istoric panorama of _Patrie_.
When Sarah Bernhardt left the Comedie Francaise, Sardou followed in her
footsteps, and afterwards devoted most of his energy to preparing a series
of melodramas to serve successively as vehicles for her. Now, Sarah
Bernhardt is an actress of marked abilities, and limitations likewise
marked. In sheer perfection of technique she surpasses all performers of
her time. She is the acme of histrionic dexterity; all that she does upon
the stage is, in sheer effectiveness, superb. But in her work she has no
soul; she lacks the sensitive sweet lure of Duse, the serene and starlit
poetry of Modjeska. Three things she does supremely well. She can be
seductive, with a cooing voice; she can be vindictive, with a cawing voice;
and, voiceless, she can die. Hence the formula of Sardou's melodramas.

His heroines are almost always Sarah Bernhardts,--luring, tremendous,
doomed to die. Fedora, Gismonda, La Tosca, Zoraya, are but a single woman
who transmigrates from play to play. We find her in different countries and
in different times; but she always lures and fascinates a man, storms
against insuperable circumstance, coos and caws, and in the outcome dies.
One of Sardou's latest efforts, _La Sorciere_, presents the dry bones of
the formula without the flesh and blood of life. Zoraya appears first
shimmering in moonlight upon the hills of Spain,--dovelike in voice,
serpentining in seductiveness. Next, she is allowed to hypnotise the
audience while she is hypnotising the daughter of the governor. She is
loved and she is lost. She curses the high tribunal of the Inquisition,--a
dove no longer now. And she dies upon cathedral steps, to organ music. _The
Sorceress_ is but a lifeless piece of mechanism; and when it was performed
in English by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, it failed to lure or to thrill. But
Sarah Bernhardt, because as an actress she _is_ Zoraya, contrived to lift
it into life. Justly we may say that, in a certain sense, this is Sarah
Bernhardt's drama instead of Victorien Sardou's. With her, it is a play;
without her, it is nothing but a formula. The young author of _Patrie_
promised better things than this. Had he chosen, he might have climbed to
nobler heights. But he chose instead to write, year after year, a vehicle
for the Muse of Melodrama, and sold his laurel crown for gate-receipts.

If Sardou suffered through playing the sedulous ape to a histrionic artist,
it is no less true that the same prac