See Mrs. Patrick Campbell playing “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,” and you will see it played exactly according to Mr. Pinero’a intention, and played brilliantly enough to distract our notice from what is lacking in the character.  A fantastic and delightful contradiction, half gamine, half Burne-Jones, she confuses our judgment, as a Paula in real life might, and leaves us attracted and repelled, and, above all, interested.  But Duse has no resources outside simple human nature.  If she cannot convince you by the thing in itself, she cannot disconcert you by a paradox about it.  Well, this passionately sincere acting, this one real 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 naivete 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 she plays with exactly the same gestures night after night, but I can quite imagine it.  She has certain little caresses, the half awkward caresses of real people, not the elegant curves and convolutions of the stage, which always enchant me beyond any mimetic movements I have ever seen.  She has a way of letting her voice apparently get beyond her own control, and of looking as if emotion has left her face expressionless, as it often leaves the faces of real people, thus carrying the illusion of reality almost further than it is possible to carry it, only never quite.