about them, and people fell into a habit of repeating after Schlegel that here was the period in which to seek the true French literature.

If this were an opinion that only a few erudite people expressed, I should regard it as easily explained. Because, independent of the real merits of the works that are the objects of his labors, the pedant is compelled to express sovereign admiration for the books that have cost him so much labor. It would be too much to have consecrated years of effort to a work unless it were admirable! But the tendency showed itself in other ways and other causes must accordingly be sought for.

Apart from this literary piety which, especially at certain periods, carries us back to the past, the ancient authors will always have a charm for us that modern productions will never know how to equal. That charm consists in showing us a world that lives in an intellectual state very different from our own. We must guard against thinking that the literary taste of a people is always the certain index of the state of society, and that the book which best represents the practical habits of the moment is the book that most charms the popular imagination. Such persons love to wander about in an ideal state that no longer exists and nourish themselves on their regrets.

Was not the idyll in style during the years preceding the Revolution, and would not the man who judged our customs on the basis of our theatrical pieces and novels be making a very inaccurate analysis? Literary sympathies are subject to the same caprices, and the most widely read authors are often those whose naïveté and abandon - contrasting most strongly with the mannered tone of the century rest eyes that are wearied with beholding modern life. They are what we no longer are and what we regret not being

able to be; they are young and we are old. Just as an old man loves to recall his childhood and carries a clearer picture of it than of the intervening years, so our imagination, when abandoned to its instincts, turns in preference toward the books and naïve works that are full of juvenile zest and frank truthfulness that mark our literary youth. They represent to us that fantastic beauty which we desire along with our love for the slightly colder eternal beauty. Marble statues never keep us from enjoying miniatures, arabesques, or other caprices of art.

I have also observed that the return to the past manifests itself especially in periods following great literary centuries when weak imitation has tried to continue them; but it is perhaps at this moment of classic perfection that literature is least original, or, better still, least self-sufficient. In fact, it is rare for a great movement to manifest itself without a mixture of two different spirits; and it is perhaps a law of all the great developments of the human spirit that this contact is essential in bringing forth masterpieces. Rome and France have only been prolific in great creations when they were put in intimate commerce, in one case with Greece, and in the other with the spirit of all antiquity.

This necessary mixture cannot work, however, without granting some concessions to originality of mind and to nature. Every nation carries in its midst an individual type, a certain group of ideas and forms of ideas that it is charged to develop and that create the interest and originality of its character. If it only obeyed this tendency, if it only followed this ideal, its literature would be entirely national but would possess a less rare beauty than the work of people who have filled out their points of view by foreign contacts and have come nearer to the general

type of humanity. Such works, having become classics, would then no longer represent an isolated nation, but humanity itself in its general laws. They know no local color, they even efface nationality; and I think that people have rightly refused the title of national literature to the literature of the time of Louis XIV without caring whether it was a reproach or not.

Primitive literature, on the other hand, is like a mould, the very imprint of the nation that has produced it, and it is for that reason more strongly marked, it has a more individual and original tint than the expressions of people who go to foreign countries to wear off the salient points of their natural characteristics by the contacts they make there, and the temperaments with which they come in touch. But when these regular general forms have succeeded in discoloring and erasing all the shape and imprint of liveliness, the primitive and original style is regretted, everything that bears a foreign taint is treated as an impure mixture, and we come back to the ancient springs that better represent the native spirit of the country. Germany presented this literary phenomenon in the most striking fashion when she reacted powerfully against the cold and feeble group of French imitators and proclaimed Germanism in literature and art. Without making such high-sounding declarations, France has shown no less clearly that she went back to the same thing when she revolted against the general colormore ancient than French of the literature of Louis XIV.

-

It is remarkable, however, that the illiterate class always remains faithful to its poetic traditions and to its first authors. This class has no need of a return to the past, for it has never given up the past. It was not in the suave and harmonious stories of Greece that

people of the seventeenth century found their pleasure and their interest. The old heroic legends of the nation, stripped of their ancient glory and fallen into that Blue Library, a refuge scarcely worthy of so much grandeur, still charm their imagination, although these poetic traditions were ridiculed by a cultivated court which disdained the past, and although a satire or some epigrammatic verses by Boileau had not failed to reach that ignorant poet who, with so many heroes to choose from, had selected Roland.

