i said that sarah bernhardt should have a chapter to herself.
“les comédiens,” said jules lema?tre, “tiennent beaucoup de place dans nos conversations et dans nos journaux parce qu’ils en tiennent beaucoup dans nos plaisirs.” amongst all the many pleasures i have experienced in the theatre, the acutest and greatest have been due to the art and genius of sarah bernhardt. providence has always been generous and yet economical in the allotment of men and women of genius to a gaping world. economical, because such appearances are rare; generous, because every human being, to whatever generation he belongs, will probably, at least once during his lifetime, have the chance of watching the transit, or a phase of the transit, of a great comet.
this is especially true of actors and actresses of genius. their visits to the earth are rare, yet our forefathers had the privilege of seeing mrs. siddons and garrick; our fathers saw rachel, ristori, and salvini; and we shall be able to irritate younger generations, when they rave about their new idol, with reminiscences of sarah bernhardt.
sometimes, of course, as in this case, the comet shines through several generations. i have talked with people who have seen both rachel and sarah bernhardt, and with some who declared that in the first two acts of phèdre, sarah bernhardt surpassed rachel. such was the opinion of that sensible and conservative critic, francisque sarcey.
the actor’s art dies with him; but the rumour of it, when it is very great, lives on the tongue and sometimes in the soul of man, and forms a part of his dreams and of his visions. the great of old still rule our spirits from their urns; and we, who never saw rachel, get an idea of her genius from the accounts of her[228] contemporaries, from théodore de banville and charlotte bront?. her genius is a fact in the dreams of mankind; just as the beauty of helen of troy and the charm of mary stuart, whom many generations of men fell in love with. so shall it be with sarah bernhardt. there will, it is to be hoped, be great actresses in the future—actresses filled with the muses’ madness and constrained to enlarge rather than to interpret the masterpieces of the world; but providence (so economical, so generous!) never repeats an effect; and there will never be another sarah bernhardt, just as there will never be another heinrich heine. yet when the incredible moment comes for her to leave us, in a world that without her will be a duller and a greyer place, her name and the memory of her fame will live in the dreams of mankind. sarah bernhardt delighted several generations, and there were many vicissitudes in her career and many sharp fluctuations in the appreciation she won from the critical both in france and abroad; nor did her fame come suddenly with a rush, as it does to actors and actresses in novels. even in henry james’ novel, the tragic muse, the development of the heroine’s career and the establishment of her fame happens far too quickly to be real. henry james was conscious of this himself. he mentions this flaw in the preface he wrote for the novel in the collected edition of his works.
sarah bernhardt’s career shows no such easy and immediate leap into fame, nor is it the matter of a few star parts; it was a series of long, difficult, laborious, and painful campaigns carried right on into old age (in spite of the loss of a limb), and right through a european war, during which she played in the trenches to the poilus; it was a prolonged wrestle with the angel of art, in which the angel was defeated by an inflexible will and an inspired purpose.
she made her début at the théatre fran?ais in 1862, in the iphigénie of racine. sarcey, writing of her performance, said:
“elle se tient bien et prononce avec une netteté parfaite. c’est tout ce qu’on peut dire en ce moment.” it was not until ten years later that she achieved her first notable success in le passant, by fran?ois coppée, and that she was hailed as a rising star as the queen in ruy blas, at the odéon, and became, in her own words, something more than “la petite fée des étudiants.”
portraits of sarah bernhardt by the author (age 7), drawn in 1881
sarah bernhardt in the eighties
[229]
in 1872 she left the odéon and entered the théatre fran?ais once more. she reappeared in mademoiselle de belle-isle[9] with partial success. in writing of this performance, sarcey expressed doubt of sarah bernhardt ever achieving power as well as grace, and strength as well as charm. “je doute,” he wrote, “que mademoiselle sarah bernhardt trouve jamais dans son délicieux organe ces notes éclatantes et profondes, pour exprimer le paroxysme des passions violentes, qui transportent une salle. si la nature lui avait donné ce don, elle serait une artiste complète, et il n’y en a pas de telles au théatre.”
