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as America's political Arctic Circle. The battle-ground for our party is the West, not the East.

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Which way are we Democrats to turn? Shall we commit hara-kiri for Senator La Follette's benefit? Can we remain as we are, a sterile cancelation of the opposing forces? Does not our future depend on liberalizing the party, so that we can frame a creed of social justice, and nominate a candidate who can carry it out?

For the Democratic party to cease to exist would, I believe, be a national calamity. Any reasoned liberalism would be out of the question. The citizens would have to vote white, or red, or stay at home. We would have government by oscillation. There is real justification for a great constructive liberal party in America, such as were the Democrats during Mr. Wilson's first administration.

The Democratic party cannot be static. If the thoroughly discredited present control continues, it will quickly wane from its present minor, but yet substantial, power to a mere Southern bloc. The wet-boss-reactionary veto has made our party organization odious. Its perpetuation will only accelerate our present rush to ruin.

The liberalization of the party is by no means impossible. It involves a twofold task: revising the party's internal machinery; and then advancing a creed of social justice. This latter task calls for a Jefferson, Lincoln, or Wilson. Undoubtedly some great figure will come forward to carry it out. I would not venture even to suggest an outline of such a program. The freeing of the party from its throttling ties, however, is fundamen

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tally a simple task, the methods of which can be indicated.

The one-third rule (usually miscalled the two-thirds rule) is the bulwark of the disproportionate power of the wetboss-reactionary alliance. Through this one-third rule any group (usually the reactionaries) which can weld together a third of the convention can thwart the will of the majority, exhaust them, and then enforce its own designs. Yet the Democratic party can be made democratic through a few modifications of its present convention rules. These are adopted not by a two-thirds vote, but by a simple majority. majority. Each convention adopts its own rules. It is the guardian of its own destiny. If enough States send to the next national convention delegations pledged to vote for majority nomination of the Presidential, and vice-presidential candidates, the onethird rule will fade to that limbo of oblivion where it has belonged ever since 1832, when Andrew Jackson, out of hatred of John C. Calhoun, imposed the rule on the national convention to prevent Calhoun's renomination for vice-president.

The one-third rule might well be accompanied into the discard by the unit rule, but abolition of the latter is a proper function of each individual State, instructing its own delegation, and the national convention itself has no inherent power over it. I think it likewise is outworn, but its demise is unessential, while that of the one-third rule is necessary for the life of the party. Its death would emasculate boss control. The West and South could enforce a liberal program, and nominate a progressive candidate. The Democratic party again could be dedicated to public service.

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Conversations with Duse

A Great Artist on Her Art

BY STARK YOUNG

USE had invited me to come to see her, but before the occasion arose for calling, I had a telegram from her, saying that she wanted to see me at once on a certain matter. This was the beginning of conversations with Duse out of which several things are worth recording, as at least a comment on her well known relation to artists and her conception of art. Before her door into the drawingroom was half open and just as I caught sight of her, Duse began to speak. "You must help me, you must help me! I have sent for you to help me," she said, with a directness that would have been merely theatrical if it had not been so simple and intense. She shook hands and sat down near me, so that indeed her fingers touched my arm now and then as she talked. She was a stranger here, she said; and she had none too much strength at best. She had asked me to come; she must ask my advice; she felt that I was her friend. I must stand by her, I must advise her.

Duse's face, I was interested to see, though wonderful enough as it was, was really more remarkable on the stage than near. I mean that Duse's endowment for her art began with a mask that was theatrical in the highest sense; the proportions of her face,

though fine and noble when you saw them thus near by, had a character that organized into something even finer under the visual conditions of the stage, under the optique du théâtre. The space between the eyes and the brows; the definite upper lids above the dark eyes; the length of the upper lip; the proportions of the cheek-bones and the forehead; the large mouth, the distinct teeth, the modeling of the chin-all were such as the light, distance and interrelationships of the theatrical scene could bring to great expressiveness, poignancy, and beauty. The same was true of her voice, which gained in beauty and expressiveness when brought to the pitch and rhythm of the stage.

