Part 8

Then follows the last act, when she meets her daughter. She comes in, dressed like an unhappy old widow, shaking with emotion, and scarcely able to contain herself. Her eyes are aglow with excitement, as she rushes forward, ready to cast herself into her daughter’s arms. But when she sees the fresh, innocent girl, she is overcome with a feeling of shyness, and shrinks from her with an awkward, anxious gesture. She speaks hesitatingly, like one who is ill at ease; she raises her shoulders and stoops, and holds her thin, restless hands clasped together, lest they should touch her daughter. The girl displays the various little souvenirs that belonged to her mother, and plays the piece which was her favorite, and talks about her “dead mother.” Then this man and woman are stirred with a deep feeling, which is the simple keynote of humanity, which they never experienced before in the days when they were together. And they sit and cry, each buried in their own sorrow, and far apart from one another. After that she puts her trembling arms round the girl, and kisses her with an expression in her face which it is impossible to simulate, and which cannot be imitated,--which no one understands except the woman who is herself a mother. She gazes at her daughter as though she could never see enough of her; she strokes her with feverish hands, arranges the lace on her dress, and you feel the joy that it is to her to touch the girl, and to know that she is really there. Then she becomes very quiet, as though she had suffered all that it was possible for her to suffer. As she passes her husband, she catches hold of his outstretched hand, and tries to kiss it. Then she tears herself away, overcome with the feeling that she can endure it no longer.

Eleonora Duse prefers difficult parts. She was nothing more than an ordinary actress in “La Locandiera,” and the witty dialogue in “Cyprienne” and “Francillon” had little in common with her nature. Even the part of “La Dame aux Camélias” was an effort to her. The silly, frivolous cocotte, with her consumptive longing to be loved, was too exaggerated a part for Eleonora Duse. A superabundance of good spirits is foreign to her nature, which is sad as life itself. Pride and arrogance she cannot act, nor yet the trustfulness which comes from inexperience. She gave the impression of not feeling young enough for “La Dame aux Camélias’” happy and unhappy moods. Eleonora Duse’s art is most at home where life’s great enigma begins:--Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going to? We are tossed to and fro on the waters in a dense fog; we suffer wrong, and we do wrong, and we know not why. Fate! fate! We are powerless in the hands of Fate! When Duse can act the blindness of fatalism, then she is content.

She was able to do so in “Fédora.”

The pretty, fashionable heroine does not change into a fury when the man whom she loves is brought home murdered. When we meet her again she is quite quiet,--a calm, cold woman of the world, with only one object in life, which is to punish the murderer. It is a task like any other, but it is inevitable, and must be undertaken as a matter of course. She makes no display of anger, and takes no perverse pleasure in thoughts of vengeance. The murderer is nothing to her,--he is a stranger. But she has been rendered desolate in the flower of her youth; the table of life, which is never spread more than once, has been upset before her eyes at the very moment of her anticipated happiness, and this is an injury which she is going to repay. She is proud, and has no illusions; she is a just judge, who recompenses evil with evil and good with good. This “Fédora” is reserved and unreasoning.

The scene changes. She loves the man whom she has been pursuing, and she discovers that the dead man has been false to both of them, and she realizes that now for the first time life’s table is spread for her, while the secret police, to whom she has betrayed him, are waiting outside, and she clings to him terrified, showers caresses upon him, kisses him with unspeakable tenderness. There is something in her of the helplessness of a little child, mingled with a mother’s protecting care, as she implores him to remain, and entices him to love, and seeks refuge in his love, as a terrified animal seeks refuge in its hole.

There are two other features of Eleonora Duse’s art which deserve notice. These are, the way in which she tells a lie, and the way she acts death. As I have said already, she is not a realist, and she frames her characters from her inner consciousness, not from details gathered from the outward features of life. Her representation of death is also the outcome of her instinct. A death scene has no meaning for her unless it reflects the inner life. As a process of physical dissolution, she takes no interest in it. She has not studied death from the side of the sick-bed, and she makes short work of it in “Fédora,” as also in “La Dame aux Camélias.” In the first piece, the point which she emphasizes is the sudden determination to take the poison; in the second, it is her joy at having the man whom she loves near her at the last.

Then her manner of lying. When Duse tells a lie, she does it as if it were the simplest and most natural thing in the world. Her lies and deceptions are as engaging, persuasive, and fantastic as a child’s. Lying is an important factor in the character of a woman who has much to fight against, and it is a weapon which she delights to use, and the use of it renders her unusually fascinating and affectionate. Even those who do not understand the words of the play, know when Duse is telling a lie, because she becomes so unusually lively and talkative, and her large eyes have an irresistible sparkle in them.

“Cavalleria Rusticana” was the only good Italian play that Duse acted. She was more of a realist in this piece than in any other, because she reproduced what she had seen daily before her eyes,--her native surroundings, her fellow-countrymen,--instead of that which she had learned by listening to her own soul. Her Santuzza--the poor, forsaken girl with the raw, melancholy, guttural accents of despair--was life-like and convincing, but the barbaric wildness of the exponent was something which was as startling in this stupid, pale weakly creature as a roar from the throat of a roe deer.

V

And now to sum up:--Eleonora Duse goes touring all round the world. She is going to America, and she is certain to go back to Berlin and St. Petersburg and Vienna, and other places where she may or may not have been before. She will have to travel and act, travel and act, as all popular actresses have done before her. She will grow tired of it, unspeakably tired,--we can see that already,--but she will be obliged to go on, till she becomes stereotyped, like all the others.

When we see her again, will she be the same as she is now? Her 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.