it was during a performance of voltaire’s za?re, on a stifling night in 1873, that sarah bernhardt discovered she had undreamed-of stores of energy and electric power at her disposal, and under her control. she had rebelled against having to act during the summer months. perrin, the director of the théatre fran?ais, had insisted. when the night came when she was due to appear in za?re (august 6), she determined to exhaust all the power that was in her, and as she was at that time as frail as a sylph and was thought to be perilously delicate (spitting blood), she decided to spite perrin by dying. she strained every nerve; she cried in earnest; she suffered in earnest; she gave a cry of real pain when struck by the stage dagger; and when it was all over she thought her last hour must have come; and then she found to her amazement that she was quite fresh, and ready to begin the performance all over again. she realised then that her intellect and will could draw when they pleased on her physical resources; and that she could do what she liked with her vocal chords. this explains a secret that often puzzled the spectators of her art—her power of letting herself go, and after a violent explosion, just when you thought her voice must be broken for ever by the effort, of opening as it were another stop, and letting flow a ripple from a flute of the purest gold.
it was in phèdre that sarah bernhardt proved she possessed not only grace but power; her rendering of do?a sol in hernani (november 1877) definitely sealed her reputation, not only as a tragic actress, but as the incarnation of something[230] new and exotic. and the world recognised her incomparable talent for speaking verse.
in 1879, the comédie fran?aise visited london, and all london went mad about sarah bernhardt. she was not then the star in a cast of mediocrities, she was a star in a dazzling firmament of stars. her fellow actors and actresses were coquelin, got, delaunay, mounet sully, worms, maubant, and febvre among the men; and among the women, croizette, baretta, madeleine brohan, reichemberg, and madame favart. a more varied, excellent, and complete cast could not be imagined. it was a faultless ensemble for tragedy and comedy, for racine, for molière, for victor hugo, and for alexandre dumas fils.
in 1880, the glory of this theatrical age of gold was eclipsed and diminished by the flight of sarah bernhardt. after a quarrel arising out of the performance of l’aventurière, she suddenly resigned, and, after a short season in london, in may 1880, started for america.
this rupture with the théatre fran?ais, which was largely due to the adulation she received and the sensation she made in london, was a momentous turning-point and break in her career. when it happened, the whole artistic world deplored it, and there are many critics in france and in england who never ceased to deplore it; but a calm review of the whole career of sarah bernhardt forces one to the conclusion that it could not have been otherwise.
the whole motto of her life was: “faire ce qu’on veut.” and sometimes she added to this: “lemieux est l’ennemi du bien.”
the théatre fran?ais at that time was indeed an ideal temple of art for so inspired a priestess. but sarah bernhardt was more than a priestess of art—she was a personality, a force, a power, which had to find full expression, its utmost limits and range; and if we weigh the pros and cons of the matter, i do not think we have been the losers. her art certainly did suffer at times from her travels and her unshackled freedom; she played to ignorant audiences, and sometimes would walk through a part without acting; she played in inferior plays. on the other hand, had she remained in the narrower confines of the théatre fran?ais, we should never have realised her capacities to the full. in fact, had she remained at the théatre fran?ais, she would not have been sarah bernhardt. we should have[231] lost as much as we should have gained. it is true we should never have seen her in plays that were utterly unworthy of her. on the other hand, we should never probably have seen her dame aux camélias, her lorenzaccio, her hamlet. we should never have had the series of plays that sardou wrote for her: fédora, théodora, la tosca, etc. some will contend that this would have been a great advantage. but, despise sardou as much as you like, the fact remains it needs a man of genius to write such plays, and not only a woman of genius, but sarah bernhardt and none other, to play in them. in fédora, eleonora duse, the incomparable duse, could not reach the audience. and now, when these plays are revived in london, we realise all too well, and the public realises too, that there is none who can act them. it is no use acting well in such plays; you must act tremendously or not at all. la tosca must be a violent shock to the nerves or nothing. when it was first produced, jules lema?tre, protesting against the play, said the main situation was so strong, so violent, and so horrible, that it was in the worst sense actor-proof, and so it seemed then. now we know better; we know by experience that without sarah bernhardt the play does not exist; we know that what made it almost unbearable was not the situation, but the demeanour, the action, the passivity, the looks, the gestures, the moans, the cries of sarah bernhardt in that situation. had sardou’s “machine-made” plays never been written, we should never have known one side of sarah bernhardt’s genius. i do not say it is the noblest side, but i do say that what we would have missed, and what sardou’s plays revealed, was an unparalleled manifestation of electric energy.
