she suffers, in the scene, for instance, where Armand
insults her, she is like a trapped wild beast which some one is
torturing, and she wakes just that harrowing pity. One's whole flesh
suffers with her flesh; her voice caresses and excites like a touch; it
has a throbbing, monotonous music, which breaks deliciously, which
pauses suspended, and then resolves itself in a perfect chord. Her
voice is like a thing detachable from herself, a thing which she takes
in her hands like a musical instrument, playing on the stops cunningly
with her fingers. Prose, when she speaks it, becomes a kind of verse,
with all the rhythms, the vocal harmonies, of a kind of human poetry.
Her whisper is heard across the whole theatre, every syllable distinct,
and yet it is really a whisper. She comes on the stage like a miraculous
painted idol, all nerves; she runs through the gamut of the sex, and
ends a child, when the approach of death brings Marguerite back to that
deep infantile part of woman. She plays the part now with the accustomed
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 Rejane; it is differently expressed, that is
all. With Rejane 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 "Phedre" that Sarah Bernhardt must be seen, if we are to
realise all that her art is capable of. In writing "Phedre," 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 l