SOURCE: "Sarah Bernhardt," "Sarah Bernhardt in Phedre," and "Pelleas and Melisande," in Punch and Judy & Other Essays, Doubleday, Page & Company, 1923, pp. 25-42; 322-6

I

"Sans doute il est trop tard pour parler encor d'elle. " So Alfred de Musset began his beautiful poem to La Malibran, in which he said almost all there is to be said about the death of one of the queens of the stage. Only, in the case of La Malibran, the world's regret, which found so lovely an echo in the song of the poet, was all the more poignant because La Malibran died in the flower of her youth.

Sarah Bernhardt, according to standards which we should apply to any one else, was an old woman when she died; old, and full of glory, "having seen, borne, and achieved more than most men on record," and yet when the news of her death flashed through the world it seemed an incredible thing, and the blackness and the void that the disappearance of her presence left behind were felt by the whole world. The world seemed a duller and a greyer place without her:

She, she is dead; she's dead: when thou knowst this,
Thou knowst how wan a ghost this our world is.

That was the feeling we had when the news of her death came. It came with the shock, as of something living, vital, and actual leaving us, and not as the final vibration of an echo of the past. For Sarah Bernhardt never grew old. She remained young because her spirit was able to serve the novitiate which, La Rochefoucauld tells us, awaits the human being at every stage of his life, and she was ready at each revolution to face the possibilities of the new phase. So that death caught her acting for the cinematograph.

Many years ago, in 1882, after her first performance of Sardou's Fédora, Jules Lemaître, bidding her farewell as she was starting for America, in one of the most graceful tributes to her genius ever written, advised her, when she was weary of travel, adventure, and struggle, to come back and find a final home at the Théâtre français and to rest in the admiration and sympathy of "ce bon peuple Parisien," who, he said, would forgive her anything, as it owed her some of its greatest pleasures. And then, he added: "Un beau soir, mourez sur la scène subitement, dans un grand cri tragique, car la vieillesse serait trop dure pour vous." No doubt he was right, if he thought of Sarah retiring, as others have done, to some quiet suburb, living in the company of a parrot and an old servant, and weeping over old Press cuttings, a living ghost, and only a name to the present generation. Only that was just what did not and what could not happen. Although she had lost a leg, and though she was over seventy, she was still finding new things to do, and things which she, and she only, could do, and till the hour of her death she continued to adjust new means to a fresh end, and never gave the world the chance of saying "What a pity!"

Indeed, one of the triumphs of her career was the twelve performances she gave of Athalie after the war, for one of which all the theatres of Paris closed to give the whole theatrical profession the chance of witnessing this example of her incomparable art.

II

What remains of it all? What idea will future generations have of the art and the power of Sarah Bernhardt? What will they believe? Will they just think of her as an old-fashioned catchword brandished to check the enthusiasm of the young as they swing their censers to a new idol? No, she will be more than that: the very photographs that exist of her, from her early days at the Comédie française, when she was as slender as a sylph, and a puff of wind seemed sufficient to blow her away, until the other day, when she embodied the sumptuous malignity of Athalie, bear witness to the feline grace, the exotic poetry, the electric power, the enigmatic expression, the strange splendour, as baffling to analysis as the scent of an aromatic herb, that emanated from her personality.

I believe there are cinematograph films which reveal at least some of the most telling of her gestures, some of the most poignant of her silences, and I used myself to have a gramophone record which held a poor ghost of her voice; but all that is nothing, for Sarah Bernhardt's art was a complex whole, a combination of rhythmical movement, gesture, look, speech, hands, hair, body, and spirit; and those who never saw her will only be able to guess at it, but it will be one of the beautiful and permanent guesses of mankind; one of the lasting dreams of poets, one of the most magical speculations of artists and of all smokers of "enchanted cigarettes," like the charm of Cleopatra, the voice of the masters of the bel canto, the colours of Greek paintings and the melodies of Greek music. The record of her struggles, her efforts, her achievements, and her triumphs, exists in full and analytical detail. We can find it in the collected writings of Sarcey, Jules Lemaître, T. T. Weiss, and in the articles of Jacques de Tillet, Faguet, and others. I have lately been reading a number of the articles that Sarcey wrote on the various plays in which Sarah Bernhardt appeared, from the outset of her career, and I feel as if I had been watching the long and crowded panorama of her artistic destiny.

