Those who like myself have cherished a feeling for the actor's art akin to reverence must have rubbed their eyes on seeing a whole front page of a popular newspaper devoted to the personal affairs of little Miss Mary Pickford and a bare half-dozen lines to the announcement that Madame Sarah Bernhardt had appeared in Athalie: "The famous actress is in her seventy-sixth year. The rôle may be described as of the recumbent order." Shudder though one may at blithe enormity, it is useless to cavil at the editorial sense of news-values. To the whole uneducated world it really does matter what Miss Pickford eats, wears, and thinks. We were once mountebank-mad; we are now tied to the grimace. Miss Pickford is very pretty and quite a good maker of babyish faces. She brings to many "escape from their creditors and a free field for emotions they dare not indulge in real life." She gives pleasure to millions who have never heard of the great actress, or having heard that she is an old lady of seventy-six, desire not to see her.

Oh, it offends me to the very soul when old age is treated so! The hey-day of a great spirit knows no passing; there is that in this old artist which shall please our children provided they have eyes to see that which is spirit and imperishable. It were idle to pretend that the gesture is as firm, the eye as bright, the voice as liquid as once we knew them. The wonder is in the gentleness of Time which has marred only the inessential. To him who would contribute his quota of good-will this great lady's art is still the quintessence of loveliness. Memory aiding, it is possible to "call back the lovely April of her prime," and looking out upon a later day to see "despite of wrinkles, this her golden time." But you have only to turn to the notices of her latest appearance in Daniel to realise the blindness of those who will not look beyond the flesh. "It is a matter for regret," writes one lusty fellow, "that this actress should be driven by circumstance to parade her infirmities before us." Follows a catalogue of departed bodily graces. "I will not bring my critical functions to bear upon the spectacle of an old lady with one leg portraying a paralytic," he concludes. I do not know that I would condemn this blind soul to any darker circle than that of its own sightlessness. The eye sees what the eye brings the means of seeing.

As the artist's physical powers have waned, so her intellectual faculties have ripened. Thirty years ago she had been content to play this foolish little Daniel with "her beauty, her grace, her flashing eye, her sinuous charm"—I quote from the catalogue of departed virtues—gathering him up to heaven at the end in her well-known cloud of fire-works. To-day Madame Bernhardt plays him, as it were, colloquially, informing unreality with a hundred little shades and accents of reality. She is fanciful, wistful, wayward, endowing little things with an actor's interest, with something of the writer's preoccupation with style. I cannot imagine any more delightful grace-note than that of the little blue flames of the rum omelette which shall enliven her loneliness. And when she quotes her line of verse you are made conscious that this is a boy's poem. She lingers over it with the tenderness of all great artists for immaturity. What panting English tragédienne, in the full measure of bodily vigour, may compass the intimacy and interest of the Frenchwoman's lowest tone and slightest motion? In the first two acts Daniel does not appear and the stage is given over to scenes of emotion very creditably portrayed by a leading light of the Comédie Française. We applaud, for the thing seems well done; but when, in the long colloquy with Daniel, the older artist sits motionless at her table, leaving the scene in full generosity to the younger, her very silence it is which holds us, and not the tinkle of less significant speech. What other actress, when it comes to dying, can so let life out of her voice and lineaments, so cease upon the midnight? Add to the glories of such a performance something that I would call a corona of malice, a gouaillerie, a Puckish hint that we shall not take this for the sublime car of tragedy but for some workaday vehicle for tears. We are to feel that the rarer gifts of the actress have not been harnessed, and our minds are sent on haunting quest for the greatnesses that once she compassed. As a younger woman she had neither the wit nor strength of mind to make this bargain with our penetration.

A year or two ago a series of performances was announced which was to be determinate and valedictory. Equally looked forward to and dreaded, they did not, as it happened, come off. In the first place the lady declared, in that vigorous way of hers, that the visit would in no way be one of farewell. She was not for epilogising; in any case the time was not yet. She was off to Honolulu, Hong-Kong, Saskatchewan, how did she know whither?—and merely desired to take temporary leave of the polite world. And then she became ill and the engagement was not fulfilled.

