discrepancy between the real feelings of the actor and those which he represents, was discussed by Diderot in a famous dialogue. Another, the singular divergence between the art of the stage and the art of the drama, was illustrated very completely by the career of Sarah Bernhardt.

It is clear that the primary business of the actor is to interpret the conception of the dramatist; but it is none the less true that, after a certain degree of excellence has been reached, the merits of an actor have no necessary dependence upon his grasp of the dramatist's meaning. To be a moderately good actor one must understand, more or less, what one's author is up to; but the achievements of Sarah Bernhardt proved conclusively that it was possible to be a very great actor indeed without having the faintest notion not only of the intentions of particular dramatists, but of the very rudiments of the dramatic art.

No one who saw her in Hamlet or in Lorenzaccio could doubt that this was so. Her Hamlet was a fantastic absurdity which far, far surpassed the permitted limits even of a Gallic miscomprehension of "le grand Will." But perhaps even more remarkable was her treatment of Lorenzaccio. Hamlet, after all, from every point of view, is an extremely difficult play; but

a study in disillusionment—the disillusionment of a tyrannicide, who finds that the assassination, which he has contrived and executed with vast hazard, skill, and difficulty, has merely resulted in a state of affairs even worse than before. Sarah Bernhardt, incredible as it may seem, brought down the final curtain on the murder of the tyrant, and thus made the play, as a play, absolutely pointless. What remained was a series of exciting scenes, strung together by the vivid and penetrating art of a marvelous actress. For art it was, and not mere posturing. Nothing could be further from the truth than to suppose that the great Frenchwoman belonged to that futile tribe of empty-headed impersonators who, since Irving, have been the particular affliction of the English stage. Dazzling divinity though she was, she was also a serious, a laborious worker, incessantly occupied not with expensive stage properties, elaborate make-up, and historically accurate scenery, but simply with acting. Sir Herbert Tree was ineffective because he neither knew nor cared how to act; he was content to be a clever entertainer. But Sarah Bernhardt's weakness, if weakness it can be called, arose from a precisely contrary reason

from the very plenitude of her power over all the resources of her craft, a

mastery over her medium of so overwhelming a kind as to become an obsession.

The result was that this extraordinary genius was really to be seen at her most characteristic in plays of inferior quality. She did not want, she did not understand, great drama; what she did want were opportunities for acting, and this was the combination which the "Toscas," the "Camélias," and the rest of them so happily provided. In them the whole of her enormous virtuosity in the representation of passion had free play: she could contrive thrill after thrill, she could seize and tear the nerves of her audience, she could touch, she could terrify. In them, above all, she could ply her personality to the utmost. All acting must be to some extent an exploitation of the personality; but in the acting of Sarah Bernhardt that was the dominating quality, the fundamental element of her art. It was there that her strength, and her weakness, lay. During her best years her personality remained an artistic instrument; but eventually it became too much for her. It absorbed both herself and her audience; the artist became submerged in the divinity, and what was genuine, courageous, and original in her character was lost sight of in oceans of applause.

This, no doubt, was partly due to the age she lived in. It is odd, but certainly true, that the eighteenth century would have been profoundly shocked by the actress who reigned supreme over the nineteenth. The gay and cynical creatures of the ancien régime, who tittered over "La Pucelle," and whose adventures were reflected without exaggeration in the pages of "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," would have recoiled in horror before what

they would have called the indécence of one of Sarah Bernhardt's ordinary scenes. Every age has its own way of dealing with these matters, and the nineteenth century made up for the high tone of its literature and the decorum of its behavior by the luscious intensity of its theatrical displays. Strict husbands in icy shirt-fronts and lovely epitomes of all the domestic virtues in bustles would sit for hours thrilling with frenzied raptures over intimate and elaborate presentments of passion in its most feverish forms. The supply and the demand, interacting upon each other, grew together. But by the end of the century the fashion had begun to change. The star of Eleanora Duse rose upon the horizon; Ibsen became almost popular; the Théâtre Antoine, the Moscow Art Theater, introduced a new style of tragic acting-a prose style-surprisingly effective and surprisingly quiet, and subtle with the sinuosities of actual life. Already by the beginning of the twentieth century the bravura of Sarah Bernhardt seemed a magnificent relic of the past. And the generation which was to plunge with reckless fanaticism into the gigantic delirium of the war found its pleasures at the theater in a meticulous imitation of the significant trivialities of middleclass interiors.

