serious. They are meant well, the action hovers about them with
little tempting solicitations, continually offering them an opportunity
to be fine, to be genuine, and then withdrawing it before it can be
grasped. The third act has all the material of tragedy, but the material
is wasted; only the actress makes anything of it. We know how Sullivan
will take a motive of mere farce, such words as the "O Captain Shaw!" of
"Iolanthe," and will write a lovely melody to go with it, fitting his
music to the feeling which the words do but caricature. That is how Miss
Irene Vanbrugh handled Mr. Jones's unshapen material. By the
earnestness, sincerity, sheer nature, power, fire, dignity, and gaiety
of her acting, she made for us a figure which Mr. Jones had not made.
Mr. Jones would set his character in some impossible situation, and Miss
Vanbrugh would make us, for the moment, forget its impossibility. He
would give her a trivial or a grotesque or a vulgar action to do, and
she would do it with distinction. She had force in lightness, a vivid
malice, a magnetic cheerfulness; and she could suffer silently, and be
sincere in a tragedy which had been conceived without sincerity. If
acting could save a play, "The Princess's Nose" would have been saved.
It was not saved.

And the reason is that even the best of actors cannot save a play which
insists on defeating them at every turn. Yet, as we may realise any day
when Sarah Bernhardt acts before us, there is a certain kind of frankly
melodramatic play which can be lifted into at all events a region of
excited and gratified nerves. I have lately been to see a melodrama
called "The Heel of Achilles," which Miss Julia Neilson has been giving
at the Globe Theatre. The play was meant to tear at one's
susceptibilities, much as "La Tosca" tears at them. "La Tosca" is not a
fine play in itself, though it is a much better play than "The Heel of
Achilles." But it is the vivid, sensational acting of Sarah Bernhardt
which gives one all the shudders. "The Heel of Achilles" did not give me
a single shudder, not because it was not packed with the raw material of
sensation, but because Miss Julia Neilson went through so many trying
experiences with nerves of marble.

I cannot help wondering at the curious lack of self-knowledge in actors.
Here is a play, which depends for a great deal of its effect on a scene
in which Lady Leslie, a young Englishwoman in Russia, promises to marry
a Russian prince wh