A Great Love! Between Sarah Bernhardt and Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was a poet and an artist... and he loved Sarah Bernhardt because she was a poet and an artist like himself; nor was her love for him any less than his love for her, despite her marriage to several other men, among them some who had the handsomeness of the gods of the Greeks.

The well-known English author Sylvester Dorian has written:

"Sarah said to me one still evening, an evening of the last autumn of her life: 'If England is a great country, she owes this greatness to her poets!'

And after a short pause of silence she added:

'England has one great poet... Oscar Wilde.'

She said it nodding her head, as though she believed with absolute faith that this was the one immortal truth that life had ever known. Then she went on to speak of Wilde with an enthusiasm that brought tears to her bright eyes. She mentioned to me that he was 'the strongest personality I have known in my life'—and this is what the English writer Ellen Beddy saw, in the book of her life's memories—'His manners, my friend, were a piece of music.'

And she continued: Do you know that he wrote several pieces of his verse for me? I have kept all his letters to me, and I have had them bound so that decay might not touch this unique legacy... There they are... And she pointed with her thin hand to a corner of her room where she had placed all the other letters she had received from the great men of her age, and before them she had set a skull bearing lines of verse in the hand of Victor Hugo."

Sarah knew his poems and much of his prose by heart, and therefore she knew him as no one else has known him or ever will. And she said

that what Oscar wrote is the best expression of the spirit of that age, and that nothing better than what he wrote will be written before another hundred years have passed.

He once wrote:

"Many have drawn aside the curtain that hides the core of my life, and after casting a searching glance they have gone their way, despairing of finding the seven deadly virtues they had longed to find there. But you are the one person who has come to this sacred temple, and to whom the pearl of my soul has been revealed in a cup of clear wine."

And he wrote to her on the occasion of her marriage, after a love affair with whose details London and Paris raved until a short time ago:

"If woman is more able than man to bear misery and toil, she is likewise more able than he to enjoy happiness and to drink from its sweet spring. The most enduring kind of happiness in this world is the happiness that women alone feel... the happiness of which a likeness is drawn on the faces of the immortal canvases, with its secret whose essence we have never once fathomed; the happiness uttered by that smile which hovers over those faces—a smile we have so often seen on a woman's lips as she carries her child by the man she loves with a true and noble love."

That intense love which joined their two hearts left a great mark on their two personalities, which almost became a single personality, so strong was the resemblance between them. Sarah imitated him in everything—in his talk, his conduct, and his eccentricity—and acted on his advice: she even bought a coffin and placed it in her bedroom, as Wilde had suggested, and she used to sleep in it, and a photograph was taken of her in that strange posture. She resembled Oscar most of all in her love of curious, striking sayings and of similes that show quickness of wit and a wide-ranging, reasoned imagination; and she succeeded in reaching the secret of his genius in this field, so that she amused herself by composing polished sayings and curious expressions whenever the chance offered.

Among Oscar Wilde's similes is that unique passage which he included in one of his letters to Sarah:

"If life is not poetic, it is at least linguistic. Life without love, for instance, is like a language without pronouns. Life ought to be like a language in which the pronouns are many; a bachelor's life is like a language that lacks conjunctions... and when a spinster marries, her life becomes a collection of question marks and exclamation points!"