Well, there's no harm in this sort of good-bye. May this triumphant lady spend her long winter with her hand at her lips bidding adieu. That's one simile, and I would find another to fit her glory now departing. The shadows may be long; they will be longer yet before the dark, fingers to stir old memories, to set pulses beating at thought of a glamour that never was on earth. Is it our creeping age and recollection playing us tricks? Was it not the artist's acting but our own youth that was the miracle? I wonder!

But there is nothing which does the subject even of avowed panegyric so much harm as lack of discrimination in praise. Let me frankly admit that Sarah Bernhardt was never the mistress of the art of reticence, and that, great show-woman that she is, she has always turned advertisement to commodity. Take the forty-year-old history of her famous tiff with the Comédie Française, ending in the rupture which was the necessary preliminary to those gallivantings over the unacted globe. The story of it all, so far as may be gleaned from the records of the time, is something as follows. The Comédie pays a visit to London, bringing in its train Mademoiselle Bernhardt, a young member whose talents have already been acclaimed by the Parisians. And here we must note that the French, in spite of an excitable temperament, are capable of a rare levelheadedness in their attitude towards artists. They know how to distinguish between the personality of the actor and his talent, and are not swayed by exorbitances outside the scope of the theatre. "Je ne veux connaître de la Comédie Française en ce feuilleton," writes Sarcey, "que ce que l'on peut en voir de sa stalle d'orchestre." The English are quite other. The critic of The Times permits himself to write: "Further, all that we have heard of Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt, of her various talents and manifold faculties, her character and even her eccentricities, has added to the effect produced by her acting and has made her, indisputably, the centre of our curiosity and interest in the Comédie Française." No Frenchman could have written so. The effect produced by the acting of an artist is, to him, incapable of irrelevant addition or subtraction; he is conquered by the artist and not by the woman. Our race is more phlegmatic, but it is also more naïve.

In the first pages of the Journal of the Visit of the Comédie Française to London in 1879 Sarcey begins by deploring the coldness of the English public towards the members of the troupe other than Mademoiselle Bernhardt. He recounts for the benefit of his readers in Paris how, in spite of her altogether admirable second act in Le Misanthrope, Mademoiselle Croizette failed to please. How, in Les Caprices de Marianne, her capriciousness was ravishing but of no avail. How, in L'Etrangère the same actress displayed her greatest fascination yet without fascinating; how, after her fine explosion in the fourth act, the audience did, after a fashion, explode in sympathy. "Mais ce n'était pas cela. Le cœur n'y était pas." The only reason he can assign is that the English cannot worship two mistresses at the same time and that their hearts have gone out wholly to Mademoiselle Bernhardt. This is the first mention of her in the Journal and is followed by the phrase: "Oh! celle-là.per … " "Nothing," he continues, "can convey any idea of the infatuation she has aroused. It amounts to madness. When she is about to appear a quiver runs through the audience; she appears, and an Ah! of joy and rapture is heard on all sides. The house listens with rapt attention, bodies bent forward, glasses glued to their eyes; they will not lose a word, and only when she has finished break into a fury of applause. Outside the theatre they speak of no one else."

It looks very much as though the English on this occasion came to the correct critical conclusion, although, it may be, for the wrong reasons. We must take into account, too, the kind of plays in which Mademoiselle Bernhardt was appearing, and contrast them with our own at the time. In 1879 the English theatre had not yet entirely emerged from the Robertsonian floods of milk-and-water. W. S. Gilbert was still posing as a sentimentalist, Byron's Our Boys had been produced four years earlier, the previous year had seen Wills's play of Olivia. Concurrently with the Comédie Française at the Gaiety there was running at the Lyceum young Mr Pinero's Daisy's Escape, and Mr Burnand's Betsy was in rehearsal. London had been melted by the pity of Miss Ellen Terry's Olivia; it was to be purged by the terror of the Frenchwoman's Phèdre. The English of that period were accustomed to see passion garbed as decently as their table legs. What, then, must they have thought of Racine and Sarah in frank exposition of incestuous love! Imagine the Englishman of du Maurier's pencil confronted by Mr Joseph Knight's account, in the respectable columns of The Athenceum, of this diversion:

