Another occasion which I shall never forget was the first night that she played Hamlet in Paris. The audience was brilliant and hypercritical, and the play was received coldly until the first scene between Polonius and Hamlet. When Hamlet answers Polonius’s question: “What do you read, my Lord?” with his “Words, words, words,” Sarah Bernhardt played it like this. (She was dressed and got up like the pictures of young Raphael, with a fair wig; she was the soul of courtesy in the part, a gentle Prince.) Hamlet was lying on a chair reading a book. The first “des mots” he said with an absent-minded indifference, just as anyone speaks when interrupted by a bore; in the second “des mots” his answer seemed to catch his own attention, and the third “des mots” was accompanied by a look, and charged with an intense but fugitive intention: something
“between a smile and a smothered sigh,”
with a break in the intonation, that clearly said: “Yes, it is words, words, words, and all books and everything else in life and in the whole world is only words, words, words.” This delicate shadow, this adumbration of a hint was instantly seized by the audience from the gallery to the stalls; and the whole house cried: “Bravo! bravo!” It was a fine example of the receptivity, the flair, and the corporate intelligence of a good French audience.
Personally I think her Hamlet was one of the four greatest achievements of her career. I will come to the others later. Excepting Sir Johnston Forbes Robertson’s Hamlet, it was the only intelligible Hamlet of our time. One great point of difference between this Hamlet and that of any other actors I have seen is, whereas most Hamlets seem isolated from the rest of the players, as if they were reciting something apart from the play and speaking to the audience, this Hamlet spoke to the other persons of the play, shared their life, their external life, however wide the spiritual gulf might be between them and Hamlet. This Hamlet was in Denmark; not in splendid isolation, on the boards, in order to show how well he could spout Shakespeare’s monologues, or that he was an interesting fellow.
Another point: her Hamlet is the only one I have seen in which there was real continuity, in which one scene seemed to have any connection with the preceding scenes.
She had already shown what she could do in the progression of a single scene by crescendo, diminuendo transition, and modulation, in the dialogue with Ophelia—“Get thee to a nunnery.” The transition between the tenderness of “Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered,” and the brutality of “I have heard of your paintings too, well enough,” was made plausible by Hamlet catching sight of the King and Polonius in the arras—a piece of business recommended, I think, by Coleridge; but the naturalness and the progression of this scene were a marvel; the profound gravity and bitterness with which she spoke the words: “I am myself indifferent honest: but I could accuse me of such things, that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious.” One seemed to be overhearing Shakespeare himself in a confessional when she said that speech, and the cynicism of the final words of the scene were whispered and hissed with a withering, blighting bitterness, her voice sinking to a swift whisper, as though all the utterance of the body has been exhausted, and these words were the cry of a broken heart. But an example of what I mean by the continuity of the interpretation is when the play within the play is finished, when Hamlet breaks up the whole entertainment by his startling behaviour. In that scene Sarah Bernhardt was like a tiger; her glance transfixed and pierced through the King, and towards the end of the play within the play she crept across the stage and climbed up on to the high, raised, balconied dais on the right of the stage, from which he was looking on, and stared straight into his face with the accusing, questioning challenge of an avenging angel. But the point I want to make is this: when that scene is over, most players take the interview with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which follows immediately after it, as though nothing had happened. Not so Sarah Bernhardt; during the whole of this interview she played in a manner which let you see that Hamlet was still trembling with excitement from what had happened immediately before; and this not only brought out the irony and the point of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s flat conventionality, but gave the audience the sharp sensation that they were face to face with life itself. So was it throughout her Hamlet; each scene depended on all the others; and the various moods of the Dane succeeded one another, like clouds that chased one another but belonged to one sky, and not like separate slides of a magic lantern.
The fight with Laertes was terribly natural; the business of the exchange of swords, and the expression in Hamlet’s eyes when he realised, and showed that he had realised, that one of the swords was poisoned and now in his hands, which, in the hands of mediocre players, becomes so preposterously extravagant, was tremendous.
The whole performance was natural, easy, life-like, and princely, and perhaps the most poignant scene of all, and what is the most poignant scene in the play, if it is well played, was the conversation with Horatio, just before the final duel when Hamlet says: “If it be not to come, it will be now.” Sarah charged these words with a sense of doom, with the set courage that faces doom and with the underlying certainty of doom in spite of the courage that is there to meet it. It made one’s blood run cold.
Another occasion when Sarah Bernhardt’s acting seemed to me tremendous, was a performance of La Dame aux Camélias not long before the war. I had seen her play the part dozens of times, and during a space of twenty years both in Paris and in London. She was not well; she was suffering from rheumatism; the stage had to be marked out in chalk for her, showing where she could stand up. She was too unwell to stand up for more than certain given moments. I went to see her with a Russian actress who had seen her play in St. Petersburg or Moscow, and not been able to endure her acting; she had seen her walk through a part before an indifferent audience that wondered what her great reputation was founded on. We arrived late after the second act, and I went behind the scenes and talked to Sarah, and told her of this Russian actress. She played the last three acts in so moving and simple a manner, and the last act with such agonising poignancy and reserve that not only was my Russian friend in tears, but the actors on the stage cried so much that their tears discoloured their faces and made runnels in their grease paint.
As we went away my Russian friend said to me that was the finest bit of acting she had ever seen or hoped to see again.