With the death of Mme. Sarah Bernhardt perhaps the last
of a very special kind of life has been lived out. We of this century, in whose first two decades Sarah Bern- hardt indeed lived, but always as something of a stranger, shall not see lived through so brilliant, so stormy a career as hers. And most of all for this reason—we cannot supply the background. To dazzle it is necessary to achieve contrast. And here arises Sarah Bernhardt's great debt to the Victorian age. That great drab page of history, sombre even in its magnificence, regular even in its excesses, supplied the perfect background to lives like Mine. Bernhardt's. Against it they glitter and shine like diamonds upon velvet. To-day, when colour, when licence, have come back into everyday things, no man or woman can hope to produce that particular and startling effect. We shall have no more " Sarahs."
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