technical power is extraordinary, but her art is simple; melancholy and
dignity are its chief ingredients. Will Duse’s womanly nature be able
to bear the strain of never-ending repetition? This fear has been the
cause of my endeavor to accentuate her individuality as it appeared
to me when I saw her. Hers is not one of those powerful natures
which always regain their strength, and are able to fight through
all difficulties. Her entire acting is tuned upon one note, which is
usually nothing more than an accompaniment in the art of acting; that
note is sincerity. In my opinion she is the greatest woman genius on
the stage.
Nowadays we are either too lavish or too sparing in our use of the word
genius; we either brandish it abroad with every trumpet, or else avoid
it altogether. We are willing to allow that there are geniuses amongst
actors and actresses, and that such have existed, and may perhaps
continue to exist, but I have never observed that any attempt is made
to distinguish between the genius of man and woman on the stage. This
may possibly be accounted for by the fact that the difference was not
great. The hero was manly, the heroine womanly, and the old people,
whether men or women, were either comic or tearful, and the characters
of both sexes were usually bad. The difference lay chiefly in the
dress, the general comportment, and the voice: one could see which was
the woman, and she of course acted a woman’s feelings; tradition ruled,
and in accordance with it the actress imitated the man, declaimed her
part like him, and even went as far as to imitate the well-known tragic
step. Types, not individuals, were represented on the stage, and I have
seldom seen even the greatest actresses of the older school deviate
from this rule.
The society pieces were supposed to represent every-day life; therefore
it was necessary before all else that the actress should be a lady, and
where a lady’s feelings are limited, hers were necessarily limited too.
To every actress, the tragedian not excepted, the question of chief
importance was how she looked.
But Duse does not care in the least how she looks. Her one desire is
to find means of expressing an emotion of the soul which overwhelms
her, and is one of the mysteries of her womanly nature. Her acting is
not realistic; by which I mean that she does not attempt to impress
her audience by making her acting true to life, which can be easily
attained by means of pathological phenomena, such as a cough, the
cramp, a death-struggle, etc., which are really the most expressive,
and also, in a coarse way, the most successful. She will have none of
this, because it is the kind of acting common to both sexes. What she
wants is to give expression to her own soul, her own womanly nature,
the individual emotions of her own physical and psychical being;
and she can only accomplish that by being entirely herself, _i.e._,
perfectly natural. That is why she makes gesticulations, and speaks in
a tone of voice which is never used elsewhere upon the stage; and she
never tries to disguise her age, because her body is nothing more to
her than an instrument for expressing her woman’s soul.
What is genius? The word has hitherto been understood to imply a
superabundance of intelligence, imagination, and passion, combined
with a higher order of intellect than that possessed by average
persons. Genius was a masculine attribute, and when people spoke of
woman’s genius, their meaning was almost identical. A finer spiritual
susceptibility scarcely came under the heading of genius; it was
therefore, upon the whole, a very unsatisfactory definition. There can
be no doubt that there is a kind of genius peculiar to women, and it is
when a woman is a genius that she is most unlike man, and most womanly;
it is then that she creates through the instrumentality of her womanly
nature and refined senses. This is the kind of productive faculty
which Eleonora Duse possesses to such a high degree.
A woman’s productive faculty has always shown a decided preference
for authorship and acting,--the two forms of art which offer the best
opportunity for the manifestation of the inner life, as being the most
direct and spontaneous, and in which there are the fewest technical
difficulties to overcome. A woman’s impulses are of such short duration
that she feels the need for constant change of emotion. The majority
of women are attracted by the stage, and there is no form of artistic
production which they find more difficult to renounce. Why is this? We
will leave vanity and other minor considerations out of the question,
and imagine Duse shedding real tears upon the stage, enduring real
mental and maybe physical sufferings, experiencing real sorrow and real
joy.
And now, putting aside all question of nerves and auto-suggestion, we
would ask what it is that attracts a woman to the stage?
Sensation.
