ple of
ductile and various art. Such a work ought surely to be recorded as one
of the great achievements of the stage. Genevieve Ward showed herself to
possess in copious abundance peculiar qualities of power and beauty upon
which mainly the part of Stephanie is reared. The points of assimilation
between the actress and the part were seen to consist in an imperial
force of character, intellectual brilliancy, audacity of mind, iron
will, perfect elegance of manners, a profound self-knowledge, and
unerring intuitions as to the relation of motive and conduct in that
vast network of circumstance which is the social fabric. Stephanie
possesses all those attributes; and all those attributes Genevieve Ward
supplied, with the luxuriant adequacy and grace of nature. But Stephanie
superadds to those attributes a bitter, mocking cynicism, thinly veiled
by artificial suavity and logically irradiant from natural hardness of
heart, coupled with an insensibility that has been engendered by cruel
experience of human selfishness. This, together with a certain mystical
touch of the animal freedom, whether in joy or wrath, that goes with a
being having neither soul nor conscience, the actress had to supply--and
did supply--by her art. As interpreted by Genevieve Ward the character
was reared, not upon a basis of unchastity but upon a basis of
intellectual perversion. Stephanie has followed--at first with
self-contempt, afterward with sullen indifference, finally with the bold
and brilliant hardihood of reckless defiance--a life of crime. She is
audacious, unscrupulous, cruel; a consummate tactician; almost sexless,
yet a siren in knowledge and capacity to use the arts of her sex;
capable of any wickedness to accomplish an end, yet trivial enough to
have no higher end in view than the reinvestiture of herself with social
recognition; cold as snow; implacable as the grave; remorseless; wicked;
but, beneath all this depravity, capable of self-pity, capable of
momentary regret, capable of a little human tenderness, aware of the
glory of the innocence she has lost, and thus not altogether beyond the
pale of compassion. And she is, in externals,--in everything visible and
audible,--the ideal of grace and melody.

In the presence of an admirable work of art the observer wishes that it
were entirely worthy of being performed and that it were entirely clear
and sound as to its applicability--in a moral sense, or even in an
intellectual sense--to h