do? Those who have studied Mr. Gilbert's poem will scarcely say so.
Galatea descended from her pedestal has to become human, and has to
reconcile her audience to the contradictory position of a woman, who,
presumably innocent of the world and its ways, is unconsciously cynical
and exquisitely pathetic. We grant that it is a most difficult part to
play. Only an artist can give effect to the comedy, or touch the true
chord of sentiment that underlies the idea of Galatea. But to make Galatea
consistently inhuman, persistently frigid, and monotonously spiritual, is,
if not absolutely incorrect, at least glaringly ineffective. If Galatea
does not become a breathing, living woman when she descends from her
pedestal, a woman capable of love, a woman with a foreshadowing of
passion, a woman of tears and tenderness, then the play goes for
nothing.... Miss Anderson reads Galatea in a severe fashion. She is a
Galatea perfectly formed, whose heart has not yet been adjusted. She
shrinks from humanity. She wants to be classical and severe, and her last
cry to Pygmalion, instead of being the utterance of a tortured soul, is
'monotonous and hollow as a ghost's.' It is with no desire to be
discourteous that we venture any comparison between the Galatea of Miss
Anderson and of Mrs. Kendal. The comparison should only be made on the
point of reading. Yet surely there can be no doubt that Mrs. Kendal's idea
of Galatea, while appealing to the heart, is more dramatically effective.
It illumines the poem."


_The Times_, 28th January, 1884.

"LYCEUM THEATER.

"Those who have suspected that Miss Mary Anderson was well advised in
clinging to the artificial class of character hitherto associated with her