uman life. Art does not go far when it stops
short at the revelation of the felicitous powers of the artist; and it
is not altogether right when it tends to beguile sympathy with an
unworthy object and perplex a spectator's perceptions as to good and
evil. Genevieve Ward's performance of Stephanie, brilliant though it
was, did not redeem the character from its bleak exile from human
sympathy. The actress managed, by a scheme of treatment exclusively her
own, to make Stephanie, for two or three moments, piteous and forlorn;
and her expression of that evanescent anguish--occurring in the appeal
to Sir Horace Welby, her friendly foe, in the strong scene of the second
act--was wonderfully subtle. That appeal, as Genevieve Ward made it,
began in artifice, became profoundly sincere, and then was stunned and
startled into a recoil of resentment by a harsh rebuff, whereupon it
subsided through hysterical levity into frigid and brittle sarcasm and
gay defiance. For a while, accordingly, the feelings of the observer
were deeply moved. Yet this did not make the character of Stephanie less
detestable. The blight remains upon it--and always must remain--that it
repels the interest of the heart. The added blight likewise rests upon
it (though this is of less consequence to a spectator), that it is
burdened with moral sophistry. Vicious conduct in a woman, according to
Stephanie's logic, is not more culpable or disastrous than vicious
conduct in a man: the woman, equally with the man, should have a social
license to sow the juvenile wild oats and effect the middle-aged
reformation; and it is only because there are gay young men who indulge
in profligacy that women sometimes become adventurers and moral
monsters. All this is launched forth in speeches of singular terseness,
eloquence, and vigour; but all this is specious and mischievous
perversion of the truth--however admirably in character from Stephanie's
lips. Every observer who has looked carefully upon the world is aware
that the consequences of wrongdoing by a woman are vastly more
pernicious than those of wrongdoing by a man; that society could not
exist in decency, if to its already inconvenient coterie of reformed
rakes it were to add a legion of reformed wantons; and that it is innate
wickedness and evil propensity that makes such women as Stephanie, and
not the mere existence of the wild young men who are willing to become
their comrades--and who generally end by being their