A productive nature cannot endure the monotony of real life. To it,
real life means uniformity. Uniformity in love, uniformity in work,
uniformity in pleasures, uniformity in sorrows. To break through this
uniformity--this half sleep of daily existence--is a craving felt by
all persons possessed of superfluous vitality. This vitality may be
more or less centred on the ego, and for such,--_i.e._, the persons
who are possessed of the largest share of individual, productive
vitality,--authorship and acting are the two shortest ways of escape
from the uniformity of daily life. Of these two, the last-named form
of artistic expression is best suited to woman, and the woman who has
felt these sensations, especially the tragic ones, can never tear
herself away from the stage. For she experiences them with an intensity
of feeling which belongs only to the rarest moments in real life, and
which cannot then be consciously enjoyed. But the artificial emotions,
which can scarcely be reckoned artificial, since they cause her excited
nerves to quiver,--of these she is strangely conscious in her enjoyment
of them; she enjoys both spiritual and physical horror, she enjoys the
thousand reflex emotions, and she also enjoys the genuine fatigue and
bodily weakness which follow after. For the majority of women our life
is an everlasting, half-waking expectation of something that never
comes, or it may be nothing more than a hard day’s work; but life
for a talented actress becomes a double existence, filled with warm
colors--sorrow and gladness. She can do what other women never can or
would allow themselves to do, she can express every sensation that she
feels, she can enjoy the full extent of a woman’s feelings, and live
them over and over again. But because this life is half reality and
half fiction, and because the strain of acting is always followed by a
feeling of emptiness and dissatisfaction, great actresses are always
disillusioned, and that is perhaps the reason why Duse’s attractive
face wears an expression of weariness and hopeless longing. But the
warm colors--the colors of sorrow and passion--are always enticing,
and that is why great tragedians can never forsake the stage, although
gradually, little by little, the intensity of their feelings grows
less, and the colors become pale and more false.
IV
_The Woman Naturalist_
I
It is a well-known peculiarity of Norwegian authors that they all
want something. It is either some of the “new devilries” with which
Father Ibsen amuses himself in his old age, or else it is the Universal
Disarm-ment Act and the peace of Europe, which Björnson, with his
increasing years and increasing folly, assures us will come to pass
as a result of “universal morality;” or else it is the rights of the
flesh, which have been discovered by Hans Jaeger; but whatever they
want, it is always something that has no connection with their art
as authors. All their writings assume the form of a polemical or
critical discussion on social subjects; yet in spite of their boasted
psychology, they care little for the great mystery which humanity
offers to them in the unexplored regions lying between the two poles:
man and woman; and as for physiology, they are as little concerned
about it as Paul Bourget in his _Physiologie de l’Amour Moderne_, where
there is no more physiology than there is in the novels of Dumas _père_.
“When the green tree,” etc. That is the style of the Norwegian authors;
and as for the authoresses of the three Scandinavian countries,--they
are all ladies who have been educated in the high schools. They cast
down their eyes, not out of shyness,--for the modern woman is too
well aware of her own importance to be shy,--but in order to read.
They read about life, as it is and as it should be, and then they set
themselves down to write about life as it is and as it should be; but
they really know nothing of it beyond the little that they see during
their afternoon walks through the best streets in the town, and at the
evening parties given by the best _bourgeois_ society.
This is the case with all Scandinavian authoresses, with one exception.
This one exception can see, and she looks at life with good large eyes,
opened wide like a child’s, and sees with the impartiality that belongs
to a healthy nature; she can grasp what she sees, and describe it too,
with a freshness and expressiveness which betray a lack of “cultured”
reading.
II
A lady of remarkable and brilliant beauty may sometimes be seen in
the theatre at Copenhagen, or walking in the streets by the side of a
tall, stout, fair gentleman, whose features resemble those of Gustavus
Adolphus. Any one can see that the lady is a native of Bergen. To us
strangers, the natives of Bergen have a certain something whereby we
always recognize them, no matter whether we meet them in Paris or in
Copenhagen. Björnson’s wife has it as decidedly as the humblest clerk
whom we see on Sundays at the table of his employer at Reval or Riga.
