Part 10
“The amazing variety of her artistry has been expressed,” says Huret, “by two famous portraits of her, one by Chartran, the other by Besnard. You could paint nothing more strikingly truthful than these portraits, yet you cannot dream how unlike they are.... Besnard has retained only those traits of his sitter which give her an expression that is energetic, even a little brutal and sensual,--the popular Réjane, the Réjane of the _Ambigu_, of realistic drama, the Réjane of _La Glu_ and _Germinie Lacerteux_. Despite her silk gown and all her finery, Besnard has seen her with the down-at-heel cloth boots that Germinie wore to third-rate balls, and in the white floss-silk gloves which, to get a realistic touch, she had borrowed from her servant-maid. That Réjane he has caught admirably!
“But it is not thus that she has appeared to Chartran. He has seen her in a dainty lace head-dress adorned with a rose-colored ribbon, her hair loose over her eyes, her mobile mouth, her gracious oval face. Above all he has seen her extraordinary and complex eyes, now quick, now velvety, now perverse beneath their large, languorous eyelids: eyes that are mocking, ardent, sparkling and dreamy. This is the Réjane of Meilhac’s plays, the Réjane who is of the line of _comédiennes_ of the eighteenth century; it is _Ma Cousine_ who is about to become _Amoureuse_.
“And this astonishing complexity of temperament is reflected in her childhood, in her life, and in her tastes to-day. The youngster who passed her evenings in the balcony of the _Ambigu_ sucking an orange, who stood in ecstasy before the glass of Adèle Page, and who for years dreamed of such a life as the acme of luxury,--her one sees in the portrait by Besnard. But the young lady of the _Conservatoire_, the favorite pupil of Regnier, who won her first success in _L’Intrigue Épistolaire_, the elegant and finished interpreter of the life of the _salons_ and _cercles_, the full-grown _artiste_ of _Marquise_: all these live in the painting of Chartran.”
“_Ces deux jolis noms d’une seule et même personne: Réjane, Madame Sans-Gêne_”; thus one of her countrymen happily characterized her. But another was just as right when he called her “the innumerable Réjane.”
ELEONORA DUSE
When the American papers announced, in the spring of 1914, that Eleonora Duse had recovered her health and was contemplating a return to the stage, the news had a curious effect, somewhat as if the New York press had casually said that “Ada Rehan and Mr. Daly’s company are to play _The Taming of the Shrew_ next Monday.” A little later the cable brought the announcement that Bernhardt was thinking of coming again to America, and though Mme. Sarah is almost old enough to be Duse’s mother, the news of her coming had not the same effect of turning the clock backward. For Bernhardt is apparently one of the earth’s permanent phenomena, like the return of vegetation in the spring; while the tragic figure of Duse, though she played in America only a dozen years ago, seems somehow to belong to the last generation.
She is, however, not yet really an old woman, for she was born October 3, 1859. The genius of strange and hard experience, which has attended her all her life, was present even at her birth, for it occurred in a third-class carriage of a railway train, near Vigevano, while her parents, the members of a band of actors, were on their way from Venice to Milan. A troubled life then began.
For two generations, at least, her forebears had been player-folk, of a rather humble station, most of them. An uncle was a player differing greatly in kind from his famous niece, for he was known throughout Northern Italy as an uproariously funny comedian.[106] Her grandfather, Luigi Duse, was of a somewhat more serious turn, and of a more important rank in the profession, for he is said to have founded the Garibaldi Theatre at Padua. He founded also a troupe of Venetian dialect comedians which was famous for many years. His four sons were all actors, and one of them, Eleonora Duse’s father, was a painter as well. Ultimately he left the stage to devote himself to that art. Duse’s mother, too, was an actress, and, after her child was baptized[107] and had attained the age of ten days, resumed her place in the company, which now had another prospective member added to its roster. Literally Duse knew the theatre and its people from the first day of her life, and was forced into its service as a matter of course.