It was a difficult career from the start. She did not want to be an actress. She once told me herself, that her ambition had been to be a painter, but since she was forced to go on the stage she decided that if she had to be an actress, she would be the first. Aut Cæsar, aut nullus. There should be no question about it. I enjoyed her friendship for many years, and that was one of the few remarks I ever heard her make on the subject of acting or the stage. She never theorised about her parts, or the plays she acted in. They were to her, I think, so much plastic material that she kneaded and moulded and shaped with all the skill and force at her command. In kneading them she was guided by instinct, and she made herself perfect in execution by unremitting, relentless practice.

When, as a little girl, she was taken by her mother to face the entrance examination for the Conservatoire before a jury headed by Auber, she recited, instead of a tirade from Corneille or Racine, La Fontaine's Fable, "Les Deux Pigeons" (just as Trilby sang, "Au clair de la Lune").

Scarcely had the lines, so says a contemporary record,

Deux pigeons s'aimaient d'amour tendre,
L'un d'eux s'ennuyant au logis,

passed her lips, when Auber interrupted her, spoke to her and told her she was admitted. The story has often been told, but it has always struck me that the recitation of those two lines probably contained, as in a microcosm, the whole of Sarah Bernhardt's genius, just as in some early lines of a poet written in the April of his genius you sometimes find the blossom that foretells the whole majesty and all the golden fruits of the tree. Such a poem is the short sigh written by the boy D'Annunzio and beginning:

O falce di luna calante,

or Keats's sonnet on Chapman's Homer.

When Sarah Bernhardt played Adrienne Lecouvreur she used to recite the opening of that fable, and one felt as one heard it that for the perfect utterance of beautiful words this was the Pillars of Hercules of mortal achievement, that it was impossible to speak verse more beautifully.

III

The sighing of La Fontaine's Fable by this little girl at the Conservatoire was the prelude, the prophecy, and in one sense the epitome of all her long and glorious career; but the career was far from being one of roses, roses all the way. The whole of Sarah Bernhardt's artistic life was a fight against apparently insurmountable difficulties— obstacles from the moment when she was handicapped by her frailty, the delicacy of her constitution, the weakness of her lungs and her vocal organs, until the moment she had to face, first the inability to move, owing to invading rheumatism, and then the loss of a leg. She prolonged the wrestle until she was on her death-bed. It was a long time before she won the suffrages of the critical. She made her début at the Théâtre français in 1862, but all that Sarcey, who as a conscientious and hard-working critic expressed for so many years the opinion of the play-going world of Paris, said of her on this occasion was that she held herself well and spoke her lines distinctly.

It is interesting in following her career as it is revealed in his articles to note the gradual crescendo of his appreciation. When she played Le Passant, by Coppée, at the Odéon in 1869, he noted the delicate charm with which she spoke the verse. The performance made her famous. In 1872 she left the Odéon, returned to the Théâtre français and played in Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle. Sarcey notes her delicious diction, but doubts whether she will ever find those strong and vibrating accents that carry an audience away. Nature had, he said, denied her that, otherwise she would be a complete artist, and such a thing, he added, did not exist on the stage. She followed this up by playing the part of Junie in Racine's Britannicus. Sarcey notes that she has "Je ne sais quel charme poétique, elle dit le vers avec une grâce et une pureté raciniennes." In 1873 she plays the small part of Aricie in Phèdre, and Sarcey says of her voice that it is music itself and of an unimaginable purity and transparency. In 1876 she had belied Sarcey's prophecy that she would never have the strength to move an audience, by her performance of the Roman Vestal's mother in Parodi's tragedy, Rome Vaincue. In this tragedy she played an old woman, Posthumia, who is blind, and who, at the end of the tragedy, stabs her daughter to save her from being buried alive; the daughter is bound and cannot stab herself, and the mother, being blind, has to fumble for the place of her heart.

