CHAPTER XIISARAH BERNHARDT

“I am profoundly grieved to inform you that the Queen expired this evening at six-thirty. Notify melancholy intelligence to Government.”

I was just going home for a little leave, but now it seemed impossible: there would be too much to do. But Sir Edward insisted on my going, all the same. Herbert was arriving back from leave, and he said he could get on without me; so I went. I saw the funeral procession from a house near the Marble Arch. The only splash of colour in the greyness and gloom of the long procession was the regalia and the bright pall on the gun-carriage that bore the coffin, and everyone agreed that the most imposingfigure in the procession was the German Emperor in a great grey cloak. But the most impressive feature of the whole ceremony was the attitude of the crowd: its size, its silence, the universal black. London was like a dead city, and as someone said at the time: “One went about feeling as if one had cheated at cards.” I felt that what “Onkel Adolph” used to say at Hildesheim was true: “Die Engländer lieben ihre alte Königin” (“The English love their old Queen”).

In February I went to Karlsruhe to hear Ethel Smyth’s first opera,Fantasio, performed at the Hofteater with Mottl conducting.Fantasiois an opera in two acts written on Musset’s play. Ethel Smyth wrote the libretto herself in German. The opera contains some lovely songs, especially one that begins: “Reite ohne Sattelpferd,” and some of the most delicate music Ethel Smyth ever composed, but the libretto is undramatic, and there are not enough bones in the framework to support the musical structure. Mottl conducted the orchestra beautifully; the opera was respectfully received, but without any great enthusiasm. When the performance was over, we had supper with the Grand Duchess of Baden, and there I met a cousin of mine, Charlie d’Otrante, whom I had not seen since I was a child. He was now, though a Swedish subject—his father was a Swede—an officer in the German Army.

I stayed at Copenhagen till the spring. The spring in Denmark comes with a rush. All is wintry, without any hint of the coming change, and then all of a sudden, and in one night, the beech trees are green, and of so startling, vivid, and fresh a green that it almost hurts the eye, and through them you see the sea, a milky haze, and the sky looks as if it had been washed clean.

In May, I went to London for my first spell of long leave since I had passed my examination. I stayed all June and July in London, and in the middle of July I went over to Brittany to stay a few days with Sarah Bernhardt at her house, the Fort des Poulains on the island of Belle-Isle, which is at the extreme north of the island. This visit entailed a terrific journey: first, a long train journey with many changes, then several hours on board a steamer, and then a two hours’ drive. The house was a little white, square, flat-roofed building among the rocks and a stone’s-throw from the sea—a great roaringgrey sea, with huge breakers, leaping cataracts of foam, and beaches of grey pebbles. Sarah Bernhardt’s son was staying there, Clairin, the artist, and one or two other people. The house was built entirely of pitch-pine inside. Sarah used to appear atdéjeuner.

She spent all the morning working. In the afternoon she played lawn-tennis on a hard court; after dinner we played every kind of game. She was carrying on at the time a heated discussion by telegraph with the poet Catulle Mendès about the forthcoming production of a poetical play of his, calledLa Vierge d’Avilon. The dispute was about the casting: the poet wished one of the female parts to be played by a certain actress; Sarah wished otherwise. Telegram after telegram was sent and received, each of them several pages in length. The poet’s telegrams were lyrical and beautifully expressed. One of them began: “Vous êtes puissante et câline,” and another addressed her as “La grande faucheuse des illusions.” How the matter was settled ultimately, I never knew. During the whole time I stayed there, Sarah never mentioned the theatre, acting, or actors, except as far as they concerned this particular business discussion. On the other hand, she talked a great deal of her travels all over the world. She talked of Greece, and I quoted to her the line of some French poet about “des temples roux dans des poussières d’or,” and asked her whether it was an accurate description. She said: “Yes, of the Greek temples in Italy”; but, in Greece, she said it was a case of “des temples roses dans des poussières d’argent.” She said the most remarkable sight she had ever seen in her life was in Australia, when, in a large prairie, she had seen the whole sky suddenly filled with a dense flock of brilliantly coloured birds, which had risen all at once from the ground and obscured the whole horizon with their dazzling coloured plumage.