The father and mother were humble strolling players who wandered about, often on foot, making a scanty living. The young Eleonora’s childhood was thus filled on the one hand with poverty, often hunger, and on the other hand, with the actor’s trade under her observation and a part of her daily instruction.[108] Hers was really not a childhood at all, a fact that helps to explain the note of melancholy and tragedy that has pervaded her whole life.
A career as a stage child, however, seems to be the thing that produces the notable actress,--the Siddons, the Terry, the Mrs. Fiske,--if only the added something is present to endow the unconsciously absorbed technique with the significance of personality and high intelligence.
At seven Eleonora was the prompter of the company. But she soon began to absorb the words and something of the meaning of certain rôles. At ten she was playing Cosette in _Les Misérables_. By the time she was twelve she was regularly appearing on the rustic stages, often impersonating characters far older than herself. There was much in the old life of the strolling players that made for joyousness--witness Modjeska’s tribute to her early experience of such life--and the young Duse was not without her gay moods, in those days, but responsibility, hard work and the impersonation of adult and much-troubled women, while she was still in her middle ’teens, inclined her toward the seriousness that has characterized her life. When she was fourteen her mother died, and her duties as _tragédienne_ were supplemented by the care of younger children. Is it any wonder that she soon seemed to be “walking through life like a somnambulist”?[109]
Before she was sixteen she had acted a round of tragic parts, among them Doña Sol, Francesca da Rimini (in the play by Pellico) and Caverina, the heroine of Victor Hugo’s _Angelo_. When she was just over sixteen she played Juliet, in Verona itself. The theatre--it was the “Arena,” an open-air theatre--was crowded, and the actress roused the assembly to enthusiasm by a Juliet that was girlish, beautiful and natural.
But her term of what we would call “barnstorming” was not to end yet. The vagabondage continued, varied first with a tour of Dalmatia, and then by an occasional engagement, in small rôles, apart from the family company.
In 1879, when she was twenty, the company she had joined was playing in Naples. Here, for some reason, its leading actress was lost to it, on the eve of the presentation of _Thérèse Raquin_. To Duse, in the emergency, was assigned the part of Thérèse. The stage--that of the old Florentine Theatre--was a famous one; Salvini and Ristori had often trod its boards. And she was to face the most discerning public that had yet seen her. The result was in the way of recompense to Duse for her years of struggle and poverty. Cesare Rossi, one of the distinguished men of the theatre in the Italy of his day, was present. Immediately he offered to place her under his own management. Duse’s years of apprenticeship may be said to end at this point, for from now on her progress was steadily upward.
Her marriage, which came at this time, when she was about twenty, was only a brief interruption. It was another touch of tragedy in Duse’s life. With her, “it has been difficult to choose the point when the make believe of the theatre ended and the reality of life began.” Her husband was a Signor Checchi, an actor of mediocre ability. A daughter was born, but the marriage was to Duse a great disappointment.
Back to the stage she went, after this time of trial, with little heart for her work, though Rossi had given her a good contract. Then, in 1880, while she was in Turin, she saw Bernhardt in _La Princesse de Bagdad_, one of the plays by which the younger Dumas was making inroads on the old-fashioned classical repertoire. Duse at once announced her intention to play in the same piece. The resulting negotiations with Dumas served not only to introduce some of his plays--of course translated into Italian--into the theatre in Italy, but to begin a warm though curiously impersonal friendship between the author and the rising young actress. She conceived the most ardent admiration for the man and his work, and it was not long before he was urging her to try her fortunes in Paris. Many years were to elapse before she was to make that venture, for very good reasons, as will later appear.[110]
Dumas, it would appear, and the success with which she made his plays, _La Princesse de Bagdad_[111] and _La Femme de Claude_, understood and liked in Italy, had a large share in restoring her interest in life and her work, and in increasing her fame. She was rapidly becoming known throughout Italy. By the time of her first venture outside of Italy--which took her to faraway South America[112]--she had achieved success in Turin, in Rome and in Milan.