Their short, straight noses lack earnestness, their hair is shiny and
untidy, their eyes are black as pitch, and they have the free and
easy movements that are peculiar to a well-proportioned body; it is
as though the essence of the vitality of Europe had collected in the
old Hanseatic town of the North. I do not think that the inhabitants
of Bergen are remarkable for their superior intelligence; if they
were it might hinder them from grasping things as resolutely, and
despatching them as promptly as they are in the habit of doing. But
among Norwegians, who are known to have heavy, meditative natures, the
people of Bergen are the most cheerful and light-hearted,--in as far as
it is possible to be cheerful and light-hearted in this world.
The lady who is walking by the side of the man with the
Gustavus-Adolphus head is a striking phenomenon in Copenhagen. She is
different from every one else, which a lady ought never to be. Compared
with the flat-breasted, lively, and flirtatious women of Copenhagen,
she, with her well-developed figure and large hips, is like a great
sailing-ship among small coquettish pleasure boats. She is always doing
something which no lady would do; she wears bright colors, which are
not the fashion; and I saw her one evening at an entertainment, where
there were not enough chairs, sitting on a table and dangling her
feet,--although she is the mother of two grown-up sons!
III
When the woman’s rights movement made its appearance in Norway,
authoresses sprang up as numerous as mushrooms after the rain. Women
claimed the right to study, to plead, and to legislate in the local
body and the state; they claimed the suffrage, the right of property,
and the right to earn their own living; but there was one very simple
right to which they laid no claim, and that was the woman’s right to
love. To a great extent this right had been thrust aside by the modern
social order, yet there were plenty of Scandinavian authors who claimed
it; it was only amongst the lady writers that it was ignored. They did
not want to risk anything in the company of man; they did not want any
love on the fourth story with self-cooked meals; they preferred to
criticise man and all connected with him; and they wrote books about
the hard-working woman and the more or less contemptible man. The
two sexes were a vanquished standpoint. These were completed by the
addition of beings who were neither men nor women, and, in consequence
of the law of adaptability, they continued to improve with time, and
woman became a thinking, working, neutral organism.
Good heavens! When women think!
Among the group of celebrated women-thinkers,--Leffler, Ahlgren,
Agrell, etc.,--who criticised love as though it were a product of the
intelligence, followed by a crowd of maidenly amazons, there suddenly
appeared an author named Amalie Skram, whom one really could not accuse
of being too thoughtful. It is true that in her first book there was
the intellectual woman and the sensual man, and a seduced servant
girl, grouped upon the chessboard of moral discussion with a measured
proportion of light and shade,--that was the usual method of treating
the deepest and most complicated moments of human life. But this book
contained something else, which no Scandinavian authoress had ever
produced before: her characters came and went, each in his own way;
every one spoke his own language and had his own thoughts; there was
no need for inky fingers to point the way; life lived itself, and the
horizon was wide with plenty of fresh air and blue sky,--there was
nothing cramped about it, like the wretched little extract of life
to which the other ladies confined themselves. There was a wealth of
minute observation about this book, brought to life by careful painting
and critical descriptions, a trustworthy memory and an untroubled
honesty; one recognized true naturalism below the hard surface of a
problem novel, and one felt that if her talent grew upon the sunny
side, the North would gain its first woman naturalist who did not write
about life in a critical, moralizing, and polemical manner, but in whom
life would reveal itself as bad and as stupid, as full of unnecessary
anxiety and unconscious cruelty, as easy-going, as much frittered away
and led by the senses as it actually is.
