person moving about among the dolls of the piece, shows up all that is
mechanical, forced, and unnatural in the construction of a play never
meant to withstand the searchlight of this woman's creative
intelligence. Whatever is theatrical and obvious starts out into sight.
The good things are transfigured, the bad things merely discovered. And
so, by a kind of naïveté in the acceptance of emotion for all it might
be, instead of for the little that it is, by an almost perverse
simplicity and sincerity in the treatment of a superficial and insincere
character, Duse plays "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray" in the grand manner,
destroying the illusion of the play as she proves over again the
supremacy of her own genius.




II


While I watch Duse's Magda, I can conceive, for the time, of no other.
Realising the singer as being just such an artist as herself, she plays
the part with hardly a suggestion of the stage, except the natural
woman's intermittent loathing for it. She has been a great artist; yes,
but that is nothing to her. "I am I," as she says, and she has lived.
And we see before us, all through the play, a woman who has lived with
all her capacity for joy and sorrow, who has thought with all her
capacity for seeing clearly what she is unable, perhaps, to help doing.
She does not act, that is, explain herself to us, emphasise herself for
us. She lets us overlook her, with a supreme unconsciousness, a supreme
affectation of unconsciousness, which is of course very conscious art,
an art so perfect as to be almost literally deceptive. I do not know if