played
the lawyer seized the general idea of his _role_ with perfect accuracy;
in four minutes it was admirably rendered to his audience, but in four
minutes it was exhausted. The preliminary cough, the constant angularity
of attitude in the midst of perpetual fidget, the indicative finger from
which the legal remarks seemed to pop off as from a pocket-pistol, were
grasped at once, and remained unvaried, undeveloped to the close. The
very ability with which the actor rendered the inner unity of legal
existence, the very fidelity with which he represented the lawyer as a
class, denied to him the subtle charm of the only unity which life as a
representation exhibits--the charm of a unity of outer impression
arising out of perpetual inner variety.

His feminine rival won her laurels just because she made no attempt to
grasp any general idea at all, but abandoned herself freely to the
phases of the character as it encountered the various other characters
of the piece. Whether as the frivolous widow or the daring coquette, as
the practical woman of business or the unprotected female, as the flirt
in her wildest extravagance or the wife in her most melting moods, she
aimed at no artistic unity beyond the general unity of sex. She remained
simply woman, and all this prodigious versatility was, as the audience
observed, "so charmingly natural," just because it is woman's life. "On
the stage," if we may venture to apply the lines about Garrick:--

On the stage she is natural, simple, affecting--
It is only that when she is off she is acting.

In actual fact she is acting whether off the boards or on, but the mere
existence in outer impressions, in the unity of a constant admiration,
which critics applaud as natural on the stage, they are unreasonably
hard upon in general society.

A man on the boards is doing an unusual and exceptional thing, and as a
rule the very effort he makes to do it only enhances his failure; but a
woman on the boards is only doing, under very favorable circumstances,
what she does every day with less notice and applause. There can be no
wonder if she is "charmingly natural," but this naturalness depends, as
we have seen, on the entire absence of what in men is called
self-consciousness--that is, the sense of anomaly. When a critic then
ventures to open this inner existence, and to give woman a peep at
herself, we cannot be astonished at the scream of indignation which
greets his efforts. B