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| Gabrielle Rejane (1856-1920) |
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In Press and Literature |
extract from PLAYS ACTING AND MUSIC, A book of Theory
by Arthur Symons, Constable and Co. London 1909
REJANE
The genius of Rejane is a kind of finesse: it is a flavour, and all the ingredients of the dish may be named without defining it. The thing is Parisian, but that is only to say that it unites nervous force with a wicked ease and mastery of charm. It speaks to the senses through the brain, as much as to the brain through the senses. It is the feminine equivalent of intellect. It "magnetises our poor vertebra," in Verlaine's phrase, because it is sex and yet not instinct. It is sex civilised, under direction, playing a part, as we say of others than those on the stage. It calculates, and is unerring. It has none of the vulgar warmth of mere passion, none of its health or simplicity. It leaves a little red sting where it has kissed. And it intoxicates us by its appeal to so many sides of our nature at once. We are thrilled, and we admire, and are almost coldly appreciative, and yet aglow with the response of the blood. I have found myself applauding with tears in my eyes. The feeling and the critical approval came together, hand in hand: neither counteracted the other: and I had to think twice, before I could remember how elaborate a science went to the making of that thrill which I had been almost cruelly enjoying.
The art of Rejane accepts things as they are, without selection or correction; unlike Duse, who chooses just those ways in which she shall be nature. What one remembers are little homely details, in which the shadow of some overpowering impulse gives a sombre beauty to what is common or ugly. She renders the despair of the woman whose lover is leaving her by a single movement, the way in which she wipes her nose. To her there is but one beauty, truth; and but one charm, energy. Where nature has not chosen, she will not choose; she is content with whatever form emotion snatches for itself as it struggles into speech out of an untrained and unconscious body. In "Sapho" she is the everyday "Venus toute entiere a sa proie attachee," and she has all the brutality and all the clinging warmth of the flesh; vice, if you will, but serious vice, vice plus passion. Her sordid, gluttonous, instructed eyes, in which all the passions and all the vices have found a nest, speak their own language, almost without the need of words, throughout the play; the whole face suffers, exults, lies, despairs, with a homely sincerity which cuts more sharply than any stage emphasis. She seems at every moment to throw away her chances of effect, of ordinary stage-effect; then, when the moment seems to have gone, and she has done nothing, you will find that the moment itself has penetrated you, that she has done nothing with genius.
Rejane can be vulgar, as nature is vulgar: she has all the instincts of the human animal, of the animal woman, whom man will never quite civilise. There is no doubt of it, nature lacks taste; and woman, who is so near to nature, lacks taste in the emotions. Rejane, in "Sapho" or in "Zaza" for instance, is woman naked and shameless, loving and suffering with all her nerves and muscles, a gross, pitiable, horribly human thing, whose direct appeal, like that of a sick animal, seizes you by the throat at the instant in which it reaches your eyes and ears. More than any actress she is the human animal without disguise or evasion; with all the instincts, all the natural cries and movements.
In "Sapho" or "Zaza" she speaks the language of the senses, no more; and her acting reminds you of all that you may possibly have forgotten of how the senses speak when they speak through an ignorant woman in love. It is like an accusing confirmation of some of one's guesses at truth, before the realities of the flesh and of the affections of the flesh. Scepticism is no longer possible: here, in "Sapho," is a woman who flagellates herself before her lover as the penitent flagellates himself before God. In the scene where her lover repulses her last attempt to win him back, there is a convulsive movement of the body, as she lets herself sink to the ground at his feet, which is like the movement of one who is going to be sick: it renders, with a ghastly truth to nature, the abject collapse of the body under overpowering emotion. Here, as elsewhere, she gives you merely the thing itself, without a disturbing atom of self-consciousness; she is grotesque, she is what you will: it is no matter. The emotion she is acting possesses her like a blind force; she is Sapho, and Sapho could only move and speak and think in one way. Where Sarah Bernhardt would arrange the emotion for some thrilling effect of art, where Duse would purge the emotion of all its attributes but some fundamental nobility, Rejane takes the big, foolish, dirty thing just as it is. And is not that, perhaps, the supreme merit of acting?
