piece, no, scarcely more than in "Fédora." So fatal is it to write for
our instruction, as fatal as to write for our amusement. A work of art
must suggest everything, but it must prove nothing. Bad imaginative work
like "La Gioconda" is really, in its way, better than this unimaginative
and theoretical falseness to life; for it at least shows us beauty,
even though it degrades that beauty before our eyes. And Duse, of all
actresses the nearest to nature, was born to create beauty, that beauty
which is the deepest truth of natural things. Why does she after all
only tantalise us, showing us little fragments of her soul under many
disguises, but never giving us her whole self through the revealing
medium of a masterpiece?




VI


"Fédora" is a play written for Sarah Bernhardt by the writer of plays
for Sarah Bernhardt, and it contains the usual ingredients of that
particular kind of sorcery: a Russian tigress, an assassination, a
suicide, exotic people with impulses in conflict with their intentions,
good working evil and evil working good, not according to a
philosophical idea, but for the convenience of a melodramatic plot. As
artificial, as far from life on the one hand and poetry on the other, as
a jig of marionettes at the end of a string, it has the absorbing
momentary interest of a problem in events. Character does not exist,
only impulse and event. And Duse comes into this play with a desperate
resolve to fill it with honest emotion, to be what a woman would really
perhaps be if life turned melodramatic with her. Visibly, deliberately,