I am not sure that the best moment to study an artist is not the moment
of what is called decadence. The first energy of inspiration is gone;
what remains is the method, the mechanism, and it is that which alone
one can study, as one can study the mechanism of the body, not the
principle of life itself. What is done mechanically, after the heat of
the blood has cooled, and the divine accidents have ceased to happen, is
precisely all that was consciously skilful in the performance of an art.
To see all this mechanism left bare, as the form of the skeleton is left
bare when age thins the flesh upon it, is to learn more easily all that
is to be learnt of structure, the art which not art but nature has
hitherto concealed with its merciful covering.
The art of Sarah Bernhardt has always been a very conscious art, but it
spoke to us, once, with so electrical a shock, as if nerve touched
nerve, or the mere "contour subtil" of the voice were laid tinglingly on
one's spinal cord, that it was difficult to analyse it coldly. She was
Phèdre or Marguerite Gautier, she was Adrienne Lecouvreur, Fédora, La
Tosca, the actual woman, and she was also that other actual woman, Sarah
Bernhardt. Two magics met and united, in the artist and the woman, each
alone of its kind. There was an excitement in going to the theatre;
one's pulses beat feverishly before the curtain had risen; there was
almost a kind of obscure sensation of peril, such as one feels when the
lioness leaps into the cage, on the other side of the bars. And the
acting was like a passionate declaration, offered to some one unknown;
it was as if the whole nervous force of the audience were sucked out of
it and flung back, intensified, upon itself, as it encountered the
single, insatiable, indomitable nervous force of the woman. And so, in
its way, this very artificial acting seemed the mere instinctive,
irresistible expression of a temperament; it mesmerised one, awakening
the senses and sending the intelligence to sleep.
After all, though Réjane skins emotions alive, and Duse serves them up
to you on golden dishes, it is Sarah Bernhardt who prepares the supreme
feast. In "La Dame aux Camélias," still, she shows herself, as an
actress, the greatest actress in the world. It is all sheer acting;
there is no suggestion, as with Duse, there is no canaille
attractiveness, as with Réjane; the thing is plastic, a modelling of
emotion before you, with every vein visible; she leaves nothing to the
imagination, gives you every motion, all the physical signs of death,
all the fierce abandonment to every mood, to grief, to delight, to
lassitude. When she suffers, in the scene, for instance, where Armand
insults her, she is like a trapped wild beast which some one is
torturing, and she wakes just that harrowing pity. One's whole flesh
suffers with her flesh; her voice caresses and excites like a touch; it
has a throbbing, monotonous music, which breaks deliciously, which
pauses suspended, and then resolves itself in a perfect chord. Her
voice is like a thing detachable from herself, a thing which she takes
in her hands like a musical instrument, playing on the stops cunningly
with her fingers. Prose, when she speaks it, becomes a kind of verse,
with all the rhythms, the vocal harmonies, of a kind of human poetry.
Her whisper is heard across the whole theatre, every syllable distinct,
and yet it is really a whisper. She comes on the stage like a miraculous
painted idol, all nerves; she runs through the gamut of the sex, and
ends a child, when the approach of death brings Marguerite back to that
deep infantile part of woman. She plays the part now with the accustomed
ease of one who puts on and off an old shoe. It is almost a part of her;
she knows it through all her senses. And she moved me as much last night
as she moved me when I first saw her play the part eleven or twelve
years ago. To me, sitting where I was not too near the stage, she might
have been five-and-twenty. I saw none of the mechanism of the art, as I
saw it in "L'Aiglon"; here art still concealed art. Her vitality was
equal to the vitality of Réjane; it is differently expressed, that is
all. With Réjane the vitality is direct; it is the appeal of Gavroche,
the sharp, impudent urchin of the streets; Sarah Bernhardt's vitality is
electrical, and shoots its currents through all manner of winding ways.
In form it belongs to an earlier period, just as the writing of Dumas
fils belongs to an earlier period than the writing of Meilhac. It comes
to us with the tradition to which it has given life; it does not spring
into our midst, unruly as nature.
But it is in "Phèdre" that Sarah Bernhardt must be seen, if we are to
realise all that her art is capable of. In writing "Phèdre," Racine
anticipated Sarah Bernhardt. If the part had been made for her by a poet
of our own days, it could not have been brought more perfectly within
her limits, nor could it have more perfectly filled those limits to
their utmost edge. It is one of the greatest parts in poetical drama,
and it is written with a sense of the stage not less sure than its sense
of dramatic poetry. There was a time when Racine was looked upon as
old-fashioned, as conventional, as frigid. It is realised nowadays that
his verse has cadences like the cadences of Verlaine, that his language
is as simple and direct as prose, and that he is one of the most
passionate of poets. Of the character of Phèdre Racine tells us that it
is "ce que j'ai peut-être mis de plus raisonnable sur le théâtre." The
word strikes oddly on our ears, but every stage of the passion of Phèdre
is indeed reasonable, logical, as only a French poet, since the Greeks
themselves, could make it. The passion itself is an abnormal, an insane
thing, and that passion comes to us with all its force and all its
perversity; but the words in which it is expressed are never
extravagant, they are always clear, simple, temperate, perfectly precise
and explicit. The art is an art exquisitely balanced between the
conventional and the realistic, and the art of Sarah Bernhardt, when she
plays the part, is balanced with just the same unerring skill. She seems
to abandon herself wholly, at times, to her "fureurs"; she tears the
words with her teeth, and spits them out of her mouth, like a wild beast
ravening upon prey; but there is always dignity, restraint, a certain
remoteness of soul, and there is always the verse, and her miraculous
rendering of the verse, to keep Racine in the right atmosphere. Of what
we call acting there is little, little change in the expression of the
face. The part is a part for the voice, and it is only in "Phèdre" that
one can hear that orchestra, her voice, in all its variety of beauty. In
her modern plays, plays in prose, she is condemned to use only a few of
the instruments of the orchestra: an actress must, in such parts, be
conversational, and for how much beauty or variety is there room in
modern conversation? But here she has Racine's verse, along with
Racine's psychology, and the language has nothing more to offer the
voice of a tragic actress. She seems to speak her words, her lines, with
a kind of joyful satisfaction; all the artist in her delights in the
task. Her nerves are in it, as well as her intelligence; but everything
is coloured by the poetry, everything is subordinate to beauty.
