to depend upon feeling, I groped after the definite rules which had
always governed the delivery of Pauline's fustian, and the fate that
commonly overtakes those who try to put old wine into new bottles
overtook me.

I knew for instance, exactly how the following speech ought to be done,
but I never could do it. It occurs in the fourth act, where Beauseant,
after Pauline has been disillusioned, thinks it will be an easy matter
to induce the proud beauty to fly with him:

"Go! (_White to the lips._) Sir, leave this house! It is humble;
but a husband's roof, however lowly, is, in the eyes of God and
man, the temple of a wife's honor. (_Tumultuous applause._) Know
that I would rather starve--aye, _starve_--with him who has
betrayed me than accept _your_ lawful hand, even were you the
prince whose name he bore. (_Hurrying on quickly to prevent
applause before the finish._) _Go!_"

It is easy to laugh at Lytton's rhetoric, but very few dramatists have
had a more complete mastery of theatrical situations, and that is a good
thing to be master of. Why the word "theatrical" should have come to be
used in a contemptuous sense I cannot understand. "Musical" is a word of
praise in music; why not "theatrical" in a theater? A play in any age
which holds the boards so continuously as "The Lady of Lyons" deserves
more consideration than the ridicule of those who think that the world
has moved on because our playwrights write more naturally than Lytton
did. The merit of the play lay, not in its bombast, but in its
situation.

Before Pauline I had played Clara Douglas in a revival of "Money," and I