Bernhardt--the most striking in a long line of similar occasions. It
was felt that her position as queen of the stage deserved a public
recognition. It was carried through with Gallic enthusiasm. Sardou
presided at a mid-day banquet attended by Coppée, Lemaître, Theuriet,
Lavedan, Coquelin, Charpentier, Rostand, and a host of others from
the literary and artistic world of Paris. Sardou hailed her as the
acknowledged sovereign of dramatic art, and bore testimony not only
to her acting, but also to “the benevolence, the charity, and the
exquisite kindness of the woman.” When Sarah had responded with a
few words of thanks, there was a great demonstration, emotionally
enthusiastic and Gallic. Later in the day, at the _Renaissance_, the
ceremonies were continued. Sarah gave the third act of _Phèdre_ and the
fourth act of _Rome Vaincue_. She gave her best efforts and her hearers
were much moved. Huret records that all his neighbors in the audience
were weeping. Then, five poets, François Coppée, Edmond Harancourt,
Catulle Mendès, André Theuriet and Edmond Rostand, advanced in turn,
each to read a sonnet in Sarah’s honor. When Rostand’s--the last and
best--was finished, she was seen to tremble and to stand weeping in
their midst. “No spectacle could be finer,” says Huret, “than this
woman, whose unconquerable energy had withstood the struggles and
difficulties of a thirty-years’ career, standing overwhelmed and
vanquished by the power of a few lines of poetry.”
Whether or not she was a divinely ennobled and beneficent artist,
this trait of “unconquerable energy” is undeniably a marvel. For
instance, in January, 1906, when she was sixty-one, she appeared in
Boston. In the twenty-six hours between half-past eight on Friday
evening and half-past ten on Saturday evening she acted Fédora, Phèdre,
and Cesarine in Dumas’s _La Femme de Claude_, each a long, exacting
and, one would think, exhausting rôle. At the end of the third play,
however, Bernhardt had her artistic resources and her strength as fully
under her command as at the beginning. And she had been forty-four
years on the stage. This was but an incident of a widely extended
tour, a sample of what she had been doing all her life.
In February, 1907, she was made a professor at the _Conservatoire_,
partly in an attempt to make her eligible for the cross of the Legion
of Honor. This was an honor that Sarah had long desired, and, it
must be said, deserved. Her service to her country as a herald of
its language and art--to say nothing of that during 1870--has been
inestimably greater than that of many who have received the honor.
But in France an actress is still without social position, and the
social conservatism of Paris officialdom always prevailed in the
face of Sarah’s champions. For no actress, merely as an actress, had
ever been admitted to the Legion. In January, 1914, however, it was
announced throughout the world that Mme. Bernhardt had received the
long-coveted decoration. The usual objections and traditions had been
interposed, but President Poincaire himself cut the red tape. In
March the formal presentation occurred. _L’Université des Annales_
organized the ceremony. Government officials, actors and actresses,
poets, playwrights and a throng of the notabilities of Paris gathered
to do Madame Sarah honor. The Minister of Fine Arts, on behalf of the
Government, presented the decoration and made a formal speech in which
he summed up her services as patriot and as a missionary of the French
language. Verses by Rostand and other poets were read, music composed
for the occasion was played, artists advanced and heaped flowers at
Bernhardt’s feet, and then came forward twelve actors and actresses,
each representing a famous character in Bernhardt’s repertoire, and
speaking lines from the original plays. The whole became a sonnet in
dialogue. Finally Bernhardt herself ended the very French but very
sincere occasion by an eloquent and tender speech of thanks.
About this time a photograph found its way into the American
newspapers. It showed Madame Sarah with the glittering cross of the
Legion pinned to her dress. Seated on her lap and gazing at the
decoration is Madame Sarah’s _great-grandchild_.
