SOURCE: "Sarah Bernhardt," in Contemporary Portraits, Grant Richards Ltd., 1924, pp. 294-302.

In the following essay, Harris eulogizes Bernhardt and provides a personal recollection of her.

Sarah, la divine, as the French called her, is dead, and the authorities have given her a gorgeous funeral: to tell truth, the finest funeral I've ever seen, even in Paris, except perhaps the funeral given to Victor Hugo some forty years ago.

But even at Hugo's funeral there were not such masses of flowers as at Sarah's: two huge van-loads, besides wreaths uncountable.

The poet had made an immense reputation: judge him how you will, condemn his rhetoric here and his theatrical effects everywhere, and there yet remains a residuum of astonishing poetry. He was a singer like Swinburne; and just as Swinburne brought new cadences, unknown harmonies, into our English verse, so did Hugo into French verse: a verbal magician of...