The question of Duse's neglect of the advantages of make-up, her almost entire absence of make-up, have been taken as the starting-point for many discussions of realism, naturalism, verisimilitude, on the stage and in art generally. Looking at Duse thus, I saw another comment on this matter. It seemed probable, I decided now, that Duse avoided elaborate make-up not only in order, as we have heard so long, to get a deeper truth than any mere illusion could give, and to let the living written on her face be read for what it might mean; not only for these

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reasons, but also because, save for a little heightening or underscoring, she found that her mask was both too fluid and too marked to do anything but lose under dark linings and powder and paste.

Something of the unity of art itself emerged from Duse's physical presence, from her face and the lines of her body as she moved. She gave the impression of, first, strength, which came from the clear rhythm of her presence and from the ardor of her spirit as she talked. But she seemed frail, too; partly from exhaustion and poor health, and partly from a tremendous sensitivity.

I got at once also, as Duse talked of herself and me and my use to her, the impression, of a kind of endless, poignant egotism. She wanted to see me right off, she went on, because the suggestion had arisen that she return to America next year. Or it might be that her Vienna contract could be arranged, and she could tour America and revisit New York in April. She wanted a play to add to her repertory, to be produced either in Italy or in America next season or both. Could I tell her of a play? Perhaps I could write her a play, if exercising the critical faculty did not destroy the desire or the ability to create. Perhaps, if I Perhaps, if I asked my friends, we might find something for her.

New days had come, and a new world of living after the war, and we must find an art that expressed it or at least came out of it. It was wrong, a sin, to go on with only the art of other generations. She must find new plays. For she must go on acting a while yet; she might live for years; it was time for her to die, but who knows? Life can last a long time.

And now there. might be some one with a beautiful play lying here or there unseen, in a desk perhaps, in some cabinet, a play that had no chance to be born in the professional theater, not answering to the usual wants. It might well be that some beautiful work or at least some sincere expression of life might be found. She had heard from a friend of a play “Anna Christie.” What of that? How old was the woman? Young? Then that would not do; it would be foolish of her to try to act a young woman. There must be some other play; perhaps O'Neill or some one would write for her.

But-and here one saw Duse's familiar attitude toward the professional theater-one thing she begged me not to do; not to let this request for a play get into print. That, she said, would mean only that the agents, the regular stage-writers, the regular theater, with all the commerce, falsity, and commonness, would be stirred up to do business, and would defile everything.

Duse seemed then to become more set on my writing a play for her, and began to speak at length of the reasons why I should, which I mention only because it bears later on the point of Duse's relation to artists.

Meanwhile something over half an hour had passed, and it seemed time, considering how fragile Duse appeared, that I should take my leave. This I did not know how to manage, since Duse herself was saying with so much absorption what she had to say. Then suddenly at the end of a sentence she rose, with the same sense of herself and her mood, and held out her hand to say good-by. I must come again after the next matinée. She started toward

the door of the bedroom, and I toward the hall. It was rather uncomfortably as if an audience had been granted and terminated. And then at her door she paused, made an Italian gesture of putting two fingers to her lips as if to throw a kiss, and smiled.

Before the next visit I wrote Duse a letter telling her of an idea I had of a play for her, turning on the theme of maternal love, to be called perhaps "La Madre Divina" and dealing with a mother and son under a modern labor situation. We would talk it over and see what she thought.

We sat down near a window. Duse had read my letter with great pleasure, she said. I must write a play for her. "La Madre Divina," yes; but we must not talk about it.

What Duse said then is important because it profoundly indicates her conception of art as a thing that is essentially whole, essentially mysterious and inexplicable and not to be predicted; and her conception of art as a thing that—in so far as it is art-is a form of life that comes into being with the body that it inhabits, and that is inseparable from this body that contains and expresses it.

