Arizona republican., 1902-11-14
MIME. DUSE AND HER PLAYS.

the Italian actress. Mime Duse. who came forth last night, at the Victoria theater in MT. D'AnnunZio's play of La GfoConda. and who can be seen there for two weeks, in that and two other dramas from the same hand. Mime Duse's professional condition is that of anguish. She carries grief by the ton, and nothing will or can con tent her soul but to behold her audi cnce steeped in tears To this end she has provided herself with several stage heroines, each one of whom is entagled in the most distressing circumstances, convulsed with the most dreadful emo tions, contorted with agony, and blighted with despair; and this corro- sive sublimate of grief is invariably amatory. Each of these heroines is desperately enamored of a man, ard in each case it is either the wrong man, as in Francesca de Rimini. or the man who does wrong, as in La Gioconda and La Citta Morta. For the embodiment of these afflicted females Mime. Duse is amply endowed by nature and ade- quately equipped by ,-- ., her qualifica- tions being q febrile temperament. morbid imagination, a wayward, undis- ciplined, egotistical mind, a passionate, | woeful. saturnine aspect, a sullen cOun- tenance, a 1.-the, nervous figure, melt ing voice, and expert skill-acquired through long experience on the prosy continental stage-in the professional life Such, at least, has ever been the testimony of her acting-through which is seen a woman of wild and lawless emotion, without intellectual purpose or control. a reveller in delirium, anu photographer of wee.
 Mme. Duse was hailed with enthusi- Gsm by a great assemblage of desolaied roourrers, for whose manifest edificl- 1 tion she cxpounded the sorrows of ''Sil- v,i Settala.' an abused, neglected, in suited, outraged wife, who, being we'd ueu to a despicable blackguard of | husband has neither the strength of mind, the dignity of character, nor the decent self-respect to control her in | fatuation for him, but condescends to quarrel with his mistress, and allows | herself to be literally crushed, in her | abject devotion to him. Many persons | appear to like this kind of thing, and to suppose, like when beholding it, that they are seeing wonderful sights, vir- | ile feelings (for all that is animal and | sensual nowadays, is ''yirile'o, and | tremendous powers-the fact being that | the grandeur of human nature is not | surrender to passion, but conquest of it; and the further fact being that there is neither sincerity of moral purpose nor valuable impairment of any kind 1 in these manifestations, and that actors who make a business of trying to show | how much they feel when they are sex ually infatuated, and how much theY suffer when their sexual infatuation is repulsed CT betrayed, are. essentially,
 humbugs. Very wisely was it said, by ! the poet Emerson:
 ! Had I a lover who was noble and free, l would he were nobler than love to me.
 The theme has grown very tiresome. ! There has been far too much stage | glorification of the jackass propensity ! in human nature; far too much analy- sis of the resultant vices and sores. An ecstacy of praise is, of course, to be ex- pected, for the writings of MT. D'An- 1 nunzio; just such a deplOrable rapture hailed the advent of the feculent Zola |; | but the reader of those writings will seek in vain for its justification. They I are bold writings, indeed, but they are | bold because they are shameless. It is, ! apparently, a case of willful literary depravity. Just as the dreary and ponderous MT. Ibsen traffics in heredity asseverating that the girl whose grand father once ate cucumber must inevit- | ably get into a pickle, so the blind, pro- fuse, reckless, and loquacious MT. l D'Annunzio traffics in the universality of carnal desire, and declares, with the catechism, that " in Adams fall We
 sinned all'-a circumstance that he
 seems to regard with the greatest sat
 isfaction. In La Gioconda his theme 1 is adultery; in La Citta Morta' it IS adulterous purpose combined with in- cipient incest in Francesca" it is erot- ic frenzy. Mime. Duse, in producing the odoriferous works of this "consum- mate analyst" is understood to con-
 slider herself freighted with moral les sons." She is. And the climax of them
 is that foreign performers, who come
 before the American people for the pur-
 pose of attending to their moral cul-
 ture and teaching them to keep the ten commandments are impertinent persons who would show better judgment and better taste by keeping their super
 fiuous morality to themselves. Our public does not need homilies on the stage; it needs plays. Mime. Duse's
 
 erted last night with plentlfully pluvial results-has been generally recognized and it is nowhere denied. The notable
 Italian acted fere in 1S93 and again in 1896, and she showed herself possesse of inordinate sensibility, emotional force, alluring charm, and 'natural'- | perhaps rather too natural-method.
 She is a clever actress along the plain
 of realism but in no sense a great actress; nor comparable with Mime.
 Modjeska in romantic drama, and far
 inferior to Ada Rehan in comedy. As
 to MT. D'Annunzio, the gist of all his
 plays-in so far as they have any
 can be found, and in infinitely better
 expression, in five lines of Shakespeare.
 But Virtue, as it never will be moved,
 Though lewdness court it in a shape
 of heaven,
 So lust, though to radiant angel link d
 Will sate itself in a celestial bed,
 And prey on garbage.