“Madame Bernhardt has the charm of a jolly maturity, rather spoilt and petulant, perhaps, but always ready with a sunshine-through-the-clouds smile if only she is made much of. Her dresses and diamonds, if not exactly splendid, are at least splendacious; her figure, far too scantily upholstered in the old days, is at its best; and her complexion shows that she has not studied modern art in vain.... She is beautiful with the beauty of her school, and entirely inhuman and incredible. But the incredibility is pardonable, because, though it is all the greatest nonsense, nobody believing in it, the actress herself least of all, it is so artful, so clever, so well recognized a part of the business, and carried off with such a genial air, that it is impossible not to accept it with good-humor. One feels, when the heroine bursts on the scene, a dazzling vision of beauty, that instead of imposing on you, she adds to her own piquancy by looking you straight in the face, and saying, in effect: ‘Now who would ever suppose that I am a grandmother?’ That, of course, is irresistible; and one is not sorry to have been coaxed to relax one’s notions of the dignity of art when she gets to serious business and shows how ably she does her work. The coaxing suits well with the childishly egotistical character of her acting, which is not the art of making you think more highly or feel more deeply, but the art of making you admire her, pity her, champion her, weep with her, laugh at her jokes, follow her fortunes breathlessly, and applaud her wildly when the curtain falls. It is the art of finding out all your weaknesses and practicing on them—cajoling you, harrowing you, exciting you—on the whole, fooling you. And it is always Sarah Bernhardt in her own capacity who does this to you. The dress, the title of the play, the order of the words may vary; but the woman is always the same. She does not enter into the leading character: she substitutes herself for it.”

Where a more tolerant judgment would proclaim Sarah’s inalterable romanticism, Mr. Shaw, whose passion for truth and realism leave him little room for the sort of truth and reality there may be in the romantic, sees only the tricks of her trade: “Every year Madame Bernhardt comes to us with a new play, in which she kills somebody with any weapon from a hairpin to a hatchet; intones a great deal of dialogue as a sample of what is called ‘the golden voice,’ to the great delight of our curates, who all produce more or less golden voices by exactly the same trick; goes through her well-known feat of tearing a passion to tatters at the end of the second or fourth act, according to the length of the piece; serves out a ration of the celebrated smile; and between whiles gets through any ordinary acting that may be necessary in a thoroughly businesslike and competent fashion. This routine constitutes a permanent exhibition, which is refurnished every year with fresh scenery, fresh dialogue, and a fresh author, whilst remaining itself invariable. Still, there are real parts in Madame Bernhardt’s repertory which date from the days before the traveling show was opened; and she is far too clever a woman, and too well endowed with stage instinct, not to rise, in an off-handed, experimental sort of way, to the more obvious points in such an irresistible new part as Magda.” On the whole, Shaw is something less than fair to Sarah. But one cannot deny him an appreciative chortle when he speaks of her “dragging from sea to sea her Armada of transports.”

On December 9, 1896, there was held a fête in Paris in honor of 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.

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