The high-water mark of Sarah’s poetical and intellectual art was probably reached in her Phèdre, her Hamlet, and her Lorenzaccio; but the furthest limits of the power of her power were revealed in Sardou’s plays, for Sardou had the intuition to guess what forces lay in the deeps of her personality, and the insight and skill to make plays which, like subtle engines, should enable these forces to reveal themselves at their highest pitch, to find full expression, and to explode in a divine combustion.
There is another thing to be said about Sarah Bernhardt’s emancipation from the Théâtre français. Had she never been independent, had she never been her own master and her own stage manager, she would never have realised for us a whole series of poetical visions and pictures which have had a deep and lasting influence on contemporary art. We should never have seen Théodora walk like one of Burne-Jones’s dreams come to life amidst the splendours of the Byzantine Court:
“Tenendo un giglio tra le ceree dita.”
We should never have seen La Princesse Lointaine crowned with lilies, sumptuous and sad, like one of Swinburne’s early poems; nor La Samaritaine evoke the spices, the fire, and the vehemence of the Song of Solomon; nor Gismonda, with chrysanthemums in her hair, amidst the jewelled glow of the Middle Ages, against the background of the Acropolis; nor Izéïl incarnating the soul and dreams of India. Eliminate these things and you eliminate one of the sources of inspiration of modern art; you take away something from D’Annunzio’s poetry, from Maeterlinck’s prose, from Moreau’s pictures; you destroy one of the mainsprings of Rostand’s work; you annihilate some of the colours of modern painting, and you stifle some of the notes of modern music; for in all these you can trace in various degrees the subtle, unconscious influence of Sarah Bernhardt.
The most serious break in the appreciation of her art, on the part of the critics and the French public, did not come about immediately after she left the Théâtre français. On the contrary, when she played the part of Adrienne Lecouvreur for the first time—this was in May 1880—in London, her triumph among the critical was complete. I have an article by Sarcey, dated 31st May 1880, in which he raves about the performance he had come to London to see, and in which he says, had the performance taken place in Paris, the enthusiasm of the audience would have been boundless. The most serious break in the appreciation of her art came about after she had been to America, toured round Europe many times, with a repertory of stock plays and an indifferent company, and acted in such complete rubbish as Léna, the adaptation of As in a Looking-Glass, of which I have already given a schoolboy’s impressions. People then began to say they were tired of her. It is true she woke up the public once more with her performance of La Tosca in 1889, but in July 1889 Mr. Walkley voiced a general feeling when he said: “I suspect she herself understands the risks of ‘abounding in her own sense’ quite as well as any of us could tell her. She knows her talent needs refreshing, revitalising, rejuvenating.” He speaks of “her consciousness of a need for a larger, saner, more varied repertory. But,” he adds, “she will never get that repertory so long as she goes wandering from pole to pole, with a new piece, specially constructed for her by M. Sardou, in her pocket.”
Fortunately this consciousness of a need for a newer, saner repertory took effect in fact, after Sarah Bernhardt came back from a prolonged tour in South America. In the ’nineties she took the Renaissance Theatre in Paris, and she opened her season with a delicate and serious drama called Les Rois, by Jules Lemaître.
I am not sure of the date of this performance, but she played Phèdre at the Renaissance in 1893, and Lemaître said that “Jamais, Madame Sarah Bernhardt, ne fut plus parfaite, ni plus puissante, ni plus adorable.” She produced Sudermann’s Magda in 1896, and Musset’s Lorenzaccio in December 1896, and then she discovered Rostand, whose first play, Les Romanesques, had been done at the Français, and turned him into the channel of serious poetical drama.
She then built a theatre for herself, and gave us Rostand’s Samaritaine, Hamlet, L’Aiglon, and a series of Classical matinées; and from that time onward she never ceased to produce at least one interesting play a year. That was a fine average, a high achievement, and a real service to art. People seldom reflect that it is necessary for managers and actors to fill their theatre, and they cannot always be producing interesting experiments that do not pay. Small blame, therefore, to Sarah Bernhardt, if she sometimes fell back on Sardou, and all praise and gratitude is due to her for the daring experiments she risked.
Among these experiments one of the most remarkable of all was that of Jeanne d’Arc in Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc; another was as Lucrezia Borgia in Victor Hugo’s play; and a third the hero of the charming poetical play Les Bouffons. She found a saner, larger repertory, and crowned her career by triumphing in Athalie in 1920.
Some French critics think her Lorenzaccio was the finest of her parts. Lemaître said about it: “Elle n’a pas seulement joué, comme elle sait jouer, son rôle: elle l’a composé. Car il ne s’agissait plus ici de ces dames aux camélias, et de ces princesses lointaines, fort simples dans leur fond, et qu’elle a su nous rendre émouvantes et belles, presque sans réflexion et rien qu’en écoutant son sublime instinct. A ce génie naturel de la diction et du geste expressifs, elle a su joindre cette fois, comme lorsqu’elle joue Phèdre (mais que Lorenzaccio était plus difficile à pénétrer!) la plus rare et la plus subtile intelligence.”