too I seemed to discern a lesson for the English stage.
Even through the silly disguises of this inconceivable production,
which pleased innocent London as it had pleased indifferent New York,
one felt a certain lilt and go, a touch of nature among the fool's
fabric of the melodrama, which set the action far above our steady
practitioners in the same art of sinking. And, above all, a sense of
parody pierced through words and actions, commenting wittily on the
nonsense of romance which so many were so willing to take seriously. She
was a live thing, defiantly and gaily conscious of every absurdity with
which she indulged the babyish tastes of one more public.

An actor or actress who is limited by talent, personality, or preference
to a single kind of _role_ is not properly an artist at all. It is the
curse of success that, in any art, a man who has pleased the public in
any single thing is called upon, if he would turn it into money, to
repeat it, as exactly as he can, as often as he can. If he does so, he
is, again, not an artist. It is the business of every kind of artist to
be ceaselessly creative, and, above all, not to repeat himself. When I
have seen Miss Marlowe as Juliet, as Ophelia, and as Viola, I am
content to have seen her also in a worthless farce, because she showed
me that she could go without vulgarity, lightly, safely, through a part
that she despised: she did not spoil it out of self-respect; out of a
rarer self-respect she carried it through without capitulating to it.
Then I hear of her having done Lady Teazle and Imogen, the Fiammetta of
Catulle Mendes and the Salome of Hauptmann; I do not know even the names
of half the parts she has played, but I can imagine her playing them
all, not with the same poignancy and success, but with a skill hardly
varying from one to another. There is no doubt that she has a natural
genius for acting. This genius she has so carefully and so subtly
trained that it may strike you at first sight as not being genius at
all; because it is so much on the level, because there are no fits and
starts in it; because, in short, it has none of the attractiveness of
excess. It is by excess that we for the most part distinguish what seems
to us genius; and it is often by its excess that genius first really
shows itself. But the rarest genius is without excess, and may seem
colourless in his perfection, as Giorgione seems beside Titian. But
Giorgione will always be the greater.

I