Another time, I think it was 1896, I was present at a performance of Magda in Paris at the Renaissance Theatre by Sarah; in her own phrase, le Dieu était là, and I shall never forget the thrill that passed through the audience when Magda, at the thought of being separated from her child, let loose her passion, and spoke the elemental love of a mother defending her child. Here the advocatus Diaboli will chuckle and say something about “tearing a passion to pieces.” This was just what it was not. The tirade was concentrated and subdued, and it culminated in a whisper which had the vehemence of a whirlwind. The scene was interrupted by a spontaneous cry of applause. I have sometimes heard applause like this before and since, when Sarah Bernhardt has been acting, but I have never seen the art of any other actor or actress provoke so great and so loud a cry.
I said Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet was one of the four great achievements of her career. These are what I think were the others:
The greatest thing an actor or an actress can do is to create a poet. It used at one time to be said that Sarah Bernhardt had failed to do this. Yet the only really remarkable French dramatic poet of modern times, whose plays really moved and held the public, Edmond Rostand, was a creation of Sarah Bernhardt. The younger generation of his time, and some men of letters in France, but not all (Émile Faguet was a notable exception, and Jules Lemaître writes of his art with great discrimination), used to despise the verse of Edmond Rostand. But whatever anyone can say about the literary value of his work, there is no doubt about its dramatic value. Rostand may or may not have been a great poet or even a great artist in verse, but that he was a great poetical dramatist was proved by the only possible test—that of the rapturous enthusiasm of his audience, wherever and in whatever language his plays are performed. Since Victor Hugo, he is the one writer of our time, and the only writer in this century in the whole of Europe, who made a direct and successful appeal to the public, to the public in all countries where his plays were performed, and stirred and delighted them to the depths of their being through the medium of dramatic poetry. Surely this is no mean achievement; besides this, even among French critics, there are many who maintain that he is a genuine poet. Well, Sarah Bernhardt is in the main responsible for Rostand, for had there been no Sarah there would have been no Princesse Lointaine, and no Cyrano (for it was Coquelin’s delight in La Princesse Lointaine which made him ask Rostand for a play), no Samaritaine, and no L’Aiglon.
This is one of the achievements of Sarah Bernhardt. Another and perhaps a more important achievement was accomplished before this—her resuscitation of Racine. Let everyone interested in this question get M. Émile Faguet’s Propos de Théâtre. M. Faguet shows with great wealth of detail and abundance of contemporary evidence that in the ’seventies, until Sarah Bernhardt played in Andromaque and Phèdre, Racine’s plays were thought unsuited for dramatic representation. Even Sarcey used to say in those days that Racine was not un homme de théâtre. Sarah Bernhardt changed all this. She revealed the beauties of Racine to her contemporaries. She put new life into his plays, and by her incomparable delivery she showed off, as no one else can hope to do, the various and subtle secrets of Racine’s verse.
She did the same for Victor Hugo when she played Doña Sol and the Queen in Ruy Bias. Théodore de Banville, in his Camées Parisiens, says there could never be another Queen in Ruy Bias like Sarah, and that, whenever the words:
“Elle avait un petit diadème en dentelle d’argent”
are spoken, the vision of Sarah Bernhardt will rise, as though it were that of a real person, frail, slender, with a small crown set in her wonderful hair.
Yet, when all is said and done, Sarah Bernhardt’s supreme achievement is another and a fourth: her Phèdre. I do not think that anyone will disagree with this. It was in Phèdre that she gave the maximum of beauty, and exhibited the whole range of her highest artistic qualities. In Phèdre her movements and her gestures, her explosions of fury and her outbursts of passion, were subservient to a commanding rhythm; from the moment Phèdre walked on to the stage trembling under the load of her unconfessed passion until the moment she descended into Hades, par un chemin plus lent, the spectator witnessed the building up of a miraculous piece of architecture, in time and not in space; and followed the progressions, the rise, the crisis, and the tranquil close of a mysterious symphony. Moreover, a window was opened for him wide on to the enchanted land: the realm of beauty in which there are no conflicts of times and fashions, but in which all who bear the torch have an equal inheritance. He saw a woman speaking the precise, stately, and musical language of the court of Louis XIV., who, by her utterance, the plastic beauty of her attitudes, and the rhythm of her movements, opened the gates of time, and beyond the veil of the seventeenth century evoked the vision of ancient Greece. Or, rather, time was annihilated, seventeenth-century France and ancient Greece, Versailles and Trézène, were merged into one; he was face to face with involuntary passion and the unequal struggle between it and reluctant conscience.
There was the unwilling prey of the goddess, “a lily on her brow with anguish moist and fever dew”; but at the sound of her voice and the music of her grief, perhaps we forgot all this, perhaps we forgot the ancient tales of Greece, and Crete, we forgot Racine and Versailles; perhaps we thought only of the woman that was there before us, who surely was something more than human: was it she who plied the golden loom in the island of Ææa and made Ulysses swerve in mid-ocean from his goal? Or she who sailed down the Cydnus and revelled with Mark Antony? Or she for whom Geoffroy Rudel sailed to Tripoli, and sang and died? Or she who haunted the vision but baffled the pencil of Leonardo da Vinci? Or she who excelled “all women in the magic of her locks,” and beckoned to Faust on the Brocken? She was something of all these things, an incarnation of the spirit that, in all times and in all countries, whether she be called Lilith or Lamia or La Gioconda, in the semblance of a “Belle Dame sans Merci,” bewitches the heart and binds the brain of man with a spell, and makes the world seem a dark and empty place without her, and Death for her sake and in her sight a joyous thing.
So used we to dream when we saw those harmonious gestures and heard that matchless utterance. Then the curtain fell, and we remembered that it was only a play, and that even Sarah Bernhardt must “fare as other Empresses,” and “wane with enforc’d and necessary change.”