Her face contracts into a staring, hopeless grimace, as if about to utter shrieks which cannot get past her lips.  She shivers slowly downwards until she sinks on her rigid heels and clasps her knees with both arms.  There, in the corner, she waits in twenty several anguishes, while the foul old man tempts her, crawling like a worm, nearer and nearer to her on the ground, with gestures of appeal that she repels time after time, with some shudder aside of her crouched body, hopping as if on all fours closer into the corner.  The scene is terrible in its scarcely thinkable distress, but it is not horrible, as some would have it to be.  Here, with her means, this actress creates; it is no mean copy of reality, but fear brought to a kind of greatness, so completely has the whole being passed into its possession.

And there is another scene in which she is absolute in a nobler catastrophe.  In her last cry before she is dragged to the stake, “La fiamma e bella! la fiamma e bella!” d’Annunzio, I have no doubt, meant no more than the obvious rhetoric suited to a situation of heroism.  Out of his rhetoric this woman has created the horror and beauty of a supreme irony of anguish.  She has given up her life for her lover, he has denied and cursed her in the oblivion of the draught that should have been his death-drink, her hands have been clasped with the wooden fetters taken off from his hands, and her face covered with the dark veil he had worn, and the vile howling crowd draws her backward towards her martyrdom.  Ornella has saluted her sister in Christ; she, the one who knows the truth, silent, helping her to die nobly.  And now the woman, having willed beyond the power of mortal flesh to endure an anguish that now flames before her in its supreme reality, strains in the irrationality of utter fear backward into the midst of those clutching hands that are holding her up in the attitude of her death, and, with a shiver in which the soul, succumbing to the body, wrings its last triumph out of an ignominious glory, she cries, shrieking, feeling the flames eternally upon her:  “La fiamma e bella! la fiamma e bella!” and thereat all evil seems to have been judged suddenly, and obliterated, as if God had laughed once, and wiped out the world.

II

Since Charles Lamb’s essay “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, considered with reference to their fitness for stage representation,” there has been a great deal of argument as to whether the beauty of words, especially in verse, is necessarily lost on the stage, and whether a well-constructed play cannot exist by itself, either in dumb show or with words in a foreign language, which we may not understand.  The acting, by the Sicilian actors, of “La Figlia di Jorio,” seemed to me to do something towards the solution of part at least of this problem.