the high-water mark of sarah’s poetical and intellectual art was probably reached in her phèdre, her hamlet, and her lorenzaccio; but the furthest limits of the power of her power were revealed in sardou’s plays, for sardou had the intuition to guess what forces lay in the deeps of her personality, and the insight and skill to make plays which, like subtle engines, should enable these forces to reveal themselves at their highest pitch, to find full expression, and to explode in a divine combustion.
there is another thing to be said about sarah bernhardt’s emancipation from the théatre fran?ais. had she never been independent, had she never been her own master and her own stage manager, she would never have realised for us a whole[232] series of poetical visions and pictures which have had a deep and lasting influence on contemporary art. we should never have seen théodora walk like one of burne-jones’s dreams come to life amidst the splendours of the byzantine court:
“tenendo un giglio tra le ceree dita.”
we should never have seen la princesse lointaine crowned with lilies, sumptuous and sad, like one of swinburne’s early poems; nor la samaritaine evoke the spices, the fire, and the vehemence of the song of solomon; nor gismonda, with chrysanthemums in her hair, amidst the jewelled glow of the middle ages, against the background of the acropolis; nor izé?l incarnating the soul and dreams of india. eliminate these things and you eliminate one of the sources of inspiration of modern art; you take away something from d’annunzio’s poetry, from maeterlinck’s prose, from moreau’s pictures; you destroy one of the mainsprings of rostand’s work; you annihilate some of the colours of modern painting, and you stifle some of the notes of modern music; for in all these you can trace in various degrees the subtle, unconscious influence of sarah bernhardt.
the most serious break in the appreciation of her art, on the part of the critics and the french public, did not come about immediately after she left the théatre fran?ais. on the contrary, when she played the part of adrienne lecouvreur for the first time—this was in may 1880—in london, her triumph among the critical was complete. i have an article by sarcey, dated 31st may 1880, in which he raves about the performance he had come to london to see, and in which he says, had the performance taken place in paris, the enthusiasm of the audience would have been boundless. the most serious break in the appreciation of her art came about after she had been to america, toured round europe many times, with a repertory of stock plays and an indifferent company, and acted in such complete rubbish as léna, the adaptation of as in a looking-glass, of which i have already given a schoolboy’s impressions. people then began to say they were tired of her. it is true she woke up the public once more with her performance of la tosca in 1889, but in july 1889 mr. walkley voiced a general feeling when he said: “i suspect she herself understands the risks of ‘abounding in her own sense’[233] quite as well as any of us could tell her. she knows her talent needs refreshing, revitalising, rejuvenating.” he speaks of “her consciousness of a need for a larger, saner, more varied repertory. but,” he adds, “she will never get that repertory so long as she goes wandering from pole to pole, with a new piece, specially constructed for her by m. sardou, in her pocket.”
fortunately this consciousness of a need for a newer, saner repertory took effect in fact, after sarah bernhardt came back from a prolonged tour in south america. in the ’nineties she took the renaissance theatre in paris, and she opened her season with a delicate and serious drama called les rois, by jules lema?tre.
i am not sure of the date of this performance, but she played phèdre at the renaissance in 1893, and lema?tre said that “jamais, madame sarah bernhardt, ne fut plus parfaite, ni plus puissante, ni plus adorable.” she produced sudermann’s magda in 1896, and musset’s lorenzaccio in december 1896, and then she discovered rostand, whose first play, les romanesques, had been done at the fran?ais, and turned him into the channel of serious poetical drama.
she then built a theatre for herself, and gave us rostand’s samaritaine, hamlet, l’aiglon, and a series of classical matinées; and from that time onward she never ceased to produce at least one interesting play a year. that was a fine average, a high achievement, and a real service to art. people seldom reflect that it is necessary for managers and actors to fill their theatre, and they cannot always be producing interesting experiments that do not pay. small blame, therefore, to sarah bernhardt, if she sometimes fell back on sardou, and all praise and gratitude is due to her for the daring experiments she risked.
among these experiments one of the most remarkable of all was that of jeanne d’arc in le procès de jeanne d’arc; another was as lucrezia borgia in victor hugo’s play; and a third the hero of the charming poetical play les bouffons. she found a saner, larger repertory, and crowned her career by triumphing in athalie in 1920.
