Like a number of actors of the other sex, but almost alone among actresses, Bernhardt has dabbled in the management of theatres. Soon after her first American tour, she assumed control of the Ambigu in Paris. If she had acted in her own theatre (as later she did) her business venture might have succeeded. As it was, she was acting Fédora at the Vaudeville, and later, with only moderate success, in Holland and Belgium. The Ambigu languished. In the meantime, Sarah had spent all her money. Finding herself in straits, she auctioned her jewels, and realized handsomely on them. It was an event in Paris, and the sale produced no less than thirty-five thousand dollars.
Her next venture in management was more successful. In 1883, on behalf of her son, she bought a partnership in the Porte St. Martin, and produced Frou-Frou there for the first time in Paris. Her régime at this house was interrupted by the long tour begun in 1886, but continued, under the prosperity shed by her own presence, until 1893, when she bought the Renaissance. Since that day she has owned her own theatre, until 1899 at the Renaissance, and since then at the more commodious Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, her renaming of the Théâtre des Nations.
When Bernhardt went to America for the first time she had in her company an actress named Marie Colombier. For reasons that are difficult to determine, this woman conceived a passionate hatred of Sarah and on her return to France prepared, or had prepared for her,[37] a thinly disguised pseudo-biography of Bernhardt which sold in enormous numbers under the name Les Memoires de Sarah Barnum. This pamphlet subjected Bernhardt to miscellaneous ridicule and abuse. Although on the whole false, parts of it may have been true enough to penetrate the armor against gossip that Sarah schooled herself to wear. At any rate, she was furiously angry. When the book had been in circulation long enough to give her action its proper background and advertising value, Bernhardt one day turned up at Mme. Colombier’s apartment, accompanied by her son and M. Jean Richepin, and armed with a horsewhip. The party forced themselves in, and Sarah, great actress, proceeded to chase her detractor about the place, beating her soundly with the whip. A similar incident occurred at Rio de Janeiro in 1886. Mme. Noirmont, a member of the company, one day “went for” Sarah with strong language and the flat of her hand. Sarah was at first content with the woman’s arrest, but one evening, between the acts, her desire for revenge got the better of her, and Mme. Noirmont was, in her turn, thoroughly horsewhipped. The cause of these (at the time) world famous ructions, which are now important only—if at all—as shedding light on Sarah’s frail humanity, has always remained shrouded in mystery.
Further proof that the “divine Sarah” was after all very human was furnished in 1907 when she published a volume of reminiscences.[38] William Winter’s estimate of this book is characteristic; it contains, he says: “some passages of interest, but, as a whole, it is diffuse, flamboyant, and artificial,—an eccentric contribution to theatrical annals, mottled over by affectation, egregious vanity, and the pervasive insincerity of an inveterate self-exploiter.” It would be juster to say that the book shows in many places a more likable woman than the eccentric celebrity was supposed to be, and that it contains but few passages that are not of interest. At any rate, it shows Sarah to be, after all, in many respects like us commonplace people.
Whatever hostility she may have met in her earlier days, Bernhardt long ago won the unqualified homage of her countrymen. To them she became a cherished national institution, the great actress of her time. “The great and only Sarah” is the phrase of the once scoffing Sarcey. “I am not quite sure,” wrote Lemaître in 1894, “whether Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt can say ‘How do you do?’ like any ordinary mortal. To be herself she must be extraordinary, and then she is incomparable.” “You cannot praise her for reciting poetry well,” said M. Theodore de Banville, a poet learned in metres and rhythms; “she is the muse of poetry itself. A secret instinct moves her. She recites poetry as the nightingale sings, as the wind sighs, and as the water murmurs.”
“Her acting is the summit of art,”—again Sarcey—“our grandfathers used to speak with emotion of Talma and Mlle. Mars. I never saw either the one or the other, and I have barely any recollection of Rachel, but I do not believe that anything more original and more perfect than Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt’s Phèdre has ever been seen in any theatre.”
To take this view of Sarah one must, perhaps, be a Frenchman. The Sarcey of America, William Winter, certainly could not take it. With what may be termed the utilitarian Puritanism that seeks in the theatre to be “benefited, cheered, encouraged, ennobled, instructed, or even rationally entertained,” he could see in Bernhardt’s art only an exhibition of morbid eccentricity. Mr. Winter, here as elsewhere, has been made intolerant of much in the institution he has served and honored by his insistence on “intrinsic grandeur” in its characters. He is always looking for “the woman essentially good and noble,” whereas the modern drama has as one of its most cherished prerogatives its right to portray mixed characters,—often women whose “essential goodness” is mingled with much human frailty.
Fairly enough, however, according to his lights, does Mr. Winter specify and define Bernhardt’s peculiar merits: “They are, in brief, the ability to elicit complete and decisive dramatic effect from situations of horror, terror, vehement passion, and mental anguish; neatness in the adjustment of manifold details; evenly sustained continuity; ability to show a woman who seeks to cause physical infatuation and who generally can succeed in doing so; a woman in whom vanity, cruelty, selfishness, and animal propensity are supreme; a woman of formidable, sometimes dangerous, sometimes terrible mental force.”
Not all of Madame Bernhardt’s impersonations, however, fall within Mr. Winter’s proscribed class. She has at times shown a startling propensity for breaking into new and strange fields. Her Jeanne d’Arc (1890), a genuine success, was certainly not a “morbid eccentric.” “It is impossible to make Hamlet Parisian,” but, in 1899, Sarah played Hamlet, to the satisfaction of the French at least. “She never did anything finer,” said Rostand. “She makes one understand Hamlet, and understand him beyond the possibility of a doubt.”[39] A year later she was playing Reichstadt, the son of Napoleon, in L’Aiglon, an impersonation that even Mr. Winter admitted “was one of beautiful symmetry.” And of recent years Sarah has threatened—though as yet she has not accomplished—the acting of Mephistopheles in Faust.
When Bernhardt was in London in 1895, George Bernard Shaw was in the midst of his career as the dramatic critic of the Saturday Review, serving a three-year term of what he called his slavery to the theatre. He observed Sarah with none too sympathetic eyes, but what he said shows, under his purposefully irritating exterior, the shrewd critical insight that makes the “Dramatic Opinions and Essays” one of the soundest books of theatrical comment, as well as one of the most readable: