Sarah Bernhardt in the eighties
In 1872 she left the Odéon and entered the Théâtre français once more. She reappeared in Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle[9] with partial success. In writing of this performance, Sarcey expressed doubt of Sarah Bernhardt ever achieving power as well as grace, and strength as well as charm. “Je doute,” he wrote, “que Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt trouve jamais dans son délicieux organe ces notes éclatantes et profondes, pour exprimer le paroxysme des passions violentes, qui transportent une salle. Si la nature lui avait donné ce don, elle serait une artiste complète, et il n’y en a pas de telles au théâtre.”
It was during a performance of Voltaire’s Zaïre, on a stifling night in 1873, that Sarah Bernhardt discovered she had undreamed-of stores of energy and electric power at her disposal, and under her control. She had rebelled against having to act during the summer months. Perrin, the director of the Théâtre français, had insisted. When the night came when she was due to appear in Zaïre (August 6), she determined to exhaust all the power that was in her, and as she was at that time as frail as a sylph and was thought to be perilously delicate (spitting blood), she decided to spite Perrin by dying. She strained every nerve; she cried in earnest; she suffered in earnest; she gave a cry of real pain when struck by the stage dagger; and when it was all over she thought her last hour must have come; and then she found to her amazement that she was quite fresh, and ready to begin the performance all over again. She realised then that her intellect and will could draw when they pleased on her physical resources; and that she could do what she liked with her vocal chords. This explains a secret that often puzzled the spectators of her art—her power of letting herself go, and after a violent explosion, just when you thought her voice must be broken for ever by the effort, of opening as it were another stop, and letting flow a ripple from a flute of the purest gold.
It was in Phèdre that Sarah Bernhardt proved she possessed not only grace but power; her rendering of Doña Sol in Hernani (November 1877) definitely sealed her reputation, not only as a tragic actress, but as the incarnation of something new and exotic. And the world recognised her incomparable talent for speaking verse.
In 1879, the Comédie française visited London, and all London went mad about Sarah Bernhardt. She was not then the star in a cast of mediocrities, she was a star in a dazzling firmament of stars. Her fellow actors and actresses were Coquelin, Got, Delaunay, Mounet Sully, Worms, Maubant, and Febvre among the men; and among the women, Croizette, Baretta, Madeleine Brohan, Reichemberg, and Madame Favart. A more varied, excellent, and complete cast could not be imagined. It was a faultless ensemble for tragedy and comedy, for Racine, for Molière, for Victor Hugo, and for Alexandre Dumas fils.
In 1880, the glory of this theatrical age of gold was eclipsed and diminished by the flight of Sarah Bernhardt. After a quarrel arising out of the performance of L’Aventurière, she suddenly resigned, and, after a short season in London, in May 1880, started for America.
This rupture with the Théâtre français, which was largely due to the adulation she received and the sensation she made in London, was a momentous turning-point and break in her career. When it happened, the whole artistic world deplored it, and there are many critics in France and in England who never ceased to deplore it; but a calm review of the whole career of Sarah Bernhardt forces one to the conclusion that it could not have been otherwise.
The whole motto of her life was: “Faire ce qu’on veut.” And sometimes she added to this: “Lemieux est l’ennemi du bien.”
The Théâtre français at that time was indeed an ideal temple of art for so inspired a priestess. But Sarah Bernhardt was more than a priestess of art—she was a personality, a force, a power, which had to find full expression, its utmost limits and range; and if we weigh the pros and cons of the matter, I do not think we have been the losers. Her art certainly did suffer at times from her travels and her unshackled freedom; she played to ignorant audiences, and sometimes would walk through a part without acting; she played in inferior plays. On the other hand, had she remained in the narrower confines of the Théâtre français, we should never have realised her capacities to the full. In fact, had she remained at the Théâtre français, she would not have been Sarah Bernhardt. We should have lost as much as we should have gained. It is true we should never have seen her in plays that were utterly unworthy of her. On the other hand, we should never probably have seen her Dame aux Camélias, her Lorenzaccio, her Hamlet. We should never have had the series of plays that Sardou wrote for her: Fédora, Théodora, La Tosca, etc. Some will contend that this would have been a great advantage. But, despise Sardou as much as you like, the fact remains it needs a man of genius to write such plays, and not only a woman of genius, but Sarah Bernhardt and none other, to play in them. In Fédora, Eleonora Duse, the incomparable Duse, could not reach the audience. And now, when these plays are revived in London, we realise all too well, and the public realises too, that there is none who can act them. It is no use acting well in such plays; you must act tremendously or not at all. La Tosca must be a violent shock to the nerves or nothing. When it was first produced, Jules Lemaître, protesting against the play, said the main situation was so strong, so violent, and so horrible, that it was in the worst sense actor-proof, and so it seemed then. Now we know better; we know by experience that without Sarah Bernhardt the play does not exist; we know that what made it almost unbearable was not the situation, but the demeanour, the action, the passivity, the looks, the gestures, the moans, the cries of Sarah Bernhardt in that situation. Had Sardou’s “machine-made” plays never been written, we should never have known one side of Sarah Bernhardt’s genius. I do not say it is the noblest side, but I do say that what we would have missed, and what Sardou’s plays revealed, was an unparalleled manifestation of electric energy.