ult part to
play. Only an artist can give effect to the comedy, or touch the true
chord of sentiment that underlies the idea of Galatea. But to make Galatea
consistently inhuman, persistently frigid, and monotonously spiritual, is,
if not absolutely incorrect, at least glaringly ineffective. If Galatea
does not become a breathing, living woman when she descends from her
pedestal, a woman capable of love, a woman with a foreshadowing of
passion, a woman of tears and tenderness, then the play goes for
nothing.... Miss Anderson reads Galatea in a severe fashion. She is a
Galatea perfectly formed, whose heart has not yet been adjusted. She
shrinks from humanity. She wants to be classical and severe, and her last
cry to Pygmalion, instead of being the utterance of a tortured soul, is
'monotonous and hollow as a ghost's.' It is with no desire to be
discourteous that we venture any comparison between the Galatea of Miss
Anderson and of Mrs. Kendal. The comparison should only be made on the
point of reading. Yet surely there can be no doubt that Mrs. Kendal's idea
of Galatea, while appealing to the heart, is more dramatically effective.
It illumines the poem."

_The Times_, 28th January, 1884.

"LYCEUM THEATER.

"Those who have suspected that Miss Mary Anderson was well advised in
clinging to the artificial class of character hitherto associated with her
engagement at the Lyceum--characters, that is to say, making little call
upon the emotional faculties of their exponent--will not be disposed to
modify their opinion from her 'creation' of the new part of distinctly
higher scope in Mr. Gilbert's one act drama, 'Comedy and Tragedy,'
produced for the first time on Saturday night. Though passing in a single
scene, this piece furnishes a more crucial test of Miss Anderson's powers
than any of her previous assumptions in this country. Unfortunately it
also assigns limits to those powers which few actresses of the second or
even third rank need despair of attaining. Such a piece as this, it will
be seen, makes the highest demands upon an actress. Tenderly affectionate,
and true with her husband, when she arranges with him the plan upon which
so much depends: heartless and _insouciante_ in manner while she receives
her guests; affectedly gay and vivacious while her husband's fate is
trembling in the balance; deeply tragic in her anguish when her fortitude
has broken down; and finally overcome with joy as her husband is restored
t