Part 2
But trouble was brewing, and the irrepressible Sarah was soon making difficulties for her _confrères_. She insisted on her right to give performances before private audiences on the nights she was not appearing with the company. Perrin had flown into a rage when he first heard of these performances, for it was the _Comédie’s_ chief grievance against her that she _would not_ rest. There came a day in London when Sarah sent word she was too tired to appear. A Saturday audience had to be dismissed at the last moment; it was too late to change the bill. A great commotion ensued among the company and in the Paris press. So many and varied were the attacks on her that she was on the point of resignation. She had brought to London a number of her sculptures and paintings and gave an exhibition, selling a few pieces, and entertaining at the gallery reception a group of aristocrats and celebrities--Gladstone and Leighton among them. She made a trip to Liverpool to buy more lions, and came back with a chetah, a wolf, and a half dozen chameleons to add to her menagerie. The members of the company thought she was ruining the dignity of “Molière’s House”; and all manner of stories were told. “It was said,” she wrote, “that for a shilling anyone might see me dressed as a man; that I smoked huge cigars leaning on the balcony of my house; that at the various receptions when I gave one-act plays, I took my maid with me for the dialogue; that I practiced fencing in my garden, dressed as a _pierrot_ in white, and that when taking boxing lessons I had broken two teeth for my unfortunate professor.” These stories were only less dreadful than the tales told in Paris: that she had thrown a live kitten into the fire, and poisoned two monkeys with her own hands!
As a matter of fact, it is probable that Sarah was finding irksome the restrictions of the _Comédie_, was ambitious to earn more money and, as anxious for her exit from the company as were her jealous _confrères_, was only waiting for a chance to sever her contract. But contracts with the _Française_ are not lightly broken. As Coquelin had told her: “When one has the good fortune and the honor of belonging to the _Comédie Française_ one must remain there until the end of one’s career.” She had to watch her chance shrewdly.
Again returned to Paris, the company of the _Comédie_ revived, on April 17, 1880, Augier’s _L’Aventurière_. From whatever cause--pique at being assigned a part she disliked in a play she detested, a temporary suspension of her usual power, or, as she says herself, illness that prevented proper study of her part,--she failed rather miserably. Even the usually indulgent Sarcey said: “Her Clorinde was absolutely colorless”; and the other critics, to a man, wrote scathing reviews. Sarah saw her chance, as she thought, and determined that this would be her last performance at the _Comédie_. The morning after the fiasco she wrote to Perrin:
“_Monsieur l’Administrateur_:
“You made me play before I was ready. You gave me only eight stage rehearsals, and there were only three full rehearsals of the piece. I could not make up my mind to appear under such conditions, but you insisted upon it. What I foresaw has come to pass, and the result of the performance has even gone beyond what I expected. One critic actually charges me with playing Virginie in _L’Assommoir_ instead of _L’Aventurière_! May Emile Augier and Zola absolve me! It is my first rebuff at the _Comédie_, and it shall be my last. I warned you at the dress rehearsal. You have gone too far. I now keep my word. When you receive this letter I shall have left Paris. Be good enough, Monsieur l’Administrateur, to accept my resignation as from this moment.
Apr. 18, 1880. SARAH BERNHARDT.”
An immense commotion at once arose, as if some tremendous political upheaval had occurred. Sarah took train and disappeared in the country, just as on a similar occasion, years before, she had suddenly gone off to Spain. The press, her fellow players, and the author of the play all poured upon her head a shower of abuse. M. Sarcey prophesied: “She had better not deceive herself. Her success will not be lasting. She is not one of those _artistes_ who can bear the whole weight of a piece on their own shoulders, and who require no assistance to hold the public attention.”[27] The _Comédie_ took legal action against her, and a few months later, when the suit was tried, Sarah was formally deprived of her standing as _sociétaire_, of her portion of the reserve fund, amounting to more than eight thousand dollars, and in addition had to pay the _Française_ damages of twenty thousand dollars. She hadn’t the money, but she soon earned it, on her first American tour.