"… Elle était admirablement costumée et grimée," wrote Sarcey, "un visage amaigri, ridé, et d'une majesté extraordinaire; des yeux vagues et ternes, un manteau qui, tombant des deux côtés quand les bras se soulevaient, semblait figurer les ailes immenses de quelque gigantesque et sinistre chauvesouris. Rien de plus terrible et de plus poétique ensemble … ce n'était plus lá une comédienne; c'était la nature même, servie par une intelligence merveilleuse, par une âme de feu, par la voix la plus juste, la plus mélodieuse, qui jamais ait enchanté les oreilles humaines. Cette femme joue avec son cœur et ses entrailles. Elle hasarde des gestes qui seraient ridicules chez tout autre et qui emportent une salle… ."

No completer criticism of the art of Sarah Bernhardt is to be found than in these lines. Many have thought her rendering of this old woman, Posthumia, one of the two greatest triumphs of her career, and it is doubtful whether she ever excelled it; she chose an act of this play together with an act of Phèdre for the celebration of her jubilee in Paris.

It must have been about this time that she first appeared in Phèdre, for in 1877 Sarcey talks of her success in Andromaque as exceeding that of her Phèdre, and he notes the number of shades she can indicate by the simple modulation of her voice in three lines of verse, without any seeming search after effect or time-taking effort, and also the continuous tremor that thrilled the audience as she spoke her lines; she was interrupted by unstiflable bravos, as happens sometimes to great singers.

In the same year, she played Doña Sol in Hernani, and from that time forth she was recognised not only as an actress of genius, but as a personality that counted not only in the life of the world of art, but in life in general. She became henceforth to France something as well known as the Arc de Triomphe, and more than that, an object of unceasing interest and curiosity, the theme of poets, the godsend of gossips and paragraph makers, the centre of a legend.

In 1879 she went to London with the Comédie française and she appeared in Phèdre, Hernani, Andromaque, L'Etrangère, Le Sphiux, and Zaïre. The London public went mad about her, and Sarah Bernhardt having tasted blood, in the shape of the conquest of London, determined on the conquest of the world. She abandoned the Théâtre français after a quarrel, and went to America.

That was the first great break in her career.

IV

All this time, her travels, her adventures, her extravagances, her tantrums, her quarrels, her facile successes, her cheap victories, never prevented her from continuing, at the same time, as if on a parallel line, her personal battle and wrestle with the angle of art, and from every now and then discovering and achieving a new victory, conquering a fresh province.

In 1880, she plays Adrienne Lecouvreur for the first time, and in London, and reveals to Sarcey, who goes to London to hear her, what were to him unsuspected stops of pathos and passion. In the same year she plays Froufrou in London, and she has to compete with memories of Aimée Desclée. She must succeed or die. "Eh, bien!" says Sarcey, comparing them in the scene which was Desclée's greatest triumph, "elle en est venue á bout. C'est tout autre chose et c'est aussi puissant.… Au quatrième acte, il n'y a pas de discussion possible, Mad^elle Sarah Bernhardt s'est montrée supérieure à sa devanciè."

Then came more journeys and more world-tours, and, in 1882, the beginning of her association with Sardou, her production of Fédora, the first of those ingenious and powerful melodramas which were cunningly constructed in order to bring out her especial qualities, garments which were cut tightly to her measure, and which no one else has been able to wear since. Théeodora, La Tosca, Gismonda, La Sorciére—she toured the world with these, and no plays brought her louder applause, and in no plays could she produce a more certain and sometimes a more stunning effect. But although her performance in them was certainly a unique phenomenon, which nobody since has been able to imitate or to emulate, they were for her easy triumphs, and it was not in them that she reached anywhere near the high-water mark of her art. She could sometimes content herself by merely imitating herself in them, and by letting the strong situations do the business, with the minimum effort on her part, although I can bear witness that there was often a vast difference between Sarah Bernhardt playing listlessly in a part of Sardou's, and any one else playing the same part with all their might.

The wrestle with art went on in spite of Sardou. Again she moved Sarcey to an ecstasy of surprise when she first plays in La Dame aux Camélias in Paris in 1883: "I have seen something perfect!" he exclaims. She continues to experiment. She plays Lady Macbeth. At one time she has the idea of playing it in English, and takes lessons from Madame de Guythéres, an inhabitant of Versailles, who told me of the first lesson. When she arrived for the second lesson, Sarah Bernhardt was selling her furniture and starting for America. The facts of life had intervened. She plays in Richepin's Nana Sahib; she plays Cleopatra in an adaptation of Shakespeare by Sardou; she plays Joan of Arc. She visits London every year. She still tours the world. Then there comes to her a moment when she instinctively feels that the public is tired of her repertory and irritated by her producing stuff that is inferior to her, so on her return from a prolonged tour in South America she turns over quite a new leaf. She takes the Renaissance Theatre in Paris, either in 1892 or 1893, and produces a delicate play by Jules Lemaître, Les Rois. "The Sarah of the 'seventies has come back to us," said the critics. In 1893 she plays Phèdre, and Sarcey says that in the part she is younger and more beautiful than she was at the Théâtre Français in the 'seventies, when her powers were not quite ripe enough for the part.

"Chose étrange, inouïe, inexplicable, mais qui est vraie cependant, Mme Sarah Bernhardt est plus jeune, plus éclatante et, tranchons le mot, plus belle qu'elle n'a jamais été, d'une beauté artistique qui fait passer dans tout le corps un frisson d'admiration comme á l'aspect d'une belle statue." Lemaître speaks in the same note. With one voice the French critics agreed that never was anything finer seen. It was here she reached the high-water mark of her genius. She does not stop; she brings into prominence Rostand, and produces La Princesse Lointaine, La Samaritaine, D'Annunzio's Ville Morte, and Sudermann's Magda. She takes a theatre of her own. She plays in Hamlet and L'Aiglon, and from this moment till the day of her death her artistic career alternates between hazardous experiments likely to be caviare to the general, such as Tristan Bernard's Jeanne Doré, and revivals of popular plays such as La Dame aux Camélias, or new productions calculated to please the crowd. She injures her leg, and her leg has to be amputated. No matter, she will appear in plays where it is not necessary for her to walk. The European war breaks out, she plays to the poilus in the trenches. And still the experiments continued; still the wrestle with great art continued, and culminated in her production of Athalie in 1920. Finally, while she was rehearsing a new play by Sacha Guitry, she fell ill from the malady from which she was destined never to recover. But she spent her last illness in rehearsing for the films, until, after the long contention, the moment for the final recueillement came and she received the last Sacraments.

V

She spent her life in making discoveries and in surprising the public and her critics by finding out what she could not do, and in immediately doing it. She began by surprising herself in 1873 when playing in Zaïre; she thought she was dying, and she determined to die in real earnest, to spite the manager, with whom she had quarrelled. She gave a cry of real pain when the stage dagger struck her, and she thought she could never recover; but to her astonishment she found herself, after the tremendous effort, exertion, and nervous expenditure, as fresh as a daisy. After this experience she knew she could draw when she liked on her physical resources. Her energy, the amount of hard work she accomplished, were frightening to think of. Her recreation was change of work. She could command sleep when she wished, but she never rested. Yet she was fundamentally sensible. She made the best of the inevitable, and from the beginning to the end of her career she turned her limitations into virtues.

She had a weak voice by nature and a delicate constitution, yet she succeeded by self-training, practice, management, and tact, in achieving so great a mastery of modulation, pitch, and tone that she could express anything from the fury of the whirlwind to the sigh of a sleepy stream.

VI

What was the secret of her art, and what were the main characteristics of her genius?

I believe that the secret of her art was that of all great art: that she was guided by an infallible instinct, and that whatever she did she could not go wrong. When what she did was done, it seemed simple, inevitable, and easy; and so swiftly accomplished, that you had no time to think of the how; nor was your sense sharp enough, however carefully you watched, to detect the divine conjury. It was the same whether she spoke lines of La Fontaine and Racine, or whether she asked, as she poured out a cup of coffee, as she did in one play: "Du sucre, deux morceaux?" She was artistically inerrant. It is this gift which was probably the secret of the great actors of the past: Garrick, Siddons, Talma, and Salvini. It is certainly to be seen in the work of the great singer of the present, Chaliapine, whether he is portraying Satan holding his court on the Brocken, or a foolish, good-natured Chinovnik, half-fuddled with drink after a night out. When such a gift is at work, the greater the material it is interpreting, the greater, of course, the effect.