some french critics think her lorenzaccio was the finest of her parts. lema?tre said about it: “elle n’a pas seulement joué, comme elle sait jouer, son r?le: elle l’a composé. car il ne s’agissait plus ici de ces dames aux camélias, et de ces princesses lointaines, fort simples dans leur fond, et qu’elle a su[234] nous rendre émouvantes et belles, presque sans réflexion et rien qu’en écoutant son sublime instinct. a ce génie naturel de la diction et du geste expressifs, elle a su joindre cette fois, comme lorsqu’elle joue phèdre (mais que lorenzaccio était plus difficile à pénétrer!) la plus rare et la plus subtile intelligence.”
this is what m. j. de tillet wrote about the performance in the revue bleue of december 1896:
“cette fois ?’a été le vrai triomphe, sans restrictions et sans réserves. je vous ai dit la semaine dernière qu’elle avait atteint, et presque dépassé le sommet de l’art. je viens de relire lorenzaccio, et ?’a été une joie nouvelle, plus rassise et plus convaincue, de retrouver et d’évoquer ses intonations et ses gestes. elle a donné la vie à ce personnage de lorenzo, que personne n’avait osé aborder avant elle; elle a maintenu, a travers toute la pièce, ce caractère complexe et hésitant; elle en a rendu toutes les nuances avec une vérité et une profondeur singulières. admirable d’un bout à l’autre, sans procédés et sans ‘déblayage,’ sans excès et sans cris, elle nous a émus jusqu’au fond de l’ame, par la simplicité et la justesse de sa diction, par l’art souverain des attitudes et des gestes. et, j’insiste sur ce point, elle a donné au r?le tout entier, sans faiblesse et sans arrêt, une inoubliable physionomie. qu’elle parle ou quelle se taise, elle est lorenzaccio des pieds à la tête, corps et ame; elle ‘vit’ son personnage, et elle le fait vivre pour nous. le talent de mme sarah bernhardt m’a parfois plus inquiété que charmé. c’est une raison de plus pour que je répète aujourd’hui qu’elle a atteint le sublime. jamais, je n’ai rien vu, au théatre, qui égalat ce qu’elle a donné dans lorenzaccio.”
in mr. bernard shaw’s collected dramatic criticism, dramatic opinions and essays, there is an interesting chapter comparing the two artists in the part of magda, in which he says that duse’s performance annihilated that of sarah bernhardt for him. let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it did the same for everyone. i saw sarah bernhardt play the part superbly in paris, and i saw duse play the part superbly in london, and i should have said that duse lent the character a nobility and a dignity that are not to be found in the text of the play, and that sarah bernhardt made of magda what the author wanted her to be: a rather noisy, exuberant, vulgar, successful prima donna, a cabotine, not without genius, and with moments, when her human feelings were touched, of[235] greatness; that she portrayed the ostentation of the actress, and the sudden intoxication of success and celebrity, with their attendant disillusions, on a talented middle-class german girl; and, when the note called for it, the majesty of motherhood, to perfection; but let us assume that duse in this part gave something more memorable, and the part certainly suited her temperament, her irony, her dignity, perhaps better than any other, and gave her a unique opportunity for self-expression, even at the cost of reality, and of the play. let us go further, and say that in dumas’ la femme de claude duse played the part of césarine, a sarah bernhardt part if ever there was one, the part of a wicked, seductive woman; and made of her creation in that part a trembling, quivering, living, vibrating thing; an unforgettable study of vice and charm and deadly wickedness and lure, which sarah bernhardt never excelled. even if we admit all this, the fact still remains that sarah bernhardt could play a poetic tragedy in a fashion beyond duse’s reach; that she could play phèdre and cleopatra and do?a sol; and that duse, in the r?le of cleopatra, dwindled and was overwhelmed by it. the critics forgot, when they compared the two artists, the glory of sarah bernhardt’s past, the extent of range of her present, the possibilities of her future; her interpretations of racine, of victor hugo; her understanding of poetry and verse; they did not compare the whole art of duse with the whole art of sarah bernhardt, and had they done so they would have at once realised the absurdity of doing such a thing—an absurdity as great as to compare keats’ poetry with tolstoy’s novels, or burne-jones with george sand.
