s
with the great ladies of the old civilisation of Italy, and has so long
disappeared from those of the younger civilisations of France and
England--a paradox. The peasant's gravity, directness, and
carelessness--a kind of uncouthness which is neither graceless nor, in
any intolerable English sense, vulgar--are to be found in the
unceremonious moments of every cisalpine woman, however elect her birth
and select her conditions. In Italy the lady is not a creature described
by negatives, as an author who is always right has defined the lady to be
in England. Even in France she is not that, and between the Frenchwoman
and the Italian there are the Alps. In a word, the educated Italian
_mondaine_ is, in the sense (also untranslatable) of singular, insular,
and absolutely British usage, a Native. None the less would she be
surprised to find herself accused of a lack of dignity.

As to intelligence--a little intelligence is sufficiently dramatic, if it
is single. A child doing one thing at a time and doing it completely,
produces to the eye a better impression of mental life than one receives
from--well, from a lecturer.

DONKEY RACES

English acting had for some time past still been making a feint of
running the race that wins. The retort, the interruption, the call, the
reply, the surprise, had yet kept a spoilt tradition of suddenness and
life. You had, indeed, to wait for an interruption in dialogue--it is
true you had to wait for it; so had the interrupted speaker on the stage.
But when the interruption came, it had still a false air of vivacity; and
the waiting of the interrupted one was so ill done, with so roving an eye
and such an arrest and failure of convention, such a confession of a
blank, as to prove that there remained a kind of reluctant and inexpert
sense of movement. It still seemed as though the actor and the actress
acknowledged some forward tendency.

Not so now. The serious stage is openly the scene of the race that
loses. The donkey race is candidly the model of the talk in every
tragedy that has a chance of popular success. Who shall be last? The
hands of the public are for him, or for her. A certain actress who has
"come to the front of her profession" holds, for a time, the record of
delay. "Come to the front," do they say? Surely the front of her
profession must have moved in retreat, to gain upon her tardiness. It
must have become the back of her profession before ever