ease of one who puts on and off an old shoe. It is almost a part of her;
she knows it through all her senses. And she moved me as much last night
as she moved me when I first saw her play the part eleven or twelve
years ago. To me, sitting where I was not too near the stage, she might
have been five-and-twenty. I saw none of the mechanism of the art, as I
saw it in "L'Aiglon"; here art still concealed art. Her vitality was
equal to the vitality of Réjane; it is differently expressed, that is
all. With Réjane the vitality is direct; it is the appeal of Gavroche,
the sharp, impudent urchin of the streets; Sarah Bernhardt's vitality is
electrical, and shoots its currents through all manner of winding ways.
In form it belongs to an earlier period, just as the writing of Dumas
fils belongs to an earlier period than the writing of Meilhac. It comes
to us with the tradition to which it has given life; it does not spring
into our midst, unruly as nature.

But it is in "Phèdre" that Sarah Bernhardt must be seen, if we are to
realise all that her art is capable of. In writing "Phèdre," Racine
anticipated Sarah Bernhardt. If the part had been made for her by a poet
of our own days, it could not have been brought more perfectly within
her limits, nor could it have more perfectly filled those limits to
their utmost edge. It is one of the greatest parts in poetical drama,
and it is written with a sense of the stage not less sure than its sense
of dramatic poetry. There was a time when Racine was looked upon as
old-fashioned, as conventional, as frigid. It is realised nowadays that
his verse has cadences like the cadences of Verlaine, that his language
is as simple and direct as prose, and that he is one of the most
passionate of poets. Of the character of Phèdre Racine tells us that it
is "ce que j'ai peut-être mis de plus raisonnable sur le théâtre." The
word strikes oddly on our ears, but every stage of the passion of Phèdre
is indeed reasonable, logical, as only a French poet, since the Greeks