only clever enough. This charge of portraiture is constantly brought
against the novelist, and it is always a difficult one to meet; but one
may begin by pointing out that, in general, it implies a radical
misconception of the story-teller's methods of procedure. An idea, a
situation, is suggested to him by real life, he takes traits and
peculiarities from this or that person whom he has known or seen, but
this is all. When he comes to write--unless, of course, it is a case of
malice and bad faith--the mere necessities of an imaginative effort
oblige him to cut himself adrift from reality. His characters become to
him the creatures of a dream, as vivid often as his waking life, but
still a dream. And the only portraits he is drawing are portraits of
phantoms, of which the germs were present in reality, but to which he
himself has given voice, garb, and action.

So the present little sketch was suggested by real life; the first hint
for it was taken from one of the lines of criticism--not that of the
author--adopted towards the earliest performances of an actress who,
coming among us as a stranger a year and a half ago, has won the respect
and admiration of us all. The share in dramatic success which, in this
country at any rate, belongs to physical gift and personal charm; the
effect of the public sensitiveness to both, upon the artist and upon art;
the difference between French and English dramatic ideals; these were the
various thoughts suggested by the dramatic interests of the time. They
were not new, they had been brought into prominence on more than one
occasion during the last few years, and, in a general sense, they are
common to the whole history of dramatic art. In dealing with them the
problem of the story-teller was twofold--on the one hand, to describe the
public in its two divisions of those who know or think they know, and
those whose only wish is to feel and to enjoy; and on the other hand, to
draw such an artist as should embody at once all the weakness and all the