d intentional.
Accordingly, you will find in the open-air theatre of many an Italian
province, away from the high roads, an art of drama that our capital
cannot show, so high is it, so fine, so simple, so complete, so direct,
so momentary and impassioned, so full of singleness and of multitudinous
impulses of passion.

Signora Duse is not different in kind from these unrenowned. What they
are, she is in a greater degree. She goes yet further, and yet closer.
She has an exceptionally large and liberal intelligence. If lesser
actors give themselves entirely to the part, and to the large moment of
the part, she, giving herself, has more to give.

Add to this nature of hers that she stages herself and her acting with
singular knowledge and ease, and has her technique so thoroughly as to be
able to forget it--for this is the one only thing that is the better for
habit, and ought to be habitual. There is but one passage of her mere
technique in which she fails so to slight it. It is in the long exchange
of stove-side talk between Nora and the other woman of "The Doll's
House." Signora Duse may have felt some misgivings as to the effect of a
dialogue having so little symmetry, such half-hearted feeling, and, in a
word, so little visible or audible drama as this. Needless to say, the
misgiving is not apparent; what is too apparent is simply the technique.
For instance, she shifts her position with evident system and notable
skill. The whole conversation becomes a dance of change and
counterchange of place.

Nowhere else does the perfect technical habit lapse, and nowhere at all
does the habit of acting exist with her.

I have spoken of this actress's nationality and of her womanhood
together. They are inseparable. Nature is the only authentic art of the
stage, and the Italian woman is natural: none other so natural and so
justified by her nature as Eleonora Duse; but all, as far as their nature
goes, natural. Moreover, they are women freer than other Europeans from
the minor vanities. Has any one yet fully understood how her liberty in
this respect gives to the art of Signora Duse room and action? Her
countrywomen have no anxious vanities, because, for one reason, they are
generally "sculpturesque," and are very little altered by mere accidents
of dress or arrangement. Such as they are, they are so once for all;
whereas, the turn of a curl makes all the difference with women of less
grave physique. Italians a