the french critics were more discriminating, and anyone who has the curiosity to turn up what lema?tre says of duse in la dame aux camélias will find a subtle and discriminating contrast between the art of these two great actresses. personally i am thankful to have seen them both, and to have thought each unapproachable in her own way.
from 1893 to 1903 sarah bernhardt’s career broadened and shone in an indian summer of maturity and glory, and it was during this period that she produced the most interesting plays of her repertory, and it was certainly during this period that she received from french criticism the highest meed of serious praise. but her career was by no means over in 1903. in 1920 all the theatres in paris closed one day, so that all the actors[236] of paris might see her play in athalie; and as i write she is still producing new plays.
in what did the magic, the secret of sarah bernhardt consist? the mainsprings of her life and her career were indomitable determination, blent with a fine indifference to the opinion of the crowd, and a saving sense of proportion enabling her to keep a cool head and a just estimate of worldly fame amidst a tornado of praise, and sometimes in face of volleys of abuse. but as to the secret of her art, when one has said that sarah bernhardt worked like a slave until she attained a perfect mastery over the means at her disposal; that her attitudes and gestures were a poem in themselves; that if she played phèdre in dumb-show it would have been worth while going to see; and that if she played do?a sol in the dark it would have been worth a pilgrimage to hear—when one has said this, one has said nearly all that can be put into words, and one has said nothing; one has left out the most important part, and in fact everything that matters, because one has omitted her personality, a blend of gestures, look, voice, movement, intonation combined, and something else, the charm, the witchery, the spell which defy analysis.
when as cleopatra she approached antony, saying: “je suis la reine d’egypte,” the fate of empires, the dominion of the world, the lordship of rome, could have no chance in the balance against five silver words and a smile, and we thought that the world would be well lost; and we envied antony his ruin and his doom.
but this magic, this undefinable charm, is a thing which it is useless to write about. one must state its existence, and with a thought of pity for those who have not had the opportunity of feeling it, and still more for those who are unable to feel it, pass on. there is no more to be said. it is impossible, too, to define the peculiar thrill that has convulsed an audience when sarah rose to an inspired height of passion. when the spark fell in these heaven-sent moments, she seemed to be carried away, and to carry us with her in a whirlwind from a crumbling world. it is fruitless to dwell at length on this theme, but i will recall some minor occasions on which the genius of sarah bernhardt worked miracles.
i remember one such occasion in the autumn of 1899. the south african war had been declared, and a concert was being[237] held at the ritz hotel in aid of the british wounded. it was a raw and dark november afternoon. in the drawing-room of the ritz hotel there was gathered together a well-dressed and singularly uninspiring crowd, depressed by the gloomy news from the front, and suffering from anticipated boredom at the thoughts of an entertainment in the afternoon. sarah bernhardt walked on to the platform dressed in furs, and prepared to recite “la chanson d’eviradnus,” by victor hugo, and an accompanist sat down before the piano to accompany the recitation with music. i remember my heart sinking. i felt that a recitation to music of a love-song in that ritz drawing-room on that dark afternoon, before a decorous, dispirited crowd, mostly stolid britishers, was inappropriate; i wished the whole entertainment would vanish; i felt uncomfortable and i pitied sarah from the bottom of my heart. then sarah opened her lips and began to speak the wonderful lyric (i quote for the pleasure of writing the words):
“si tu veux faisons un rêve,
montons sur deux palefrois;
tu m’emmènes, je t’enlève,
l’oiseau chante dans les bois.
je suis ton ma?tre et ta proie;
partons, c’est la fin du jour;
mon cheval sera la joie;
ton cheval sera l’amour.”
ritz and the well-dressed crowd, and the raw november air, and the gloom of the war, the depression and the discomfort all disappeared.
“nous ferons toucher leurs têtes;
les voyages sont aisés;
nous donnerons à ces bêtes
une avoine de baisers.
viens! nos doux chevaux mensonges
frappent du pied tous les deux,
le mien au fond des songes
et le tien au fond des cieux.
un bagage est nécessaire;
nous emporterons nos v?ux,
nos bonheurs, notre misère,
et la fleur de tes cheveux.”
we heard the champing of the steeds in an enchanted forest,[238] the song of the calling bird, and the laughter of adventurous lovers.
