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.
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