By the same token, the relatively greater intelligence of actresses is
explained. They are, at their worst, quite as bad as the generality of
actors. There are she-stars who are all temperament and
balderdash--intellectually speaking, beggars on horseback, servant girls
well washed. But no one who knows anything about the stage need be told
that it can show a great many more quick-minded and self-respecting
women than intelligent men. And why? Simply because its women are
recruited, in the main, from a class much above that which furnishes its
men. It is, after all, not unnatural for a woman of considerable
intelligence to aspire to the stage. It offers her, indeed, one of the
most tempting careers that is open to her. She cannot hope to succeed in
business, and in the other professions she is an unwelcome and
much-scoffed-at intruder, but on the boards she can meet men on an equal
footing. It is, therefore, no wonder that women of a relatively superior
class often take to the business.... Once they embrace it, their
superiority to their male colleagues is quickly manifest. All movements
against puerility and imbecility in the drama have originated, not with
actors, but with actresses--that is, in so far as they have originated
among stage folks at all. The Ibsen pioneers were such women as Helena
Modjeska, Agnes Sorma and Janet Achurch; the men all hung back. Ibsen,
it would appear, was aware of this superior alertness and took shrewd
advantage of it. At all events, his most tempting acting parts are
feminine ones.

The girls of the stage demonstrate this tendency against great
difficulties. They have to carry a heavy handicap in the enormous number
of women who seek the footlights merely to advertise their real
profession, but despite all this, anyone who has the slightest
acquaintance with stagefolk will testify that, taking one with another,
the women have vastly more brains than the men and are appreciably less
vain and idiotic. Relatively few actresses of any rank marry actors.
They find close communion with the strutting brethren psychologically
impossible. Stock-brokers, dramatists and even theatrical managers are
greatly to be preferred.

XX

THE CROWD

Gustave Le Bon and his school, in their discussions of the psychology of
crowds, have put forward the doctrine that the individual man, cheek by
jowl with the multitude, drops down an intellectual peg or two, and so
tends to show the mental and em