We have mentioned Mr. Winter’s wholesale repudiation of the plays in
which Bernhardt attained her eminence. Without subscribing to the total
depravity of such plays and of Bernhardt’s influence, one can freely
admit that her appeal fell below the supremest heights of drama, and
that her field was, after all, a narrow one. There were natural causes
for this narrowness. It was imposed by her personality. She partakes
to the fullest extent of that variation of the French character that
is predominatingly sensual, yet regards its sensuality as a kind of
spirituality. Again, her technical equipment as an actress included a
voice of such richness and variety of effect, and a power of gesture
and pose so naturally adapted to the grand style, that her tendency was
for the florid and rhetorical. Thus the idealistic or poetic play, on
the one hand, and the frankly naturalistic on the other, were beyond
her province. The result has been, most notably, a succession of plays
by Sardou--_Fédora_, _Théodora_, _La Tosca_, _Cléopâtre_, _Gismonda_,
_Zoraya_, in which the author “accepting her limitations, harped
time and time again upon the same notes. His heroines are creatures
all alike compounded of Bernhardtesque attributes--feline in their
endearments, tigerish in their passions of love and hate. As stage
figures they represent the boldest prose of the emotions, expressed
with a rhetoric that is flawless, but still rhetoric.”[40]
So much for the main note. In a career so astonishingly long and
successful there have been, of course, others. We have seen how, in
_L’Aiglon_, _Hamlet_, and _Jeanne d’Arc_ she boldly went outside her
usual field. Even within it there have been of course many moments of
winning appeal or great power. To none other than Mr. Winter did her
Frou-Frou appear pure-spirited, “an exquisite texture ... of childlike
womanhood,”[41] and as Floria Tosca “Bernhardt’s acting ... was
magnificent,--for it created the effect of perfect illusion”; it will
“be remembered with a shuddering sense of horror as long as anything is
remembered of her achievement.... Of its kind it was absolutely perfect
art.” In _La Femme X_ he found her art consummate. Her Marguérite
Gauthier in _La Dame aux Camélias_ did much to give that heroine
genuine and compelling appeal to the purer emotions, her Phèdre has
its moments of genuine nobility. And though it may be true that, in
the main, she worked in those strata of the drama that are of “little
benefit to humanity,” the sheer extent and strength of her influence
bear witness that much in her work found a response in the minds and
sympathies of two generations of people.
She is, after all, unique, whatever the loftiness of her message;
for the intensity of her power, the span of time over which she has
exercised it and the universality of her fame combine to write a
chapter that stands alone in theatrical annals.
* * * * *
To the body of Bernhardtian legend has now been added the legend of the
leg. This time it is an authentic legend, and one that adds greatly to
Sarah’s merited fame for courage and will.
In February, 1915, she wrote to Mme. Jane Catulle Mendès:
“_My Dear_: As you perhaps have learned, they are going to cut off my
leg Monday. They should have done so last Sunday, but it seems I was
not sufficiently prepared for that first performance. The principal
artist, my right leg, had not learned its rôle. It has now learned it,
and it will be charming.”
There is a long story of patiently endured suffering back of that
lightly phrased note. In 1912 she made a visit to America, playing--as
before and since in London--in the vaudeville theatres short scenes
from her former successes. There were circumstances in her acting that
puzzled the beholders. She would take a fixed position and maintain
it for long periods. When she moved across the stage, it was usually
with another’s support. Such hamperings to her acting were commonly put
down to her advanced age, or sometimes to rheumatism. As a matter of
fact, Sarah had for ten years suffered from osteoarthritis--chronic
inflammation of the articulation of her right knee. The trouble
manifested itself first at Montevideo, and was there temporarily and
inadequately treated. From that time, at first intermittently and then
continuously, the knee brought her pain that she endured with fortitude
and without curtailment of her work. As time went on, she gradually
modified the business of her parts, and even had plays written to suit
her limitations,--as in _Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc_, in which she stood
in court all during one act and in another remained seated at the side
of her bed.
In the Spring of 1914, while she was playing in Liège, she gave the
afflicted knee a slight sprain. Upon this, the trouble became acute.
