y,
beauty, in the person of Miss Bretherton! How many men and women, I
thought, have laboured and struggled and died in the effort to reach a
higher and higher perfection in one single art, and are they to be
outdone, eclipsed in a moment, by something which is a mere freak of
nature, something which, like the lilies of the field, has neither toiled
nor spun, and yet claims the special inheritance and reward of those who
have! It seemed to me as though my feeling in her presence of the night
before, as if the sudden overthrow of the critical resistance in me had
been a kind of treachery to the human cause. Beauty has power enough, I
found myself reflecting with some fierceness,--let us withhold from her a
sway and a prerogative which are not rightfully hers; let us defend
against her that store of human sympathy which is the proper reward, not
of her facile and heaven-born perfections, but of labour and
intelligence, of all that is complex and tenacious in the workings of the
human spirit.

'And then, as my mood cooled still further, I began to recall many an
evening at the _Francais_ with you, and one part after another, one actor
after another, recurred to me, till, as I realised afresh what dramatic
intelligence and dramatic training really are, I fell into an angry
contempt for our lavish English enthusiasms. Poor girl! it is not her
fault if she believes herself to be a great actress. Brought up under
misleading conditions, and without any but the most elementary education,
how is she to know what the real thing means? She finds herself the rage
within a few weeks of her appearance in the greatest city of the world.
Naturally, she pays no heed to her critics,--why should she?

'And she is indeed a most perplexing mixture. Do what I will I cannot
harmonise all my different impressions of her. Let me begin again. Why is
it that her acting is so poor? I never saw a more dramatic personality!
Everything that she says or does is said or done with a warmth, a force,
a vivacity that make her smallest gesture and her lightest tone impress
themselves upon you. I felt this very strongly two or three times after
the play on Friday night. In her talk with Forbes, for instance, whom she
has altogether in her toils, and whom she plays with as though he were
the gray-headed Merlin and she an innocent Vivien, weaving harmless
spells about him. And then, from this mocking war of words and looks,
this gay camaraderie, in which ther