heart, a long race of play actors determined
her vocation, and yet she rose superior to all
these things, to experiences that would have
either crushed or made mechanical the aver-
age artist. Life with its disillusionments was
the sculptor that finally wrought the something
precious and strange we recognize in Eleonora
Duse.

Without especial comeliness, without the
golden ductile voice of Bernhardt, Duse so
drilled her bodily organs that her gestures,
angular if executed by another, become potent
instruments; her voice, once rather thin, siccant,
now gives a soft, surprised speech; and her face
is the mirror of her soul. Across it flit the ago-
nies, the joys, of the modern anæmic, overwrought
woman. She excels in the delineation of listless,
nervous, hysterical, and half-mad souls. She
passes easily from the passionate creatures
of Dumas and Sardou to the chillier-blooded
women of Ibsen and Sudermann, unbalanced
and out of tune with their surroundings. Shall
we ever forget her reading of Vladimir's letter
in Fédora? And yet her assumption of the
Russian was a tour-de-force of technic; tem-
peramentally the rôle belongs to the hotter-
tongued Bernhardt. With Santuzza, a primitive
nature, she accomplished wonders. That mis-
erable, deserted girl, in a lowly Sicilian village,
with her qualms of conscience, her nausea,
her hunted looks--here was Verga's heroine
stripped of all Mascagni's rustling music, the

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