SARAH BERNHARDT
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 of
_Phèdre_, 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 her contemporaries, 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 the _poilus_; 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 the _Iphigénie_ of
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 in _Le Passant_, by François Coppée,
and that she was hailed as a rising star as the Queen in _Ruy Blas_, at
the Odéon, and became, in her own words, something more than “la petite
fée des étudiants.”
[Illustration: Portraits of Sarah Bernhardt by the author (age 7), drawn
in 1881]
[Illustration: Sarah Bernhardt in the eighties]
In 1872 she left the Odéon and entered the Théâtre français once more.
She reappeared in _Mademoiselle 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’s _Zaïre_, 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 in _Zaïre_ (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 in _Phèdre_ that Sarah Bernhardt proved she possessed not only
grace but power; her rendering of Doña Sol in _Hernani_ (November 1877)
definitely sealed her reputation, not only as a tragic actress, but as
the incarnation of something new 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 of _L’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 have lost 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 her _Dame
aux Camélias_, her _Lorenzaccio_, her _Hamlet_. 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. In _Fédora_,
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 acting _well_ in such plays; you must act tremendously or not at
all. _La Tosca_ must 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 her _Phèdre_, her _Hamlet_, and her _Lorenzaccio_; 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 whole series 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 as _Léna_, the adaptation of _As 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 of _La Tosca_ in 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
called _Les Rois_, by Jules Lemaître.
I am not sure of the date of this performance, but she played _Phèdre_
at 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’s _Magda_ in 1896, and Musset’s _Lorenzaccio_ in
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’s
_Samaritaine_, _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 in _Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc_; another was as Lucrezia
Borgia in Victor Hugo’s play; and a third the hero of the charming
poetical play _Les Bouffons_. She found a saner, larger repertory, and
crowned her career by triumphing in _Athalie_ in 1920.
Some French critics think her _Lorenzaccio_ was 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 su nous 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 the _Revue
Bleue_ of 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, successful _prima donna_, a _cabotine_, not
without genius, and with moments, when her human feelings were touched,
of greatness; 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 Claude_ Duse 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 in _La Dame aux Camélias_
will 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
actors of Paris might see her play in _Athalie_; 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 being held 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):
“Si tu veux faisons un rêve,
Montons sur deux palefrois;
Tu m’emmènes, je t’enlève,
L’oiseau chante dans les bois.
Je suis ton maître et ta proie;
Partons, c’est la fin du jour;
Mon cheval sera la joie;
Ton cheval sera l’amour.”
Ritz and the well-dressed crowd, and the raw November air, and the gloom
of the war, the depression and the discomfort all disappeared.
“Nous ferons toucher leurs têtes;
Les voyages sont aisés;
Nous donnerons à ces bêtes
Une avoine de baisers.
Viens! nos doux chevaux mensonges
Frappent du pied tous les deux,
Le mien au fond des songes
Et le tien au fond des cieux.
Un bagage est nécessaire;
Nous emporterons nos vœux,
Nos bonheurs, notre misère,
Et la fleur de tes cheveux.”
We heard the champing of the steeds in an enchanted forest, the song of
the calling bird, and the laughter of adventurous lovers.
“Viens, le soir brunit les chênes,
Le moineau rit; ce moqueur
Entend le doux bruit des chaînes
Que tu m’as mises au cœur.
Ce ne sera point ma faute
Si les forêts et les monts,
En nous voyons côte à côte,
Ne murmurent pas: Aimons!
Viens, sois tendre, je suis ivre.
O les verts taillis mouillés!
Ton soufle te fera suivre
Des papillons réveillés.”
In the second line of the last stanza quoted:
“O les verts taillis mouillés!”
her voice suddenly changed its key and passed, as it were, from a minor
of tenderness to an abrupt major of childlike wonder or delighted awe; it
half broke into something between a sob of joy and a tearful smile; we
saw the dew-drenched grasses and the gleaming thickets, and then as she
said the two next lines the surprise died away in mystery and an infinite
homage:
“Was it love or praise?
Speech half asleep or song half awake?”
And when further on in the poem she said:
“Allons nous en par l’Autriche!
