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 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.