makes itself
into a very effectual kind of reality. She has played these pieces until
she has got them, not only by heart, but by every nerve and by every
vein, and now the ghost of the real thing is so like the real thing that
there is hardly any telling the one from the other. It is the living on
of a mastery once absolutely achieved, without so much as the need of a
new effort. The test of the artist, the test which decides how far the
artist is still living, as more than a force of memory, lies in the
power to create a new part, to bring new material to life. Last year, in
"L'Aiglon," it seemed to me that Sarah Bernhardt showed how little she
still possessed that power, and this year I see the same failure in
"Francesca da Rimini."

The play, it must be admitted, is hopelessly poor, common,
melodramatic, without atmosphere, without nobility, subtlety, or
passion; it degrades the story which we owe to Dante and not to history
(for, in itself, the story is a quite ordinary story of adultery: Dante
and the flames of his hell purged it), it degrades it almost out of all
recognition. These middle-aged people, who wrangle shrewishly behind the
just turned back of the husband and almost in the hearing of the child,
are people in whom it is impossible to be interested, apart from any
fine meanings put into them in the acting. And yet, since M. de Max has
made hardly less than a creation out of the part of Giovanni, filling
it, as he has, with his own nervous force and passionately restrained
art, might it not have been possible once for Sarah Bernhardt to have
thrilled us even as this Francesca of Mr. Marion Crawford? I think so;
she has taken bad plays as willingly as good plays, to turn them to her
own purpose, and she has been as triumphant, if not as fine, in bad
plays as in good ones. Now her Francesca is lifeless, a melodious
image, making meaningless music. She says over the words, cooingly,
chantingly, or frantically, as the expression marks, to which she seems
to act, demand. The interest is in following her expression-marks.

The first thing one notices in her acting, when one is free to watch it
coolly, is the way in which she subordinates effects to effect. She has
her crescendos, of course, and it is these which people are most apt to
remember, but the extraordinary force of these crescendos comes from the
smooth and level manner in which the main part of the speaking is done.
She is not anxious to make points