The genius of Réjane 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 vertebrae," 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 Réjane 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 entière à sa proie attachée," 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.
Réjane 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. Réjane, 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, Réjane takes the big, foolish,
dirty thing just as it is. And is not that, perhaps, the supreme merit
of acting?