Not all of Madame Bernhardt’s impersonations, however, fall within Mr. Winter’s proscribed class. She has at times shown a startling propensity for breaking into new and strange fields. Her _Jeanne d’Arc_ (1890), a genuine success, was certainly not a “morbid eccentric.” “It is impossible to make _Hamlet_ Parisian,” but, in 1899, Sarah played _Hamlet_, to the satisfaction of the French at least. “She never did anything finer,” said Rostand. “She makes one understand Hamlet, and understand him beyond the possibility of a doubt.”[39] A year later she was playing Reichstadt, the son of Napoleon, in _L’Aiglon_, an impersonation that even Mr. Winter admitted “was one of beautiful symmetry.” And of recent years Sarah has threatened--though as yet she has not accomplished--the acting of Mephistopheles in _Faust_. When Bernhardt was in London in 1895, George Bernard Shaw was in the midst of his career as the dramatic critic of the _Saturday Review_, serving a three-year term of what he called his slavery to the theatre. He observed Sarah with none too sympathetic eyes, but what he said shows, under his purposefully irritating exterior, the shrewd critical insight that makes the “Dramatic Opinions and Essays” one of the soundest books of theatrical comment, as well as one of the most readable: “Madame Bernhardt has the charm of a jolly maturity, rather spoilt and petulant, perhaps, but always ready with a sunshine-through-the-clouds smile if only she is made much of. Her dresses and diamonds, if not exactly splendid, are at least splendacious; her figure, far too scantily upholstered in the old days, is at its best; and her complexion shows that she has not studied modern art in vain.... She is beautiful with the beauty of her school, and entirely inhuman and incredible. But the incredibility is pardonable, because, though it is all the greatest nonsense, nobody believing in it, the actress herself least of all, it is so artful, so clever, so well recognized a part of the business, and carried off with such a genial air, that it is impossible not to accept it with good-humor. One feels, when the heroine bursts on the scene, a dazzling vision of beauty, that instead of imposing on you, she adds to her own piquancy by looking you straight in the face, and saying, in effect: ‘Now who would ever suppose that I am a grandmother?’ That, of course, is irresistible; and one is not sorry to have been coaxed to relax one’s notions of the dignity of art when she gets to serious business and shows how ably she does her work. The coaxing suits well with the childishly egotistical character of her acting, which is not the art of making you think more highly or feel more deeply, but the art of making you admire her, pity her, champion her, weep with her, laugh at her jokes, follow her fortunes breathlessly, and applaud her wildly when the curtain falls. It is the art of finding out all your weaknesses and practicing on