She remained, first at her house on Belle Isle, and later at Andernos,
now Arcachon, with the knee in a fixed plaster cast. The pain was
reduced; Mme. Sarah could paint and could work on her memoirs, and her
general health was excellent; but here she was with her career cut off!
When the surgeons, hoping to replace the cast with some apparatus that
would permit her to walk, found that instead the knee would have to be
kept unmoved for an indefinite time, Sarah took matters into her own
hands, and ordered the offending member removed. It was better, she
said, in a letter to Maurice Barres, “to be mutilated than to remain
impotent.”
On February 22, 1915, at Bordeaux, in her seventy-first year, Mme.
Bernhardt’s right leg was amputated above the knee. “While the
hospital attendants were preparing for the operation,” said a dispatch
from her bedside, “the actress conversed volubly with her doctors:
‘Work is my life. So soon as I can be fitted with an artificial leg,
I shall resume the stage and all my good spirits shall be restored. I
hope again to be able to use all that force of art which now upholds
me and which will sustain me until beyond the grave,’”--a speech, as
Philip Hale said, “worthy of one of Plutarch’s men.” Surgeons and
nurses present at the operation were deeply impressed by the calm
courage with which she faced the operation.[42]
Even in the midst of the horrors and anxieties of universal war,
Bernhardt’s ordeal challenged world-wide sympathy. Portraits and
eulogies appeared in every paper. For a week or more, until it
became certain that the operation had been successful, bulletins on
her condition were printed daily. Queen Victoria of Spain, the aged
Eugénie, M. Deschanel, president of the Chamber of Deputies, Edmond
Rostand--these were only a few of those, both proud and humble, whose
messages poured in upon her from all quarters. Alexandra, Queen-mother
of Great Britain, sent word of the “sympathy which all England shares
for the greatest artist in the world.” After the operation, Mme.
Bernhardt said that she was to “live again. Already I am free from
suffering, happy and full of courage, and now I am going to get well
quickly. I shall retake my place in the world.”
This announcement was sufficiently astounding. The remarkable woman
then followed it with another,--that she would make a new tour in
America, this time not in the vaudeville theatres (where interest in
her was before not overwhelming), but in the regular theatres, where
she would offer a number of plays in which she has not yet been seen on
this side of the Atlantic.
Thus does Bernhardt remain vividly alive to the last. M. Jules Lemaître
once said that he admired her because of the unknown he felt to be
in her. “She might go into a nunnery, discover the North Pole, be
inoculated with rabies, assassinate an emperor, or marry a negro king,
and I should never be surprised at anything she did. She is more alive
and more incomprehensible by herself than a thousand other human
beings.”
Thus it may be that she will again rally about her on the stage of
Paris the loyal affection that went out to her in the hospital. It is
an open secret that for half a dozen years the allegiance of her Paris
public has not always been unflagging. She is indubitably old, and her
affliction was imperfectly understood. And yet, when her latest play,
_Jeanne Doré_, by Tristan Bernard, was produced in December, 1913,
a flash of the old enthusiasm broke out again and one correspondent
described the occasion as “easily the most brilliant first night of the
Paris season so far.” The part, moreover, was an exacting emotional
one. In it Madame Sarah seems again to have shown her great power.
HELENA MODJESKA
The acting of Madame Modjeska is still remembered vividly by American
and English theatregoers, yet its beginnings lie as far away in time
as the sixties and as distant in place as Poland. She was born on
October 12, 1840, in Cracow, the old Polish capital, now the second
city of Galitzia, or Austrian Poland. Twenty-five years before, by the
agreement of Russia, Prussia, and Austria, it had been proclaimed a
free city. In the year when Modjeska was six, however, Austria, greedy
then as now, broke her pledge and annexed the city. The Poles were
always a passionately patriotic people, and did not submit calmly.
Discontent grew to open revolt, but the hopes of the Cracovians were
crushed by the bombardment of the city by the Austrians in 1848.
[Illustration: HELENA MODJESKA]
Thus the little Helcia[43] was born in tragic times, and as a little
girl saw scenes of terror and bloodshed. Her mother’s house was struck
by the cannon shot, and she saw men and children killed before her very
door. The horrors of those days were vividly impressed upon her memory
and were perhaps not without their effect upon the nature of the future
actress.
