If such a woman could exist, and she could not, she
would be that, precisely that. But just as we are beginning to believe,
not only in her but in the play itself, in comes the spying lady's maid,
or the valet who spies on the lady's maid, and we are in melodrama
again, and among the strings of the marionettes. Where are the three
stages, truth, philosophy, conscience, which Dumas offers to us in his
preface as the three stages by which a work of dramatic art reaches
perfection? Shown us by Duse, from moment to moment, yes; but in the
piece, no, scarcely more than in "Fedora." So fatal is it to write for
our instruction, as fatal as to write for our amusement. A work of art
must suggest everything, but it must prove nothing. Bad imaginative work
like "La Gioconda" is really, in its way, better than this unimaginative
and theoretical falseness to life; for it at least shows us beauty,
even though it degrades that beauty before our eyes. And Duse, of all
actresses the nearest to nature, was born to create beauty, that beauty
which is the deepest truth of natural things. Why does she after all
only tantalise us, showing us little fragments of her soul under many
disguises, but never giving us her whole self through the revealing
medium of a masterpiece?
VI
"Fedora" is a play written for Sarah Bernhardt by the writer of plays
for Sarah Bernhardt, and it contains the usual ingredients of that
particular kind of sorcery: a Russian tigress, an assassination, a
suicide, exotic people with impulses in conflict with their intentions,
good working evil and evil working good, not according to a
philosophical idea, but for the convenience of a melodramatic plot.
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