LA DUSE

Grey River Argus, 23 April 1925, Page 8

LA DUSE

STORY OF SARAH BERNHARDT'S RIVAL. Eleonora Djse, tho gre.it tragic actress, the strange, extravagant, harcie woman, whoso life was :i painful spiritual ascent towm/ls those bo’ghts of love and knowledge oml beauty, the conquest of which has an irristiblo attraction for the exploring mind nf the mystic, died in A.pril, 1924, at Pittsburg. By Sop!opibrr, Joanne Pordeux, who claims to known her more int : mplcly thru anyon? else, tu have seen her in all tho different lights in which different friends saw her. merged Into one, hc-i finish.?-! “Eleonora Duse: Ti e Storv of Her Life, ’ ststes Christopher St. John -a “John o' Londonk Weekly.” Mor bi.og;a'-h-er doa\ fuliy with her development us an actress, transcrih i''g manv tceiin.’cal dot*. L of her c?» ly porformac-v s from a monograph by : ho Italian r,cor Luigi Ras ; , who at onp DrDuse’s “loading man,” published in Florence in 1901. When she played Juliet at the ago of fourteen she seems already to have been mistress of that art of endowing inanimate things with significance which 'was always to 1.0 :in important element in her acting. She had many humiliations and disappointments. Her methods, so original, so “natural” in the sense that all the separate strokes nf :ir | wore by her intorgrated into one single, highly complex stroke, and were no longer recognisable as art. irritated a-tors V’ith conventional ideas. Pezzana, one of her first managers, flew into a rage ■with her at rehearsal, and a (-wording to Miss Bordeaux, yelled:- - “Why don’t you quit trying tn bo an actress? Petter find another I n-i--u.ess where you’ll have more chance! ” When her fame wms established, and the more penetrating critics had recognised that in purity and delicacy of emotion, in tho creation of a truth often greater than that conceived bv the dramatist, in the faculty of living as well as playing a part, she was the superior of Sarah Bernhardt, many of her follow-artists, either from jealousy or from stupidity, refused to concede that she was great. Snlvini was one. Bernhardt herself another. She had. never created a. being or vision that makes one think immediate ly of her. She has done nothing more than put on other people’s gloves, wrong-side out. Ellen Terry, on the other hand, has always spoken and written with enthusiasm of Eleonora Duse, and tho friend skip biotween them last ' until her death. £f TTer greatest preoccupation before going to London (in 1923 for the last limo) was Ellen Terry; so much so that in one of her telegrams she asked to have a box reserved for tho grand English tragedienne for the first performhnee, a request which she repented in a letter to Air Cochran a few days before tho first matinee.” Tho writer of this article, deputed by Ellen ’Perry, who was away in tho eoun try. ill. on tho night of Duse’s arrival, to meet her at tho station, will never forget tho radiant smile which iliummod tho tired traveller’s face (she looked then as if she wore not much longer to bo stretched out “upon Ihe rack of Ibis tough world”) when she heard iho name she venerated above al! other names in England. “Eleonora Duse was groat, famous wherever a theatre existed, but tho real grandness, originality and spiritual development of tho woman did not roa"h its perfection until at forty years of age, she know and loved Gabriele d ’An nunzio. ’ ’ The part of Miss Bordeaux's biography which deals with the episode is founded to a groat extent on d’Annunzio’s novel “11 Fuoco.” of whwh she writes: “What he gained by it in literary fame, ho lost a thousandfold in social prestige—for the story was too evident, too blatant, too unmanly She was too noble to refer the subject; perhaps too ashamed tn let even her friends see Dio depth of tho wound it had caused. And her intimates respected her silence enough not to interrogate her.” How comes it, then, that Miss Bordeux reproduced (without acknowledgement') the substance of what so deeply wounded the dead actress? How copies it that she passes off a love affair" as Dm truth? It is, of course, debatable wheHior a biographer should respect the wishes of the dead that what they keep private should remain so. It would bo 1 impossible to understand the character of this great woman (of whom F. Jean Worth wrote: “Tf there arc saints in heaven she is among them ”) if she wore not shown as grand anui!r*..'is well ns grand al rice, but a t::?. s“ delicate demands a more skillen p- ii. :l more sensitive taste, a more profound insight, and, above all. a pioie iutin- tie knowledge ot tho subject Dian Miss Pordoux possesses.