WITH FIFTY-FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS
LONDON
CHAPMAN & HALL, Ltd.
1899
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
London & Bungay.
PREFACE
My Dear Huret,
You have given me an attack of vertigo. I have been reading your biography of our illustrious friend. Its rapid, nervous style, its accumulation of dates and facts, its hurried rush of scenery and events flying past as though seen from an express train, all help to attain what I imagine must have been your object—to give the reader vertigo. I have got it.
I knew all these things, but I had forgotten them. They are so many that no one even attempts to reckon them up. We are accustomed to admire Sarah. “An extraordinary woman,” we say, without at all realizing how true the remark is. And when we find ourselves suddenly confronted with an epic narrative such as yours; with such a series of battles and victories, expeditions and conquests, we stand amazed. We expected that there was more to tell than we knew, but not quite so much more! Yes, here is something we had quite forgotten, and here again is something more! All the early struggles and difficulties and unfair opposition! All the adventures and freaks of fancy! Twenty triumphs and ten escapades on a page! You cannot turn the leaves without awakening an echo of fame. Your brain reels. There is something positively alarming about this impetuous feminine hand that wields sceptre, thyrsus, dagger, fan, sword, bauble, banner, sculptor’s chisel, and horsewhip. It is overwhelming. You begin to doubt. But all this is told us by Huret, or, in other words, by History, and we believe. No other life could ever have been so full of activity. The poet I was used to admire in her the Queen of Attitude and the Princess of Gesture; I wonder now whether the other poet I am ought not to still more admire in her the Lady of Energy.
What a way she has of being both legendary and modern! Her golden hair is a link between her and fairyland, and do not words change into pearls and diamonds as they fall from her lips? Has she not worn the fairy’s sky-blue robe, and is not her voice the song of the lark at heaven’s gate? She may be an actress following an impresario, but she is none the less a star fallen from the sky of the Thousand and One Nights, and something of the mysterious blue ether still floats about her. But just as the enchanted bark gives way to the great Atlantic liner, just as the car drawn by flying frogs and the carriage made out of a pumpkin vanish before the Sarah Bernhardt saloon-car, so in this story of to-day, intelligence, independence, and intrepidity have replaced the miraculous interventions in the tales of long ago. This heroine has no protecting fairy but herself. Sarah is her own godmother. Inflexible will is her only magic wand. To guide her through so many strange and wonderful events to her final apotheosis, she has no genius but her own.