; it smouldered like the volcanoes of the South.  And so we were seeing a new thing on the stage, rendered by actors who seemed, for the most part, scarcely actors at all, but the real peasants; and, above all, there was a woman of genius, the leader of the company, who was much more real than reality.

Mimi Aguglia has studied Duse, for her tones, for some of her attitudes; her art is more nearly the art of Rejane.  While both of these are great artists, she is an improviser, a creature of wild moods, of animal energies, uncontrolled, spontaneous.  She catches you in a fierce caress, like a tiger-cat.  She gives you, as in “Malia,” the whole animal, snarling, striking, suffering, all the pangs of the flesh, the emotions of fear and hate, but for the most part no more.  In “La Folfaa” she can be piquant, passing from the naughty girl of the first act, with her delicious airs and angers, her tricks, gambols, petulances, to the soured wife of the second, in whom a kind of bad blood comes out, turning her to treacheries of mere spite, until her husband thrusts her brutally out of the house, where, if she will, she may follow her lover.  Here, where there is no profound passion but mean quarrels among miserable workers in salt-mines, she is a noticeable figure, standing out from the others, and setting her prim, soubrette figure in motion with a genuine art, quite personal to her.  But to see her after the Santuzza of Duse, in Verga’s “Cavalleria Rusticana,” is to realise the difference between this art of the animal and Duse’s art of the soul.  And if one thinks of Rejane’s “Sapho,” the difference is hardly less, though of another kind.  I saw Duse for the first time in the part of Santuzza, and I remember to this day a certain gentle and pathetic gesture of her apparently unconscious hand, turning back the sleeve of her lover’s coat over his wrist, while her eyes fasten on his eyes in a great thirst for what is to be found in them.  The Santuzza of Mimi Aguglia is a stinging thing that bites when it is stepped on.  There is no love in her heart, only love of possession, jealousy, an unreasonable hate; and she is not truly pathetic or tragic in her furious wrestle with her lover on the church steps or in her plot against him which sends an unanticipated knife into his heart.

Yet, in the Mila di Codra of d’Annunzio’s “Figlia di Jorio” she has moments of absolute greatness.  Her fear in the cave, before Lazaro di Roio, is the most ghastly and accurate rendering of that sensation that, I am sure, has been seen on any stage.  She flings herself upright against a frame of wood on which the woodcarver has left his tools, and as one new shudder after another sets her body visibly quaking, some of the tools drop on the floor, with an astonishing effect on the nerves.