Sarah Bernhardt has been playing a patriotic play, _Les Cathedrales_, in
London. “It is such a great play I intend taking it into the provinces
and then back to London again”, she says. We have said it is a patriotic
play; nothing more need be said. Bernhardt plays one of the seven
cathedrals, _Strasburg_. In the interview, quoted above, given to the
London magazine, _Drawing_, Bernhardt has also this to say: “And now, it
seems to me that artists in the Allied Countries, and also authors,
painters, composers, and all those concerned in the theatre have to bind
themselves into a league for removing all traces of German nature and
influence from our plays and theatres.... Now the German showman
Reinhardt flooded Paris and London with the Berliner deluge of the
spectacular. He claims artistic superiority on the grounds of having
introduced several novel trivialities. But to trace the real curve of
truth I must say that he did nothing of the kind. He merely revived, in
_Sumurun_ and _Oedipus Rex_, certain outworn conventions which existed
before his time! But he has not the honesty to acknowledge it.” Later
she does say something worth thinking over: “What he has done is to use
Eastern methods for Western ideas when he should have used Eastern ideas
for Western methods.” Plagiarism is an irrelevant charge to bring
against an artist, but acknowledging an artistic right to adaptation
means expansion and, despite nationalism, a universal one-ness.