From the moment she entered on the stage, carefully guarded and supported by Œnone, Mademoiselle Bernhardt realised fully the passionate, febrile, and tortured woman. Her supple frame writhed beneath the influence of mental agony and restless desire, and her postures seemed chosen with admirable art for the purpose of blending the greatest possible amount of seduction with the utmost possible parade of penitence. This is, of course, the true reading, and the whole shame of Phèdre is due to her ill success. The key-note to her character is struck in a later act, the third, wherein she says:

Il n'est plus temps: il sait mes ardeurs insensées,
De l'austère pudeur, les bornes sont passées.
J'ai declaré ma honte aux yeux de mon vainqueur,
Et l'espoir malgré moi s'est glissé dans mon cœur.

While, accordingly, she exhausts herself in invective against herself for her crime, she is, in fact, in the very whirlwind of her passion studying, like a second Delilah,

His virtue or weakness which way to assail.

Obvious as is this view, it is not always presented, the cause of absence being, perhaps, the weakness of the actress. In the present case it was fully revealed, and the picture of abject and lascivious appeal was terrible in its intensity.

Add to such a portrayal the personality which was to charm the educated men and women of half the civilised globe, and there is no wonder that the English public lost something of measure in its praise. Incense was offered up, the idol's head was turned. I give what happened next as related by M. Georges d'Heylli:

It is common knowledge that this great and original artist has a distaste for behaving like the rest of the world and that discipline appears to her mechanical and wearisome. One is not mistress of several arts for nothing. Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt did not content herself in England with exhibiting one aspect of her charming personality: to be an actress and nothing but an actress was not enough. She established a studio for painting and sculpture where she could be admired in the delightful costume with which the photographers have made us familiar. Yielding to the numerous requests which her great talents and the general curiosity procured for her, she consented to give performances in the drawing-rooms of the aristocracy. Now this would have been in no way the concern of either her colleagues or the Press, had it not been that the stress of this additional work told so much upon the actress as to render her physically and mentally incapable of giving her best in the theatre. The day arrived when she was unable to fulfil her part in L'Etrangère. The bill had to be changed and the money which had been taken for the performance returned. This was followed by recriminations between the artist and the French and English Press. Mademoiselle Bernhardt, annoyed at the general censure, resigned her membership of the Comédie Française, and accepted, or did not accept—the rumour at least was rife—an engagement for a tour in America.

Peace was, however, restored, the artist made a sociétaire and granted two months' holiday in the year. She resumed her performances on 17th April 1880. Shortly afterwards a critic of standing complained that she played Doña Clorinde in Augier's L'Aventurière in the same manner as Virginie in L'Assommoir.

La nouvelle Clorinde a eu, pendant les deux derniers actes, des emportements excessifs de toute manière, d'abord parce qu'ils forçaient sa voix qui n'a de charme que dans le médium, ensuite parce qu'ils l'amenaient á des mouvements de corps et de bras qu'il serait fâcheux d'emprunter á la grande Virginie de l'Assommoir pour les introduire á la Comédie Française.

Thus Auguste Vitu in the Figaro.

Sarah again resigned, and the great Sarcey was devilish cross about it. "Is it the fault of the Comédie," he asks, "that one of the members has preferred the rôle of star to that of artist? And then, is this so new to us Parisians? Are we not by this time used to the eccentricities of this flamboyant personage? Mademoiselle Bernhardt has resigned and is leaving us. It is unfortunate, it is true, but more particularly unfortunate for her. The Comédie loses a charming actress and must for the time being withdraw a few plays which are now hardly practicable without her. But the number of these plays is small, for her art, divine instrument though it be, has not many notes. Her absence is to be regretted, but we shall get over it, and another artist will arrive, perhaps Mademoiselle Bartet, who with other qualities will turn the public's head in the same way and efface the memory of her predecessor. Actors come and actors go. After Régnier, Coquelin; after Provost, Thiron; after Samson, Got; and others will succeed to the inheritance of Got, Thiron, and Coquelin. Remember the old proverb, Faute d'un moine l'abbaye ne chôme pas." Finally he delivered himself up to prophecy. "Let her make no mistake; her success will not be lasting. She is not one of those who can bear the whole brunt of a play and whose brilliance has no need of a background of mediocrity." Was ever augur more woefully mistaken? Sarcey had tried to bolster up Croizette; the world has long judged between Mademoiselle Bernhardt and Mademoiselle Bartet.

