White Caps of the press have visited her. There might be a palliating defence for the man who permits himself to be led in her wake at the end of a golden string, even if his attitude appears ignoble. But I think that no respect of ours will ever return to the maddened assailant who smashes the trembling woman in the face, and turns with a leer for the public to applaud the strength he has put in the blow.

Mrs. Potter should not shut herself in her rooms and weep over the scourging she has lately received, as I am told she does. There are places where the cry of the fawn, as the wolves pull her down, dies unheard, but New York is not such, Perhaps if the artistic shortcomings of the actress had been treated with the gentle spirit of rebuke that they deserve no one would have felt the duty of lifting his shield above her; but now she may rest assured that somewhere and at all times there will be blades opposed to those that are raised to slay her. There must always be champions arise to defend every woman who has turned the world against her.

It is in the power of Mrs. Potter to bring her detractors down in shame at her heels. It will require five years of determined and well directed study to do so. She must get her voice out of its monotone. She must unclinch her teeth, she must unbind her intelligence as well as her limbs. The fainting eye, outthrust chin, and languorous breathing of words, are all excellent as a phase, but as a fixture they produce drowsi

ness.

Mrs. Potter appears to be of that temperament which is unconsciously verstile, and I am bound to believe that it is an effort for her to sustain this monotony of style which is now her most serious fault. I think she has been convinced by her friends, or by the egotism of introspection, that she has struck a fine vein of individualty in this long drawn out sweetness of manner, and that to stamp herself indelibly as an artist without a prototype, it must be worked down to the very grave.

And this conception of herself and the art she follows must be torn right away from Mrs. Potter. She has broken the shackles of dilettantism from her body, but they still rest on her soul. They will not melt until she can bring herself to catch a clear mental view of the real splendor of wom

anhood—that palace of lights, of sounds, of warmths, all changeful and new. She has the intelligence to act; experience will give her a better control of this intelligence, and it now remains for her to bring the intellect to bear upon feminine character, and to learn how the most dramatic and fascinating examples of it may be satisfyingly represented

As I have said, Mrs. Potter's temperament appears to be of that sensitive sort which is filled with all the nervous tumult of apprehension and comprehension which makes versatility of action imperative. And as I feel that this naturalness has been up to the present time held in subjection, and its legitimate expression put out of countenance by the strained utilization of a commonplace mannerism, I consider that only practical experience, sincere application, and intellectual study intervene at this moment between the actress and a goal bound round with dignity, honor, and fortune.

I am sure that I can detect the minutest blemish on the fluttering wings of Mrs. Potter's art. I should scarcely,defend her against the most exhaustive severity of criticism, so long as the writing partook of justice and courtesy. But pray tell me where any man has found the right to cease criticising her. Where is the ground to stand upon and say she is an insult to histrionism? From what exhibits do these censors deduce the charges that she is insincere, insanely conceited, sordid, base, and reprehensible? I do not exaggerate in these queries, I am asking the public to judge charges made by autocratic writers, whom I should not trouble myself to address directly, for I know them to be adamant; I invite you, to judge writers who can scarcely become just without becoming brutal, and who after long records of prevarication, hypocritical quibbling, and humble pliabilty to contemptible circumstance, have drawn themselves up now in the biliousness of their might and struck one woman as a butcher would strike an ox.

Suppose yourself to be an authority in the sculptor's art and a young man brings to you a figure of a crouching lion. You regard it carefully, and you find that it has good proportion, is fairly modelled, and conveys to the senses the somewhat grand conception in the mind of its author. But it lacks the fierce trait of greatness.

Shall you turn to the youth like a mad dog and bury your fangs in him for missing that element of greatness? Or will you point out the faults of his study, and try to make him comprehend the vital requisite of transcendent art? Might it not be that your advice, provided it was well conceived, would knock the few remaining shackles of restraint from his struggling purpose ?

Mrs. Potter is this type of artist. She has brought to us a crouching lion of artistry. Her sincerity is as palpable as it well could be, and the result of her work is worth every cent she charges for it. Any fair man must trace her faults to such sources as inexperience, excitement, and curable egotism. She has never dreamed of insulting us, and she is not base, not disgusting, not hopeless. The men who assure us that she is are all that, and upon them should the wrath of sensible people descend instead of upon this

woman.

