of animal
energies, uncontrolled, spontaneous. She catches you in a fierce caress,
like a tiger-cat. She gives you, as in "Malia," the whole animal,
snarling, striking, suffering, all the pangs of the flesh, the emotions
of fear and hate, but for the most part no more. In "La Folfaa" she can
be piquant, passing from the naughty girl of the first act, with her
delicious airs and angers, her tricks, gambols, petulances, to the
soured wife of the second, in whom a kind of bad blood comes out,
turning her to treacheries of mere spite, until her husband thrusts her
brutally out of the house, where, if she will, she may follow her lover.
Here, where there is no profound passion but mean quarrels among
miserable workers in salt-mines, she is a noticeable figure, standing
out from the others, and setting her prim, soubrette figure in motion
with a genuine art, quite personal to her. But to see her after the
Santuzza of Duse, in Verga's "Cavalleria Rusticana," is to realise the
difference between this art of the animal and Duse's art of the soul.
And if one thinks of Rejane's "Sapho," the difference is hardly less,
though of another kind. I saw Duse for the first time in the part of
Santuzza, and I remember to this day a certain gentle and pathetic
gesture of her apparently unconscious hand, turning back the sleeve of
her lover's coat over his wrist, while her eyes fasten on his eyes in a
great thirst for what is to be found in them. The Santuzza of Mimi
Aguglia is a stinging thing that bites when it is stepped on. There is
no love in her heart, only love of possession, jealousy, an unreasonable
hate; and she is not truly pathetic or tragic in her furious wrestle
with her lover on the church steps or in her plot against him which
sends an unanticipated knife into his heart.

Yet, in the Mila di Codra of d'Annunzio's "Figlia di Jorio" she has
moments of absolute greatness. Her fear in the cave, before Lazaro di
Roio, is the most ghastly and accurate rendering of that sensation that,
I am sure, has been seen on any stage. She flings herself upright
against a frame of wood on which the woodcarver has left his tools, and
as one new shudder after another sets her body visibly quaking, some of
the tools drop on the floor, with an astonishing effect on the nerves.
Her face contracts into a staring, hopeless grimace, as if about to
utter shrieks which cannot get past her lips. She shivers slowly
downwards until she sinks on her rigid h