But there is another factor in this character besides wilfulness and caprice—the vacillation in artistic purpose. The Journal of the Goncourts gives a picture of her in mid-career which illustrates this. It is Edmond who writes:

10th October.

Lunch with Sarah Bernhardt at Bauer's, who is kindly using his influence to induce her to play my La Faustin.

Sarah arrives in a pearl-grey tunic braided with gold. No diamonds except on the handle of her lorgnette. A moth-like wisp of black lace on the burning bush of her hair; beneath, the black shadow of lashes and the clear blue of her eyes. Seated at the table she complains of being little, and indeed her figure is that of the women of the Renaissance. She sits sideways on the corner of her chair, exactly like a child who has been promoted to the big table.

At once, with gusto, she embarks upon the history of her world-scamperings. She relates how in the United States, as soon as her next tour is announced, and though it be a year beforehand, orders are sent to France for a shipload of professors in order that the young American "miss" may know what the play is about.

I am placed next to Sarah. She must be nearly fifty. She wears no powder and her complexion is that of a young girl.… She talks hygiene, morning exercises, hot baths. From this she goes on to portraits of people she has known. Dumas fils among others. She has a natural instinct for affability, a desire to please which is not assumed.

17th October.

Dinner at Sarah's to read La Faustin.

The little studio where she receives is not unlike a stage setting. On the floor against the walls rows of pictures, giving the apartment something of the appearance of an auction-room; over the mantelpiece her full-length portrait by Clairin. Furniture everywhere, mediaeval chests and cabinets, an infinity of articles of virtu more or less rasta, statuettes from Chili, musical instruments from the Antipodes. Only one sign of individual taste, the skins of great polar-bears shedding a lustre on the corner where she sits… .

At dinner Sarah is very gracious and full of small attentions. We return to the studio to read the play. There is no lamp and only a few candles. The copy is typewritten and much less readable than it would have been in the usual round hand, with the result that Bauer does not read very well. The effect is cold. After the seventh scene I insist upon reading myself. I, too, do not manage very well, but I get tension into it and Sarah seems impressed by the last scene. Then tea, during which there is no further talk of the play. Finally Sarah comes over to me, says that the piece is full of passion, that the last act seems superb, and asks me to leave the script that she may go through one or two scenes which have been omitted. A few vague sentences which may mean that Sarah will accept the play, and even a phrase as to putting me into touch with her manager, but nothing decisive.

Now there are some things which are not favourable. Sarah is a romantic. At the moment the fuss they are making of Réjane inclines her towards the modern, but her artistic temperament is against it. Further, in my play Sarah has a wretch of a sister, and it so happens that she actually possesses one—a fact of which, until recently, I was ignorant.

26th November.

In reply to my letter asking for the return of my play I have to-day received a telegram from Sarah affirming a wish to act in something of mine, and asking for a further six weeks in which to think La Faustin over quietly. My belief is that although she may wish to give the piece she will not do so.

22nd February.

To-day, without a word, the manuscript is returned.