As yet there was little thought of her as other than an Italian for the Italians. Dumas’ appeals to act in Paris had always been in vain. If reports of her acting had been carried home by visitors from the great capitals, she was not thought of, as yet, as a world’s actress. To carry plays to Moscow, to Vienna, to Berlin, and act them there effectively in a foreign tongue, an actress must needs be of great power, must have a genius that makes itself felt above all differences of speech. In 1892 she went to Vienna, comparatively unheralded, and from there word went forth that a new and great actress had come from her native Italy and blazed into a sudden glory. Francisque Sarcey, the distinguished French critic, had followed the company of the _Comédie Française_ to Vienna, and from there wrote to the _Temps_ accounts of her display of versatility in playing equally well _Antony_ and _Cleopatra_, _La Dame aux Camélias_ (“_Camille_”) and _Divorçons_. Sworn admirer of Bernhardt that he was, he easily found faults in Duse, but he praised her justly too: “She is not handsome, but has an intelligent and expressive face and wonderful mobility of features. Her voice is not particularly musical, but its occasional metallic vibrations produce thrilling effects. Her diction, like Mme. Bernhardt’s, is distinct and clear, each syllable coming out with well-rounded edges.” Though Sarcey thought her, as Cleopatra, to have “the air of a crowned grisette,” (in contrast to Sarah, who was “always the Queen of Egypt”) he confessed that “La Duse carried the house by storm with her alternate explosions of fury and sudden tones of touching tenderness.” Sarcey’s early sympathy for Duse was, as we shall see, to be of benefit to her later. During this transalpine tour Duse acted in Russia and Germany, as well as in Austria; and now was to come her first venture in an English-speaking country.
In 1893 Americans interested in the European stage knew that Duse had achieved fame in her own country and had succeeded notably in Austria and Germany. The average American theatregoer knew little of her. Even those who had heard of her had little notion that she really was an actress of the first rank, fully worthy of comparison with Bernhardt and Modjeska.
On an evening of January, 1893, when a large and brilliant audience assembled at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York to see her in _Camille_, the prevailing atmosphere was therefore one of curiosity.[113] Duse had not long to wait before striking fire. One who was present said: “Her power over an audience was manifested in a very striking manner before she had been on the stage five minutes. The actress had scarcely made her appearance and given her careless nod of recognition to De Varville before everybody was in an attitude of strained attention. Already the old and hackneyed character had been revivified by the power of genius. Signora Duse does not attempt to make a Frenchwoman of Camille, but fills her with the fire and passion of her own Italian temperament. But both the fire and passion, except at very rare intervals, are kept under complete control. Their glow is apparent in all the love scenes, and breaks into flame at one or two critical moments, but it is by the suggestion of force in reserve that she makes her most striking effects. Only an artist of the highest type could create so profound an impression with so little apparent effort or forethought, by some light and seemingly spontaneous gesture, by a sudden change of facial expression, or by some subtle inflection of the voice. The chief beauties of her impersonation are to be found in its lesser and, to the inexperienced eye, insignificant details. All her by-play, although it appears to be due only to the impulse of the moment, is dearly the result of the most deliberate design, and changes with every variety of mood or condition which it is meant to illustrate. The impetuous, audacious, bored and querulous Camille of the first act becomes quite another creature beneath the softening influence of the love passages with Armand--such love passages as have not been witnessed in a New York theatre half a dozen times in this generation--and is transformed into a type of placid and contented womanhood in the country home of Armand. She played the whole of this act with perfect skill and profoundest pathos, and in the scene of parting with her lover, she suggested the heart-breaking under a smile, with a simplicity so true and so poignant that her own suppressed sob found many an echo in the audience.”[114] In the many accounts of Duse’s Camille there is constant reference to a simple and telling interpolation that she made in the scene in which Armand publicly denounces her. Where other actresses have sought to express Marguérite’s feelings only through facial expression and pantomime, Duse spoke at intervals during his tirade her lover’s name--“Armand!”--at first in simple incredulity, then in fright, then in deeply hurt pride, then in heart-breaking anguish[115]. Sarcey, however, severely condemned her for making this emendation, which, he thought, ruined the naturalness and effectiveness of the scene.