There is an injustice beyond description in the spectacle that these brutes of the press have provided in their cowardly attacks upon an American girl. They have ignored even the facts that she is influenced by those feminine characteristics which often need defence against themselves, and that decent and generous consideration may serve to develope toward good a nature which, till now, has never shown in public a harsh trait. They take up their rusty weapons and fight her as though she had defied them to combat. They strike her on points which she cannot answer, in fact any chance to answer is denied her by the proprietors of the papers supporting her assailants. They do not ask her to improve they ask her to commit suicide. They do not advise her of professional shortcomings; they smash heron the forehead with a blunt axe. Their own conceit is so enormous that they would receive my words or yours as a tin roof would take hail. They have a line of duty marked out for them that they would no more forsake than a clam would voluntarily forsake its mud. That duty consists of being negative as a general rule, of bowing down like cads to those people who they know it is useless to assail, but of stabbing through the shadow of the characterless press a girl who dares to try, who is ambitious, and who is ten times as humane as they are.

The only eminent justice conferred upon the

actress in her latest dramatic production by the press of this city was found in the wholly comprehensive criticism of The Sun. The writer of it did not commit himself to any opinion other than one upon which he may reflect with complacency; he treated a lady as a gentleman should, he criticised an actress as a connoisseur is bound to do, and he told us and Mrs. Potter squarely and decently the faults and the virtures which a truly elegant theatric presentment had divulged. He did not insult the woman by saying, like a talking cur, that she had insulted him. He evidently did not feel that he had been insulted by that elaborate exhibtion on Mr. Palmer's stage. He was not entirely satisfied. There is a difference between that and insult.

I have not established, here or endeavored to establish, a defence of Mrs. Potter as an actress, I have only tried to point out, as I often have before, that there are several dirty dogs in New York journalism.

C. M. S. Mc. Lellan.

"THIS WAS NOT SO BEFORE."

WE

E have recently read scores of articles in the papers on the social status of stage-people and on the frequent preferance shown by American managers for English actors and actresses.

In many instances it has been asked, why should these managers import English material to fill up the subordinate ranks of their companies when capable American material, male and female, seems so plenty?

The prompt answer is that the foreigners are more capable, less obstreperous, readier to submit to proper discipline and are more gentlemanly and ladylike in their general conduct.

The fact is that while the first efforts of foreign aspirants to distinction on the stage are of course directed toward becoming proficient in their art. their next endeavors are to conduct themselves in all relations of life like veritable ladies and gentlemen.

The former Wallack Company and those of Daly and Palmer are shining examples of this class on this side of the big pond.

If they fail in these latter endeavors after entering the ranks of the profession it is more than

likely that they would have made equal failures in this direction in any other walk of life.

If there is anything in the theatrical world that tends to make those within it less honorable and worthy as men and women, where shall we look for the cause of it? Outside of its limits or within them?

If outside of its confines it can only be owing to the fact that the public has ever been too lenient and forgiving to the members of the guild.

There is certainly nothing about the profession of the stage per se. that must of necessity make its followers less honorable or virtuous in their relations either with one another or with the rest of the world.

On the contrary their peculiar professional experience, their studies, thoughts, actions and struggles for their artistic advancement ought to, as might be easily shown, if anything, make them, if not the superiors, at least the equals of other men and women.

If any of them fall by the wayside they would more than likely have fallen from grace in other ordinary social or business surroundings.

If however, as is so frequently insisted, there is something in the atmosphere of the theatre that makes the descent from the nobler estate of humanity easier and more frequent, then let us find out where the cause or the fault lies and root it out. This would be worthy of the best efforts of a people who cling to the theatre with the tenacity the American people do.

In the first place let me ask however why the social status of the stage of its honorable members should be higher than that of other professions such as the lawyers, the doctors or even the honest and industrious tradesman, the commercial traveler, the clerk, the accountant or the ordinary office scribe.

These latter classes are not always indiscriminately admitted, nor do they struggle to be treated socially as their equals, in the gatherings of the millionaires, the merchant princes, the railroad kings, the coal barons, the lords of the factories, the chief jurists, the leading statesmen or the highest officials in the land, not even in those of the grain gamblers on our boards of trade.

This exclusiveness of the latter class is no serious disappointment to the former; why should

it be to the sensible actor or actress? Let them be content, the same as the rest of us poor mortals, to shine in and cheer the more modest gatherings of those who do not place wealth above honesty and moral and artistic worth.

That many of the disciples of the stage of today are too frequently inflated with their own bigness however must be admitted. That not a few of them frequently seek socially as a right, that to which they are not entitled in the customary grading of social intercourse is to be regretted on their own account.

Those who aspire too high on their waxen wings will always find their fall the more sudden and severe, as soon as they come too close to the rays of the sun of lucre. Let their own disappointments be their merited punishment.

Is there not however some extenuating cause as an excuse for the misguided, often arrogant social aspirations or false and almost silly claims to prominence of many of the profession to be found in vain-glorious puffery of them by the speculative managers, an almost exclusively American incubus, now at the helm of the theatrical ships?

Are not these barnacles, together with a few silly critical gossips almost scuttling the overloaded craft by their mercenary schemes?

Have not such piratical freebooters in the managerial ranks while sailing under the guise of honest mariners, really done more to injure the theatre and its honest crew than the noble institution can recover from for many years to come?

Have not these leeches by the very inflation and the exuberance of their verbosity by manufactured public adulation of their stellar victims, whom they expected to ultimately pluck, dug their own graves and made the stage ridiculous and abhorred.?

Have not these stort-sighted plungers made their "stars" and their surroundings so arrogant and overbearing that they became unmanagable by their manufacturers and sickening in the nostrils of a patient public?

Is it not a further fact that as soon as some obscure actor or "stage beauty" in late years made any kind of an impression on a thoughtless portion of the public in some simple part, that that moment some monied gambler or rich dude

turned up as the backer of some over ambitious advance man" to bring Mr. or Miss Obscurity out as a "star" of the first magnitude in some trashy play, thus simply robbing the stage of a possibly fairly useful member in a subordinate line, to manufacture a struggling mountebank.

"This was not so before" in the anti-combination days. These wreckers with their peculiar methods of aspiration, while making the stage largely an object of censure and ridicule have made it almost impossible for conscientious American managers to cast a good play as it should be with capable people throughout.

Their methods have destroyed much of the discipline and have and are constantly making arrogant buffoons out of many promising beginners and otherwise useful members.

44

They do these things different in France" in Germany-aye, even in England. The ordinary American actors and actresses in their spirit of natural independence too frequently rebel against the demands of strict stage management while the foreign stage workers look upon the boards they tread as upon a battlefield where strict obedience to authority is the only road to ultimate success.

So the American actor must blame himself for the lamentable state of things of which he most bitterly complains and the only salvation for him is to "reform it altogether."

HERE is what E. L. Baron, the able dramatic critic of the Chicago Inter-Ocean writes in its issue of Dec. 30.

"We believe in a protective association of American actors. Our stage needs it sorely. If Mr. Booth, Mr. Barret, Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Palmer, Mr. Daly, and the admirable number of actors and managers, who in this country honor the stage and have faith in its glorious mission, will sincerely get to work to protect the American actor, they will find cordial popular sympathy that may astonish them. By all means let there be a managers and actors protective association, and let some of its purposes be to:

Shut the stage-door against adventurers;

Make it impossible for a woman who has forfeited social respect to use her infamy as the inducement to a theatrical engagement;

Establish for the theatre the same moral code that is enforced in ordinary society;

Make the stage wanton as odious as the public bawd; Put the actor in proper subordination to the stage manager and secure stage managers worthy the name ;

Place the business of the theatre, between managers and actors and between actors and managers, on a strict business basis;

Make the wanton violation of contracts disreputable; Restore the old system of rehearsals for "business," com pelling the actor to acquire and observe essential rules of art in the detail of acting;

Re-establish something of the stock-days courtesy and deference between grades as of actors and between actors and managers;

Treat the dramatic art as a jealous mistress hard to placate, harder still to win, not a strumpet that impudence may embrace at will;

There, among other things, indicate of what sort of protection the American stage is in need, and foreign actors help us to realize it.

It might be insisted that a class of people who seem loth to make any serious efforts to save themselves from ostracision from their fellow beings do not deserve sympathy but for the fact that in this case the people-the nation—is too seriously interested in the theatre as a public institution. Those outside of the dramatic profession have therefore a right-nay it is their duty to speak on this subject. The theatre and its disciples in disgrace means disgrace to public taste and public morals. The dramatic profession, having brought on this discussion by the recent foolish action of some of their number, can not now close its ears to what is being hurled at its ranks by outsiders who are as deeply interested as themselves. There are black sheep in all professions and in all walks of life, but it is urged by many that the black sheep predominate in the theatre and what is still worse is that only too often great pains are taken by the ruling spirits to make the very blackness of the sheep their principal claims for prominence and suc

THIS

* **

HIS is clearly no light task-in fact it is a very delicate task. An existing organization might possibly be made available. As to past records it would of course for the time being not be advisable nor necessary to draw the line very close. A sort of forget-and-forgive sort of principle ought to prevail. As to future conduct of members however, manager as well as actors, male or female, rules of business-and personal -conduct ought to be laid down that should be a credit to any honorable and intelligent body of

THE DRAMATIC GENIUS.

"I WOULD RATHER THAT YOU BE CHARLES LE BON THAN LE GRAND."-Charles I. to the Prince of Wales.

NOWHERE save in the Actor's Art is the evo

lution of worthy talents more confused and overwhelmed. There are a few exceptions among the classes of feigned aristocracy that evade the languid decisions on a new play and on the "coarse and affected" players. Among these classes the anticipation of dramatic geniuses is an unfailing speculation. The epicurean becomes emaciated beneath the weight of a disguised expression of interestedness toward the genial father that cools his guest's coffee with a tearful enthusiasm for the artistic precocity of of his youngest son-that ashen cheeked youth relaxing statuesquely on that odd piece of furniture, raising with the slender white finger of his right hand a colored glass of lustrous chartreuse while his left hand just feels the depending covers of "Delsarte." The recurrent contact with family geniuses is remarkable insomuch as their value to the profession at large is in no way artistically promotive.

We listen with a practical leaning attention that becomes falsely heated in the glow of that voluptuous languor, which is respectfully laudatory to the youth who has read for us "Tartuffe" in a concert of grace and of sweet tones. It is not uujust to appreciate these talents, but it is an impetus to a deformed æstheticism to praise diplomatically the affectations of biographical impostors, to offer a pliant sensibility, an ever ready acquiescence to the possessors of thin gold. The entirety of a fine carving is its expression of gratitude to the artist. Balzac betook himself to a vapor bath and imbibed coffee at numberless short intervals before the commencement of his literary moments. A warm loaf and a rosy hearth were certainly enough for the author of Queen Mab. These abnormal cooperations were productive of phenomenal intel

rectual blossoming; the outer assistances were almost enforcing to talents that lay reposeful and serpentine; they were delicate instruments of intellectual conduct and habitude, and with repetition might become as it were so veined in his teachings that more strenuous abstractions would be necessitated, and hence a chivalrous intelligence would spring up within the artist. From men whose habits are independently estranged from society and whose eccentric manners have sombre and picturesque interests for us we wait for either a proletorial scorn or the keen utterances of the latest geniuses; otherwise their words are proportionate to their mannerism and vice-versa. Our judgments and expressions paid to genius should be qualified by its benificence, its worthiness afterwards. The entrances into the dramatic profession of those who are-as Leigh Hunt would write-" appetites" are accompanied in these years of American conservatories by the most ludicrous and peculiar “staginess" in speech, in dress, and in physical invention of attractiveness. The protuberance of caricature is remarkable in a lively thoroughfare. The youth that is gleaning references for the character of Richelieu has brillant auburn hair and poises anywhere for a drawing in red chalk by L. da Vinci; and he that balances a reflective walking stick with fingers enringed with Egyptian ornaments becomes so rapturous in the favorite reading of "The Tempest" that the breakfast opinion is that he will die permaturely.

These vignettes of distorted personalities are more prevalent among the modern male aspirants of the stage than among the females, who appear in rather a natural deportment and who converse in a busy eagerness with the managers. It would be well for the genuine lover of his art to endeavor for qualification such as these in his preparation for the primary experiences.

This profession nothing is more venomous to a well strung refinement than the vicissitudes than everywhere beset it and crumble the fair imaginary. In no other art are the avenues to worthy honors most generous to the artist student, and nowhere is education more barren.

Education behind the curtain is a kind of insanity. Art-talks among professional people is not adequate to any occasion. Business, as in