Once free of the Comédie, Sarah envisages her famous world-tours, and embarks upon gallivantings innumerable. And once definitely on the rampage candour compels me to admit, as it compelled Joe Gargery, that she was indeed a Buster. So began the long period of trumpeting vagabondage, and with it the history of "Sardoodledum." The actress tore about the habitable globe piling whirlwind upon earthquake and littering the stages of half-a-dozen countries with the pasteboard wreckage of Fédoras, Théeodoras, Toscas, Sorcières. There was probably not more than one English critic who kept his head in all this welter of popes, princes, cardinals, Russian Grand Dukes, Austrian Archdukes, German counts, cantatrices, Inquisitors, gaolers, nihilists, poisoners and assassins. Amid the general delirium Mr Shaw alone was heard to declare himself unimpressed by the sight of an actress "chopping a man to death with a hatchet as a preliminary to appearing as a mediaeval saint with a palm in her hand at the head of a religious procession." "Her charm," he declared, "could be imitated by a barmaid with unlimited pin-money and a row of footlights before her instead of the handles of a beer-machine." Her voice he likened to the voix céleste stop, "which, like a sentimental New England villager with an American organ, she keeps always pulled out."

But this was not criticism's general temper. Even Mr Shaw admitted that when the actress was engaged "not in stabbing people with hat-pins, but in the normal straight-forward business of acting she could do it completely enough." Then came the great day of Wednesday, 9th December 1896. A grand fête was organised by a Mr Henry Bauer, "to mark the apogee of Mademoiselle Bernhardt's artistic career." This gentleman invited Sarah to sit herself down for an hour or two and, recalling her early struggles and her present triumphs, let the readers of the Figaro into her soul-state on the occasion of a ceremony which was to be in every way remarkable. Nothing daunted, the great artist replied "Mais c'est un examen de conscience que vous me demandez, cher ami," and with characteristic aplomb continued: "Et cependant, je n'hésite pas une seconde á vous répondre." The affair was a combination of luncheon and theatrical performance; sonnets specially composed were read by François Coppée, Edmond Haraucourt, André Theuriet, Catulle Mendès and one, inaudibly, by Heredia. And then the great Rostand gave tongue:

En ce temps sans beauté, seule encor tu nous
  restes
Sachant descendre, pâle, un grand escalier clair,
Ceindre un bandeau, porter un lys, brandir un
  fer.
Reine de l'attitude et Princesse des gestes.

En ce temps, sans folie, ardente, tu protestes!
Tu dis des vers. Tu meurs d'amour. Ton vol
  se perd.

Tu tends des bras de rêve, et puis des bras de
  chair.
Et quand Phèdre paraît, nous sommes tous
  incestes.

Avide de souffrir, tu t'ajoutas des cœurs;
Nous avons vu couler—car ils coulent tes
  pleurs!—
Toutes les larmes de nos âmes sur tes joues.

Mais aussi tu sais bien, Sarah, que quelquefois
Tu sens furtivement se poser, quand tu joues,
Les lèvres de Shakespeare aux bagues de tes
 doigts.

Our own Wilson Barrett sent a silver crown with the names of her rôles on the leaves, and Sarah was duly overcome.

But then Sarah could always be overcome at will. It is said that when, many years later, she rehearsed the English of her reply to the address to be publicly presented to her by Sir Herbert Tree, she paused in the middle and said: "Here I shall cry a little." And, on the day, in that place she did cry a little.

There is a strange account of the actress by the Roumanian, de Max, which the curious will not desire that I should omit:

Il y a deux Sarah—au moins. Il y a celle qu'on voit de la salle. Et il y a celle qu'on voit des coulisses. Le malheur est que, des coulisses, on voit quelquefois la même que dans la salle, la plus belle. C'est un malheur, parce que ces jours-lá, on n'est plus maître de soi; on arrive avec de la haine, de la fureur. On veut se venger d'elle, et puis on devient spectateur en jouant; quand le rideau se ferme, on lui baise les mains, avec des larmes.… Acteur, je connus l'actrice Sarah. Je commus aussi á son Théâtre une petite fille, qui s'appelait, par hasard, Sarah. Ai-je détesté, ai-je aimé cette insupportable petite fille? Je ne sais plus. C'est si loin. J'ai vieilli. Pas elle. C'est toujours une petite fille, une insupportable petite fille, qui a des caprices, des cris, des crises. Ah! les crises de cette petite fille!