Nous aurons l’aube à nos fronts;
Je serai grand, et toi riche,
Puisque nous nous aimerons,”
we heard the call of youth, the soaring of first love, the spirit of
adventure, of romance, and of spring. When she came to the last stanza of
all:
“Tu sera dame, et moi comte;
Viens, mon cœur s’épanouit,
Viens, nous conterons ce conte
Aux étoiles de la nuit,”
she opened wide her raised arms, and one could have sworn a girl of
eighteen, “April’s lady,” was calling to her “lord in May.”
When she had done, a great many people in the audience were crying; the
applause was deafening, and she had to say the whole poem over a second
time, which she did, with the same effect on the audience.
Another occasion which I shall never forget was the first night that she
played _Hamlet_ in Paris. The audience was brilliant and hypercritical,
and the play was received coldly until the first scene between Polonius
and Hamlet. When Hamlet answers Polonius’s question: “What do you read,
my Lord?” with his “Words, words, words,” Sarah Bernhardt played it like
this. (She was dressed and got up like the pictures of young Raphael,
with a fair wig; she was the soul of courtesy in the part, a gentle
Prince.) Hamlet was lying on a chair reading a book. The first “_des
mots_” he said with an absent-minded indifference, just as anyone speaks
when interrupted by a bore; in the second “_des mots_” his answer seemed
to catch his own attention, and the third “_des mots_” was accompanied by
a look, and charged with an intense but fugitive intention: something
“between a smile and a smothered sigh,”
with a break in the intonation, that clearly said: “Yes, it is words,
words, words, and all books and everything else in life and in the
whole world is only words, words, words.” This delicate shadow, this
adumbration of a hint was instantly seized by the audience from the
gallery to the stalls; and the whole house cried: “Bravo! bravo!” It
was a fine example of the receptivity, the flair, and the corporate
intelligence of a good French audience.
Personally I think her Hamlet was one of the four greatest achievements
of her career. I will come to the others later. Excepting Sir Johnston
Forbes Robertson’s Hamlet, it was the only intelligible Hamlet of our
time. One great point of difference between this Hamlet and that of any
other actors I have seen is, whereas most Hamlets seem isolated from
the rest of the players, as if they were reciting something apart from
the play and speaking to the audience, this Hamlet spoke to the other
persons of the play, shared their life, their external life, however
wide the spiritual gulf might be between them and Hamlet. This Hamlet
was in Denmark; not in splendid isolation, on the boards, in order to
show how well he could spout Shakespeare’s monologues, or that he was an
interesting fellow.
Another point: her Hamlet is the only one I have seen in which there was
real continuity, in which one scene seemed to have any connection with
the preceding scenes.
She had already shown what she could do in the progression of a single
scene by crescendo, diminuendo transition, and modulation, in the
dialogue with Ophelia—“Get thee to a nunnery.” The transition between
the tenderness of “Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered,”
and the brutality of “I have heard of your paintings too, well enough,”
was made plausible by Hamlet catching sight of the King and Polonius in
the arras—a piece of business recommended, I think, by Coleridge; but
the naturalness and the progression of this scene were a marvel; the
profound gravity and bitterness with which she spoke the words: “I am
myself indifferent honest: but I could accuse me of such things, that
it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful,
ambitious.” One seemed to be overhearing Shakespeare himself in a
confessional when she said that speech, and the cynicism of the final
words of the scene were whispered and hissed with a withering, blighting
bitterness, her voice sinking to a swift whisper, as though all the
utterance of the body has been exhausted, and these words were the cry of
a broken heart. But an example of what I mean by the continuity of the
interpretation is when the play within the play is finished, when Hamlet
breaks up the whole entertainment by his startling behaviour. In that
scene Sarah Bernhardt was like a tiger; her glance transfixed and pierced
through the King, and towards the end of the play within the play she
crept across the stage and climbed up on to the high, raised, balconied
dais on the right of the stage, from which he was looking on, and stared
straight into his face with the accusing, questioning challenge of an
avenging angel. But the point I want to make is this: when that scene is
over, most players take the interview with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
which follows immediately after it, as though nothing had happened. Not
so Sarah Bernhardt; during the whole of this interview she played in a
manner which let you see that Hamlet was still trembling with excitement
from what had happened immediately before; and this not only brought
out the irony and the point of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s flat
conventionality, but gave the audience the sharp sensation that they
were face to face with life itself. So was it throughout her Hamlet;
each scene depended on all the others; and the various moods of the Dane
succeeded one another, like clouds that chased one another but belonged
to one sky, and not like separate slides of a magic lantern.