She was irresistibly comic at times, full of bubbling gaiety and spirits, and an admirable mimic. Jules Huret wrote, while I was at Paris, an article about her, in which he described this side of her admirably.

“Quand elle veut,” he said, “Sarah est d’un comique extraordinaire, par l’outrance de ses images toujours justes, et la violence imprévue de ses reparties. Cette gaieté de Sarah est bien caractéristique de sa force. C’est évidemment un trop plein de sève qui se résout en joie. Elle a des trouvailles,des mimiques, des répliques, une verve, des silences mêmes, qui font irrésistiblement éclater le rire autour d’elle. Elle imite certains de ses amis avec une vérité comique incroyable.”

What struck me most about her, when I saw her in private life, was her radiant and ever-present common-sense. There was no nonsense about her, no pose, and no posturing. She was completely natural. She took herself as much for granted as being the greatest actress in the world, as Queen Victoria took for granted that she was Queen of England. She took it for granted and passed on. She told me once she had never wished to be an actress—that she had gone on to the stage against her will; she would greatly have preferred to have been a painter, and all her life she continued to model as it was, and did some interesting things in this line, especially some bronze fishes and sea-shapes for which she found models at Belle-Isle, but when she found she had got to be an actress, she said to herself: “If it has got to be, then I will be the first.”

She said she had never got over her nervousness in playing a new part, or for the first time before a new audience; if she felt the audience was friendly, this knowledge half-paralysed her; if, on the other hand, she knew or guessed the audience to be hostile, every fibre in her being tightened for the struggle. She said that first nights at Paris, when she knew there would be hostile elements and critics ready to say she could no longer act, always gave her the greatest confidence; she felt then it was a battle, and a battle she could win; she would force the critics to acknowledge that she could act. She told me, too, she had never gone an inch out of her way to seek for friends or admirers; she had always let them come to her; she had never taken any notice of them till they forced their attention on her. At Belle-Isle I never once heard her allude to any of her parts or to any of her triumphs; but she talked a great deal about current events—of the people and politicians she had met in her life, in all the countries of Europe—and said some very shrewd things about the men who were ruling England at that time.

I stayed at Belle-Isle three or four days, then I went back to London, and at the end of July I started for Russia. I had been invited to stay with the Benckendorffs at their house in the country, Sosnofka in the Government of Tambov. I did not yet know one word of Russian. At Warsaw station I had to get out and change. I left my bag for a moment on the seatof the carriage. This bag contained my money, my ticket, my passport, and several other necessaries. When I came back it was gone. I couldn’t even tell anyone what had happened. As the result of a conversation in dumb show, I was put into a train; it was not the express it should have been, but a slow train, and then I had my first experience of the kindness and obligingness of the Russian people, for a fellow-traveller registered my luggage, bought me a ticket, telegraphed to the Benckendorffs for me, to the hotel at Moscow, and supplied me with food and money for the journey, which in this train took three days.

Thanks to the kindness of this traveller, I arrived safely at Moscow, and at Sosnofka the next day. It was a blazing hot August that year in Russia. The country was burnt and parched; the green of the trees had been burnt away. Sosnofka is a large straggling village, with thatched houses. Once every seven years the whole village would probably be burnt down. Russia was very different from what I had expected. I had read several Russian books in translations—Tolstoy and Tourgenev—but the background they had formed in my mind was not like Russia at all. In fact, I had never thought of these books as happening in Russia. The people they described were so like real people, so like people that I had known myself, that I had always imagined the action taking place in England or France. I imaginedAnna Kareninahappening in London. Not only did the characters seem real and familiar to me, but they struck me as being theonlycharacters I had ever met in any books which gave me the impression that I had myself known them. Dickens’ characters are real enough, and Thackeray’s characters are realistic enough; I believe absolutely in Sam Weller, in Mr. Micawber, in Mr. Guppy, in Mrs. Gamp, Mrs. Nickleby, and any you like to mention; the genius of Dickens has made me believe in them; I also believe in the existence of Major Pendennis and Becky Sharp; I feel I might meet people like that, but I never have; whereas with the characters in Tolstoy’s books I am not sure whether they belong to bookland at all; I am not at all sure they do not belong to my own past, my own limbo, which is peopled by real people and dream people. The background which I called up in my mind was something quite unconnected with Russian books, and something far removed from reality.It was the conventional background borrowed from detective stories, and Jules Verne’sMichael Strogoff, and from many melodramas. That is to say, I imagined barbaric houses, glittering and spangled bedizened Asiatic people. The reality was so different. Russia seemed such a natural country. Everybody seemed to be doing what they liked, without any fuss; to wear any clothes they liked; to smoke when and where they wished; to live in such simplicity and without any paraphernalia at all.