The people always protest against any foreign invasion of their literature, and that is easy to understand. Itself an energetic and exclusive representative of the national type, the popular mind does not comprehend a mind of different sort. It appreciates only those literary pictures in which it recognizes its own image. The people remain forever the representatives of the nation's own originality. When literary people turn back to that they are merely joining it again at the stage where it has always been.

This return to the literary past, however, is characteristic of the human mind. There is not a single people that does not have genealogical legends of its own, and does not delight in pointing out the tombs of its forefathers. It is characteristic of the animal alone to live merely its own present individual life. It is the glory of mankind to have a past and to have ancestors, to link its own nobility with them, and to love to discuss them. Often the oldest are the dearest.

Literary relationship, in fact, by no means follows the same laws as blood relationship. The direct link is not always the closest. It seems as though affection grows stronger in proportion as the degree of relationship is attenuated. The son often appears merely as a successor, the father merely as a pred

ecessor who is replaced, and nowhere is it truer than in literature that one seldom loves his own heir presumptive. Michelangelo taxed Raphael with effeminacy, Corneille spoke of Racine as a youngster just beginning and endowed with a good deal of vigor. In our eyes Racine is the literary son of Corneille, but in Corneille's eyes he was a successor. Hence we have a reaction of the rising against the setting sun, a battle of their rays, and the calm, serene view is impossible. A just and impartial appreciation is possible only for those who are already far distant in time from the struggles of our horizon, deep in that peaceful blue whose distance extinguishes the fires that burn too bitterly. These are the pure stars that the eye regards with calm and tranquil pleasure.

Can this return, inevitably brought about by the scheme of things, be useful, and can it exercise a salutary influence upon the age that feels its force? I believe that it can, and I think that both language and literature may derive precious advantages from it. Languages, in fact, are like the human body; and, like everything else that pertains to mankind, they are in a perpetual flow of parts, which they admit, use, and reject when they have gone clear through the cycle of circulation. It is a genuine inner nutrition which has its phases and its periods. Languages, therefore, require food to make up their losses and to sustain their vitality.

Whence are they to draw this nutri

ment? There are two sources, one foreign, the other at home. They can live by loans from abroad, or they can have recourse to that ancient hoard of riches bequeathed them by their fathers, which they are always far from having exhausted. This second source, always the more preferable, ought especially to be the one chosen for the French language. We know with what severity our early grammarians conducted themselves in the process of admitting each word of our academic language. The elimination was severe, perhaps too severe; and although men of more indulgent taste have demanded the admission of a host of words discarded by that rigid assembly, nevertheless there remain outside — or, to put it more truly, ahead of our cultivated and ordered speech a mass of native riches set apart, which offer precious pearls to him who will go to the trouble of gathering them. There are the words of sound value, struck in the popular national mint, which Fénelon was already regretting and which might spare us these embarrassing and colorless alms which we are perpetually begging of foreign languages.

Finally, literature itself can only gain by bathing itself again in its ancient springs where are to be found, pure and unmixed, the true French spirit. There it can take on some of this new varnish of originality and that personal quality that becomes necessary to color the pallor of a literature whose most recent endeavors fail for lack of strong relief and originality.

Ir is a princess of legend who has just died. No one has shaken more hearts, nor has anyone communicated to us more deeply the thrill of heroism or the divine sweetness of tears. Successive generations have been swept away by her transports, have quivered at the caress of her voice, have wept at her feigned sorrows that were often more poignant than real ones.

The numberless images that she left behind for us take shape again to-day before our eyes. Only a very few of us have the privilege of remembering the earliest ones: her enchantment began sixty years ago. But the stirring, almost octogenarian figure of a grandmother whom we again saw on the stage last year, whom we almost saw at the beginning of this year, links together without transition the Lorenzaccio of 1912 and the Duke of Reichstadt of 1900, astounding figures in a youth that we used to like to believe eternal.