Two years passed by and “Constance Ring,” the story of a woman who was
misunderstood, was followed by “Sjur Gabriel,” the story of a starving
west coast fisherman. There is not a single false note in the book,
and not one awkward description or superfluous word. It resembles one
of those sharp-cut bronze medallions of the Renaissance, wherein the
intention of the artist is executed with a perfected technical power in
the use of the material. This perfection was the result of an intimate
knowledge of the material, and that was Fru Skram’s secret. Her soul
was sufficiently uncultured, and her sense of harmony spontaneous
enough to enable her to reproduce the simplest cause in the heart’s
fibre. She describes human beings as they are to be found alone with
nature,--with a raw, niggardly, unreliable, Northern nature; she
tells of their never-ending, unfruitful toil, whether field labor
or child-bearing, the stimulating effect of brandy, the enervating
influence of their fear of a harsh God,--the God of a severe
climate,--the shy, unspoken love of the father, and the overworked
woman who grows to resemble an animal more and more. Such are the
contents of this simplest of all books, which is so intense in its
absolute straightforwardness. The story is told in the severest style,
in few words without reflections, but with a real honesty which looks
facts straight in the face with unterrified gaze, and is filled with a
knowledge of life and of people combined with a breadth of experience
which is generally the property of men, and not many men. We are forced
to ask ourselves where a woman can have obtained such knowledge, and we
wonder how this unconventional mode of thinking can have found its way
into the tight-laced body and soul of a woman.
A second book appeared the same year, called “Two Friends.” It is the
story of a sailing vessel of the same name, which travels backwards and
forwards between Bergen and Jamaica, and Sjur Gabriel’s grandson is the
cabin boy on board. This book offers such a truthful representation of
the life, tone of conversation, and work on board a Norwegian sailing
vessel, that it would do credit to an old sea captain. The tone is
true, the characters are life-like, and the humor which pervades the
whole is thoroughly seamanlike. The description of how the entire
crew, including the captain, land at Kingston one hot summer night
to sacrifice to the Black Venus, and the description of the storm,
and the shipwreck of the “Two Friends” on the Atlantic Ocean, the
gradual destruction of the ship, the state of mind of the crew, and the
captain’s suddenly awakened piety;--it is all so perfectly life-like,
so characteristically true of the sailor class, and so full of local
Norwegian coloring, that we ask ourselves how a woman ever came to
write it,--not only to experience it, but to describe it at all,
describe as she does with such masterly confidence and such plain
expressions, without any affectation, prudery, or conceit, and without
any trace of that dilettantism of style and subject which has hitherto
been regarded as inseparable from the writings of Scandinavian women.
IV
Whence comes this sudden change from the dilettante book, “Constance
Ring,” with its Björnson-like reflections, to the matured style of
“Sjur Gabriel” and “Two Friends”?
I could not understand it all at first, but the day came when I
understood. Amalie Skram as a woman and an author had come on to the
sunny side.
I have often wondered why it is that so few people come on to the
sunny side. I have studied life until I became the avowed enemy of all
superficial pessimism and superficial naturalism. I have discovered a
secret attraction between happiness and individualism,--an attraction
deeper than Zola is able to apprehend; it is the complete human beings
who, with wide-opened tentacles, are able to appropriate to their own
use everything that their inmost being has need of; but whether a
person is or is not a complete human being, that fate decides for them
before they are born.
Fru Amalie Skram was, in her way, one of these complete women. She
passed unscathed through a girl’s education, was perhaps scarcely
influenced by it, and with sparkling eyes and glowing cheeks she gazed
upon the world and society with the look of a barbaric Northern woman,
who retains the full use of her instinct. When quite young she married
the captain of a ship, by whom she had two sons. She went with him
on a long sea voyage round the world; she saw the Black Sea, the Sea
of Azof, and the shores of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. She saw
life on board ship, and life on land,--man’s life. Her mind was like
a photographic plate that preserves the impressions received until
they are needed; and when she reproduced them, they were as fresh and
complete as at the moment when they were first taken. These impressions
were not the smallware of a lady’s drawing-room; they represented the
wide horizon, the rough ocean of life with its many dangers. It was the
kind of life that brings with it freedom from all prejudice, the kind
of life which is no longer found on board a modern steamer going to and
fro between certain places at certain intervals.