The fight with Laertes was terribly natural; the business of the exchange
of swords, and the expression in Hamlet’s eyes when he realised, and
showed that he had realised, that one of the swords was poisoned and
now in his hands, which, in the hands of mediocre players, becomes so
preposterously extravagant, was tremendous.
The whole performance was natural, easy, life-like, and princely, and
perhaps the most poignant scene of all, and what is the most poignant
scene in the play, if it is well played, was the conversation with
Horatio, just before the final duel when Hamlet says: “If it be not to
come, it will be now.” Sarah charged these words with a sense of doom,
with the set courage that faces doom and with the underlying certainty
of doom in spite of the courage that is there to meet it. It made one’s
blood run cold.
Another occasion when Sarah Bernhardt’s acting seemed to me tremendous,
was a performance of _La Dame aux Camélias_ not long before the war. I
had seen her play the part dozens of times, and during a space of twenty
years both in Paris and in London. She was not well; she was suffering
from rheumatism; the stage had to be marked out in chalk for her, showing
where she could stand up. She was too unwell to stand up for more than
certain given moments. I went to see her with a Russian actress who had
seen her play in St. Petersburg or Moscow, and not been able to endure
her acting; she had seen her walk through a part before an indifferent
audience that wondered what her great reputation was founded on. We
arrived late after the second act, and I went behind the scenes and
talked to Sarah, and told her of this Russian actress. She played the
last three acts in so moving and simple a manner, and the last act with
such agonising poignancy and reserve that not only was my Russian friend
in tears, but the actors on the stage cried so much that their tears
discoloured their faces and made runnels in their grease paint.
As we went away my Russian friend said to me that was the finest bit of
acting she had ever seen or hoped to see again.
Another time, I think it was 1896, I was present at a performance of
_Magda_ in Paris at the Renaissance Theatre by Sarah; in her own phrase,
_le Dieu était là_, and I shall never forget the thrill that passed
through the audience when Magda, at the thought of being separated from
her child, let loose her passion, and spoke the elemental love of a
mother defending her child. Here the _advocatus Diaboli_ will chuckle and
say something about “tearing a passion to pieces.” This was just what it
was not. The tirade was concentrated and subdued, and it culminated in a
whisper which had the vehemence of a whirlwind. The scene was interrupted
by a spontaneous cry of applause. I have sometimes heard applause like
this before and since, when Sarah Bernhardt has been acting, but I have
never seen the art of any other actor or actress provoke so great and so
loud a cry.
I said Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet was one of the four great achievements of
her career. These are what I think were the others:
The greatest thing an actor or an actress can do is to create a poet.
It used at one time to be said that Sarah Bernhardt had failed to do
this. Yet the only really remarkable French dramatic poet of modern
times, whose plays really moved and held the public, Edmond Rostand,
was a creation of Sarah Bernhardt. The younger generation of his time,
and some men of letters in France, but not all (Émile Faguet was a
notable exception, and Jules Lemaître writes of his art with great
discrimination), used to despise the verse of Edmond Rostand. But
whatever anyone can say about the literary value of his work, there is no
doubt about its dramatic value. Rostand may or may not have been a great
poet or even a great artist in verse, but that he was a great poetical
dramatist was proved by the only possible test—that of the rapturous
enthusiasm of his audience, wherever and in whatever language his plays
are performed. Since Victor Hugo, he is the one writer of our time, and
the only writer in this century in the whole of Europe, who made a direct
and successful appeal to the public, to the public in all countries where
his plays were performed, and stirred and delighted them to the depths of
their being through the medium of dramatic poetry. Surely this is no mean
achievement; besides this, even among French critics, there are many who
maintain that he is a genuine poet. Well, Sarah Bernhardt is in the main
responsible for Rostand, for had there been no Sarah there would have
been no _Princesse Lointaine_, and no _Cyrano_ (for it was Coquelin’s
delight in _La Princesse Lointaine_ which made him ask Rostand for a
play), no _Samaritaine_, and no _L’Aiglon_.