Well, and she seems still to be the same Phèdre that she was eleven or
twelve years ago, as she is the same "Dame aux Camélias." Is it reality,
is it illusion? Illusion, perhaps, but an illusion which makes itself
into a very effectual kind of reality. She has played these pieces until
she has got them, not only by heart, but by every nerve and by every
vein, and now the ghost of the real thing is so like the real thing that
there is hardly any telling the one from the other. It is the living on
of a mastery once absolutely achieved, without so much as the need of a
new effort. The test of the artist, the test which decides how far the
artist is still living, as more than a force of memory, lies in the
power to create a new part, to bring new material to life. Last year, in
"L'Aiglon," it seemed to me that Sarah Bernhardt showed how little she
still possessed that power, and this year I see the same failure in
"Francesca da Rimini."
The play, it must be admitted, is hopelessly poor, common,
melodramatic, without atmosphere, without nobility, subtlety, or
passion; it degrades the story which we owe to Dante and not to history
(for, in itself, the story is a quite ordinary story of adultery: Dante
and the flames of his hell purged it), it degrades it almost out of all
recognition. These middle-aged people, who wrangle shrewishly behind the
just turned back of the husband and almost in the hearing of the child,
are people in whom it is impossible to be interested, apart from any
fine meanings put into them in the acting. And yet, since M. de Max has
made hardly less than a creation out of the part of Giovanni, filling
it, as he has, with his own nervous force and passionately restrained
art, might it not have been possible once for Sarah Bernhardt to have
thrilled us even as this Francesca of Mr. Marion Crawford? I think so;
she has taken bad plays as willingly as good plays, to turn them to her
own purpose, and she has been as triumphant, if not as fine, in bad
plays as in good ones. Now her Francesca is lifeless, a melodious
image, making meaningless music. She says over the words, cooingly,
chantingly, or frantically, as the expression marks, to which she seems
to act, demand. The interest is in following her expression-marks.
The first thing one notices in her acting, when one is free to watch it
coolly, is the way in which she subordinates effects to effect. She has
her crescendos, of course, and it is these which people are most apt to
remember, but the extraordinary force of these crescendos comes from the
smooth and level manner in which the main part of the speaking is done.
She is not anxious to make points at every moment, to put all the
possible emphasis into every separate phrase; I have heard her glide
over really significant phrases which, taken by themselves, would seem
to deserve more consideration, but which she has wisely subordinated to
an overpowering effect of ensemble. Sarah Bernhardt's acting always
reminds me of a musical performance. Her voice is itself an instrument
of music, and she plays upon it as a conductor plays upon an orchestra.
One seems to see the expression marks: piano, pianissimo, largamente,
and just where the tempo rubato comes in. She never forgets that art is
not nature, and that when one is speaking verse one is not talking
prose. She speaks with a liquid articulation of every syllable, like one
who loves the savour of words on the tongue, giving them a beauty and an
expressiveness often not in them themselves. Her face changes less than
you might expect; it is not over-possessed by detail, it gives always
the synthesis. The smile of the artist, a wonderful smile which has
never aged with her, pierces through the passion or languor of the part.
It is often accompanied by a suave, voluptuous tossing of the head, and
is like the smile of one who inhales some delicious perfume, with
half-closed eyes. All through the level perfection of her acting there
are little sharp snaps of the nerves; and these are but one indication
of that perfect mechanism which her art really is. Her finger is always
upon the spring; it touches or releases it, and the effect follows
instantaneously. The movements of her body, her gestures, the expression
of her face, are all harmonious, are all parts of a single harmony. It
is not reality which she aims at giving us, it is reality transposed
into another atmosphere, as if seen in a mirror, in which all its
outlines become more gracious. The pleasure which we get from seeing her
as Francesca or as Marguerite Gautier is doubled by that other pleasure,
never completely out of our minds, that she is also Sarah Bernhardt. One
sometimes forgets that Réjane is acting at all; it is the real woman of
the part, Sapho, or Zaza, or Yanetta, who lives before us. Also one
sometimes forgets that Duse is acting, that she is even pretending to be
Magda or Silvia; it is Duse herself who lives there, on the stage. But
Sarah Bernhardt is always the actress as well as the part; when she is
at her best, she is both equally, and our consciousness of the one does
not disturb our possession by the other. When she is not at her best, we
see only the actress, the incomparable craftswoman openly labouring at
her work.