But it was not to be expected that the monotony of the life could
satisfy her. She separated herself from her husband, and remained on
shore, where she became interested in various social problems, and
wrote “Constance Ring.”
It was then that she made the acquaintance of Erik Skram.
The man with the head of Gustavus Adolphus is Denmark’s most Danish
critic. His name is little known elsewhere, and he cannot be said to
have a very great reputation; but this may be partly accounted for
by the fact that he has no ambition, and partly because he has one
of those profound natures that are rendered passive by the depth of
their intellect. He is a man of one book, a novel called “Gertrude
Colbjörnson,” and he is never likely to write another. But he
contributes to newspapers and periodicals, where his spontaneous talent
is accompanied by that quiet, delicate, easy-going style which is one
of the forms of expression peculiar to the Danish sceptics.
Fru Amalie Müller became Fru Amalie Skram, and the bold Bergen woman,
who was likewise the dissatisfied lady reformer of Christiania, became
the wife of a born critic, and went to live at Copenhagen. She was an
excitable little _brunette_, he a fair, phlegmatic man, and together
they entered upon the struggle for the mastery, which marriage always
is.
In this struggle Fru Amalie Skram was beaten; every year she became
more of an artist, more natural, more simple, more herself, and more
of all that a woman never can become when she is left to herself. Her
husband’s superior culture liberated her fresh, wild, primitive nature
from the parasites of social problems; the experienced critic saw that
her strength lay in her keen observation, her happy incapacity for
reasoning and moralizing, her infallible memory for the impressions
of the senses and emotions, and her good spirits, which are nothing
more than the result of physical health. He cautiously pushed her into
the direction to which she is best suited, to the naturalism which is
natural to her. Her books were no longer drawn out, neither were they
as poor in substance as books by women generally are, even the best of
them; they grew to be more laconic than the majority of men’s books,
but clear and vivid; there was nothing in them to betray the woman. And
after he had done this much for her, the experienced man did yet one
thing more,--he gave her the courage of her recollections.
V
Amalie Skram’s talent culminated in “Lucie.” In this book we see
her going about in an untidy, dirty, ill-fitting morning gown, and
she is perfectly at home. It would scandalize any lady. Authoresses
who struggle fearlessly after honest realism--like Frau von
Ebner-Eschenbach and George Eliot--might perhaps have touched upon it,
but with very little real knowledge of the subject. Amalie Skram, on
the other hand, is perfectly at home in this dangerous borderland. She
is much better informed than Heinz Tovote, for instance, and he is a
poet who sings of women who are not to be met with in drawing-rooms.
She describes the pretty ballet girl with genuine enjoyment and
true sympathy; but the book falls into two halves, one of which has
succeeded and the other failed. Everything that concerns Lucie is a
success, including the part about the fine, rather weak-kneed gentleman
who supports her, and ends by marrying her, although his love is not
of the kind that can be called “ennobling.” All that does not concern
Lucie and her natural surroundings is a failure, especially the fine
gentleman’s social circle, into which Lucie enters after her marriage,
and where she seems to be as little at home as Amalie Skram herself.
Many an author and epicurean would have hesitated before writing such
a book as “Lucie.” But Amalie Skram’s naturalism is of such an honest
and happy nature that any secondary considerations would not be likely
to enter her mind, and in the last chapter the brutal naturalism of the
story reaches its highest pitch. In the whole of Europe there are only
two genuine and honest naturalists, and they are Emile Zola and Amalie
Skram.
Her later books--take, for instance, her great Bergen novel, “S. G.
Myre,” “Love in North and South,” “Betrayed,” etc.--are not to be
compared with the three that we have mentioned. They are naturalistic,
of course; their naturalism is of the best kind; they are still _unco
in de la nature_, but they are no longer entirely _vu à travers un
tempérament_. They are no longer quite Amalie Skram.