VARIOUS PERFORMANCES.

No actress has appeared, in our time, as completely qualified as Mary Anderson was to personify Pride. Her stately beauty, absolute poise, distinction, and refinement combined to make her, in a physical sense, the veritable reality of Bulwer's ideal of the proud Pauline, in "The Lady of Lyons." She naturally and early presented the perfect image of aristocracy, but Pauline, beneath her reserve, is tender and loving, and the actress as naturally and easily expressed the growth and operation of Love. Conflict in a woman's heart between those two forces is the exposition accomplished in the comedy, and while exigent criticism must smile at a wildly romantic plot, incredible incidents, and occasional versified fustian, judgment must concede that the conflict is one well calculated to inspire interest and win sympathy when shown by an actress who is at once beautiful, artistically proficient, and profoundly in earnest. Miss Anderson's fine, woman-like reserve, in that character, as also in some others,-was, in her time, censured as a fault, and it still is occasionally carped at by an order of mentality less notable for intelligence than for fat-witted conceit and chuckle-brained dulness. It must be indeed an undeveloped or seriously impoverished mind that can view and consider a dramatic performance merely for the purpose of ascertaining whether, by some contriv

ance of detraction, it can be disparaged. Life is short, and for most persons who feel and think its joys are few and infrequent: to prowl around in the realm of art armed with a microscope, scales, and tape-measure is to sadden it beyond endurance. Nothing but spiritual stagnation can come of such parsimony. There are, of course, times when the mind must work with all its masonic implements to lay the foundations of judgment, broad and true, in exact knowledge and immutable principles; but in the presence of artistic works which are gracious and lovely in spirit-and therefore filled with help and cheer for the mind that is striving to poise itself in serenity and hope amidst the frets and mutations of life-criticism can well indulge grateful disregard for superficial flaws.

Miss Anderson's expression of the tranquil ecstasy of content, during Melnotte's wooing, is remembered as a significant subtlety of her impersonation of Pauline. Her assumption of sarcasm, her storm of passion, and her ultimate splendid abandonment, in the Cottage Scenes, revealed a variety of power and a depth of passion that finally refuted those observers who had accounted her frigid in temperament and mechanical in style. At the beginning, with exquisite skill and propriety, she gave to Pauline a tone of languid artifice, but that was cast aside the moment the character becomes dominated by genuine feeling, and thereafter the treatment of the ordeal with Melnotte was marked

by deep tenderness struggling through righteous, natural, woman-like resentment. The preeminence and especial individuality of the actress were seen to be tragical, the outbursts, when they came, being somewhat out of harmony with the capability of the part, and, in fact, the wild utterances of a personal nature much larger, broader, and deeper than that which it assumed. So much pathos, however, such lovely use of gentleness, and such forlorn misery in the crushed condition of Pauline have seldom, if ever, been infused into an assumption of this character.

In her impersonation of Julia, in "The Hunchback," Miss Anderson's denotement of the dignity of grief was intensely impressive. With the lighter elements of the part, its innocence, sweetness, grace, mirth, and pride, and with its transit from rural simplicity to superficial artifice and feather-brained folly, she was easily conversant, and as to those elements her various condition and devious and piquant action were admirable. There comes a time in the experience of Julia when almost the greatest sorrow that a woman can feel has suddenly aroused her to a sense of the solemn reality of life and thrown her for support upon the resources of her spiritual strength. At certain moments in the Fourth and Fifth acts of "The Hunchback" the performer of its heroine can show her as rising to a noble height of moral majesty. All littleness falls away from her. The tumult of passion is hushed by the consciousness

of fault and of duty. The mood is one of settled misery, but the soul will be true to itself and adequate to every test that fate may enjoin. It was in her exquisite repose, at the extreme tension of the feeling thus indicated, that Miss Anderson reached the crowning excellence of her Julia. It is no common intellect that understands, and no common achievement in the dramatic art that makes others understand, the absolute isolation and loneliness of the human soul in every one of the great experiences of life. That was her victory.

After the late William S. Gilbert (1836-1911) had seen Mary Anderson act Galatea, in his "Pygmalion and Galatea," he wrote for her use another play, called "Comedy and Tragedy." Those two plays she often acted on the same night and, doing so, pointed a striking contrast, gave a puissant, convincing evidence of her dramatic power, and provided one of the best theatrical bills of her time.

Her Galatea furnished a shining example of what can be accomplished when a character in itself slender receives the investiture of a noble, poetical personality. Galatea as embodied by Miss Anderson was a superb type equally of woman's ideal grandeur and woman's human loveliness. The charm which she diffused through the character was that of angelic innocence pervading a sinless though human and passionate love and expressing itself in artless words and ways, which sometimes brought a smile to the lips and sometimes smote the