le drama, a prima donna of Italian origin. Consequently she
was sure to be denounced as unnatural and undramatic by the critics.
The most vicious man in the play is not in the least a stage villain;
indeed, he regards his own moral character with the sincere complacency
of a hero of melodrama. The amiable devotee of romance and beauty is
shewn at an age which brings out the futilization which these worships
are apt to produce if they are made the staple of life instead of
the sauce. The attitude of the clever young people to their elders is
faithfully represented as one of pitiless ridicule and unsympathetic
criticism, and forms a spectacle incredible to those who, when young,
were not cleverer than their nearest elders, and painful to those
sentimental parents who shrink from the cruelty of youth, which pardons
nothing because it knows nothing. In short, the characters and their
relations are of a kind that the routineer critic has not yet learned
to place; so that their misunderstanding was a foregone conclusion.
Nevertheless, there was no hesitation behind the curtain. When it went
up at last, a stage much too small for the company was revealed to an
auditorium much too small for the audience. But the players, though it
was impossible for them to forget their own discomfort, at once made the
spectators forget theirs. It certainly was a model audience, responsive
from the first line to the last; and it got no less than it deserved in
return.

I grieve to add that the second performance, given for the edification
of the London Press and of those members of the Stage Society who cannot
attend the Sunday performances, was a less inspiriting one than the
first. A solid phalanx of theatre-weary journalists in an afternoon
humor, most of them committed to irreconcilable disparagement of problem
plays, and all of them bound by etiquette to be as undemonstrative
as possible, is not exactly the sort of audience that rises at the
performers and cures them of the inevitable reaction after an excitingly
successful first night. The artist nature is a sensitive and therefore
a vindictive one; and masterful players have a way with recalcitrant
audiences of rubbing a play into them instead of delighting them with
it. I should describe the second performance of Mrs Warren's Profession,
especially as to its earlier stages, as decidedly a rubbed-in one. The
rubbing was no doubt salutary; but it must have hurt some of the thinner
skins.