THE DIVINE SARAH.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XVI, Issue 943, 2 April 1908, Page 18

THE DIVINE SARAH.

“ Here is a volcanic nature as we know, and here has been a volcanic career. and nothing of this volcanicism is lost in her description of it. It has been doubted whether she really wrote the ’ book ’ (The Memories of Sarah Bernhardt) hersielf. The vividness of the narration,' the -sure sense of what was worth telling - and what was not, the sharp, salt vivacity of the style (which not even the "Slip-shod English of the translator, i caftJ'obscure) —all these virtues have to some pedants seemed incompatible with authenticity. Paris contains, of course, many accomplished hacks who would gladly -have done the job for her, and would have done it'quite n’cely. But none of them could, have imparted to the book the peculiar fire and salt that it has —the rushing spontaneity that stamps it, for every discriminating reader, as Sarah’s own. “Her life may have said to have been an almost unbroken series of ‘scenes’ from the moment when, at the age of three, she fell into the fire. ‘The screams of my foster-father, who could not move, brought in some neighbours. I was thrown, all smoking, into a large pail of fresh milk. . . I have been told since that nothing was so painful to witness and yet so charming as my mother’s despair.’ The average little girl would not resent being removed from a boarding-school by an,:aunt. She would not ‘roll about on the ground uttering the most heart-rending cries.’ But that is what little Sarah did; and ‘the struggle lasted two hours,,.and while I was being dressed I escaped twice into the garden and attempted to climb the trees and to throw myself into the pond. . . I was so feverish that my life was said to be in danger.’ “ On another occasion she swallowed the contents of a large ink-pot, after her mother had made her take some medicine, and ‘I cried to mamma, “It is you who have killed me!”’ The desire for death —death as a means of scoring off someone, or as an emotional experience—was frequent both in her childhood and in her maturity. When she was appearing as ‘Zare,’ M. Perrin, her manager, offended her in some way, and she was ‘determined to faint, determined to vomit blood, determined to die, in order to enrage Perrin.’ Fainting was the next best thing to dying, and Sarah, throughout her early career, was continually faintng, with or without provocation. HER EMOTIONAL ENERGY. “ It is a wonder that so much emotional energy as she had to express in swoons, in floods of tears, in torrents of invective, did not utterly wear out her very frail body. Somehow her body fed and thrived on her spirit. The tragedian

in her cured the invalid. Doubtless, if she had not been by nature a tragedian, and if all her outbursts of emotion had come straight from her human heart, she could not have survived. It is clear that even in her most terrific moments one half of her soul was in the position of spectator, applauding vigorously. This artistic detachment is curiously illustrated by the tone she takes about herself throughout her memories. The test of a good autobiography is the writer’s power to envisage himself. Sarah envisages herself with perfect clearness and composure. She does not, in retrospect, applaud herself except when applause is deserved. She is never t’red of laughing at herself with the utmost good humour, or of scolding herself with exemplary sternness. ■‘ Emotion for emotion’s sake is not the law of your being. It is because that is so immutabl— so overwhelmingly, the law of Sarah’s being that we have in Sarah — yes, even now. for all the tricks she plays with her art —the greatest of living tragedians.’’—Max Beerbohm in “Saturday Review. ”