The little warning was in season, for the poor White Lady had but too
many after opportunities of blurring the impression she had made. In the
great situation at the end of the second act, in which the Countess has
to give, in the presence of the Court, a summary of the supposed story of
the White Lady, her passion at once of love and hatred charges it with a
force and meaning which, for the first time, rouses the suspicions of the
Prince as to the reality of the supposed apparition. In the two or three
fine and dramatic speeches which the situation involved, the actress
showed the same absence of knowledge and resources as before, the same
powerlessness to create a personality, the same lack of all those quicker
and more delicate perceptions which we include under the general term
'refinement,' and which, in the practice of any art, are the outcome of
long and complex processes of education. There, indeed, was the bald,
plain fact--the whole explanation of her failure as an artist lay in her
lack both of the lower and of the higher kinds of education. It was
evident that her technical training had been of the roughest. In all
technical respects, indeed, her acting had a self-taught, provincial air,
which showed you that she had natural cleverness, but that her models had
been of the poorest type. And in all other respects--when it came to
interpretation or creation--she was spoilt by her entire want of that
inheritance from the past which is the foundation of all good work in the
present. For an actress must have one of the two kinds of knowledge: she
must have either the knowledge which comes from a fine training--in
itself the outcome of a long tradition--or she must have the knowledge
which comes from mere living, from the accumulations of personal thought
and experience. Miss Bretherton had neither. She had extraordinary beauty
and charm, and certainly, as Kendal admitted, some original quickness. He
was not inclined to go so far as to call it 'power.' But this quickness,
which would have been promising in a _debutante_ less richly endowed on