Her father, Michael Opid, born in the Carpathian mountains, and a
teacher in the high school in Cracow, was a simple-hearted, lovable
man, something of a scholar and a great lover of music. He was
extremely fond of children. His own girls and boys and those of his
neighbors would gather about him in the evening, listening to the folk
lore of the mountaineers, Polish legends, and tales from the Iliad.
When Helcia, years later, herself studied Homer, those winter evenings
and their stories were vividly recalled. But Michael Opid’s chief
delight was music. He played several instruments, the flute especially
well. His melodies appealed almost too strongly to the sensitive little
Helcia, who during plaintive passages in the music would burst into
wails and cries. Singers and musicians were frequent visitors at the
Opid house, and in its atmosphere there was thus an artistic element,
which undoubtedly had some influence in determining the career of
Helcia. Her father died when she was seven, of consumption, induced by
exposure while seeking his drowned brother’s body. When he knew he was
dangerously ill, he returned to his native mountains to die.
It had been the second marriage of Madame Opid. She had been Madame
Benda, and having altogether ten children to care for, she could
give by no means exclusive attention to any one of them, even had
she known that that one was to be a great actress. The children were
well cared for so far as their bodily wants were concerned, but
their personalities were left to themselves to develop. For Helcia
this was not altogether unfortunate, for her imagination, stirred by
history-making events and by the songs and poems of which she was so
fond, had free rein. She did not care much for the society of other
children, and was not popular with them. She was a little dreamer,
almost painfully bashful, living much in a world of her imagination,
and fond of going to church. She would steal away alone to the
Dominican chapel, where she would lie face down on the floor, in the
manner of the peasant women, arms outstretched, kissing the floor and
praying for a miracle or a glimpse of an angel or a saint.
Her first schooling was in the house of a friend of her mother’s, a
woman with two well-educated daughters who taught the little Helcia, by
the time she was seven, to read with ease. She fed her imagination with
all the books she could find at hand. In school she liked her Polish
history, her French and her grammar.
When Helcia was seven, she was taken to the theatre for the first time.
The play was _The Daughter of the Regiment_, and was followed by a
ballet _The Siren of Dniestr_, in which little Josephine Hofmann (to be
Josef Hofmann’s aunt) dressed as a butterfly, hovered about in the air.
Helcia was entranced; to her it was all a dream of joy come true.[44]
She went to bed that night with a high fever, and for weeks afterward
she practiced the butterfly dance, watching her shadow on the wall,
much to the amusement of her small brothers. But theatricals became the
family pastime. Helcia’s three older brothers were enthusiastic. They
rigged up a stage at home, with the help of some other boys formed a
little company, and every month gave performances for admiring friends.
They excluded the girls, and played all the women’s parts themselves.
The home theatre was probably of great influence in the lives of
its members, for two of the boys, besides Helcia and her sister,
subsequently went on the stage.
In 1850, when Helcia was in her tenth year, Cracow was burned. The
conflagration lasted ten days, and a large part of the city was
destroyed. Madame Opid up to this time had been a woman of some
property. Her first husband had left her a small estate which she had
managed skillfully. Her two houses were now destroyed, her insurance
had lapsed ten days before, and she was practically ruined. Here was
more misfortune to impress the growing Helcia, to make her, for her
years, unusually sensitive and thoughtful. After a few days of almost
vagabondage, the family was given temporary quarters in a friend’s
house. There Helcia, left much to herself, spent her time reading her
_Life of St. Genevieve_, a treasured volume which she rescued in the
moment of peril. At length installed in a newly hired house, Madame
Opid sent Helcia and her little sister Josephine as day pupils to St.
John’s convent, and supplemented the teachings of the sisters with
lessons at home in music and dancing.
It was at this time, when Helena was ten, that she first met Gustave
Modrzejewski,[45] who was later to be her husband. He was twenty years
her senior. He was a friend of the family and taught the children
German, the hated language of the oppressor.
