quoted to an old friend and fervent admirer of Miss Marlowe the words
of Bacon which were always on the lips of Poe and of Baudelaire, about
the "strangeness in the proportions" of all beauty. She asked me, in
pained surprise, if I saw anything strange in Miss Marlowe. If I had
not, she would have meant nothing for me, as the "faultily faultless"
person, the Mrs. Kendal, means nothing to me. The confusion can easily
be made, and there will probably always be people who will prefer Mrs.
Kendal to Miss Marlowe, as there are those who will think Mme. Melba a
greater operatic singer than Mme. Calve. What Miss Marlowe has is a
great innocence, which is not, like Duse's, the innocence of wisdom, and
a childish and yet wild innocence, such as we might find in a tamed wild
beast, in whom there would always be a charm far beyond that of the
domestic creature who has grown up on our hearth. This wildness comes to
her perhaps from Pan, forces of nature that are always somewhere
stealthily about the world, hidden in the blood, unaccountable,
unconscious; without which we are tame christened things, fit for
cloisters. Duse is the soul made flesh, Rejane the flesh made Parisian,
Sarah Bernhardt the flesh and the devil; but Julia Marlowe is the joy of
life, the plenitude of sap in the tree.

The personal appeal of Mr. Sothern and of Miss Marlowe is very
different. In his manner of receiving applause there is something almost
resentful, as if, being satisfied to do what he chooses to do, and in
his own way, he were indifferent to the opinion of others. It is not the
actor's attitude; but what a relief from the general subservience of
that attitude! In Miss Marlowe there is something young, warm, and
engaging, a way of giving herself wholly to the pleasure of pleasing, to
which the footlights are scarcely a barrier. As if unconsciously, she
fills and gladdens you with a sense of the single human being whom she
is representing. And there is her strange beauty, in which the mind and
the senses have an equal part, and which is full of savour and grace,
alive to the finger-tips. Yet it is not with these personal qualities
that I am here chiefly concerned. What I want to emphasise is the
particular kind of lesson which this acting, so essentially English,
though it comes to us as if set free by America, should have for all who
are at all seriously considering the lamentable condition of our stage
in the present day. We have nothing like it i