of beauty, with a feverish energy which is still energy, 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 Camelias,” 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 has come suddenly, as a new sentiment coming suddenly into her life, but the simple, instinctively loving woman, in whom we see nothing of the demi-monde, only the natural woman in love.  Throughout the play she has moments, whole scenes, of absolute greatness, as fine as anything she has ever done:  but there are other moments when she seems to carry repression too far.  Her pathos, as in the final scene, and at the end of the scene of the reception, where she repeats the one word “Armando” over and over again, in an amazed and agonising reproachfulness, is of the finest order of pathos.  She appeals to us by a kind of goodness, much deeper than the sentimental goodness intended by Dumas.  It is love itself that she gives us, love utterly unconscious of anything but itself, uncontaminated, unspoilt.  She is Mlle. de Lespinasse rather than Marguerite Gautier; a creature in whom ardour is as simple as breath, and devotion a part of ardour.  Her physical suffering is scarcely to be noticed; it is the suffering of her soul that Duse gives us.  And she gives us this as if nature itself came upon the boards, and spoke to us without even the ordinary disguise of human beings in their intercourse with one another.  Once more an artificial play becomes sincere; once more the personality of a great impersonal artist dominates the poverty of her part; we get one more revelation of a particular phase of Duse.  And it would be unreasonable to complain that “La Dame aux Camelias” is really something quite different, something much inferior; here we have at least a great emotion, a desperate sincerity, with all the thoughtfulness which can possibly accompany passion.