So ended, for good and all, Bernhardt’s connection with the government theatres; so abruptly did she turn a corner in her remarkable career. From her retirement Sarah announced, absurdly enough, that she would renounce the stage, and live by painting and sculpture, for these, she said, brought her thirty thousand francs ($6,000) a year. As a matter of fact, within two weeks she signed a contract with Henry E. Abbey, who post-haste crossed the ocean for the purpose, to go to America. His English agent, Jarrett, had long been importuning her to go. Now she was glad to accept.[28]
Sarah’s wanderings now began--those wanderings that have carried her up and down the world, made her name familiar everywhere, brought her riches and (in William Winter’s sonorous phrase) “such adulation and advocacy as have seldom been awarded to even the authentic benefactors of human society.” First she played a month in London, giving the pieces she was preparing for the American tour, and scoring a tremendous success, artistic, financial and social. A newspaper writer said at this time: “It has been said here that English society is not so eager this season to make her a social goddess as it was last; but it would hardly be possible for a woman to be more thoroughly besieged than is Sarah--that is the name by which people generally fondly call her. To see her is almost as difficult as to see the Queen--I dare say for people not connected with the artistic world even more so. Sarah lives very comfortably--even luxuriously--and entertains lavishly. It seems to me that the only lack of attention that she could possibly complain of is that the Queen has not yet left her card, and that is a complaint she must share with many people.”
To her amazement the Paris critics followed her to London, and praised her extravagantly. Sarcey personally tried to induce her to return to Paris, and M. Perrin sent Got, the _doyen_ of the _Comédie_, on the same errand. Sarah refused; she was enjoying her freedom and her large earnings. She went to Belgium and then to Denmark. At Copenhagen she brought a storm about her ears by a gratuitous affront to the German Ambassador to Denmark, Baron Magnus. At a dinner in her honor he gallantly proposed a health to “_la belle France_.” Sarah was at once on her feet, in a theatrical mood, mindful of the smarts that lingered from the war of 1870–1871, and much impressed with her own importance. “I suppose, _Monsieur l’Embassadeur de Prusse_,” she cried, “you mean the _whole_ of France.” This obvious reference to Alsace-Lorraine put the amiable Baron to confusion, broke up the dinner, threw consternation into the French diplomats on duty in Copenhagen, and enraged Bismarck. It is only fair to say that Sarah was genuinely sorry for her impetuous “break.”
Before sailing for America, Sarah was prevailed upon to undertake a month’s provincial tour in France--something she had never done. She appeared in Nantes, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Lyons and Geneva. Everywhere enthusiasm for her ran high. “Medals bearing her image and superscription, Sarah Bernhardt bracelets and collars, photographs and biographies were sold in the streets. At Lyons the Khedive’s son unsuccessfully offered £80 for a stage-box.”[29]
On October 16, 1880, Mlle. Bernhardt sailed for New York. On November 8, at Booth’s Theatre, she made her first appearance in America in _Adrienne Lecouvreur_, which, with much success, she had added to her repertoire since leaving the _Comédie_.[30] Her triumph was immediate. She had been told that New York would receive her coldly. At the end of the play, however, “there was quite a manifestation and everyone was deeply moved,” while after the play a large crowd serenaded and cheered before her hotel. Sarah had been put on her mettle, and, as always, she did her best in the face of possible opposition. And these ovations repeated themselves in each city, both in the United States and in Canada.
The Bishop of Montreal took it upon himself to condemn Bernhardt, her company, her plays, the authors and French literature in general. As if in reply to his utterances, the public flocked to see Sarah. As is usual with such strictures, the Bishop had given the best possible advertising[31] and each night Sarah’s sleigh was dragged by cheering men.
Wherever she went, her astute managers saw to it that the Bernhardtian advertising tradition was maintained: She went to Menlo Park to call on Thomas A. Edison; at Boston she visited a captive live whale in the harbor, and stood (and fell!) upon its back; in Canada she visited a tribe of Iroquois; at Montreal she ventured on the ice in the St. Lawrence and put her life in peril; visiting the Colt factory at Springfield, Massachusetts, she fired off some newly invented cannon;--“it amused me very much without procuring me any emotion,” she wrote; at Chicago she witnessed the slaughtering of pigs at the stock-yards; in St. Louis her jewelry was exhibited in a store window; at Niagara she again endangered her life by getting herself into an awkward place on the ice bridge below the falls.