Duse had come unheralded, but her few weeks in New York proved a genuine “sensation.” She followed _Camille_ with _Fédora_, in which she again demonstrated her strange power of creating a stirring dramatic effect by the simplest and apparently the most unstudied means. As Clotilde in _Fernande_ she presented another type: “The change wrought in her by the dispatch that proved her lover’s perfidy was an extraordinary illustration of suppressed emotion, and the remorseless deliberation of her manner while beguiling the faithless Andre into the net which she had spread for him was intensely eloquent of a woman scorned. Not until after the marriage had been accomplished did she give vent to the rage which she had restrained so long; but when the floodgates of passion were once opened, the torrent of her wrath and hate and scorn might almost be called appalling. This one revelation of her power would place her instantly in the front rank of emotional actresses.”[116] Another jealous woman was revealed in Santuzza in _Cavalleria Rusticana_. Astonishing in this part was the complete sinking of her own personality in that of a peasant woman. By voice, walk, subtle suggestions of gesture and pose, she achieved a masterpiece in what the French call “getting within the skin” of a character. When to the other impersonations she added her Mirandolina in _La Locandiera_, a part calling for a charming archness and humor, and as sure a touch in comedy as Santuzza in tragedy, her wide range was astonishingly revealed.[117]
After visiting a few other American cities, Duse’s company arrived in London, and opened an engagement there in May (1893). She was the first Italian since Salvini to claim London’s serious attention. She was at least as unknown there to “the general” as she had been in New York, though of course there were many who had either seen her on the continent or had read glowing accounts of her. But there were many, at first, to ask: “Who is she?” When she made her presence felt, as she promptly did, there arose a fine critical storm with her as the center. Bernhardt was idolized in London, appeared there in the same season, and naturally comparison was rife. As a matter of fact, comparison between Duse and Bernhardt, both of whom were well within their prime in the early nineties, was one of the favorite intellectual amusements of the day, with both professional and amateur critics. Duse succeeded in London, however, as she had succeeded elsewhere.[118]
Thus had she swung about the world, making known her great gifts, and firmly establishing a genuine, honestly won fame. Only Paris remained to be conquered, and before she attempted that formidable task, she visited America again.[119]
Now, at last, came Duse’s invasion of Paris. Why was it delayed so long? What were the circumstances of her going? And how did she fare there? The answers to these questions form a curious chapter in her history, and in that of a great sister artist. Duse’s few weeks in Paris in the early summer of 1897 mark the climax of her career, and may well be described in some detail.
It is an established tenet of Parisian faith that nothing in the artistic world can really be said to have won the stamp of authentic achievement until it has been seen and approved by Paris. With much justification, surely, the French are likely to consider themselves final arbiters, and they do not go out of their way to discover merit in a foreigner who has not yet shown his art in “the home of art.”
Paris had heard the echoes of Duse’s achievements, then, with the comfortable feeling that if she really amounted to anything she would come to Paris and prove it. Until then Parisians could wait. Duse was known to be the best Italian actress, Dumas’ interest in her had been evidenced years before, and her success in the large European cities and in America and England was by no means unknown. But the occasional whisper that Duse was comparable to Bernhardt herself brought only indulgent smiles. The lady evidently avoided the test.
That she had avoided the test was true. Duse had been really afraid to go to Paris. Later, after she had won the day, she admitted as much. A failure in Paris would be, she recognized, a fatal blow to her prestige and ambitions.
When Dumas had urged her to try her fortunes in the French capital, he assumed that she would act in French. But Duse knew how sensitive were French ears to the niceties of the language, how dependent on purity and beauty of speech was much of the drama to which they were accustomed, and how, she would be placing herself under a heavy handicap in acting in a strange medium.