“viens, le soir brunit les chênes,
le moineau rit; ce moqueur
entend le doux bruit des cha?nes
que tu m’as mises au c?ur.
ce ne sera point ma faute
si les forêts et les monts,
en nous voyons c?te à c?te,
ne murmurent pas: aimons!
viens, sois tendre, je suis ivre.
o les verts taillis mouillés!
ton soufle te fera suivre
des papillons réveillés.”
in the second line of the last stanza quoted:
“o les verts taillis mouillés!”
her voice suddenly changed its key and passed, as it were, from a minor of tenderness to an abrupt major of childlike wonder or delighted awe; it half broke into something between a sob of joy and a tearful smile; we saw the dew-drenched grasses and the gleaming thickets, and then as she said the two next lines the surprise died away in mystery and an infinite homage:
“was it love or praise?
speech half asleep or song half awake?”
and when further on in the poem she said:
“allons nous en par l’autriche!
nous aurons l’aube à nos fronts;
je serai grand, et toi riche,
puisque nous nous aimerons,”
we heard the call of youth, the soaring of first love, the spirit of adventure, of romance, and of spring. when she came to the last stanza of all:
“tu sera dame, et moi comte;
viens, mon c?ur s’épanouit,
viens, nous conterons ce conte
aux étoiles de la nuit,”
she opened wide her raised arms, and one could have sworn a girl of eighteen, “april’s lady,” was calling to her “lord in may.”
when she had done, a great many people in the audience were crying; the applause was deafening, and she had to say[239] the whole poem over a second time, which she did, with the same effect on the audience.
another occasion which i shall never forget was the first night that she played hamlet in paris. the audience was brilliant and hypercritical, and the play was received coldly until the first scene between polonius and hamlet. when hamlet answers polonius’s question: “what do you read, my lord?” with his “words, words, words,” sarah bernhardt played it like this. (she was dressed and got up like the pictures of young raphael, with a fair wig; she was the soul of courtesy in the part, a gentle prince.) hamlet was lying on a chair reading a book. the first “des mots” he said with an absent-minded indifference, just as anyone speaks when interrupted by a bore; in the second “des mots” his answer seemed to catch his own attention, and the third “des mots” was accompanied by a look, and charged with an intense but fugitive intention: something
“between a smile and a smothered sigh,”
with a break in the intonation, that clearly said: “yes, it is words, words, words, and all books and everything else in life and in the whole world is only words, words, words.” this delicate shadow, this adumbration of a hint was instantly seized by the audience from the gallery to the stalls; and the whole house cried: “bravo! bravo!” it was a fine example of the receptivity, the flair, and the corporate intelligence of a good french audience.
personally i think her hamlet was one of the four greatest achievements of her career. i will come to the others later. excepting sir johnston forbes robertson’s hamlet, it was the only intelligible hamlet of our time. one great point of difference between this hamlet and that of any other actors i have seen is, whereas most hamlets seem isolated from the rest of the players, as if they were reciting something apart from the play and speaking to the audience, this hamlet spoke to the other persons of the play, shared their life, their external life, however wide the spiritual gulf might be between them and hamlet. this hamlet was in denmark; not in splendid isolation, on the boards, in order to show how well he could spout shakespeare’s monologues, or that he was an interesting fellow.
another point: her hamlet is the only one i have seen in[240] which there was real continuity, in which one scene seemed to have any connection with the preceding scenes.
