Virginia Tracy

“ We know too well that the actress with the handsome appearance will reply that it is wholly unnecessary, all results depending upon health and hard work. And when the actress without the handsome appearance answers that it is the whole question, and that without it you have about as much chance to rise as a blind mute in a cellar with three-pile felt nailed over the hatchway, we all know how something in the weary acid of that retort bites the more convincingly into our nerves. ”

“ The sight of beauty is, in itself, excitement; and if only those whom endless days composed largely of constant shopping and waiting for trolley-cars have set starving for excitement would assert boldly that whenever they can get beauty well framed and well lighted, they will be great fools not to take a stare at it, we shall perhaps have enlightened tableaux vivants as well as Russian ballets, without the shame-faced pretension that we ought somehow to be tied up in a plot. ”

“ It is a healthy human impulse to defy the influence of Circe. And there is, indeed, a barefaced pomp of beauty—beauty that cannot enter a room without giving the whole house a shock; beauty that, as Mr. Kipling vigorously says, "hits you right between the eyes and knocks you flat"—of which the mere existence carries a challenge to stand up against that avalanche. I do well remember a certain opening night when Miss Maxine Elliott sat throned in a stage box, and the emotions of the whole audience beat and broke upon that imperturbable statue, icily regular, splendidly null. ”

“ Among our rising stars to-day—Lorette Taylor, Doris Keene, Emily Stevens, Elsie Ferguson, Florence Reed—is there not one whose beauty out-tops that of the others enough to make her typically Beauty? I do not mean Hedwig Reicher, whose loveliness is of that classic type which simply cannot be suppressed into a vanity-box, so that she has merely ceased to exist for us. ”

“ The superior public is not made up of the esthetic specialists alone, but, let me repeat, of that desire for superiority in the heart of every one of us which makes us fall such easy and clamorous victims to the hints not only of judgment from without, but of prejudgment from within—the prejudgment that if you have beauty, you are not very likely to have anything else. ”

“ THERE is none, of course, if your beauty is all your stock. Beauty is not a handicap to nothingness. Even to that agreeable talent which aims only at doing the best possible with limited means in a hard world, it opens more doors than it bars. Let us admit at once that it is a handicap that all of us would like to try. ”

“ It would be interesting to know, when one of our dramatic heroines does actually make such a struggle not to become standardized, how much support she gets from the superior public. One hears so much wistful criticism about the drama's bondage to pretty women who never play anything but themselves that one fancies all culture rushing to the support of the actress who determines not to play herself. And to certain obscure attempts—particularly obscure foreign attempts—it does quite generously rush. But it passes over the effort of the obvious popular beauty without trial. ”

“ The contention is, I believe, that these poor creatures elevate beauty to undue heights by not knowing what they want; that, with their power over the box-office, they push a good-looking inferior artist to the center of the stage because they confuse acting with good looks, and beauty is nine tenths of the battle because they mistake any beauty for a great actress. Believe me, they make no such mistake; their confusion is not along those lines, and they know what they want well enough if they were not afraid to say so. ”

“ It is a dreadful fog through which to try to make your goal, this atmosphere of incredulity. Every one who has done work requiring personal initiative knows how baffling and how chilly. Surely it would be well-nigh impossible for people to find their way without guide-posts. There are guide-posts, then? Oh, yes, indeed; there are the critics! ”

“ It is perfectly natural that all the public should want beauty, well dusted in rich clothes; that the superiors and critics should want also to assume that they are too clever to want it; that the managers should refuse to trifle with their public by offering it unsought wares ”

“ Despite all the preaching of the higher esthetics against dramatized novels, most of us cherish some beloved exception, and to me there is no figure more dramatically suggestive, more thrillingly brilliant, than that fair and baleful girl—strangest portrait in the whole gallery of Henry James—the Princess Casamassima. The part would be hard to cast, because beauty is essential to it—an essential for which no substitute of whatever grace or charm would avail ”

“ For then you will have kept yourself free—free, at least, of that rosy net we begin to weave for you at first sight. And by the time you are fifty you may get a quiet moment in which the stage is vacant of any other interest "to thrust one naked phrase like a lean knife between the ribs of Time." How you are to have lived up to that moment I cannot tell you.
No instance of the public's preoccupation can be nearer to hand than an evening of a few weeks ago enriched by Miss Elsie Ferguson's extraordinary performance in "Outcast." ”

“ The superior public.
In that chill bosom curdles the beginning of the conspiracy against beauty; thence we receive those icy sips which presently poison and pervert the natural human greed for it. The grown-up child who laughs with joy at sight of the pretty lady is turned into the grown-up child who apes the intellectual disdain of "mere beauty," and, while insisting on the despised quality, has to pretend that it wants something more complicated; thereby creating, indeed, a confusion of which, left to itself, it was quite innocent. ”

“ Great physical beauty remains forever completely democratic. It can be seen with the naked eye, it can be felt by very ordinary nerves, and, while the superior public is mainly concerned with its own subtleness of perception, no subtle perception is proved by pointing out what everybody is gaping at already. ”

“ I remember hearing a very animated description of Miss Marlowe's desire to secure the part of Zaza and the determination the powers had had to display in refusing to risk her popularity. No matter whether or not one admires Zaza, it certainly offers to a Juliet and a Rosalind that variety and impersonation which we pretend to demand from actresses, and which beauties are supposed perversely to deny us. Here was a beauty with prestige, popularity, and money, a star of extraordinary, of unquestioned, powers ”

“ She could look as heavenly as if she were playing Little Eva, her gowns would be the best that Paris could do, the action occurs in the highest of high life, and we should simply be presented with the bonus of a real play. ”

“ No matter that it leaves us a little bewildered as to whether the excellence of this flat-nosed young girl lay in the fact that no one else had seen her or that it took a very exceptional person to admire her when she was seen. Enough that it has differentiated itself from the thoughtless and the insufficiently particular. ”

“ No one who heard the loud, sodden, dastardly laugh that burst so unexpectedly from that Persian kitten can doubt her ability to sound other than angelic melodies, and the highest heights must become very monotonous at times. ”

“ Yes, but why should the management worry with real plays when she draws packed houses without them? What 's the sense of racing round trying to throw a new light on her, when all the public asks is just to look at her as she is. ”

“ And if, then and always, they would carry their frankness one step further, all would be, if not well, greatly better; if they would not attempt dressing up what they wish to see in a play, then at least the beauties who can act would not be weighed down by the precedent of the beauties who can't. People will always desire beautiful things, and so long as life in general is pretty dull, so long will they desire them excessively. ”