As for the landscape, my first impression was that of a large, rolling plain; a church with blue cupolas; a windmill and another church. The plain is dotted with villages, and every village is like the last; the houses are squat, sometimes built of logs and sometimes built of bricks, and the roofs are thatched with straw. The houses stand at irregular intervals, sometimes huddled close together and sometimes with wide gaps between them; it was dusty when I arrived; the broad road, which is not a real road, but an immense stoneless track like the roads in America and Australia, was littered with straw and various kinds of messes, and along it the creaking carts groaned, the peasants driving them leisurely and sometimes walking beside them. Every now and then there was a well with a large wooden see-saw pole to draw the water with; and everywhere, and over everything, the impression of space and leisureliness and the absence of hurry. The peasants wore loose shirts, with a leather coat thrown carelessly over their shoulder, or left in the cart, and the women looked picturesque in their everyday clothes; the folds of their prints and calicoes, which had something Biblical and statuesque about them, were more impressive to the eye than the silken finery which they wore when they went to church on Sunday.

The Benckendorffs lived at Sosnofka in two small separate two-storied houses, which were close together. The kitchen was in a separate building apart. In the pantry, the night-watchman, André, would play draughts in the daytime with Alexei, who cleaned the boots. By night the watchman watched; and every now and then blew a whistle. The butler, Alexander, was an old soldier in every sense of the word. His ingenuity had no end; nor had his resource. He could make anything and do anything; and in the course of one revolving noon he could be chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon. Hecould not only play, but he could make any musical instrument. He was an expert mixer of fireworks, an inspired carpenter, and he could mend anything. He bore the traces of an early military training and drill in his upright shoulders; and about once a month he would disappear and be drunk for two or three days. The house was housemaided by two old Russian peasants, Mavra and Masha, who wore kerchiefs over their heads and speckled calico shawls. Mavra’s devotion to the Benckendorff children passed all expression; she cared little for her fate and fortune and for that of her own family as long as they were alive and well. Michael, the coachman, was another great character; he wore a black cap with peacocks’ feathers sticking upright in it, and a black tunic with red sleeves. He drove thetroika, three horses abreast, and no road, or rather no absence of road, daunted him; on the edge of an impossible hill, with no track through it, and nothing in sight but bushes and logs, and nothing to guess at except holes, if asked whether it was possible to go on, he would always laconically answer, “Moshno” (“Possible”), and it always was possible. There was an under-coachman called Fro. He had his qualities too; and one of these was the way in the winter he would find and recognise a track after there had been a blizzard, which had entirely obliterated all semblance or trace of any path or roadway. Sometimes a little bit of paper or a stray twig would give him the clue. Only one felt just this: that Michael would have been quite unshaken in face of any catastrophes; the earth might have opened in front of one, a hostile aeroplane might have barred the way, a regiment of machine-gunners might have been reported to be in ambush—he would just have nodded and quietly said, “Moshno,” and nothing more.