The greater the play Sarah Bernhardt appeared in, the greater the demand on her instinct, which was her genius; the swifter and the fuller the response. As the occasion expanded, so did her genius rise to it.

Her Hamlet was and is still hotly discussed, and quite lately several eminent English writers have expressed opinions that are completely at variance with one another on the subject. But every critic when he reads Hamlet creates a Hamlet in his own image, and when he sees it acted, the more vivid the impersonation, the more likely it is to be at variance with his own conception. One critic finds her Hamlet an unpardonable Gallic liberty to take with Shakespeare; another, that she electrified Hamlet with the vigour of her personality. I remember a cultivated philosopher, who was a citizen of the world, telling me that he thought her Hamlet the only intelligible rendering he had seen of the part, just because it rendered the youthful inconsequence of the moods of the moody Dane. But whether you thought it justifiable or unjustifiable, true or untrue to Shakespeare, in witnessing it you were aware of the genius of the interpreter answering the genius of the dramatic poet. Deep was calling to deep.

When Hamlet looked into the guilty King's face at the end of the play within the play, or thought for one second that the King and not Polonius had blundered into death behind the arras; when Hamlet concealed his forebodings from Horatio, and when Hamlet looked at Laertes during the duel and let him know that he knew the swords had been exchanged and that one of them had been poisoned, all thought of the part—the rendering, tradition, the language, the authorship—went to the winds: you knew only that something which had been invented by one great genius was being interpreted by another great genius, and that the situation had found an expression which was on its own level. That, at least, was the impression of many.

A brilliant Irish essayist (whose essays appeared during the war) arrived at just such a conception of Hamlet as Sarah Bernhardt did, and it should always be remembered that she was the first to give to the French stage a plain and accurate translation of Hamlet in which the play was allowed to speak for itself, and was neither "adapted" nor dislocated by being put into romantic French verse.

A French friend of mine, an English scholar, who was a friend of M. Marcel Schwob, the translator of this version of Hamlet, assisted at some of the rehearsals, and once or twice, he told me, Sarah Bernhardt consulted him as to the meaning of a passage. He said what he thought, and she answered in a way which showed she had completely misunderstood him, had perhaps not even listened. Then, he said, she went on to the stage and played the passage in question, not only as if she understood the words that he had explained, but as if she had had access to the inner secrets of the poet's mind. This, again, was an instance of her instinct at work. If you pressed her for a theory about any part or passage she might invent something ready-made to please you, but it would have been an afterthought and not a preconceived plan. She acted by instinct and left the theory to others.

Her performance in Musset's Lorenzaccio was thought by some to be the most subtly interesting of all her achievements—nothing she ever did received greater praise from the critical in Paris (it received but little in London). M. Camille Mauclair speaks of "ce magnifique 'Lorenzaccio' dont elle faisait une des merveilles de sa carrière." It is true that Musset's work was mangled to make an acting play, but as it was written it would probably be unactable, and given the nature of Sarah Bernhardt's performance it was worth it. But there was one part which, great as it was, needed no readjustment or alteration when she assumed it, and that was the part of Phèdre.

Of all the parts she played it demanded the greatest effort and exertion, and that is why, during her long career, she played it comparatively seldom. Here, at any rate, she was beyond discussion. When she played it for the first time in London in 1879 she was so overcome with nervousness that she had to be pushed on to the stage, and as she began to speak she pitched her voice too high. Whenever she played it afterwards, she told me herself that she went through an agonising period of anguish, wondering whether she could bear the heavy load, and I remember seeing her between the acts of one performance in London, reading over her part, which was copied out in a large copy-book, murmuring the lines and saying to herself, with tears in her eyes: "Quel rôle, quel rôle," fearful even then of succumbing!

