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 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 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