with a sense of what is imaginative in the facts of actual life. It is
written in Italian which is a continual delight to the ear, prose which
sounds as melodious as verse, prose to which, indeed, all dramatic
probability is sacrificed. And Duse seems to acquire a new subtlety, as
she speaks at last words in themselves worthy of her speaking. It is as
if she at last spoke her own language.




IV


Dumas fils has put his best work into the novel of "La Dame aux
Camélias," which is a kind of slighter, more superficial, more
sentimental, more modern, but less universal "Manon Lescaut." There is a
certain artificial, genuinely artificial, kind of nature in it: if not
"true to life," it is true to certain lives. But the play lets go this
hold, such as it is, on reality, and becomes a mere stage convention as
it crosses the footlights; a convention which is touching, indeed, far
too full of pathos, human in its exaggerated way, but no longer to be
mistaken, by the least sensitive of hearers, for great or even fine
literature. And the sentiment in it is not so much human as French, a
factitious idealism in depravity which one associates peculiarly with
Paris. Marguerite Gautier is the type of the nice woman who sins and
loves, and becomes regenerated by an unnatural kind of self-sacrifice,
done for French family reasons. She is the Parisian whom Sarah Bernhardt
impersonates perfectly in that hysterical and yet deliberate manner
which is made for such impersonations. Duse, as she does always, turns
her into quite another kind of woman; not the light woman, to whom love