pride, the face, the eyes, set, while only his mouth twitched, seeming to chew his words, with the disgust of one swallowing a painful morsel.  Where other actors would have raved, he spoke with bitter humour, a humour that seemed to hurt the speaker, the concise, active humour of the soldier, putting his words rapidly into deeds.  And his pride was an intellectual pride; the weakness of a character, but the angry dignity of a temperament.  I have never seen Irving so restrained, so much an artist, so faithfully interpretative of a masterpiece.  Something of energy, no doubt, was lacking; but everything was there, except the emphasis which I most often wish away in acting.

DUSE IN SOME OF HER PARTS

I

The acting of Duse is a criticism; poor work dissolves away under it, as under a solvent acid.  Not one of the plays which she has brought with her is a play on the level of her intelligence and of her capacity for expressing deep human emotion.  Take “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.”  It is a very able play, it is quite an interesting glimpse into a particular kind of character, but it is only able, and it is only a glimpse.  Paula, as conceived by Mr. Pinero, is a thoroughly English type of woman, the nice, slightly morbid, somewhat unintelligently capricious woman who has “gone wrong,” and who finds it quite easy, though a little dull, to go right when the chance is offered to her.  She is observed from the outside, very keenly observed; her ways, her surface tricks of emotion, are caught; she is a person whom we know or remember.  But what is skin-deep in Paula as conceived by Mr. Pinero becomes a real human being, a human being with a soul, in the Paula conceived by Duse.  Paula as played by Duse is sad and sincere, where the Englishwoman is only irritable; she has the Italian simplicity and directness in place of that terrible English capacity for uncertainty in emotion and huffiness in manner.  She brings profound tragedy, the tragedy of a soul which has sinned and suffered, and tries vainly to free itself from the consequences of its deeds, into a study of circumstances in their ruin of material happiness.  And, frankly, the play cannot stand it.  When this woman bows down under her fate in so terrible a spiritual loneliness, realising that we cannot fight against Fate, and that Fate is only the inevitable choice of our own natures, we wait for the splendid words which shall render so great a situation; and no splendid words come.  The situation, to the dramatist, has been only a dramatic situation.  Here is Duse, a chalice for the wine of imagination, but the chalice remains empty.  It is almost painful to see her waiting for the words that do not come, offering tragedy to us in her eyes, and with her hands, and in her voice, only not in the words that she says or in the details of the action which she is condemned to follow.