“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.”
Portraits of Sarah Bernhardt by the author (age 7), drawn in 1881
