Paula,
as conceived by Mr. Pinero, is a thoroughly English type of woman, the
nice, slightly morbid, somewhat unintelligently capricious woman who has
"gone wrong," and who finds it quite easy, though a little dull, to go
right when the chance is offered to her. She is observed from the
outside, very keenly observed; her ways, her surface tricks of emotion,
are caught; she is a person whom we know or remember. But what is
skin-deep in Paula as conceived by Mr. Pinero becomes a real human
being, a human being with a soul, in the Paula conceived by Duse. Paula
as played by Duse is sad and sincere, where the Englishwoman is only
irritable; she has the Italian simplicity and directness in place of
that terrible English capacity for uncertainty in emotion and huffiness
in manner. She brings profound tragedy, the tragedy of a soul which has
sinned and suffered, and tries vainly to free itself from the
consequences of its deeds, into a study of circumstances in their ruin
of material happiness. And, frankly, the play cannot stand it. When this
woman bows down under her fate in so terrible a spiritual loneliness,
realising that we cannot fight against Fate, and that Fate is only the
inevitable choice of our own natures, we wait for the splendid words
which shall render so great a situation; and no splendid words come.
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