I was looking this afternoon at Whistler’s portrait of Carlyle at the Guildhall, and I find in both the same final art:  that art of perfect expression, perfect suppression, perfect balance of every quality, so that a kind of negative thing becomes a thing of the highest achievement.  Name every fault to which the art of the actor is liable, and you will have named every fault which is lacking in Duse.  And the art of the actor is in itself so much a compound of false emphasis and every kind of wilful exaggeration, that to have any negative merit is to have already a merit very positive.  Having cleared away all that is not wanted, Duse begins to create.  And she creates out of life itself an art which no one before her had ever imagined:  not realism, not a copy, but the thing itself, the evocation of thoughtful life, the creation of the world over again, as actual and beautiful a thing as if the world had never existed.

III

“La Gioconda” is the first play in which Duse has had beautiful words to speak, and a poetical conception of character to render; and her acting in it is more beautiful and more poetical than it was possible for it to be in “Magda,” or in “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.”  But the play is not a good play; at its best it is lyrical rather than dramatic, and at its worst it is horrible with a vulgar material horror.  The end of “Titus Andronicus” is not so revolting as the end of “La Gioconda.”  D’Annunzio has put as a motto on his title-page the sentence of Leonardo da Vinci:  “Cosa bella mortal passa, e non d’arte,” and the action of the play is intended as a symbol of the possessing and destroying mastery of art and of beauty.  But the idea is materialised into a form of grotesque horror, and all the charm of the atmosphere and the grace of the words cannot redeem a conclusion so inartistic in its painfulness.  But, all the same, the play is the work of a poet, it brings imagination upon the stage, and it gives Duse an opportunity of being her finest self.  All the words she speaks are sensitive words, she moves in the midst of beautiful things, her whole life seems to flow into a more harmonious rhythm, for all the violence of its sorrow and suffering.  Her acting at the end, all through the inexcusable brutality of the scene in which she appears before us with her mutilated hands covered under long hanging sleeves, is, in the dignity, intensity, and humanity of its pathos, a thing of beauty, of a profound kind of beauty, made up of pain, endurance, and the irony of pitiable things done in vain.  Here she is no longer transforming a foreign conception of character into her own conception of what character should be; she is embodying the creation of an Italian, of an artist, and a creation made in her honour.  D’Annunzio’s tragedy is, in the final result, bad tragedy, but it is a failure of a far higher order than such successes as Mr. Pinero’s.  It is written with a consciousness