In Juliet Miss Marlowe is ripe humanity, in Ophelia that same humanity broken down from within.  As Viola, in “Twelfth Night” she is the woman let loose, to be bewitching in spite of herself; and here again her art is tested, and triumphs, for she is bewitching, and never trespasses into jauntiness on the one hand, or, on the other, into that modern sentiment which the theatre has accustomed itself to under the name of romance.  She is serious, with a calm and even simplicity, to which everything is a kind of child’s play, putting no unnecessary pathos into a matter destined to come right in the end.  And so her delicate and restrained gaiety in masquerade interprets perfectly, satisfies every requirement, of what for the moment is whimsical in Shakespeare’s art.

Now turn from Shakespeare, and see what can be done with the modern make-believe.  Here, in “Jeanne d’Arc,” is a recent American melodrama, written ambitiously, in verse which labours to be poetry.  The subject was made for Miss Marlowe, but the play was made for effect, and it is lamentable to see her, in scenes made up of false sentiment and theatrical situations, trying to do what she is ready and able to do; what, indeed, some of the scenes give her the chance to be:  the little peasant girl, perplexed by visions and possessed by them, and also the peasant saint, too simple to know that she is heroic.  Out of a play of shreds and patches one remembers only something which has given it its whole value:  the vital image of a divine child, a thing of peace and love, who makes war angelically.

Yet even in this play there was ambition and an aim.  Turn, last of all, to a piece which succeeded with London audiences better than Shakespeare, a burlesque of American origin, called “When Knighthood was in Flower.”  Here 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