slight it. It is in the long exchange of stove-side talk between

Nora and the other woman of "The Doll's House." Signora Duse may
have felt some misgivings as to the effect of a dialogue having so

little symmetry, such half-hearted feeling, and, in a word, so
little visible or audible drama as this. Needless to say, the

misgiving is not apparent; what is too apparent is simply the
technique. For instance, she shifts her position with evident

system and notable skill. The whole conversation becomes a dance of
change and counterchange of place.

Nowhere else does the perfect technical habit lapse, and nowhere at
all does the habit of acting exist with her.

I have spoken of this actress's nationality and of her womanhood
together. They are inseparable. Nature is the only authentic art

of the stage, and the Italian woman is natural: none other so
natural and so justified by her nature as Eleonora Duse; but all, as

far as their nature goes, natural. Moreover, they are women freer
than other Europeans from the minor vanities. Has any one yet fully

understood how her liberty in this respect gives to the art of
Signora Duse room and action? Her countrywomen have no anxious

vanities, because, for one reason, they are generally
"sculpturesque," and are very little altered by mere accidents of

dress or arrangement. Such as they are, they are so once for all;
whereas, the turn of a curl makes all the difference with women of

less grave physique. Italians are not uneasy.
Signora Duse has this immunity, but she has a far nobler deliverance

from vanities, in her own peculiar distance and dignity. She lets
her beautiful voice speak, unwatched and unchecked, from the very

life of the moment. It runs up into the high notes of indifference,
or, higher still, into those of ennui, as in the earlier scenes of

Divorcons; or it grows sweet as summer with joy, or cracks and
breaks outright, out of all music, and out of all control. Passion

breaks it so for her.
As for her inarticulate sounds, which are the more intimate and the

truer words of her meaning, they, too, are Italian and natural.
English women, for instance, do not make them. They are sounds e

bouche fermee, at once private and irrepressible. They are not
demonstrations intended for the ears of others; they are her own.

Other actresses, even English, and even American, know how to make
inarticulate cries, with open mouth; Signora Duse's noise is not a

cry; it is her very thought audible - the thought of the woman she
is playing, who does not at every moment give exact words to her

thought, but does give it significant sound.
When la femme de Claude is trapped by the man who has come in search

of the husband's secret, and when she is obliged to sit and listen
to her own evil history as he tells it her, she does not interrupt

the telling with the outcries that might be imagined by a lesser
actress, she accompanies it. Her lips are close, but her throat is

vocal. None who heard it can forget the speech-within-speech of one
of these comprehensive noises. It was when the man spoke, for her

further confusion, of the slavery to which she had reduced her
lovers; she followed him, aloof, with a twang of triumph.

If Parisians say, as they do, that she makes a bad Parisienne, it is
because she can be too nearly a woman untamed. They have accused

her of lack of elegance - in that supper scene of La Dame aux
Camelias, for instance; taking for ill-breeding, in her Marguerite,

that which is Italian merely and simple. Whether, again, Cyprienne,
in Divorcons, can at all be considered a lady may be a question; but

this is quite unquestionable - that she is rather more a lady, and
not less, when Signora Duse makes her a savage. But really the

result is not at all Parisian.
It seems possible that the French sense does not well distinguish,

and has no fine perception of that affinity with the peasant which
remains with the great ladies of the old civilisation of Italy, and

has so long disappeared from those of the younger civilisations of
France and England - a paradox. The peasant's gravity, directness,

and carelessness - a kind of uncouthness which is neither graceless
nor, in any intolerable English sense, vulgar - are to be found in

the unceremonious moments of every cisalpine woman, however elect
her birth and select her conditions. In Italy the lady is not a

creature described by negatives, as an author who is always right
has defined the lady to be in England. Even in France she is not

that, and between the Frenchwoman and the Italian there are the
Alps. In a word, the educated Italian mondaine is, in the sense

(also untranslatable) of singular, insular, and absolutely British
usage, a Native. None the less would she be surprised to find

herself accused of a lack of dignity.
As to intelligence - a little intelligence is sufficiently dramatic,

if it is single. A child doing one thing at a time and doing it
completely, produces to the eye a better impression of mental life

than one receives from - well, from a lecturer.
DONKEY RACES

English acting had for some time past still been making a feint of
running the race that wins. The retort, the interruption, the call,

the reply, the surprise, had yet kept a spoilt tradition of
suddenness and life. You had, indeed, to wait for an interruption

in dialogue - it is true you had to wait for it; so had the
interrupted speaker on the stage. But when the interruption came,

it had still a false air of vivacity; and the waiting of the
interrupted one was so ill done, with so roving an eye and such an

arrest and failure of convention, such a confession of a blank, as
to prove that there remained a kind of reluctant and inexpert sense

of movement. It still seemed as though the actor and the actress
acknowledged some forward tendency.

Not so now. The serious stage is openly the scene of the race that
loses. The donkey race is candidly the model of the talk in every

tragedy that has a chance of popular success. Who shall be last?
The hands of the public are for him, or for her. A certain actress

who has "come to the front of her profession" holds, for a time, the
record of delay. "Come to the front," do they say? Surely the

front of her profession must have moved in retreat, to gain upon her
tardiness. It must have become the back of her profession before

ever it came up with her.
It should rejoice those who enter for this kind of racing that the

record need never finally be beaten. The possibilities of success
are incalculable. The play has perforce to be finished in a night,

it is true, but the minor characters, the subordinate actors, can be
made to bear the burden of that necessity. The principals, or those

who have come "to the front of their profession," have an almost
unlimited opportunity and liberty of lagging.

Besides, the competitor in a donkey race is not, let it be borne in
mind, limited to the practice of his own tediousness. Part of his

victory is to be ascribed to his influence upon others. It may be
that a determined actor - a man of more than common strength of will

- may so cause his colleague to get on (let us say "get on," for
everything in this world is relative); may so, then, compel the

other actor, with whom he is in conversation, to get on, as to
secure his own final triumph by indirect means as well as by direct.

To be plain, for the sake of those unfamiliar with the sports of the
village, the rider in a donkey race may, and does, cudgel the mounts

of his rivals.
Consider, therefore, how encouraging the prospect really is. The

individual actor may fail - in fact, he must. Where two people ride
together on horseback, the married have ever been warned, one must

ride behind. And when two people are speaking slowly one must needs
be the slowest. Comparative success implies the comparative

failure. But where this actor or that actress fails, the great
cause of slowness profits, obviously. The record is advanced.

Pshaw! the word "advanced" comes unadvised to the pen. It is
difficult to remember in what a fatuous theatrical Royal Presence

one is doing this criticism, and how one's words should go
backwards, without exception, in homage to this symbol of a throne.

It is not long since there took place upon the principal stage in
London the most important event in donkey-racing ever known until

that first night. A tragedian and a secondary actor of renown had a
duet together. It was in "The Dead Heart." No one who heard it can

possibly have yet forgotten it. The two men used echoes of one
another's voice, then outpaused each other. It was a contest so

determined, so unrelaxed, so deadly, so inveterate that you might