(Stevens Post Gazette, 29th May, 1895)
REJANE IS THE CRAZE
AMY LESLIE'S OPINION OF THE FRENCH ACTRESS.
The Artistic Beauty of Her Performance Is Beyond Question — Her Bizarre and Original Methods Have Captured Americans.
O Paris there belongs a bewitching gylph of imagination, a poem of exquisite femininity, born of French gallantry, impressionistic art and chartreuse rouge. That she really exists outside of volatile boulevard compliment, Dumas and Bourget literature, or Cheret posters is a question neither permissible nor spirituelle, but she is as much a part of French history as St. Genevieve Catherine di Medici.
This mythical abstraction of seduisance and incomparable charm is la Parisienne. It is doubtful whether she ever materialized in such glorious perfections until the advent of Gabrieile Rejane. Voila the realization of all of Bouret de Monvel's dazzling piquancies in billowy petticoats and bewildering eyes, Spiridon's infatuating wraiths of enticement and Dudley Hardy's boa-wound heroines in two stunning colors. The vagrant spirit of Rejane must have hypnotized latter-day painters of woman into foretelling, foreshadowing herself, for she is the incarnation of that intangible, rare, yet omnipresent creature of dreams in French literature and modern illustration. Aside from the grace of verifying French chivalry and substantiating the furbelowed rights of Paris to an essential, special being of allurements, Mme. Rejane is so wealthily endowed with wit, dramatic genius, peculiar, haunting expressiveness and emotional expansion that she brings with her an awakening bell in art.
She has temperament exquisitely attuned to the poetic and picturesque, over which is a measure of the uncanny and ghoulish fascination which hangs about Sarah Bernhardt. There is the irresistible attractiveness of frenetic taint and decadence not only in the art of Rejane but her strange orientalism of personality, the witchery of her face, her serpentine grace of movement and the rakish carelessness and unevenness of her methods and manners. She is a type of the century, a genius unhealthy in luxuriance and abundant in fascinations. Her beauty is a beauty created by artists before her comedies and fierce little Ibsen dramas were written. Her methods are absorbingly animal and instinctive with that spiritistic unconsciousness resultant in the most brilliant dramatic achievement. She is a culminative expression of the hour's vague tendency, and she comes like a whirlwind from an impenetrable forest of orchids, a flash of lightning carrying in its zig-zag spasm of fire. She is not complete, she is not solacing nor filling, she is Rejane and the magic of a name made so unusual must become food for a new word, a special adjective of advanced significance. There is but a sixteenth of Mme. Rejane's talent called upon for exhibition in "Mme. Sans-Gene." There are brusque comedy and instants of pathos, swift febriculose surprises of power and a richly original humor spontaneous and delightful, but scarcely a chance for display of Rejane's greatest gifts. Ibsen's didactic and sullen women, with their frights and appalling silences, their tempestuous sufferings and pretended gayeties, must give better play to the kaleidoscopic possibilities of Mme. Rejane's accomplishments.
Her comedy is incomparable, daring and pretty as a garden of carnations. Her odd, deep eyes with their wizard little eyebrows have wonderful eloquence and wit enough to take the place of impotent words. Gesture in Mme. Sans-Gene is so obtrusively gauche and characteristic that scarcely a notion of Rejane's grace is hinted, though the force and correctness of every pantomime sentence are evident outgrowths of that control which means absolute beauty of movement and pose. As the Jolly, loyal washerwoman of the empire Rejane is a busy, sharp-toned clod of good nature and business: as the democratic duchess she is a crudely natural out-of-place innocent, at all times conspicuous and occasionally pathetic and histrionic. Something of a soubrette's amativeness for applause leads Mme. Rejane into stereotyped business with trains, fans and feathers which brummagem stage ladies are always expected to render abnormally comic. But the dash and audacity of Rejane outshine small insufficiencies and the rollicking humor, beauty and artistic depth in her study of the Sardou-Moreau heroine are convincing and delicious.
In these days when the masses are given over to farce and the pulses of higher order beat pleasantly only when the hands may be stopped "in the gray twilight of Gothic things," the true ring of artistic comedy is the healthiest, happiest, heartiest thing in all art, and Mme. Rejane's Brilliant exposition of rare methods and great talent must be held a benison of sweetest comfort.
AMY LESLIE.