And yet this petite fille is the artist from whom "speech fell, even as her dress, in great straight folds, fringed with gold." It is the artist with the soul of Clairon's "I am eighty-five; my heart is twenty-five."

It is now a good many years since Madame Sarah, as she likes to be called by people who have a real affection for her, came to lunch at my mother's house at Manchester. My mother managed, throughout her long life, to super-impose upon an outlook not unlike Jane Austen's a great sympathy with all artists. This may have been through her descent from Edward Shuter, the comedian, of whom Doran says that his life was one round of intense professional labour, jollification, thoughtlessness, embarrassment, gay philosophy and addiction to religion as expounded by Whitfield. My mother's grace and wit were, however, entirely her own. She accepted Madame Sarah's proposal that she should come to lunch graciously and without commotion of spirit. There was some discussion, I remember, as to what ceremonies were to be observed, and what eaten and drunk. We tried to imagine what Charles Lamb would have set before Mrs Siddons. Could we rely upon our guest "counting fish as nothing"? Our old nurse it was who clinched the matter. "I suppose the poor body eats like everyone else," she said, "her stomach will be none the worse for a good warming." There was some question as to who should hand the great lady out of her carriage and help her up the steep slope of the path. It was decided that the gardener, who for many years had performed this office for my mother, should not now be denied. If there had ever been sincerity in Adrienne's passages with the old servitor, she would, we felt, understand. You see we were not unmindful of the fiasco of the seaport Mayor. The story goes that many years ago the great actress was to descend upon a town which boasts of a fine council-chamber, situated at the top of a flight of forty-six steps. Here, when the time came, were to be ensconced the Mayor in his robes, the town clerk, the beadle and other dignitaries. It was up these steps that the great actress was to toil. The train draws in, a state carriage with postillions and outriders is at hand. A huge crowd. A delighted Sarah sets forth, only to catch sight, after a few yards, of the stairway at top of which, perched in his eyrie, Bumble-surrounded, awaits her the Mayor. "Ah, mais non! mais non!" she cries "J'ai assez grimpé dans ma vie! A l'hôtel."

Well, Madame Sarah came, and she came in state. She wore a wonderful mantle of misty grey like the breasts of sea-birds. It was in the first chill of autumn, and I like to think that the bowed trees of the garden bent still lower to touch with the tips of their branches the radiance as it passed. It was a moment or two before the presentations were over; she had brought her granddaughter and a woman friend. And the lunch, of which we could persuade our guest to touch only a quarter of a wing of chicken and some toast fingers dipped in milk. Horribly I found myself thinking of Tilburina and her confidante. But almost at once, to put us at our ease, she began to talk. The smallest of small talk, conventional inquiries as to what we did, a declaration that if my brothers became great men or my sister a great actress, we should not, the whole lot of us, amount to the value of our mother's little finger. About the theatre she would say very little and it was a subject we naturally avoided. I had a feeling that one of us might suddenly, out of sheer nervousness, ask her to recite.

And then, after a time, Sarah fell to talking about actors and acting, and this I take to be the finest politeness I have experienced. First she had some handsome things to say of English players. Of Henry Irving, whom she called a great artist and a bad actor. She admired his temperament, but his oddities, his uncouthness, his queerness of technique perplexed her, and I should certainly not have trusted her to appreciate Benson. Of Forbes-Robertson, whose Hamlet she considered a jewel to be worn on the finger of the poet himself. She talked affectionately of Coquelin, "ce bon Coquelin," and admiringly of Réjane. A very great comedian she called her, but rather resented my suggestion that she had great tragic gifts. "Non," she replied, "elle a la voix canaille." And then the conversation turned upon her interpretation of a part which she was then playing. This was Lucrecia Borgia, of whom I thought then, and still think, her conception wrong. Her idea of Lucrecia—and in this it must be admitted that she followed Hugo's lead—was of a perfectly good woman with a poisonous kink. She held that even if Lucrecia did entertain a passion for murder she would not show her vice except when viciously engaged. One remembered Charles Peace fiddling between thefts, but without succeeding in thinking this an apt reinforcement for her. One thought, too, of the provincial lady who was accustomed to give a lecture to schoolgirls on the occasion of the annual Shakespearean revisal. Confronted with Antony and Cleopatra the lecturer evaded the difficulties of her subject by announcing that she proposed to confine her considerations of the heroine's character to her aspect as a mother. This, again, did not seem a very suitable remark, and frankly, we did not shine.