Fortunately, however, Sarah Bernhardt's genius did not spend itself entirely in amazing personal triumphs and the satisfaction of the emotional needs of a particular age. Fortunately the mightier genius of Jean Racine was of such a nature that it was able to lift hers on to its own level of the immortal and the universal. In this case there was no need on her part for an intellectual realization of

the dramatist's purpose. Racine had enough intellect for both: all that she had to do was to play the parts he had provided for her to the height of her ability; his supreme art did the rest. Her Hermione was a masterpiece; but certainly the greatest of all her achievements was in "Phédre." Tragedy possesses an extraordinary quality, which, perhaps, has given it its traditional place of primacy among all the forms of literature. It is not only immortal; it is also forever new. There are many implications in it which reveal themselves by a mysterious law to each succeeding generation. The "dipus" acted yesterday at Cambridge was the identical play that won the prize two thousand years ago; and yet it was a different "Edipus," with meanings for the modern audience that were unperceived by the Athenians. The records show conclusively that the Phédre of Bernhardt differed as much from that of Rachel as Rachel's differed from Clarion's, and as Clarion's differed from that of the great actress who created the part under the eyes

of Racine. But each was Phédre. Probably the latest of these interpretations was less perfect in all its parts than some of its predecessors; but the great moments, when they came, could never have been surpassed. All through there were details of such wonderful beauty that they return again and again upon the memoryunforgetable delights. The hurried horror of

"Mes yeux le retrouvaient dans les

traits de son père";

the slow, expanding, mysterious grandeur of

"Le ciel, tout l'univers, est plein de mes aïeux";

the marvelous gesture with which the words of Enone, announcing the approach of Thésée, seemed to be pressed back into silence down her "ill-uttering throat" such things, and a hundred others, could have been conceived and executed only by a consummate artist in her happiest vein. But undoubtedly the topmost reach came in the fourth act, when the Queen, her reason tottering with passion and jealousy, suddenly turns upon herself in an agony of self-reproach. Sarah Bernhardt's treatment of this passage was extremely original, and it is difficult. to believe that it was justified by the text. Racine's words seem to import a violent directness of statement: "Chaque mot sur mon front fait

dresser mes cheveux";

but it was with hysteric irony, with dreadful, mocking laughter, that the actress delivered them. The effect was absolutely overwhelming, and Racine himself could only have bowed to the ground before such audacity. Then there followed the invocation to

Minos, culminating in the stupendous

"Je crois voir de ta main tomber

l'urne terrible."

The secret of that astounding utterance baffles the imagination. The words boomed and crashed with a superhuman resonance which shook the spirit of the hearer like a leaf in the wind. The voix d'or has often been raved over; but in Sarah Bernhardt's voice there was more than gold: there was thunder and lightning; there was heaven and hell. But the pitcher is broken at the fountain; that voice is silent now forever, and the terror and the pity that lived in it and purged the souls of mortals have faded into incommunicable dreams.

F the freedom of the press is ever destroyed in the United States, the last barricade to yield will be the sporting page. The sporting writer has been allowed to have his fling as long as he could interest his readers. His fling, however, has been almost entirely in the direction of novel language. What he has had to report is news of a very technical sort, with accurate statistics. To give variety to his material he has minted strange coins and carved curious images; he has done to the common idiom what some gardener does who makes flowers of amazing color and scent out of ordinary blossoms. It is true that the gaudiest flowers of speech, which belong to the language of base-ball, have of late left the sporting page of the more civilized newspapers, which talk less than formerly about "clouting the sphere" and "kissing the leather" and "carving the air," because they prefer what is at once. plainer and more vivid than these endless twists and turns. But enough of venturesome originality remains in base-ball English (or base-ball American) to make the uninitiated stare and to satisfy the demand among the initiated for a special dialect worthy of the sport. Here is a wide-spread, yet well-knit, guild of players and spectators which has a tradition, a technic, a vogue, a language; no wonder it has also its jongleurs and minstrels in the

sporting writers who are read with a delight in their verbal felicities that perhaps no other group of writers in America can be said to waken. Has the guild contributed its share to the sum of literature in the country?

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Without question it still awaits that genius who in time may lift this particular department of the vernacular to the point to which Mark Twain lifted the department of newspaper humor. Nor does it seem clear how those minstrels and jongleurs, the sporting writers, are to make enduring lays or ballads, sagas or epics, out of news which is dead in a day. The most noteworthy master of the art, Ring W. Lardner, struck off from the highway of the main tradition in "You Know Me Al" and has since gone farther. In that extraordinary document he invented for his protagonist a certain Jack Keefe who is a pitcher expert enough to play with the White Sox and a fool complete enough to tickle even the stupid among the fans by his incomparable stupidity. Jack, babbling with his pen to a friend in his native village, has bragged his way through various base-ball seasons and, in "Treat 'Em Rough" and "The Real Dope," through his conduct in the war. Both the writer who conceived him and the low-brow public