Her object was accomplished, at all events. She had won in America a new fame and a much needed fortune. She had earned more than one hundred and eighty thousand dollars. She was now able to pay her debt to the _Française_, and had a comfortable sum left. And her return to France was a veritable return from Elba. Her vessel was met by scores of small boats, gay with welcoming flags, and the wharves held thousands of people shouting: “_Vive_ Sarah Bernhardt!” Her first performance in France of _La Dame aux Camélias_, at Havre in May, 1881, was “a perfect triumph.”
It is startling to reflect that a woman who thus reached the zenith of her career a generation ago is still a working actress. What a triumph for the frail physique and the dauntless will! It is worth while to get a picture of her at about the time of her American tour, when she was thirty-six years old. A correspondent who visited her in London wrote: “I never was more agreeably disappointed in the appearance of a person than when Sarah smilingly and merrily tripped into the room. She looked infinitely fresher, brighter and prettier than I had ever seen her on the stage. Her photographs are perfect caricatures--every one of them. They give no idea of those wonderfully clear, translucent, great blue eyes, with their now soft and melting and now keen and penetrating glance; of her fresh and fair complexion, which on the stage is hidden under a horrid mask of thick paint; of her beautiful light blond hair, which lacks just a shade of being golden and is curled in the most graceful fashion; of her tender and sensitive mouth, the slightest motion of which is full of character and expression. I had never considered her pretty. I now, after a most careful and painstaking inspection, decidedly thought her so. She was charmingly dressed, too, and her thinness of person, which is so generally marked, but which she ridicules herself, was most artistically disguised. The waves of lace and ruffles which fell about her neck appeared to hide a bust worthy of Diana herself.”
Other contemporary accounts show that those who visited her at her studio found her clad in a gray or white flannel suit of masculine garments,--jacket, trousers, necktie and all, “looking something like a thirteen-year-old boy.” Though Sarah performed wonders in the way of self-advertising, more than one observer has noticed that she had a certain natural dignity that was not altogether inconsistent with a rather rollicking playfulness. “Her words are those of a lady,” wrote one, “and her enunciation, though rapid, beautifully distinct.” She has always been eminently hospitable.
In the engaging phrase of one of her biographers,[32] “Marriage was the only eccentricity that Sarah had not yet perpetrated.” In the spring of 1882 she remedied this deficiency by marrying a member of her company, a Greek named Damala, or, as he was known on the stage, Daria. Sarah had been proceeding up and down Europe (always patriotically excepting Germany), playing in France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Russia, Italy, Austria and Spain, everywhere with immense success.[33] In the midst of this tour, quite unexpectedly (April, 1882), came the announcement of the marriage. In order to have the ceremony performed in London, she had traveled from Naples, and then returned to Spain to resume the tour.[34] It was the talk of the day that the reason for Sarah’s sudden marriage and for the selection of London as the scene of the ceremony, was not only her passing infatuation for Damala, but also a wish to propitiate English Puritanism. For a tour of England and Scotland soon followed. The marriage was not a huge success, however. It lasted not more than a year.
The mere statement of Bernhardt’s wanderings is sufficiently astonishing and is one proof of her wonderful vitality. In 1886, a tour that lasted more than a year took her to Mexico, Brazil, Chile, the Argentine,[35] the United States and Canada. Two years later she acted in Constantinople, Cairo and Alexandria, besides most of the European countries. In the early part of 1891 she left Europe for two years and played not only in North and South America, but this time as far afield as Australia. Sarah has been a cosmopolitan figure, if there ever was one. As the land of readily won dollars, the United States has naturally been much favored; for beginning in 1880, Bernhardt has made no less than nine tours in America.[36]
Like a number of actors of the other sex, but almost alone among actresses, Bernhardt has dabbled in the management of theatres. Soon after her first American tour, she assumed control of the _Ambigu_ in Paris. If she had acted in her own theatre (as later she did) her business venture might have succeeded. As it was, she was acting _Fédora_ at the _Vaudeville_, and later, with only moderate success, in Holland and Belgium. The _Ambigu_ languished. In the meantime, Sarah had spent all her money. Finding herself in straits, she auctioned her jewels, and realized handsomely on them. It was an event in Paris, and the sale produced no less than thirty-five thousand dollars.
