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| Gabrielle Rejane (1856-1920) |
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In Press and Literature |
(Stevens Post Gazette, 29th May, 1895)
REJANE IS THE CRAZE
AMY LESLIE'S OPINION OF THE FRENCH ACTRESS.
The Artistic Beauty of Her Performance Is Beyond Question — Her Bizarre and Original Methods Have Captured Americans.
O Paris there belongs a bewitching gylph of imagination, a poem of exquisite femininity, born of French gallantry, impressionistic art and chartreuse rouge. That she really exists outside of volatile boulevard compliment, Dumas and Bourget literature, or Cheret posters is a question neither permissible nor spirituelle, but she is as much a part of French history as St. Genevieve Catherine di Medici.
This mythical abstraction of seduisance and incomparable charm is la Parisienne. It is doubtful whether she ever materialized in such glorious perfections until the advent of Gabrieile Rejane. Voila the realization of all of Bouret de Monvel's dazzling piquancies in billowy petticoats and bewildering eyes, Spiridon's infatuating wraiths of enticement and Dudley Hardy's boa-wound heroines in two stunning colors. The vagrant spirit of Rejane must have hypnotized latter-day painters of woman into foretelling, foreshadowing herself, for she is the incarnation of that intangible, rare, yet omnipresent creature of dreams in French literature and modern illustration. Aside from the grace of verifying French chivalry and substantiating the furbelowed rights of Paris to an essential, special being of allurements, Mme. Rejane is so wealthily endowed with wit, dramatic genius, peculiar, haunting expressiveness and emotional expansion that she brings with her an awakening bell in art.
She has temperament exquisitely attuned to the poetic and picturesque, over which is a measure of the uncanny and ghoulish fascination which hangs about Sarah Bernhardt. There is the irresistible attractiveness of frenetic taint and decadence not only in the art of Rejane but her strange orientalism of personality, the witchery of her face, her serpentine grace of movement and the rakish carelessness and unevenness of her methods and manners. She is a type of the century, a genius unhealthy in luxuriance and abundant in fascinations. Her beauty is a beauty created by artists before her comedies and fierce little Ibsen dramas were written. Her methods are absorbingly animal and instinctive with that spiritistic unconsciousness resultant in the most brilliant dramatic achievement. She is a culminative expression of the hour's vague tendency, and she comes like a whirlwind from an impenetrable forest of orchids, a flash of lightning carrying in its zig-zag spasm of fire. She is not complete, she is not solacing nor filling, she is Rejane and the magic of a name made so unusual must become food for a new word, a special adjective of advanced significance. There is but a sixteenth of Mme. Rejane's talent called upon for exhibition in "Mme. Sans-Gene." There are brusque comedy and instants of pathos, swift febriculose surprises of power and a richly original humor spontaneous and delightful, but scarcely a chance for display of Rejane's greatest gifts. Ibsen's didactic and sullen women, with their frights and appalling silences, their tempestuous sufferings and pretended gayeties, must give better play to the kaleidoscopic possibilities of Mme. Rejane's accomplishments.
Her comedy is incomparable, daring and pretty as a garden of carnations. Her odd, deep eyes with their wizard little eyebrows have wonderful eloquence and wit enough to take the place of impotent words. Gesture in Mme. Sans-Gene is so obtrusively gauche and characteristic that scarcely a notion of Rejane's grace is hinted, though the force and correctness of every pantomime sentence are evident outgrowths of that control which means absolute beauty of movement and pose. As the Jolly, loyal washerwoman of the empire Rejane is a busy, sharp-toned clod of good nature and business: as the democratic duchess she is a crudely natural out-of-place innocent, at all times conspicuous and occasionally pathetic and histrionic. Something of a soubrette's amativeness for applause leads Mme. Rejane into stereotyped business with trains, fans and feathers which brummagem stage ladies are always expected to render abnormally comic. But the dash and audacity of Rejane outshine small insufficiencies and the rollicking humor, beauty and artistic depth in her study of the Sardou-Moreau heroine are convincing and delicious.
In these days when the masses are given over to farce and the pulses of higher order beat pleasantly only when the hands may be stopped "in the gray twilight of Gothic things," the true ring of artistic comedy is the healthiest, happiest, heartiest thing in all art, and Mme. Rejane's Brilliant exposition of rare methods and great talent must be held a benison of sweetest comfort.
AMY LESLIE.