This is one of the achievements of Sarah Bernhardt. Another and
perhaps a more important achievement was accomplished before this—her
resuscitation of Racine. Let everyone interested in this question get M.
Émile Faguet’s _Propos de Théâtre_. M. Faguet shows with great wealth of
detail and abundance of contemporary evidence that in the ’seventies,
until Sarah Bernhardt played in _Andromaque_ and _Phèdre_, Racine’s plays
were thought unsuited for dramatic representation. Even Sarcey used
to say in those days that Racine was not _un homme de théâtre_. Sarah
Bernhardt changed all this. She revealed the beauties of Racine to her
contemporaries. She put new life into his plays, and by her incomparable
delivery she showed off, as no one else can hope to do, the various and
subtle secrets of Racine’s verse.
She did the same for Victor Hugo when she played Doña Sol and the Queen
in _Ruy Bias_. Théodore de Banville, in his _Camées Parisiens_, says
there could never be another Queen in _Ruy Bias_ like Sarah, and that,
whenever the words:
“Elle avait un petit diadème en dentelle d’argent”
are spoken, the vision of Sarah Bernhardt will rise, as though it were
that of a real person, frail, slender, with a small crown set in her
wonderful hair.
Yet, when all is said and done, Sarah Bernhardt’s supreme achievement
is another and a fourth: her Phèdre. I do not think that anyone will
disagree with this. It was in _Phèdre_ that she gave the maximum of
beauty, and exhibited the whole range of her highest artistic qualities.
In _Phèdre_ her movements and her gestures, her explosions of fury and
her outbursts of passion, were subservient to a commanding rhythm;
from the moment Phèdre walked on to the stage trembling under the load
of her unconfessed passion until the moment she descended into Hades,
_par un chemin plus lent_, the spectator witnessed the building up
of a miraculous piece of architecture, in time and not in space; and
followed the progressions, the rise, the crisis, and the tranquil close
of a mysterious symphony. Moreover, a window was opened for him wide
on to the enchanted land: the realm of beauty in which there are no
conflicts of times and fashions, but in which all who bear the torch
have an equal inheritance. He saw a woman speaking the precise, stately,
and musical language of the court of Louis XIV., who, by her utterance,
the plastic beauty of her attitudes, and the rhythm of her movements,
opened the gates of time, and beyond the veil of the seventeenth century
evoked the vision of ancient Greece. Or, rather, time was annihilated,
seventeenth-century France and ancient Greece, Versailles and Trézène,
were merged into one; he was face to face with involuntary passion and
the unequal struggle between it and reluctant conscience.
There was the unwilling prey of the goddess, “a lily on her brow with
anguish moist and fever dew”; but at the sound of her voice and the music
of her grief, perhaps we forgot all this, perhaps we forgot the ancient
tales of Greece, and Crete, we forgot Racine and Versailles; perhaps
we thought only of the woman that was there before us, who surely was
something more than human: was it she who plied the golden loom in the
island of Ææa and made Ulysses swerve in mid-ocean from his goal? Or she
who sailed down the Cydnus and revelled with Mark Antony? Or she for
whom Geoffroy Rudel sailed to Tripoli, and sang and died? Or she who
haunted the vision but baffled the pencil of Leonardo da Vinci? Or she
who excelled “all women in the magic of her locks,” and beckoned to Faust
on the Brocken? She was something of all these things, an incarnation of
the spirit that, in all times and in all countries, whether she be called
Lilith or Lamia or La Gioconda, in the semblance of a “Belle Dame sans
Merci,” bewitches the heart and binds the brain of man with a spell, and
makes the world seem a dark and empty place without her, and Death for
her sake and in her sight a joyous thing.
So used we to dream when we saw those harmonious gestures and heard
that matchless utterance. Then the curtain fell, and we remembered that
it was only a play, and that even Sarah Bernhardt must “fare as other
Empresses,” and “wane with enforc’d and necessary change.”
Nevertheless, we give thanks—we that have lived in her day; for, whatever
the future may bring, there will never be another Sarah Bernhardt:
“Yea, they shall say, earth’s womb has borne in vain
New things, and never this best thing again.”