Her next venture in management was more successful. In 1883, on behalf of her son, she bought a partnership in the _Porte St. Martin_, and produced _Frou-Frou_ there for the first time in Paris. Her régime at this house was interrupted by the long tour begun in 1886, but continued, under the prosperity shed by her own presence, until 1893, when she bought the _Renaissance_. Since that day she has owned her own theatre, until 1899 at the _Renaissance_, and since then at the more commodious _Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt_, her renaming of the _Théâtre des Nations_.
When Bernhardt went to America for the first time she had in her company an actress named Marie Colombier. For reasons that are difficult to determine, this woman conceived a passionate hatred of Sarah and on her return to France prepared, or had prepared for her,[37] a thinly disguised pseudo-biography of Bernhardt which sold in enormous numbers under the name _Les Memoires de Sarah Barnum_. This pamphlet subjected Bernhardt to miscellaneous ridicule and abuse. Although on the whole false, parts of it may have been true enough to penetrate the armor against gossip that Sarah schooled herself to wear. At any rate, she was furiously angry. When the book had been in circulation long enough to give her action its proper background and advertising value, Bernhardt one day turned up at Mme. Colombier’s apartment, accompanied by her son and M. Jean Richepin, and armed with a horsewhip. The party forced themselves in, and Sarah, great actress, proceeded to chase her detractor about the place, beating her soundly with the whip. A similar incident occurred at Rio de Janeiro in 1886. Mme. Noirmont, a member of the company, one day “went for” Sarah with strong language and the flat of her hand. Sarah was at first content with the woman’s arrest, but one evening, between the acts, her desire for revenge got the better of her, and Mme. Noirmont was, in her turn, thoroughly horsewhipped. The cause of these (at the time) world famous ructions, which are now important only--if at all--as shedding light on Sarah’s frail humanity, has always remained shrouded in mystery.
Further proof that the “divine Sarah” was after all very human was furnished in 1907 when she published a volume of reminiscences.[38] William Winter’s estimate of this book is characteristic; it contains, he says: “some passages of interest, but, as a whole, it is diffuse, flamboyant, and artificial,--an eccentric contribution to theatrical annals, mottled over by affectation, egregious vanity, and the pervasive insincerity of an inveterate self-exploiter.” It would be juster to say that the book shows in many places a more likable woman than the eccentric celebrity was supposed to be, and that it contains but few passages that are _not_ of interest. At any rate, it shows Sarah to be, after all, in many respects like us commonplace people.
Whatever hostility she may have met in her earlier days, Bernhardt long ago won the unqualified homage of her countrymen. To them she became a cherished national institution, the great actress of her time. “The great and only Sarah” is the phrase of the once scoffing Sarcey. “I am not quite sure,” wrote Lemaître in 1894, “whether Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt can say ‘How do you do?’ like any ordinary mortal. To be herself she must be extraordinary, and then she is incomparable.” “You cannot praise her for reciting poetry well,” said M. Theodore de Banville, a poet learned in metres and rhythms; “she is the muse of poetry itself. A secret instinct moves her. She recites poetry as the nightingale sings, as the wind sighs, and as the water murmurs.”
“Her acting is the summit of art,”--again Sarcey--“our grandfathers used to speak with emotion of Talma and Mlle. Mars. I never saw either the one or the other, and I have barely any recollection of Rachel, but I do not believe that anything more original and more perfect than Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt’s _Phèdre_ has ever been seen in any theatre.”
