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 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