As Duse spoke now, her gestures and images and phrases had the same characteristic that appeared in her acting, in which there was a kind of terrible, direct penetration that went to the bottom of any part she acted, and that either showed up its emptiness by dilating it with her own truth or furthered its greatness by giving her own quivering spirit as the agent of its truth. Duse's art had a kind of poetic realism that one saw now at that moment in what she said and did. There was a quality exact and luminous at the same time, something like the

poetry of Dante and the sculpture of sixteenth-century Italy, something externally so concrete, so literal, so much what it was, that the idea, the soul of it, was entirely complete and manifest.

I must tell nobody of the play until it was written, Duse said. A work of art that is to be, if it is ever to be truly born, with its life in it, could not be discussed or known before it was created. And this the artist must remember always because, Duse said, a work of art did not exist at all before it was expressed in its medium.

A work of art was like love. If you saw a man and loved him,-it might be in the street even,-you could not know what sort of love you felt for him until you did love him. There are many kinds of love; what this love would be could be known only when you loved him.

If you detached two roses from the rest-Duse took two roses from the vase beside her-and laid them on the floor, you would not know what you had really done until you saw them there. She stood up and pointed to the roses before her. A work of art was like that.

A work of art was like a woman with her child. While she carries it hereDuse struck her hand on her abdomen --she cannot know what the child will be; it may be born a gentleman or a ruffian, a great poet, a fool, or what you please. But before it was born the mother could not know.

I must therefore not talk of the play with her, but must think of it, write it, and come to Asolo and bring it to her there. Then we could discuss it. There was plenty of time for everything to find its own birth. But-and again the old Duse spoke-above all things I was to live away from groups,

cliques, the professional theater, people one was tied to or had to please, which was the death of art and of talent and of sincerity. And I was to remember that she believed in this play, in me, that she loved me, "io ti amo," she said. I should write the play without telling her of it till it was done, but should say to myself, Duse had faith in me, Duse believes. I set this down because of the comment in it. Duse said it as simply as if God or Nature were speaking, as if her belief were the substance and the evidence of the thing we hoped for.

All this concerns what was one of Duse's great qualities and the origin to no small extent of her fame; I mean her impression on artists everywhere and on their creative impulse.

Duse had, as had no other artist of her time, a quality that touched in others the springs of creative life. In fact this characteristic was a phase of what raised Duse above her own theatrical craft, made her unique in the theater of the world, a great pathetic myth of beauty and response to living; and baffled any classification or definition of her art. Duse illustrated not so much one art as the nature of all arts, and was a source of creative energy that might extend into music, poetry, or architecture as easily as into acting.

You felt in Duse's presence both obliterated and exalted. There was something about her central intensity and egotism that was like the creative impulse itself, like sexual love and like creation in an artist. This egotism seemed a thing without humor, but above the need for it; non-social, but divinely deep and true. Duse's approach was penetrating and oblivious at the same time. It ignored and held you. It asked nothing for itself, and

everything. It seemed all egotism, and at the same time sheer quality, impersonal, ideal in its nature. She reduced you to nothing and gave you at the same moment the sense of being taken as no mere individual, but as that something in yourself that was immortal. You felt ashamed to think of yourself at all or to resent her seeming oversight of your presence; and at the same time you felt concerned only with what might be your idea, your eternal self. eternal self. Duse seemed to give you

an unescapable, cruel, poignant life. You felt that after her there would never be peace any more, but only, in so far as you were alive at all, the pressure and necessity of birth, la mia delizia ed erinnes, as Leonardo said of art-the delight and torment of creation.

And yet it would not be fair to let it go at that, making Duse out what to many people's eyes would be inhuman. There were very much two sides to her. And all this was true when she was thinking over something with you or taking you as an artist. There was another side to her as simple as a child, quiet, defenseless. Her eyes followed you into everything you said, in whatever mood. And a tenderness beyond words would come into her face over little details of your own, of your family, over little affairs dear only to yourself. On the personal side she took you, if at all, with an extraordinary simple completeness.

Once Duse discussed the plays that she had brought with her. She was very much limited in her choice of plays, she said. She could no longer act plays with the usual love motive. Maternal love in one way or another was in all these plays of her present repertory, though not so much in "La

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