Those illustrious artists who have held crowds breathless under the spell of their words and gestures have a melancholy fate, for nothing but their names lives after them. There is no common measure to place them in the position where they belong. To say of Madame Sarah Bernhardt that she was the greatest artist of our time seems like weak praise that does not befit her. It makes us wonder whether there was not someone else - Champmeslé, Clairon, Adrienne Lecouvreur, Rachel who carried the sublimity of art to a higher pitch. History offers

no example of any other career so magnificently full; in all the countries of the world no one has been accorded more glorious deification, no one has more universally contributed to the diffusion of French thought.

It was in 1880 that she crossed the Atlantic for the first time. She had toured in Italy for four months. When she sailed for the United States, ten years of success had already sanctified her renown, which kept on growing from day to day. For more than half a century, in France and outside of France, in Europe and in America, she lavished the inexhaustible supply of charm that emanated from her, with untiring activity and with astonishing vitality. The intelligence is confounded at such a display of energy and courage.

When young, she was so delicate and frail that people were always worried about her health. When she was seventy-two, a terrible mutilation took part of her physical strength away from her without weakening the resistance of her soul. She who talked of death at thirty was still acting when she was almost eighty. In her dressing-room at the Théâtre Edouard VII, just before going on the stage, she had her first fainting fit two days before Christmas. But last week she acted a motion picture in her hotel on the Boulevard Pereire, only sorry that sickness condemned her on this occasion to the silent art.

romantic circumstances that autobiographical confidences still leave obscure. Her father was a Jew, converted to Catholicism; her mother was Dutch. In her childhood she was tormented with nervous crises, violent storms of anger, and fainting spells. In the Versailles convent where she was brought up, she dipped into mysticism and revolt. One day she ran away and was taken back by some officers in the camp at Satory.

When she was given the part of the angel in the sacred play called Tobie Recouvrant la Vue, which was presented before Monseigneur Sibour, the Duke of Morny, who was present, was struck by the excellence of her performance and advised her to go to the Conservatory. It was there that she made her dramatic début. But she did not dream of the theatre. She wanted to become a nun. Nevertheless she presented herself at the trials and was admitted at the age of sixteen to Provost's class. Her recitation of "The Two Pigeons' was sufficient testimony. 'What a shame,' said Auber, 'that that voice is not destined for singing!' In 1861 she won a first prize at tragedy in Zaïre and a second prize at comedy in La Fausse Agnès. The next year she did not even get a second prize at comedy and that was a cruel blow to her: she then thought of devoting her life to painting.

The protection of the Duke of Morny gained her an immediate engagement in the Comédie Française. She only stayed there for a few months, and her interpretations of Iphigénie, Valérie, and Femmes Savantes were of less importance than the slap in the face that she gave one of her companions, which caused her departure. The Gymnase got hold of her but did not know enough to keep her. The mediocrity of the parts she had to play prevented her from falling victim to the charms of a

tour through Spain. In the meantime she spent two weeks at the Porte-SaintMartin playing the rôle of a fairy princess in the ruinous revival of La Biche au Bois. 'It is an amusing piece,' Sardou had said, 'but not for the managers!'

Duquesnel engaged her for the Odéon. For one hundred and fifty francs a month she played Racine, Marivaux, George Sand, Dumas, Shakespeare, and finally the part of Zanetto in Le Passant by François Coppée. It was a triumph for the author and the actor. The war, during which Sarah Bernhardt devoted herself to the hospital that was installed in the Odéon, only postponed for several months a none the less continuous ascent. At the revival of Ruy Blas in 1872, Victor Hugo gave her the part of the queen and her success was such that the Comédie Française had to take her on again.

In spite of her rapid rise in the world in 1875, her quarrels with the manager, Perrin, who had dubbed her Mademoiselle La Revolte, have remained legendary. Moreover she often played classic and modern drama, one after the other - Junie, Chérubin, Aircie in Phèdre, Zaïre, and the Phèdre herself, a rôle in which no one since has equaled her, adding to the repertory various creations in La Fille de Roland, Gabrielle, L'Étrangère, and Rome Vaincue. At last, in 1877, she was Doña Sol, an unforgettable incarnation. She deserved the famous tribute of Victor Hugo: 'You have been great and charming; you have stirred me, an old warrior; and at one moment while the audience, moved and enchanted by you, applauded, I wept.'

But the manager did not disarm. It must also be confessed that this fantastical member of his company multiplied the occasions on which she provoked him. It was the time when she