It was not, then, until in Austria, Russia, England and the United States she had been warmly received while acting in her native tongue, that the conquest of Paris began to seem possible.
Enter now, Sarah Bernhardt. Mme. Sarah, unlike most Parisians, had seen Duse and knew her quality. She knew the truth of the growing impression that Duse was really a worthy rival. Therefore, if Duse was really coming to Paris, Sarah wished to involve herself in the proceedings, and protect her position. It was announced that where others had failed to induce Duse to come to Paris, Bernhardt had succeeded. More, she had offered Duse the use of her own theatre. Thus Duse was put at once in the position of _protégée_, and the press resounded with praises of Sarah’s magnanimity.
Duse chose _Magda_ for her first appearance. It was a part well suited to her, and in it she had less to fear in comparison with Bernhardt, who had never scored so heavily with it as with her other rôles. Bernhardt forthwith called on Duse, and the announcement at once followed that the opening performance was to be changed to _La Dame aux Camélias_ (_Camille_). Whatever the honesty of Bernhardt’s motives, she had succeeded in inducing Duse to appear first in a part that was one of Sarah’s own triumphs. One can imagine the new security that Bernhardt felt.
The house was crowded with the most brilliant audience that Paris could muster. Word had gone forth that one was to appear who had been mentioned in the same breath with the idolized Bernhardt. Rochefort was there, and so was Halévy, and Got, the _doyen_ of the _Française_, and a throng of the distinguished men and women of the Paris of the day. For the critics, Lemaître was there, and Catulle Mendes, and, most important, Francisque Sarcey. Sarah herself was there, holding court, and serene and smiling in her rôle of protecting friend.
The story of that first performance is soon told. It was a disappointment. During the first act Duse was almost painfully nervous; in the second she showed flashes of power, and won some mild enthusiasm; in the third she was listened to only with patience; in the fourth the audience took more pleasure in Ando, her “leading man,” than in Duse herself; in the fifth she played the death scene beautifully, but it was too late. “If someone had triumphed it was not Duse.”
Already Paris thought that it had taken Duse’s measure, and now that the alleged comparison with Bernhardt was disposed of settled back to enjoy her, if possible, for her own sake. _Magda_ followed. The critics were a little more impressed. Sarcey in particular--his criticism always appeared after a few days’ interval--poured balm on Duse’s feelings. He began to see that all had not yet been told. “Everyone,” he wrote, “was delighted to see so much naturalness combined with such great force of feeling.... I think I am beginning to distinguish the characteristic traits of her peculiar talent.”
After the first performance of _Magda_, Duse had been suddenly taken ill. Immediately after Sarcey’s encouraging article--whether or not it was the cause,[120]--she recovered and was ready for the lists again.
Bernhardt grew apprehensive. She proposed a gala performance in aid of the fund for a memorial to Dumas. She announced that she would give the last two acts of _La Dame aux Camélias_, and that Duse had been asked to give the second and third acts of the same play. Now the third act was the point where Duse had most signally failed to please Paris on that memorable first night. She was by now wary of Bernhardt’s “friendship,” and said that while she was eager to appear in honor of Dumas, she would substitute the second act of _La Femme de Claude_. And on this substitution she insisted in spite of all Mme. Sarah could say.
The audience had anticipated a rare feast of acting and was not disappointed. It applauded both actresses to the echo. But notice how Sarah worked into this occasion an element that had reference not so much to the glorification of Dumas as to the glorification of herself: “The curtain rises to disclose the celebrated bust of Dumas, by Carpeaux, which occupies the center of the stage. Grouped about, at a respectful distance, are all the artists who have taken part in the performance, while in advance of all, face to face with the bust itself, stands Sarah Bernhardt. She still wears the costume of Marguérite Gauthier, and is there as the accepted symbol, the unrivaled personification of Dumas’ immortal creation. Duse is in the background along with the others.