After dinner, that summer we used to sit on the balcony or on a stone terrace on one side of the house, and watch the message of light, the warning halo the rising moon sent up from behind the hill before she rose:

“Perchance an orb more wondrous than the moonTrembles beneath the rim of the dark hills,”

“Perchance an orb more wondrous than the moon

Trembles beneath the rim of the dark hills,”

and listen in the thick dark night, while the peasants in the village stamped their rhythmical dances to the accompaniment of bleating accordions or three-stringed balalaikas; some watchman’s rattle beat time; the frogs croaked, and sometimes avoice—a rather hoarse, high, slightly sharp voice—began a long-drawn-out, high wail, and other voices chimed in, singing the same melody in a rough counterpoint. We sat at a little green garden-table drinking our coffee, and ournalivka, the delicious clean liqueur distilled from cherries. There seemed to be no time in Russia. People slept when they felt inclined, not necessarily because it was night. Once when I went to stay with a friend near Kirsanof he advised me to arrive at four o’clock in the morning, if possible, as the servants would enjoy thebustleof someone arriving when it was still dark.

One evening we went out riding through the woods, and over the plains, and no sooner had we left the front door than my pony, altogether out of control, galloped away into space. One morning we were called at one, and went out to the marshes to shoot wild duck before the dawn. It was quite dark when we started, and after the shooting was over, and I shot two wild duck dead, we drove home in the dawn across the dewy plains, when the whole country was awakening, the cocks crowing and the birds singing, and the plains were bathed in lemon-coloured light, and faint pink and grey clouds hung like shreds from Aurora’s scarf across the horizon.

One night we camped out in the woods. We took bottles of beer and water-melons, and playing-cards, and a camera, and many rugs. We slept little; the wood was full of flies and mosquitoes, but we enjoyed ourselves much all the same, and came back with that pleasant headache which is the result of sleeping on straw in the open air on a hot August night, and covered with bites. The morning after, we had a wolf-shoot, but it was too early in the year for wolves, and nobody saw one. But there was a great display, nevertheless; a man rode on a white horse and blew a trumpet, and there were a multitude of beaters. I remember a short dialogue bawled slowly, quietly, and sonorously in prolonged accents across a whole field between André, the night-watchman, and Wassili, the keeper. “Who is that man yonder?” asked Wassili. “He is a shepherd,” said André; “he feeds sheep.” “On pastukh, on past korov.” It was so dignified, so slow, like a fragment of dialogue from the Old Testament. In the morning we used to have breakfast out of doors, in the garden, under a tree, with a pleasant after-breakfast interlude of smokingand conversation; then Alexander and the gardener would stroll into the garden, and there would be endless discussion about the pulling down of some paling, or the repairing of some fence or chair, or the painting of some room or gate; Alexander’s volubility had no limit, and the gardener was extraordinarily ingenious in twisting the meaning of anything into the opposite of what had been said. We had luncheon at half-past twelve, and sat afterwards on the terrace, till the great heat was over, and then we would go out in thetroika, and take tea and a samovar with us, or find a samovar somewhere, and perhaps bathe in the river. After dinner, when it was too cold to stay out, we would sit indoors and play cards at the green table, marking the score in chalk on the table; and Pierre Benckendorff, who was not yet an officer, but still at the cadet college, used to read out Mark Twain in German, or draw pictures, or make me draw pictures, while he gave advice, or played the treble of tunes on the pianoforte.