she had already shown what she could do in the progression of a single scene by crescendo, diminuendo transition, and modulation, in the dialogue with ophelia—“get thee to a nunnery.” the transition between the tenderness of “nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered,” and the brutality of “i have heard of your paintings too, well enough,” was made plausible by hamlet catching sight of the king and polonius in the arras—a piece of business recommended, i think, by coleridge; but the naturalness and the progression of this scene were a marvel; the profound gravity and bitterness with which she spoke the words: “i am myself indifferent honest: but i could accuse me of such things, that it were better my mother had not borne me: i am very proud, revengeful, ambitious.” one seemed to be overhearing shakespeare himself in a confessional when she said that speech, and the cynicism of the final words of the scene were whispered and hissed with a withering, blighting bitterness, her voice sinking to a swift whisper, as though all the utterance of the body has been exhausted, and these words were the cry of a broken heart. but an example of what i mean by the continuity of the interpretation is when the play within the play is finished, when hamlet breaks up the whole entertainment by his startling behaviour. in that scene sarah bernhardt was like a tiger; her glance transfixed and pierced through the king, and towards the end of the play within the play she crept across the stage and climbed up on to the high, raised, balconied dais on the right of the stage, from which he was looking on, and stared straight into his face with the accusing, questioning challenge of an avenging angel. but the point i want to make is this: when that scene is over, most players take the interview with rosencrantz and guildenstern, which follows immediately after it, as though nothing had happened. not so sarah bernhardt; during the whole of this interview she played in a manner which let you see that hamlet was still trembling with excitement from what had happened immediately before; and this not only brought out the irony and the point of rosencrantz and guildenstern’s flat conventionality, but gave the audience the sharp sensation that they were face to face with life itself. so was it throughout[241] her hamlet; each scene depended on all the others; and the various moods of the dane succeeded one another, like clouds that chased one another but belonged to one sky, and not like separate slides of a magic lantern.
the fight with laertes was terribly natural; the business of the exchange of swords, and the expression in hamlet’s eyes when he realised, and showed that he had realised, that one of the swords was poisoned and now in his hands, which, in the hands of mediocre players, becomes so preposterously extravagant, was tremendous.
the whole performance was natural, easy, life-like, and princely, and perhaps the most poignant scene of all, and what is the most poignant scene in the play, if it is well played, was the conversation with horatio, just before the final duel when hamlet says: “if it be not to come, it will be now.” sarah charged these words with a sense of doom, with the set courage that faces doom and with the underlying certainty of doom in spite of the courage that is there to meet it. it made one’s blood run cold.
another occasion when sarah bernhardt’s acting seemed to me tremendous, was a performance of la dame aux camélias not long before the war. i had seen her play the part dozens of times, and during a space of twenty years both in paris and in london. she was not well; she was suffering from rheumatism; the stage had to be marked out in chalk for her, showing where she could stand up. she was too unwell to stand up for more than certain given moments. i went to see her with a russian actress who had seen her play in st. petersburg or moscow, and not been able to endure her acting; she had seen her walk through a part before an indifferent audience that wondered what her great reputation was founded on. we arrived late after the second act, and i went behind the scenes and talked to sarah, and told her of this russian actress. she played the last three acts in so moving and simple a manner, and the last act with such agonising poignancy and reserve that not only was my russian friend in tears, but the actors on the stage cried so much that their tears discoloured their faces and made runnels in their grease paint.
as we went away my russian friend said to me that was the finest bit of acting she had ever seen or hoped to see again.
another time, i think it was 1896, i was present at a[242] performance of magda in paris at the renaissance theatre by sarah; in her own phrase, le dieu était là, and i shall never forget the thrill that passed through the audience when magda, at the thought of being separated from her child, let loose her passion, and spoke the elemental love of a mother defending her child. here the advocatus diaboli will chuckle and say something about “tearing a passion to pieces.” this was just what it was not. the tirade was concentrated and subdued, and it culminated in a whisper which had the vehemence of a whirlwind. the scene was interrupted by a spontaneous cry of applause. i have sometimes heard applause like this before and since, when sarah bernhardt has been acting, but i have never seen the art of any other actor or actress provoke so great and so loud a cry.
i said sarah bernhardt’s hamlet was one of the four great achievements of her career. these are what i think were the others:
the greatest thing an actor or an actress can do is to create a poet. it used at one time to be said that sarah bernhardt had failed to do this. yet the only really remarkable french dramatic poet of modern times, whose plays really moved and held the public, edmond rostand, was a creation of sarah bernhardt. the younger generation of his time, and some men of letters in france, but not all (émile faguet was a notable exception, and jules lema?tre writes of his art with great discrimination), used to despise the verse of edmond rostand. but whatever anyone can say about the literary value of his work, there is no doubt about its dramatic value. rostand may or may not have been a great poet or even a great artist in verse, but that he was a great poetical dramatist was proved by the only possible test—that of the rapturous enthusiasm of his audience, wherever and in whatever language his plays are performed. since victor hugo, he is the one writer of our time, and the only writer in this century in the whole of europe, who made a direct and successful appeal to the public, to the public in all countries where his plays were performed, and stirred and delighted them to the depths of their being through the medium of dramatic poetry. surely this is no mean achievement; besides this, even among french critics, there are many who maintain that he is a genuine poet. well, sarah bernhardt is in the main responsible for rostand, for[243] had there been no sarah there would have been no princesse lointaine, and no cyrano (for it was coquelin’s delight in la princesse lointaine which made him ask rostand for a play), no samaritaine, and no l’aiglon.
