ELEONORA DUSE!

When this extraordinary woman first came
to New York in January, 1893, she attracted
a small band of admirable lunatics who saw
her uncritically as a symbol rather than as an
actress. Some of us went to fantastic lengths in
our devotion. She was Our Lady of Evil, one
of Baudelaire's enigmatic women; Mater Malo-
rium, a figure out of De Quincey's opium-stained
dreams; she was not only superior to Sarah of
the Sardou régime, but the true successor to
Rachel. This semi-absurd jumbling of Poe,
Swinburne, Baudelaire, and the Elizabethans-
what a tremendous Duchess of Malfi we fancied
Duse would make!--was not altogether the
fabric of fantasy. Nor was personality the
strongest asset in her art. She had suffered
academic training; she had practised when
young all the scales of thumb-rule theatricalism;
she had played Cosette when a child and knew
Electra. The apprenticeship then had been
exhausting, the thirty-six situations she had by

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