Whatever hostility she may have met in her earlier days, Bernhardt long ago won the unqualified homage of her countrymen. To them she became a cherished national institution, the great actress of her time. “The great and only Sarah” is the phrase of the once scoffing Sarcey. “I am not quite sure,” wrote Lemaître in 1894, “whether Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt can say ‘How do you do?’ like any ordinary mortal. To be herself she must be extraordinary, and then she is incomparable.” “You cannot praise her for reciting poetry well,” said M. Theodore de Banville, a poet learned in metres and rhythms; “she is the muse of poetry itself. A secret instinct moves her. She recites poetry as the nightingale sings, as the wind sighs, and as the water murmurs.” “Her acting is the summit of art,”--again Sarcey--“our grandfathers used to speak with emotion of Talma and Mlle. Mars. I never saw either the one or the other, and I have barely any recollection of Rachel, but I do not believe that anything more original and more perfect than Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt’s _Phèdre_ has ever been seen in any theatre.” To take this view of Sarah one must, perhaps, be a Frenchman. The Sarcey of America, William Winter, certainly could not take it. With what may be termed the utilitarian Puritanism that seeks in the theatre to be “benefited, cheered, encouraged, ennobled, instructed, or even rationally entertained,” he could see in Bernhardt’s art only an exhibition of morbid eccentricity. Mr. Winter, here as elsewhere, has been made intolerant of much in the institution he has served and honored by his insistence on “intrinsic grandeur” in its characters. He is always looking for “the woman essentially good and noble,” whereas the modern drama has as one of its most cherished prerogatives its right to portray mixed characters,--often women whose “essential goodness” is mingled with much human frailty. Fairly enough, however, according to his lights, does Mr. Winter specify and define Bernhardt’s peculiar merits: “They are, in brief, the ability to elicit complete and decisive dramatic effect from situations of horror, terror, vehement passion, and mental anguish; neatness in the adjustment of manifold details; evenly sustained continuity; ability to show a woman who seeks to cause physical infatuation and who generally can succeed in doing so; a woman in whom vanity, cruelty, selfishness, and animal propensity are supreme; a woman of formidable, sometimes dangerous, sometimes terrible mental force.”