We have mentioned Mr. Winter’s wholesale repudiation of the plays in which Bernhardt attained her eminence. Without subscribing to the total depravity of such plays and of Bernhardt’s influence, one can freely admit that her appeal fell below the supremest heights of drama, and that her field was, after all, a narrow one. There were natural causes for this narrowness. It was imposed by her personality. She partakes to the fullest extent of that variation of the French character that is predominatingly sensual, yet regards its sensuality as a kind of spirituality. Again, her technical equipment as an actress included a voice of such richness and variety of effect, and a power of gesture and pose so naturally adapted to the grand style, that her tendency was for the florid and rhetorical. Thus the idealistic or poetic play, on the one hand, and the frankly naturalistic on the other, were beyond her province. The result has been, most notably, a succession of plays by Sardou--_Fédora_, _Théodora_, _La Tosca_, _Cléopâtre_, _Gismonda_, _Zoraya_, in which the author “accepting her limitations, harped time and time again upon the same notes. His heroines are creatures all alike compounded of Bernhardtesque attributes--feline in their endearments, tigerish in their passions of love and hate. As stage figures they represent the boldest prose of the emotions, expressed with a rhetoric that is flawless, but still rhetoric.”[40] So much for the main note. In a career so astonishingly long and successful there have been, of course, others. We have seen how, in _L’Aiglon_, _Hamlet_, and _Jeanne d’Arc_ she boldly went outside her usual field. Even within it there have been of course many moments of winning appeal or great power. To none other than Mr. Winter did her Frou-Frou appear pure-spirited, “an exquisite texture ... of childlike womanhood,”[41] and as Floria Tosca “Bernhardt’s acting ... was magnificent,--for it created the effect of perfect illusion”; it will “be remembered with a shuddering sense of horror as long as anything is remembered of her achievement.... Of its kind it was absolutely perfect art.” In _La Femme X_ he found her art consummate. Her Marguérite Gauthier in _La Dame aux Camélias_ did much to give that heroine genuine and compelling appeal to the purer emotions, her Phèdre has its moments of genuine nobility. And though it may be true that, in the main, she worked in those strata of the drama that are of “little benefit to humanity,” the sheer extent and strength of her influence bear witness that much in her work found a response in the minds and sympathies of two generations of people. She is, after all, unique, whatever the loftiness of her message; for the intensity of her power, the span of time over which she has exercised it and the universality of her fame combine to write a chapter that stands alone in theatrical annals. * * * * *