There were three little rooms on the ground floor of the first house, which was built of wood. The first room into which the small front hall led was Count Benckendorff’s sitting-room. It had a writing-table; a table where there was an array of long pipes, neatly arranged; a round table with a green cloth on it, and a wooden cup and ball on a plate; a bookcase full of books of reference, which were constantly consulted, whenever, as so often occurred, there was a family argument. In this room, near one of the windows, there was a deal drawing-table. There were prints on the wall. The next room had some old French wooden furniture painted with little flowers, and a large grand pianoforte, and a comfortable corner round the fireplace; in front of a window, which went down to the ground and opened like a door, there was a stone terrace with orange trees in pots on it and agapanthus plants (later there were rose trees as well). Beyond this there was a third room full of books, old books, the library of Count Benckendorff’s grandfather—the books that had been modern in the eighteenth century, in their dark brown calf bindings, and old marbled papers; here was the newest edition of Byron in French, the poems of Pope and Corneille and Voltaire and Gresset, the letters of Madame de Sévigné, the memoirs of Madame de Caylus, Napoleonic memoirs and the poems of Ossian, Schiller’s plays, and an early edition of Gogol. Upstairs onthe landing, there was a cupboard full of every imaginable kind of novel: the Tauchnitz novels of many ages, and French novels of every description, the early Zolas, the early Feuillets, and Maupassant’s first stories. Before going to bed, we would dive into that cupboard, and one was always sure, even in the dark, of finding something one could read. I have always thought since then, the ideal bookcase would be that in which you could plunge a hand into in the dark and be sure of extracting something readable. In the stone-house, the boys had each of them a sitting-room on the ground floor, and I had a bedroom and sitting-room upstairs. Next to the school library at Eton, that sitting-room proved to be my favourite room in all the world and in all my life; and at its big table I painted innumerable water-colours, and wrote four plays in verse, two plays in prose, three long books in prose, besides translating a book of Leonardo da Vinci and writing endless letters and newspaper articles. In this room, one had the feeling of the world forgetting by the world forgot, and one was recalled to reality by a bell, or by Alexander coming up to the room, as he always did, to say that tea was ready or dinner, or that the horses were at the door.

I felt the charm of Russia directly I crossed the frontier; and after a three weeks’ stay there I was so bitten by it that I resolved firstly to learn Russian, and, secondly, to go back there as soon as I could.

I went back to Copenhagen, and stopped some hours at Moscow on the way, and saw the Kremlin, and had some amusing adventures at Testoff’s restaurant. Pierre Benckendorff had written down for me a list of things to ask for; one of which was caviare, which in Russian isikra. But when I saidikrathe waiters thought I saidigra, which means play, and merely turned on the great mechanical organ which that restaurant then boasted of, and I could not get any caviare.

When I got back to Copenhagen, I at once had lessons in Russian from thepsalomtchtchikat the Russian Church.

On the 19th of September, King EdwardVII.arrived in Denmark to pay his first visit to Denmark as King of England. The King was to arrive at Elsinore in theOsborne. The Staff of the Legation had received orders to go to Elsinore and meet His Majesty on board the yacht. His Majesty was to land in time to meet the King of Denmark, the Crown Prince and allthe Danish Royal Family, the King of Greece, Queen Alexandra, the Emperor and Empress of Russia, the Dowager Empress of Russia, Prince and Princess Charles of Denmark, and other members of the various Royal Families. We were to go in uniform. The train started at eight. I have already said I was living at the Legation, but my rooms were completely isolated from Sir Edward’s house, and had no connection with them. I had a Danish servant called Peter. He had been told to call me punctually at seven. He forgot, or overslept himself. I woke up by accident, and automatically, and found to my horror it was twenty-five minutes to eight, and the station was far off, and I had to dress in uniform. I dressed like lightning, but it is not easy to dress like lightning in a diplomatic uniform; the tight boots are a special difficulty. I had no time to shave. I got a cab, and we drove at full gallop to the station, and I got into Sir Edward’s carriage as the train was moving out of the station. At Elsinore, we had fortunately some time to spare before going on board theOsborne, and I was able to get shaved in the village. Then we went on board and were presented to the King, and kissed his hand on his accession.

That same night there was a banquet at the Palace of Fredensborg for the King, to which the staff of the Legation were invited. I remember only one thing about this dinner, and that is that we were given 1600 hock to drink. It was quite bitter, and had to be drunk with about five lumps of sugar in a glass.

After dinner, we stood round a large room while the Kings and Queens, the Emperor and Empresses and Princesses, went round and talked to the guests; and this was the end of a tiring day.

A few days later the King came to luncheon at the Legation.

There was one other Royal arrival which I shall never forget. I cannot place its date, but I think it must have been Queen Alexandra’s first visit as Queen to Copenhagen. But what I remember is this, that while we were waiting on the station platform, Queen Alexandra descended from the train all in black, with long floating veils, and threaded her way through the crowd of Royalties and officials, looking younger than anyone present, with still the same fairy-tale-like grace of carriage and movement that I remembered as a child, and with the same youthful smile of welcome, and with all herdelicacy of form and feature heightened by her mourning and her long black veils, whose floating intricacy were obedient and docile to the undefinable rhythm of her beauty, and I remember thinking of Donne’s lines:

“No spring, no summer beauty has such graceAs I have seen in one autumnal face.”

