SARAH BERNHARDT


I am not sure that the best moment to study an artist is not the moment
of what is called decadence. The first energy of inspiration is gone;
what remains is the method, the mechanism, and it is that which alone
one can study, as one can study the mechanism of the body, not the
principle of life itself. What is done mechanically, after the heat of
the blood has cooled, and the divine accidents have ceased to happen, is
precisely all that was consciously skilful in the performance of an art.
To see all this mechanism left bare, as the form of the skeleton is left
bare when age thins the flesh upon it, is to learn more easily all that
is to be learnt of structure, the art which not art but nature has
hitherto concealed with its merciful covering.

The art of Sarah Bernhardt has always been a very conscious art, but it
spoke to us, once, with so electrical a shock, as if nerve touched
nerve, or the mere "contour subtil" of the voice were laid tinglingly on
one's spinal cord, that it was difficult to analyse it coldly. She was
Phèdre or Marguerite Gautier, she was Adrienne Lecouvreur, Fédora, La
Tosca, the actual woman, and she was also that other actual woman, Sarah
Bernhardt. Two magics met and united, in the artist and the woman, each
alone of its kind. There was an excitement in going to the theatre;
one's pulses beat feverishly before the curtain had risen; there was
almost a kind of obscure sensation of peril, such as one feels when the
lioness leaps into the cage, on the other side of the bars. And the
acting was like a passionate declaration, offered to some one unknown;
it was as if the whole nervous force of the audience were sucked out of