f our young lady
have a wealthy father, and retain her schoolroom faculty for learning
poetry by heart, there is no power on earth to prevent her from making
her de'but, somewhere, as Juliet--if she be so inclined; and such is
usually her inclination. That her voice is untrained, that she cannot
scan blank-verse, that she cannot gesticulate with grace and propriety,
nor move with propriety and grace across the stage, matters not a
little bit--to our young lady. 'Feeling,' she will say, 'is
everything'; and, of course, she, at the age of eighteen, has more
feeling than Juliet, that 'flapper,' could have had. All those other
things--those little technical tricks--'can be picked up,' or 'will
come.' But no; I misrepresent our young lady. If she be conscious that
there are such tricks to be played, she despises them. When, later, she
finds the need to learn them, she still despises them. It seems to her
ridiculous that one should not speak and comport oneself as artlessly
on the stage as one does off it. The notion of speaking or comporting
oneself with conscious art in real life would seem to her quite
monstrous. It would puzzle her as much as her grandmother would have
been puzzled by the contrary notion.

Personally, I range myself on the grandmother's side. I take my stand
shoulder to shoulder with the Graces. On the banner that I wave is
embroidered a device of prunes and prisms.

I am no blind fanatic, however. I admit that artlessness is a charming
idea. I admit that it is sometimes charming as a reality. I applaud it
(all the more heartily because it is rare) in children. But then,
children, like the young of all animals whatsoever, have a natural
grace. As a rule, they begin to show it in their third year, and to
lose it in their ninth. Within that span of six years they can be
charming without intention; and their so frequent failure in charm is
due to their voluntary or enforced imitation of the ways of their
elders. In Georgian and Early Victorian days the imitation was always
enforced. Grown-up people had good manners, and wished to see them
reflected in the young. Nowadays, the imitation is always voluntary.
Grown-up people have no manners at all; whereas they certainly have a
very keen taste for the intrinsic charm of children. They wish children
to be perfectly natural. That is (aesthetically at least) an admirable
wish. My complaint against these grown-up people is, that they
themselves, whom time has rob