powerlessness to create a personality, the same lack of all those quicker and more delicate perceptions which we include under the general term ‘refinement,’ and which, in the practice of any art, are the outcome of long and complex processes of education.  There, indeed, was the bald, plain fact—­the whole explanation of her failure as an artist lay in her lack both of the lower and of the higher kinds of education.  It was evident that her technical training had been of the roughest.  In all technical respects, indeed, her acting had a self-taught, provincial air, which showed you that she had natural cleverness, but that her models had been of the poorest type.  And in all other respects—­when it came to interpretation or creation—­she was spoilt by her entire want of that inheritance from the past which is the foundation of all good work in the present.  For an actress must have one of the two kinds of knowledge:  she must have either the knowledge which comes from a fine training—­in itself the outcome of a long tradition—­or she must have the knowledge which comes from mere living, from the accumulations of personal thought and experience.  Miss Bretherton had neither.  She had extraordinary beauty and charm, and certainly, as Kendal admitted, some original quickness.  He was not inclined to go so far as to call it ‘power.’  But this quickness, which would have been promising in a debutante less richly endowed on the physical side, seemed to him to have no future in her.  ’It will be checked,’ he said to himself, ’by her beauty and all that flows from it.  She must come to depend more and more on the physical charm, and on that only.  The whole pressure of her success is and will be that way.’

Miss Bretherton’s inadequacy, indeed, became more and more visible as the play was gradually and finely worked up to its climax in the last act.  In the final scene of all, the Prince, who by a series of accidents has discovered the Countess Hilda’s plans, lies in wait for her in the armoury, where he has reason to know she means to try the effect of a third and last apparition upon the Princess.  She appears; he suddenly confronts her; and, dragging her forward, unveils before himself and the Princess the death-like features of his old love.  Recovering from the shock of detection, the Countess pours out upon them both a fury of jealous passion, sinking by degrees into a pathetic, trance-like invocation of the past, under the spell of which the Prince’s anger melts away, and the little Princess’s terror and excitement change into eager pity.  Then, when she sees him almost reconquered, and her rival weeping beside her, she takes the poison phial from her breast, drinks it, and dies in the arms of the man for whose sake she has sacrificed beauty, character, and life itself.

A great actress could hardly have wished for a better opportunity.  The scene was so obviously beyond Miss Bretherton’s resources that even the enthusiastic house, Kendal fancied, cooled down during the progress of it.  There were signs of restlessness, there was even a little talking in some of the back rows, and at no time during the scene was there any of that breathless absorption in what was passing on the stage which the dramatic material itself amply deserved.