When Helena was twelve, her half-brothers Joseph and Felix Benda had
gone away to be actors on the professional stage. To relieve the quiet
at home she and her brother Adolphe Opid, who was then fifteen, wrote a
play, a one-act tragedy. The scene was laid in Greece, and the acting
required the death of Adolphe, and an impassioned scene of grief by
Helena when with a sob she threw herself over her dead lover’s body.
She drew from the sympathetic servants and her great-aunt Theresa
genuine tears, but her practical mother was unmoved, thought Helena
over-excited and forbade further theatricals.
At fourteen Helena finished the highest grade at the convent. This was
the end of her formal schooling, but she at once began a strenuous
and varied course of reading. She began with the Polish poets, of whom
there are several proudly cherished by their countrymen. It was the
family’s pleasant custom, fostered by the well-read Mr. Modrzejewski,
to read aloud in the winter evenings. In this way Helena learned
of Scott, Dickens, Dumas, George Sand, and many another. She had
neglected her German, and it was to stimulate an interest in the
disliked language that Mr. Modrzejewski proposed that she be taken to
see a German play. She was immensely excited, for it was seven years
since she had been to the theatre. The play was Schiller’s _Kabale und
Liebe_. She entered the theatre in a state of awe, she sat through the
performance in spellbound fascination, and the next morning with the
help of a dictionary began reading Schiller in German. Schiller became
for the time an overwhelming enthusiasm with her. She imagined herself
in love with him, and placed before her in her room his statuette, as a
kind of idol. Such extravagances as this, and the religious period that
preceded it, would have indicated to a discerning eye a promisingly
responsive and emotional nature. To those about her, however, even to
her mother, she was only a moody and at times excitable child whose
enthusiasm was to be repressed and whose future was doubtful. She
helped with the family work, as all did in this time of stress, but she
was living apart in a world of poetry, of vague and ardent dreams.
She was now taken to the theatre occasionally. Felix Benda had become
one of the popular actors of the local theatre. One day, when Helena
was about sixteen, he overheard her reciting to her sister. Surprised
and pleased, he took her next day to the house of one of the leading
actresses of the company, who as an artist of experience could judge
of the young girl’s chances of success on the stage. All this came
very suddenly. Helena had not seriously thought of a stage career.
The hearing was a trying ordeal, for she was terribly frightened.
After giving Helena a lesson or two, the actress was discouraging.
She advised Madame Opid to keep the young girl at home rather than
allow her to become a mediocre actress. For a while Helcia’s budding
ambitions were crushed.
Madame Opid, for one, was not disappointed. The family was not so well
off as it was before the fire and to Helcia fell a large share of the
housework. But she studied and read and thought, with unsettled mind
and changing purpose. At one time she thought she would try to achieve
fame as a writer; again, at her mother’s wish, she studied furiously
with a teacher’s examination in mind; again, to become a nun seemed
the only thing worth while. But shortly there came a rude shock to all
these plans. Fritz Devrient, a German actor of great talent, played
_Hamlet_ in Cracow, and Helena was taken to see him. She had heard
of Shakespeare, but had never seen or read any of his plays. The
effect on her was overwhelming. Shakespeare became her master then
and there, and she never deserted him. She spent a sleepless night,
and the longing to be an actress returned with redoubled strength.
She greedily read the plays of Shakespeare in Polish translations,
and his bust speedily replaced that of Schiller. The family friend,
Gustave Modrzejewski, to her great delight seconded her in her renewed
ambition, recommended that she study for the German stage as offering a
wider field than the Polish, and arranged for lessons from an excellent
actor, Herr Axtman. Indeed, his interest extended further, for when
Helcia was seventeen he urged that their marriage, which had come to be
an understood thing, take place at once. She had seen much of him; they
had read together Goethe and Lessing and the northern sagas; he was her
guardian and the kindly counselor of the family; and she looked on him,
a man more than twice her age, with real affection; and so they were
married at once.