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.