It is not the
actor's attitude; but what a relief from the general subservience of
that attitude! In Miss Marlowe there is something young, warm, and
engaging, a way of giving herself wholly to the pleasure of pleasing, to
which the footlights are scarcely a barrier. As if unconsciously, she
fills and gladdens you with a sense of the single human being whom she
is representing. And there is her strange beauty, in which the mind and
the senses have an equal part, and which is full of savour and grace,
alive to the finger-tips. Yet it is not with these personal qualities
that I am here chiefly concerned. What I want to emphasise is the
particular kind of lesson which this acting, so essentially English,
though it comes to us as if set free by America, should have for all who
are at all seriously considering the lamentable condition of our stage
in the present day. We have nothing like it in England, nothing on the
same level, no such honesty and capacity of art, no such worthy results.
Are we capable of realising the difference? If not, Julia Marlowe and
Edward Sothern will have come to England in vain.
A THEORY OF THE STAGE
Life and beauty are the body and soul of great drama.
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