“No spring, no summer beauty has such grace

As I have seen in one autumnal face.”

I spent that Christmas at Copenhagen, and on the 7th of January 1902 a dispatch came to say I had been transferred from the post of a Third Secretary at His Majesty’s Legation at Copenhagen to that of a Third Secretary of His Majesty’s Embassy at Rome. Before I left Copenhagen I had finished an article on Taine, an article on modern French literature, and an article on Sully Prudhomme, for the new edition of theBritish Encyclopædia.

I said that Sarah Bernhardt should have a chapter to herself.

“Les Comédiens,” said Jules Lemaître, “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 ofPhèdre, 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 hercontemporaries, from Théodore de Banville and Charlotte Brontë. 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 thepoilus; 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 Théâtre français in 1862, in theIphigénieof 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 inLe Passant, by François Coppée, and that she was hailed as a rising star as the Queen inRuy 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

In 1872 she left the Odéon and entered the Théâtre français once more. She reappeared inMademoiselle 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 théâtre.”

It was during a performance of Voltaire’sZaïre, 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 Théâtre français, had insisted. When the night came when she was due to appear inZaïre(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 inPhèdrethat Sarah Bernhardt proved she possessed not only grace but power; her rendering of Doña Sol inHernani(November 1877) definitely sealed her reputation, not only as a tragic actress, but as the incarnation of somethingnew and exotic. And the world recognised her incomparable talent for speaking verse.

In 1879, the Comédie française 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 ofL’Aventurière, she suddenly resigned, and, after a short season in London, in May 1880, started for America.

This rupture with the Théâtre français, 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 Théâtre français 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 Théâtre français, we should never have realised her capacities to the full. In fact, had she remained at the Théâtre français, she would not have been Sarah Bernhardt. We should havelost 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 herDame aux Camélias, herLorenzaccio, herHamlet. 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. InFédora, 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 actingwellin such plays; you must act tremendously or not at all.La Toscamust be a violent shock to the nerves or nothing. When it was first produced, Jules Lemaître, 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 herPhèdre, herHamlet, and herLorenzaccio; 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 Théâtre français. 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 wholeseries 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 Izéïl 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 Théâtre français. 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 asLéna, the adaptation ofAs 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 ofLa Toscain 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’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 calledLes Rois, by Jules Lemaître.

I am not sure of the date of this performance, but she playedPhèdreat the Renaissance in 1893, and Lemaître said that “Jamais, Madame Sarah Bernhardt, ne fut plus parfaite, ni plus puissante, ni plus adorable.” She produced Sudermann’sMagdain 1896, and Musset’sLorenzaccioin December 1896, and then she discovered Rostand, whose first play,Les Romanesques, had been done at the Français, and turned him into the channel of serious poetical drama.

She then built a theatre for herself, and gave us Rostand’sSamaritaine,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 inLe Procès de Jeanne d’Arc; another was as Lucrezia Borgia in Victor Hugo’s play; and a third the hero of the charming poetical playLes Bouffons. She found a saner, larger repertory, and crowned her career by triumphing inAthaliein 1920.

Some French critics think herLorenzacciowas the finest of her parts. Lemaître said about it: “Elle n’a pas seulement joué, comme elle sait jouer, son rôle: 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 sunous 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 theRevue Bleueof December 1896:

“Cette fois ç’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 ç’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’âme, 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 rôle 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 âme; 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 théâtre, qui égalât 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, successfulprima donna, acabotine, not without genius, and with moments, when her human feelings were touched, ofgreatness; 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 ClaudeDuse 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 Doña Sol; and that Duse, in the rôle 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 Lemaître says of Duse inLa Dame aux Caméliaswill 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 actorsof Paris might see her play inAthalie; 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 Doña 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 beingheld 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):

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