career. She helped herself,
as most people do who get on. I am afraid that I have discouraged more
stage aspirants than I have encouraged. Perhaps I have snubbed really
talented people, so great is my horror of girls taking to the stage as a
profession when they don't realize what they are about. I once told an
elderly aspirant that it was quite useless for any one to go on the
stage who had not either great beauty or great talent. She wrote saying
that my letter had been a great relief to her, as now she was not
discouraged. "I have _both_."

There is one actress on the English stage whom I did definitely
encourage, of whose talent I was _certain_.

When my daughter was a student at the Royal Academy of Music, Dr. (now
Sir Alexander) Mackenzie asked me to distribute the medals to the
Elocution Class at the end of the term. I was quite "new to the job,"
and didn't understand the procedure. No girl, I have learned since, can
be given the gold medal until she has won both the bronze and the silver
medals--that is, until she has been at the Academy three years. I was
for giving the gold medalists, who only wanted certificates, _bronze_
medals; and of one young girl who was in her first year and only
entitled to a bronze medal, I said: "Oh, she must have the gold medal,
of course!"

She was a queer-looking child, handsome, with a face suggesting all
manner of possibilities. When she stood up to read the speech from
"Richard II." she was nervous, but courageously stood her ground. She
began slowly, and with a most "fetching" voice, to _think_ out the
words. You saw her think them, heard her speak them. It was so different
from the intelligent elocution, the good recitation, but bad
impersonation of the others! "A pathetic face, a passionate voice, a
_brain_," I thought to myself. It must have been at this point that the
girl flung away the book and began to act, in an undisciplined way, of
course, but with such true emotion, such intensity, that the tears came
to my eyes. The tears came to her eyes too. We both wept, and then we
embraced, and then we wept again. It was an easy victory for her. She
was incomparably better than any one. "She has to work," I wrote in my
diary that day. "Her life must be given to it, and then she will--well,
she will achieve just as high as she works." Lena Pocock was the girl's
name, but she changed it to Lena Ashwell when she went on the stage.

In the days of the elocution class there was