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If such a study of the femme collante, the mistress who cannot be shaken off or rather of the man whom she ruins, for it is Gaussin, not Sapho, that is the main subject of Daudet's acute analysis was to be written at all, it had to be written with a resolute art such as Daudet applied to it.
It is not so subtle a study of character as Numa Roumestan, nor is it a drama the scene of which is set somewhat in a corner removed from the world's scrutiny and full comprehension, as is more or less the case with Kings in Exile. It is comparatively unamenable to the moral, or, if one will, the puritanical, objections so naturally brought against Sapho.
In the second place, we must bravely realize that the morality of a work of fiction has little or no dependence on the subject that it treats. It is utterly unjust to the novelist to decide, as many unreasonable readers do, that such a book as Daudet's "Sapho" must be of necessity immoral because it exhibits immoral characters in a series of immoral acts.
True love as true sorrow shrinks from exhibition and should be permitted to enjoy the sacredness of privacy. The famous women of the world, Herodias, Semiramis, Aspasia, Thais, Cleopatra, Sapho, Messalina, Marie de Medici, Catherine of Russia, Elizabeth of England all of them have been immoral.
But then, Edna had never lived in Huntington, not even before she began to find books like "Sapho" and "Mademoiselle de Maupin," secretly sold in paper covers throughout Illinois. It was as if she had come into Huntington, into the Bowers family, on one of the trains that puffed over the marshes behind their back fence all day long, and was waiting for another train to take her out.
Will she be on her guard against shrinking to the prejudices and flirtations of a coterie, dying to all finer and higher issues? Will she worship virtue more and viceroys less? Will Hogarth keep wine-bibbers from the bottle, or can you make men sober by acts of "L'Assommoir"? Will "Madame Bovary" stay a sister's fall, or "Sapho" repel an eligible young man?
More than any actress she is the human animal without disguise or evasion; with all the instincts, all the natural cries and movements. In "Sapho" or "Zaza" she speaks the language of the senses, no more; and her acting reminds you of all that you may possibly have forgotten of how the senses speak when they speak through an ignorant woman in love.
Here, as elsewhere, she gives you merely the thing itself, without a disturbing atom of self-consciousness; she is grotesque, she is what you will: it is no matter. The emotion she is acting possesses her like a blind force; she is Sapho, and Sapho could only move and speak and think in one way.
Réjane, in "Sapho" or in "Zaza" for instance, is woman naked and shameless, loving and suffering with all her nerves and muscles, a gross, pitiable, horribly human thing, whose direct appeal, like that of a sick animal, seizes you by the throat at the instant in which it reaches your eyes and ears.
'Sapho' , an operatic version of Daudet's famous novel, and 'Cendrillon' , a charming fantasia on the old theme of Cinderella, both succeeded in hitting Parisian taste. No less fortunate was 'Grisélidis' , a quasi-mediæval musical comedy, founded upon the legend of Patient Grizel, and touching the verge of pantomime in the characters of a comic Devil and his shrewish spouse.
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