In reading the play again and conjuring up the visions, the sounds, of the harmonious, rhythmical, architectural symphony which was her Phèdre, the moments I remember most vividly were firstly her look, as of a frightened hunted animal suddenly caught in a trap, when in the first act Oenone first mentions the name of Hippolyte and Phèdre cries out, as if stabbed by a poisoned arrow, or feeling the fangs of a steel trap close:

C'est toi qui l'as nommé!

Then I see her sitting rigid with horror on her golden throne as she reflects that her Father is Judge in Hell and there is no refuge for her, the guilty, either on the earth, in the sky, or under the earth:

Minos juge aux enfers tous les pâles Humains.

As she said the line her eyes reflected the visions of Virgil and Dante:

Terribiles visu formae! Letumque, Labosque!

There was a line she charged with so great a sorrow and so grave a load of beauty that one thought Racine must have stirred in his tomb as she said it:

On ne voit pas deux fois le rivage des morts.

And the note of pathos was almost unbearable when she said:

Est-ce un malheur si grand que de cesser de vivre?

But perhaps most beautiful of all, and as striking in its restraint as the explosions of the preceding acts were formidable by their fury, was her utterance of Phèdre's final speech.

J'ai voulu, devant vous exposant mes remords,
Par un chemin plus lent descendre chez les morts.
J'ai pris, j'ai fait couler dans mes brûlantes veines
Un poison que Médée apporta dans Athènes.
Déjá jusqu'á mon cœur le venin parvenu
Dans ce cœur expirant jette un froid inconnu.
Déjá je ne vois plus qu'á travers un nuage,
Et le ciel, et l'époux que ma présence outrage.
Et la mort á mes yeux dérobant la clarté
Rend au jour qu'ils souillaient toute sa pureté.

After all the passion and the paroxysms, the storm and stress, the exultations and the agonies, she breathed out her final confession with that calm and harmonious unity of tone and absence of gesture and of facial expression which the quiet close of a great tragedy demands. She spoke as if she were already dead, with the impersonality and aloofness of what was no longer mortal. Her voice seemed to come from a distance, from the sunless regions; the chill of Cocytus was upon it, and as her head fell on the shoulder of the attendant slave, visions of the masterpieces of Greek sculpture were evoked, and all that the poets have said so briefly and so sweetly about the mowing down of beautiful flowers, and broken blossoms and ruined rhymes.

It was in moments such as these that Sarah Bernhardt enlarged rather than interpreted the masterpieces of the world. But praise of her now is no longer a living thing that might prove an incentive to others to go and see and hear for themselves. It is only a dirge of regret and a procession of melancholy shadows. Nevertheless, it is fitting to weave a few words, however idle and inadequate, and to honour her imperishable name with a perishable wreath.

VII

When in the future people will say, "But you should have heard Sarah Bernhardt in the part!" the newcomers will probably shrug their shoulders and say, "Oh, we know all about that!"

But they will not know, nor will anybody be able to tell them or explain to them what Sarah Bernhardt could do with a modulated inflexion, a trait de voix, a look, a gesture, a cry, a smile, a sigh, nor what majesty, poetry and music she could suggest by the rhythm of her movements and her attitudes, what it was like to hear her speak verse, to say words such as:

Songe, songe, Céphise, á cette nuit cruelle,

or,

Si tu veux faisons un rêve.

Nobody will be able to tell them, because, in spite of the gramophone and the cinematograph, the actor's art dies almost wholly with the actor. It is shortlived, but only relatively shortlived; and nobody understood that better than Sarah Bernhardt, one of whose mottoes was "Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse."

(It was tempered by another: "Quand même.")

On the loom of things the poems of Homer are only a little less ephemeral than a leading article, and the art of a Phidias is, after all, as perishable as the sketches of a "lightning" music-hall artist.

Le temps passe. Tout meurt. Le marbre même
   s'use.
Agrigente n'est plus qu'une ombre, et Syracuse
Dort sous le bleu linceul de son ciel indulgent.

The most enduring monuments, the most astounding miracles of beauty achieved by the art and craft of man, are but as flotsam, drifting for a little while upon the stream of Time; and with it now there is a strange russet leaf, the name of Sarah Bernhardt.