acting; though we may have more or less interesting and energetic or
graceful conventions that pass for art. But any student of international
character knows well enough that there are also supplementary reasons of
weight. For example, it is bad to make a conventional world of the
stage, but it is doubly bad to make it badly--which, it must be granted,
we do. When we are anything of the kind, we are intellectual rather than
intelligent; whereas outward-streaming intelligence makes the actor. We
are pre-occupied, and therefore never single, never wholly possessed by
the one thing at a time; and so forth.

On the other hand, Italians are expressive. They are so possessed by the
one thing at a time as never to be habitual in any lifeless sense. They
have no habits to overcome by something arbitrary and intentional.
Accordingly, you will find in the open-air theatre of many an Italian
province, away from the high roads, an art of drama that our capital
cannot show, so high is it, so fine, so simple, so complete, so direct,
so momentary and impassioned, so full of singleness and of multitudinous
impulses of passion.

Signora Duse is not different in kind from these unrenowned. What they
are, she is in a greater degree. She goes yet further, and yet closer.
She has an exceptionally large and liberal intelligence. If lesser
actors give themselves entirely to the part, and to the large moment of
the part, she, giving herself, has more to give.

Add to this nature of hers that she stages herself and her acting with
singular knowledge and ease, and has her technique so thoroughly as to be
able to forget it--for this is the one only thing that is the better for
habit, and ought to be habitual. There is but one passage of her mere
technique in which she fails so to slight it. It is in the long exchange