I said that Sarah Bernhardt should have a chapter to herself.
“Les Comédiens,” said Jules Lema?tre, “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[228] contemporaries, from Théodore de Banville and Charlotte Bront?. 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 Théatre fran?ais 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 Fran?ois 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
Sarah Bernhardt in the eighties
[229]
In 1872 she left the Odéon and entered the Théatre fran?ais 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 théatre.”
It was during a performance of Voltaire’s Za?re, 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 Théatre fran?ais, had insisted. When the night came when she was due to appear in Za?re (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 Do?a Sol in Hernani (November 1877) definitely sealed her reputation, not only as a tragic actress, but as the incarnation of something[230] new and exotic. And the world recognised her incomparable talent for speaking verse.
In 1879, the Comédie fran?aise 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 Théatre fran?ais, 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 Théatre fran?ais 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 Théatre fran?ais, we should never have realised her capacities to the full. In fact, had she remained at the Théatre fran?ais, she would not have been Sarah Bernhardt. We should have[231] 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 Lema?tre, 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.
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 Théatre fran?ais. 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[232] 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 Izé?l 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 Théatre fran?ais. 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’[233] 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 Lema?tre.
I am not sure of the date of this performance, but she played Phèdre at the Renaissance in 1893, and Lema?tre 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 Fran?ais, 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. Lema?tre said about it: “Elle n’a pas seulement joué, comme elle sait jouer, son r?le: 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[234] 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.”
This is what M. J. de Tillet wrote about the performance in the Revue Bleue of December 1896:
“Cette fois ?’a été le vrai triomphe, sans restrictions et sans réserves. Je vous ai dit la semaine dernière qu’elle avait atteint, et presque dépassé le sommet de l’art. Je viens de relire Lorenzaccio, et ?’a été une joie nouvelle, plus rassise et plus convaincue, de retrouver et d’évoquer ses intonations et ses gestes. Elle a donné la vie à ce personnage de Lorenzo, que personne n’avait osé aborder avant elle; elle a maintenu, a travers toute la pièce, ce caractère complexe et hésitant; elle en a rendu toutes les nuances avec une vérité et une profondeur singulières. Admirable d’un bout à l’autre, sans procédés et sans ‘déblayage,’ sans excès et sans cris, elle nous a émus jusqu’au fond de l’ame, par la simplicité et la justesse de sa diction, par l’art souverain des attitudes et des gestes. Et, j’insiste sur ce point, elle a donné au r?le tout entier, sans faiblesse et sans arrêt, une inoubliable physionomie. Qu’elle parle ou quelle se taise, elle est Lorenzaccio des pieds à la tête, corps et ame; elle ‘vit’ son personnage, et elle le fait vivre pour nous. Le talent de Mme Sarah Bernhardt m’a parfois plus inquiété que charmé. C’est une raison de plus pour que je répète aujourd’hui qu’elle a atteint le sublime. Jamais, je n’ai rien vu, au théatre, qui égalat ce qu’elle a donné dans Lorenzaccio.”
In Mr. Bernard Shaw’s collected dramatic criticism, Dramatic Opinions and Essays, there is an interesting chapter comparing the two artists in the part of Magda, in which he says that Duse’s performance annihilated that of Sarah Bernhardt for him. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it did the same for everyone. I saw Sarah Bernhardt play the part superbly in Paris, and I saw Duse play the part superbly in London, and I should have said that Duse lent the character a nobility and a dignity that are not to be found in the text of the play, and that Sarah Bernhardt made of Magda what the author wanted her to be: a rather noisy, exuberant, vulgar, successful prima donna, a cabotine, not without genius, and with moments, when her human feelings were touched, of[235] greatness; that she portrayed the ostentation of the actress, and the sudden intoxication of success and celebrity, with their attendant disillusions, on a talented middle-class German girl; and, when the note called for it, the majesty of motherhood, to perfection; but let us assume that Duse in this part gave something more memorable, and the part certainly suited her temperament, her irony, her dignity, perhaps better than any other, and gave her a unique opportunity for self-expression, even at the cost of reality, and of the play. Let us go further, and say that in Dumas’ La Femme de Claude Duse played the part of Césarine, a Sarah Bernhardt part if ever there was one, the part of a wicked, seductive woman; and made of her creation in that part a trembling, quivering, living, vibrating thing; an unforgettable study of vice and charm and deadly wickedness and lure, which Sarah Bernhardt never excelled. Even if we admit all this, the fact still remains that Sarah Bernhardt could play a poetic tragedy in a fashion beyond Duse’s reach; that she could play Phèdre and Cleopatra and Do?a Sol; and that Duse, in the r?le of Cleopatra, dwindled and was overwhelmed by it. The critics forgot, when they compared the two artists, the glory of Sarah Bernhardt’s past, the extent of range of her present, the possibilities of her future; her interpretations of Racine, of Victor Hugo; her understanding of poetry and verse; they did not compare the whole art of Duse with the whole art of Sarah Bernhardt, and had they done so they would have at once realised the absurdity of doing such a thing—an absurdity as great as to compare Keats’ poetry with Tolstoy’s novels, or Burne-Jones with George Sand.
The French critics were more discriminating, and anyone who has the curiosity to turn up what Lema?tre says of Duse in La Dame aux Camélias will find a subtle and discriminating contrast b............