this is one of the achievements of sarah bernhardt. another and perhaps a more important achievement was accomplished before this—her resuscitation of racine. let everyone interested in this question get m. émile faguet’s propos de théatre. m. faguet shows with great wealth of detail and abundance of contemporary evidence that in the ’seventies, until sarah bernhardt played in andromaque and phèdre, racine’s plays were thought unsuited for dramatic representation. even sarcey used to say in those days that racine was not un homme de théatre. sarah bernhardt changed all this. she revealed the beauties of racine to her contemporaries. she put new life into his plays, and by her incomparable delivery she showed off, as no one else can hope to do, the various and subtle secrets of racine’s verse.
she did the same for victor hugo when she played do?a sol and the queen in ruy bias. théodore de banville, in his camées parisiens, says there could never be another queen in ruy bias like sarah, and that, whenever the words:
“elle avait un petit diadème en dentelle d’argent”
are spoken, the vision of sarah bernhardt will rise, as though it were that of a real person, frail, slender, with a small crown set in her wonderful hair.
yet, when all is said and done, sarah bernhardt’s supreme achievement is another and a fourth: her phèdre. i do not think that anyone will disagree with this. it was in phèdre that she gave the maximum of beauty, and exhibited the whole range of her highest artistic qualities. in phèdre her movements and her gestures, her explosions of fury and her outbursts of passion, were subservient to a commanding rhythm; from the moment phèdre walked on to the stage trembling under the load of her unconfessed passion until the moment she descended into hades, par un chemin plus lent, the spectator witnessed the building up of a miraculous piece of architecture, in time and not in space; and followed the progressions, the rise, the crisis, and the tranquil close of a mysterious symphony. moreover, a window was opened for him wide on to the enchanted[244] land: the realm of beauty in which there are no conflicts of times and fashions, but in which all who bear the torch have an equal inheritance. he saw a woman speaking the precise, stately, and musical language of the court of louis xiv., who, by her utterance, the plastic beauty of her attitudes, and the rhythm of her movements, opened the gates of time, and beyond the veil of the seventeenth century evoked the vision of ancient greece. or, rather, time was annihilated, seventeenth-century france and ancient greece, versailles and trézène, were merged into one; he was face to face with involuntary passion and the unequal struggle between it and reluctant conscience.
there was the unwilling prey of the goddess, “a lily on her brow with anguish moist and fever dew”; but at the sound of her voice and the music of her grief, perhaps we forgot all this, perhaps we forgot the ancient tales of greece, and crete, we forgot racine and versailles; perhaps we thought only of the woman that was there before us, who surely was something more than human: was it she who plied the golden loom in the island of ??a and made ulysses swerve in mid-ocean from his goal? or she who sailed down the cydnus and revelled with mark antony? or she for whom geoffroy rudel sailed to tripoli, and sang and died? or she who haunted the vision but baffled the pencil of leonardo da vinci? or she who excelled “all women in the magic of her locks,” and beckoned to faust on the brocken? she was something of all these things, an incarnation of the spirit that, in all times and in all countries, whether she be called lilith or lamia or la gioconda, in the semblance of a “belle dame sans merci,” bewitches the heart and binds the brain of man with a spell, and makes the world seem a dark and empty place without her, and death for her sake and in her sight a joyous thing.
so used we to dream when we saw those harmonious gestures and heard that matchless utterance. then the curtain fell, and we remembered that it was only a play, and that even sarah bernhardt must “fare as other empresses,” and “wane with enforc’d and necessary change.”
nevertheless, we give thanks—we that have lived in her day; for, whatever the future may bring, there will never be another sarah bernhardt:
“yea, they shall say, earth’s womb has borne in vain
new things, and never this best thing again.”