Actors are always difficult to talk to. They will not realise that all that matters is the impression the spectator actually receives and that he is not influenced by what the actor thinks or hopes he is conveying. If only actors knew how much of the interpreting is done by the spectator and how little by themselves! We experienced, of course, extreme difficulty in putting it to Sarah that what she thought about Lucrecia was of no importance, that it was only what she made us think that mattered. In fact we could not put it at all. We could only say that she turned Lucrecia into a good-natured goose with unaccountable moments. However, she came to the rescue with a happy "Eh bien, je vois que ça ne vous plaît pas. Qu'est-ce qui vous plaît donc?" And we tried to get her to talk about her Pelléas, which is the one perfect thing that not Mademoiselle Mars, not Mademoiselle Clairon, not ten thousand Rachels could ever have accomplished. She had singularly little to say about this, but we put it down to our not having proved ourselves worthy to be talked to. The thing we would most have instilled into our guest was that our admiration was critical. Youthfully we had long settled the order of her parts. First Pelléas, the butt and sea-mark of her utmost sail, then the world-wearied Phèdre; next the Jeanne d'Arc of inviolate ecstasy, and last the Marguerite, patchouli'd, but still incredibly lovely. We wanted her to realise something of this. Well, we failed.

We would have read to her the whole of that passage on art and the artist which I have given in an earlier part of this book. "There!" we would have said. "That's what we think of the actor's art, and of the heights to which only the very few are capable of rising. It's just because art is as fine as all this that you can be so fine." I think we would have lectured her in our young enthusiasm, but for the impossibility of throwing off so tremendous a creed at a moment's notice. "Mais, qu'est-ce qu'ils me chantent, ces enfants?" she would have exclaimed.

She declared that she never read dramatic criticism: "Les critiques ne savent rien." It was then that I wanted to do something violent, to induce in that august head some perception of the discernment of which she had been the object. But she was, I thought, a little like some intolerant goddess bored by her worshippers and disinclined for nice distinctions.

I tried to get her to understand something of the overthrow of my small soul when first I saw her act. It was on an evening in July in the early nineties. From my place in the queue I could see a long poster in mauve and gold, spangled with silver stars. The ineffability was that of Marguerite Gautier. It was not for some years that I was to hear how such a commonplace sentence as "On nous abandonne, et les longues soirées succèdent aux longs jours," could be set to such music that it should vibrate in the memory for ever. I had yet to hear these phrases dropped like stones into some golden well of felicity. The play that evening was La Tosca. The wait was long. At the hour of her coming my heart began to beat. I remember as though it were yesterday the opening of the door, the dark, silent theatre, the second long wait, the turning up of the lights, the going up of the curtain, the exquisite tenderness of the opening scene. I remember the setting of the candles round the body of Scarpia, and that is all. I next saw the actress in Fédora, and shortly afterwards in Frou-frou and Adrienne Lecouvreur. La Dame aux Camélias followed about 1898. All these were in Manchester; and then came the time when I went to Paris frequently and saw her often. There was always great difficulty in getting a glimpse of her Phèdre. The actress seemed wilfully to prefer rubbish, and both Phèdre and Pelléas were difficult birds to bring down. When, finally, one saw it there was the further difficulty of finding any French critic up to writing adequately about it. Once more I turn up my little hand-book and read again what the late W. T. Arnold wrote forty years ago:

Could anything have been more deliciously poetical than that kindling eager eye, the hand slowly stretched out, and the finger pointing into space, as Phèdre sees before her half in a dream the chariot "fuyant dans la carrière"? The great Phèdre has hitherto been that of Rachel. It is useless to dilate upon Rachel's tragic power. Her performance alike in the second and in the fourth acts is declared by all competent critics to have been all but perfection. The doubtful question is rather whether she was capable of rendering the tenderness and the infinite piteousness of the hapless woman as she rendered her transports of passion. We can conceive Rachel as having been better than Madame Bernhardt in the denunciation of Œnone, and, indeed, M. Sarcey, in his notice of the performance of Phèdre by the Comédie Française intimates that she was so; but we should like to know how Rachel said such passages as this:

Œnone, il peut quitter cet orgueil qui te
  blesse;
Nourri dans les forêts, il en a la rudesse.
  Hippolyte, endurci par de sauvages lois,
Entend parler d'amour pour la première fois:
Peut-être sa surprise a causé son silence;
Et nos plaintes peut-être ont trop de violence.

The inexpressible tenderness with which those lines were sighed rather than spoken was all Madame Bernhardt's own. This line again:

Et l'espoir malgré moi s'est glissé dans mon cœur.

And this, when she has discovered the love of Hippolyte and Aricie, and contrasts their affection with her own guilty passion:

Tous les jours se levoient clairs et sereins
pour eux.

These were the passages Madame Bernhardt marked with the most personal and enduring charm, and in these we cannot believe that she has not surpassed her forerunners.

And then came the time, about 1908, when I was first privileged to write about her. I have written elsewhere all that I ever intend to write What more is there to be said of that quick and frenzied diction, that foam and spate of speech alternating with pools of liquid bliss? What more of those plumbed depths of abasement, those scaled yet unimaginable heights of remorse, that fury of immolation tearing its own flanks as the tiger "rends with those so awful paws the velvet of the breeding hind"? Where earlier actresses have been content with a molten and brassy horror, Bernhardt's passion has taken on the fragrance of bruised violets. None other could suffer as she did. Rachel may have exceeded her in terror; she cannot have surpassed her in inviolacy and immaculacy, in rapt and mystical purity. Bernhardt did not use to die so much as to swoon upon death. "Combien sont morts qui, moins heureux que vous, n'ont pas même donné un seul baiser á leur chimère!" Her beloved Rostand asks the same question:

                           Combien,
Moins heureux, épuisés d'une poursuite vaine,
Meurent sans avoir vu leur Princesse lointaine.

And Mélissinde replies:

 Combien, aussi, l'ont trop tôt vue, et trop
 longtemps,
Et ne meurent qu'après les jours désenchantants!

Yet none of this is true of Bernhardt. She has embraced the glory and the dream. She has measured herself with destiny and touched the lips of her desire. Her acting is now an affair of the spirit, the victory of the incorruptible. For victory it is, victory over the fraying scabbard, victory in the dauntless survival of the soul of steel, the will to persist, quand même. One picture springs to the mind. It is the transfiguration of Lear:

            I will do such things—
What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth.

Substitute for terrors, wonders; then picture this valiant woman still wresting a last late secret from her art. Can we not see the trust put in us here to read by the spirit those ardours, perils, and adventures which may no longer be expressed save by the spirit? Yet be sure of this, that as no quarter is asked so none will be given. If this acting of to-day mislikes you, you must be prepared to say that at the player's hey-day you had also been displeased; for of genius it is the spirit and not the body which matters. Of this artist all that is left is spirit. She has bent her will to battle with doom and death. She has, to echo Charlotte Brontë, fought every inch of ground, sold every drop of blood, resisted to the latest the rape of every faculty, has willed to see, has willed to hear, has willed to breathe, has willed to live up to, within, and even beyond the moment when death to any less fiery spirit had said: "Thus far and no farther!"

Can it not be realised that it was something of all this that we wanted, and failed so lamentably to say? We wanted to tell her that we knew. Did she know, I wonder? As she drove away she said something to my mother which we did not hear. The carriage receded and she waved her flowers. There was a look of grave amusement in her eyes, something of the memory and the kinship of youth.