ess 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 Phedre Racine tells us that it
is "ce que j'ai peut-etre mis de plus raisonnable sur le theatre." The
word strikes oddly on our ears, but every stage of the passion of Phedre
is indeed reasonable, logical, as only a French poet, since the Greeks
themselves, could make it. The passion itself is an abnormal, an insane
thing, and that passion comes to us with all its force and all its
perversity; but the words in which it is expressed are never
extravagant, they are always clear, simple, temperate, perfectly precise
and explicit. The art is an art exquisitely balanced between the
conventional and the realistic, and the art of Sarah Bernhardt, when she
plays the part, is balanced with just the same unerring skill. She seems
to abandon herself wholly, at times, to her "fureurs"; she tears the
words with her teeth, and spits them out of her mouth, like a wild beast
ravening upon prey; but there is always dignity, restraint, a certain
remoteness of soul, and there is always the verse, and her miraculous
rendering of the verse, to keep Racine in the right atmosphere. Of what
we call acting there is little, little change in the expression of the
face. The part is a part for the voice, and it is only in "Phedre" that
one can hear that orchestra, her voice, in all its variety of beauty. In
her modern plays, plays in prose, she is condemned to use only a few of
the instruments of the orchestra: an actress must, in such parts, be
conversational, and for how much beauty or variety is there room in
modern conversation? But here she has Racine's verse, along with
Racine's psychology, and the language has nothing more to offer the
voice of a tragic actress. She seems to speak her words, her lines, with
a kind of joyful satisfaction; all the artist in her delights in the
task. Her nerves are in it, as well as her intelligence; but everything
is coloured by the poetry, everything is subordinate to beauty.

Well, and she seems still to be the same Phedre that she was eleven or
twelve years ago, as she is the same "Dame aux Camelias." Is it reality,
is it illusion? Illusion, perhaps, but an illusion which