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She was thoroughly and consistently good, she was lifelike, amusing, never out of key; only, while she reminded one at times of Réjane, she had none of Réjane's magnetism, none of Réjane's exciting naturalness. The whole company is one of excellent quality, which goes together like the different parts of a piece of machinery. There is Mme.
Rejane, Caruso, Coquelin, Garrick and a thousand others sittin' against the towering walls, sittin' with their eyes on the huge door within' to see who's a-comin' in now. All right, professor, jes' a little music. Nothin' much. Anything kind o' sad and fidgetylike. Tha's it, that-a-boy. There's no use worryin' much.
And so, in its way, this very artificial acting seemed the mere instinctive, irresistible expression of a temperament; it mesmerised one, awakening the senses and sending the intelligence to sleep. After all, though Réjane skins emotions alive, and Duse serves them up to you on golden dishes, it is Sarah Bernhardt who prepares the supreme feast.
There are others, however, such as Madame Réjane, more ambitious, who in their selection of plays do some disservice to their country. The humour of Mr Gilbert's line "The not too French French bean" appeals irresistibly to the English. There has long been a vague idea in British bosoms that our neighbours in sexual matters are far more immoral than ourselves.
A little while ago the critic of an evening paper received a letter partly in the following words: "I am deeply grateful to you, but for you, I should not have known that Réjane made a speech at the end of La Souris. Such morning papers as I saw said nothing about it. Things have changed sadly, you see. I write slowly, and I hate last acts; they always spoil a play.
Madame Réjane, it was stated in the papers, has expressed herself shocked by A Wife without a Smile, and alleged that she would never act in such a piece; but it may well be that her horror lay in the fact that the parties concerned in the farce had been through a ceremony of marriage, and that she would have accepted it as permissible if it were correctly entitled A Cocotte without a Leer.
It is not likely that when Madame de Navarro pronounced that estimate she was forgetting either Miss Terry or Mrs. Campbell or Mesdames Rejane and Bernhardt or Signora Duse. Madame de Navarro is no mean judge: and those who have read Miss Morris's wonderful book, Life on the Stage, will think the judgment in this case not incredible. Similarly I believe that in Mr.
With Réjane the vitality is direct; it is the appeal of Gavroche, the sharp, impudent urchin of the streets; Sarah Bernhardt's vitality is electrical, and shoots its currents through all manner of winding ways. In form it belongs to an earlier period, just as the writing of Dumas fils belongs to an earlier period than the writing of Meilhac.
And so we were seeing a new thing on the stage, rendered by actors who seemed, for the most part, scarcely actors at all, but the real peasants; and, above all, there was a woman of genius, the leader of the company, who was much more real than reality. Mimi Aguglia has studied Duse, for her tones, for some of her attitudes; her art is more nearly the art of Réjane.
Rejane is the most comedian of comedians, and an artist when she wishes to be.
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