To take this view of Sarah one must, perhaps, be a Frenchman. The Sarcey of America, William Winter, certainly could not take it. With what may be termed the utilitarian Puritanism that seeks in the theatre to be “benefited, cheered, encouraged, ennobled, instructed, or even rationally entertained,” he could see in Bernhardt’s art only an exhibition of morbid eccentricity. Mr. Winter, here as elsewhere, has been made intolerant of much in the institution he has served and honored by his insistence on “intrinsic grandeur” in its characters. He is always looking for “the woman essentially good and noble,” whereas the modern drama has as one of its most cherished prerogatives its right to portray mixed characters,--often women whose “essential goodness” is mingled with much human frailty.
Fairly enough, however, according to his lights, does Mr. Winter specify and define Bernhardt’s peculiar merits: “They are, in brief, the ability to elicit complete and decisive dramatic effect from situations of horror, terror, vehement passion, and mental anguish; neatness in the adjustment of manifold details; evenly sustained continuity; ability to show a woman who seeks to cause physical infatuation and who generally can succeed in doing so; a woman in whom vanity, cruelty, selfishness, and animal propensity are supreme; a woman of formidable, sometimes dangerous, sometimes terrible mental force.”
Not all of Madame Bernhardt’s impersonations, however, fall within Mr. Winter’s proscribed class. She has at times shown a startling propensity for breaking into new and strange fields. Her _Jeanne d’Arc_ (1890), a genuine success, was certainly not a “morbid eccentric.” “It is impossible to make _Hamlet_ Parisian,” but, in 1899, Sarah played _Hamlet_, to the satisfaction of the French at least. “She never did anything finer,” said Rostand. “She makes one understand Hamlet, and understand him beyond the possibility of a doubt.”[39] A year later she was playing Reichstadt, the son of Napoleon, in _L’Aiglon_, an impersonation that even Mr. Winter admitted “was one of beautiful symmetry.” And of recent years Sarah has threatened--though as yet she has not accomplished--the acting of Mephistopheles in _Faust_.
When Bernhardt was in London in 1895, George Bernard Shaw was in the midst of his career as the dramatic critic of the _Saturday Review_, serving a three-year term of what he called his slavery to the theatre. He observed Sarah with none too sympathetic eyes, but what he said shows, under his purposefully irritating exterior, the shrewd critical insight that makes the “Dramatic Opinions and Essays” one of the soundest books of theatrical comment, as well as one of the most readable:
“Madame Bernhardt has the charm of a jolly maturity, rather spoilt and petulant, perhaps, but always ready with a sunshine-through-the-clouds smile if only she is made much of. Her dresses and diamonds, if not exactly splendid, are at least splendacious; her figure, far too scantily upholstered in the old days, is at its best; and her complexion shows that she has not studied modern art in vain.... She is beautiful with the beauty of her school, and entirely inhuman and incredible. But the incredibility is pardonable, because, though it is all the greatest nonsense, nobody believing in it, the actress herself least of all, it is so artful, so clever, so well recognized a part of the business, and carried off with such a genial air, that it is impossible not to accept it with good-humor. One feels, when the heroine bursts on the scene, a dazzling vision of beauty, that instead of imposing on you, she adds to her own piquancy by looking you straight in the face, and saying, in effect: ‘Now who would ever suppose that I am a grandmother?’ That, of course, is irresistible; and one is not sorry to have been coaxed to relax one’s notions of the dignity of art when she gets to serious business and shows how ably she does her work. The coaxing suits well with the childishly egotistical character of her acting, which is not the art of making you think more highly or feel more deeply, but the art of making you admire her, pity her, champion her, weep with her, laugh at her jokes, follow her fortunes breathlessly, and applaud her wildly when the curtain falls. It is the art of finding out all your weaknesses and practicing on them--cajoling you, harrowing you, exciting you--on the whole, fooling you. And it is always Sarah Bernhardt in her own capacity who does this to you. The dress, the title of the play, the order of the words may vary; but the woman is always the same. She does not enter into the leading character: she substitutes herself for it.”