Ruby," and made a decisive success. She proved a disturbing element in Daly's company, because strongly individual and formidable in character, brilliant in beauty, and piquantly original in style. After leaving that company, although she immediately obtained an engagement to act Milady, with James O'Neill, in "The Three Guardsmen," she experienced some vicissitudes of fortune, but though she was sometimes obliged to revert to the stock she did not lapse into obscurity. She was, however, for some time constrained to wear the fetter, but she made her way by her strength, and the hour came when, by a distinct popular success, she effected her liberation. It is the nature of a strong character, whatever may be the confronting obstacles, steadfastly to pursue its inherently propulsive purpose. Her character was strong and aspirant, it had not been saddened, and by the compelling enticement of it, and by her ability, persistence, and achievement, she was soon in a position to command. The notable parts in which she has conspicuously appeared, in various professional associations, after Countess Mirtza and Milady, are Hannah Jacobs, in "The Children of the Ghetto"; Cora, in "Naughty Anthony"; Cho-Cho-San, in "Madame Butterfly"; Cigarette, in "Under Two Flags"; Yo-San, in "The Darling of the Gods" (her most symmetrical performance); The Girl, in "The Girl of the Golden West," and Anna Granger, in "Fighting Hope." Neither of them, nor all of them combined, could wholly

arouse the nature which, at moments, she indicated in her acting of them, or could completely liberate all the feeling and governing control of feeling which, at those moments, she suggested as within her capability; and it is little less than wonderful that, with such material, she was able to accomplish so much.

Blanche Bates might be a great actress, either in Comedy or Tragedy, or both: potentially, by reason of what she is, and of the simplicity, truth, and finish of her artistic method, she is a great actress. There is no woman visible on the American Stage to-day who rivals her in combined brilliancy and power. She could act Shakespeare's Beatrice, and she could, with study, act his Cleopatra. She possesses the temperament, the person, and the kindred expressive faculties for all such characters as are typified by Zenobia, Hypatia, Semiramis, Queen Katharine, and Mary Stuart. Her range of expression would admit of her successful acting in Margaret of Navarre, at one extreme, and Lady Jane Grey, at the other. All those parts are mentioned not as parts necessarily desirable to be shown, but as representative, indicative types. No one wishes to induct Miss Bates, or any other performer, into a classical dramatic cemetery. The point is that, at a time when the Stage stands in urgent need of intellectual control, that actress, greatly gifted and graciously endowed, had attained a position of leadership, and, in a moment,-whether from caprice, or weariness,

or feminine amiability, or acquisitiveness, or bad judgment, or cynical compliance with the vacuous social taste and sordid commercial spirit of the day, tossed it aside, as if it were a withered flower. It would be foolish to deny to Blanche Bates the attribute of intellectual character, but the conclusion is inevitable, when contemplating the course she has chosen to take, that her professional ambition has not been directed by intellectual purpose, or rather that she has weakly permitted her purpose to be thwarted. Ample material gain has rewarded her exertions, but her material success has involved a considerable sacrifice. She is an actress who might have rivalled the achievement and renown of either Mary Anderson or Ada Rehan, and she might have done so with monetary gain-popularly considered the true and only certificate of success. During the two years 1910 to 1912 Miss Bates has devoted her fine talents to a farce called "Nobody's Widow," one of the silliest conglomerations of twaddle and indelicacy with which the trash-ridden Stage of America has been encumbered, presenting in that employment a radiant image of female loveliness and a melancholy spectacle of talent perverted and opportunity thrown away.

The central idea of that farce (the work of Mr. Avery Hopwood) is denial of an established relationship under circumstances which might cause absurd perplexities and ridiculous consequences, such, in general character, as ensue when Charles Courtly, in "London Assurance,"

on being introduced to his father, Sir Harcourt, blandly greets him as a new acquaintance. The chief female character, Roxana, acted by Miss Bates, has, in Europe, met and married a "Mr. Clayton," who, actually, is an English nobleman, the Duke of Moreland; but having, on their wedding-day, found him in the embrace of a mistress, Roxana has repudiated and left him,-privately instituting proceedings for divorce, and presently apprising her friends in America that her husband, of whom they have heard, but only by his assumed name of Clayton, is dead, and that she, accordingly, is a widow. Later she visits one of those friends, at Palm Beach, Florida, and there she is, by chance, confronted by her husband, then a visitor to the same hostess, but bearing his right name. Roxana's husband endeavors to reinstate himself in her affections, but, persistently and with alternate pleasantry and sarcasm, he is treated by her as an accidental acquaintance. Roxana assures him that, as "Mr. Clayton," he is "dead"; that she has never before seen him; that, to her, he is, as the Duke of Moreland, nobody; that she is a widow. That attitude she maintains until apprised of her divorce, when she becomes conscious of a sudden access of tenderness for him; and, eventually, though not until after various trips and stumbles on the track of reconciliation,—she first allows herself to be again married to him, and then allows herself to be convinced of his honest intentions and the sincerity of his love.

That is the general outline of the piece, and, momentarily, it seems the harbinger of genuine if preposterous fun. An expert dramatist, adhering to one medium of expression, would, and easily could, have worked out the process of reconciliation between the wife and husband through a series of, at least at the moment, seemingly rational and certainly comical complexities, and thus made a good and inoffensive farce. The fabricator of "Nobody's Widow," while making an auspicious start and supplying a few passages of colloquy which now and then show a glint of wit, piled silliness of situation, clumsiness of construction, paltriness of incident and "business," and steadily accumulative coarseness, verbal or suggested, upon flimsiness of character and insignificance of plot, till his structure of crude nonsense became a veritable monument of inanity and indelicacy.

A farce is well enough, in its way and in its place, and a good farce well acted gives pleasure and merits praise. But such an actress as Blanche Bates, in the prime of life, in the plenitude of her powers, and after a conspicuous career of thirteen years, largely on the metropolitan stage, should not be acting in farce, -and in wretchedly bad farce. Such a manager as David Belasco,-to whom the public has a right to look for enterprise worthy of his high artistic reputation and vast influence, should not place a paltry fabric upon the stage with a care and lavish expenditure suit