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On what may be called neutral ground, such as Ibsen plays, we have held our own very well against any performances in London by Continental players; Miss Janet Achurch was a more characteristic Nora than Duse or Réjane; nor have we seen a Mrs Linden, Hedda Gabler or Hilda Wangle comparable with that of Miss Elizabeth Robins. There is no need to multiply instances.
But not even Réjane has given us the whole animal, in its self-martyrdom, as this woman has given it to us. Such knowledge and command of the body, and so frank an abandonment to its instinctive motions, has never been seen on our stage, not even in Sada Yacco and the Japanese. They could outdo Sarah in a death-scene, but not Aguglia in the scene in which she betrays her secret.
Duse is the soul made flesh, Réjane the flesh made Parisian, Sarah Bernhardt the flesh and the devil; but Julia Marlowe is the joy of life, the plenitude of sap in the tree. The personal appeal of Mr. Sothern and of Miss Marlowe is very different.
Drop in, if you are in Paris and know the way, at one of Madeleine Lemaire's informal evenings in her studio. There you may find the Prince de Ligne, chatting with Rejane or Coquelin; or Henri d'Orleans, just back from an expedition into Africa. A little further on, Saint-Saens will be running over the keys, preparing an accompaniment for one of Madame de Tredern's songs.
For example, Sur la Terrasse, with its audacious crimson, like the imperious challenge of a trumpet; La Loge and its gorgeous fabrics; a Baigneuse in a light-green scheme; the quaint head of Jeanne Samary a rival portrait to Besnard's faun-like Réjane and a lot of Renoir's later experimentings, as fugitive as music; exploding bouquets of iridescence; swirling panels, depicting scenes from Tannhäuser; a flower garden composed of buds and blossoms in colour scales that begin at a bass-emerald and ascend to an altitudinous green where green is no longer green but an opaline reverberation.
I love their jolly abandon of manner, their kindness and "honesty," and their gasconade. So here's to you Cyrano and Daudet, D'Artagnan and Tartarin, not forgetting M. le Président. Who do you think sat beside us within arm's length but Réjane!
The pleasure which we get from seeing her as Francesca or as Marguerite Gautier is doubled by that other pleasure, never completely out of our minds, that she is also Sarah Bernhardt. One sometimes forgets that Réjane is acting at all; it is the real woman of the part, Sapho, or Zaza, or Yanetta, who lives before us.
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.
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?
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
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