Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/274

250 conception as false as it is gross. We refer to her action in the following passage, which occurs immediately after Landry has declared his love for her:

It will be seen that the stage direction of the prompt book is unusually full and clear. It tells the actress "to run quick as lightning" from Landry when he dares to do this thing.

Miss Mitchell disregards this direction altogether, and nestles close into Landry's breast, her whole body trembling, her eyes glowing with hungry passion, her very feet and limbs sentient with the warmth and pleasure of Landry's embrace.

It is the one single blemish in an else perfect picture. Of the artist, we will only say, she is too conscious, and of the act, that in either maiden or actress it is scarcely delicate.

The greatest excellence, however, achieved by the actress—and in it lies the beautiful moral of the play, and which runs through all of its earlier acts—is one that she loses sight of but once, in the scene with Landry, as above; and with that single exception, she, with exquisite delicacy and sustained power, keeps it always prominently before her audience. It consists in showing how in the heart of a rough, eccentric and apparently half-witted girl, a flower of pure love springs up, the color and fragrance of which, entering into her life gradually and by nice degrees, redeem it from its grossness, making it beautiful and fragrant forever. George Sand knew the woman's heart better than her fellow-laborer, Dumas the younger. In the latter's play, which is known to us as "Camille," when unsordid love enters the heart of his heroine, purifying and lifting it into a sweeter, nobler atmosphere, the prayer of her lover's father has power to send her back to walk in her old, unclean ways. The story of that poor girl was a true one, but abused and given to shame by the novelist. It had this nobler ending. When Camille was deserted by her lover, she did not return to crime, but buried the pure, sweet life her woman's love had taught her in the waters of the Seine. The story was known to all Paris, but only the younger Dumas dared to lay foul hands upon it.

Excellent as the early portions of Miss Mitchell's performance are, we hesitate to profane the sacred inspirations of art by calling it the consequence of her genius. If it were that, she would produce like results in other parts, or she would carry the impersonation of Fanchon to a triumphant close. She does neither. Her few other characters are indifferently played, and Fanchon, divested of her ragged dress, her dishevelled hair and her elfish eccentricities, which are solely the property of the first three acts, becomes, in Miss Mitchell's hands, a part worthy of no especial regard.

The stage direction, written by one not altogether at home in our language, quaintly says to the player that on her return to her native village "One must see that Fanchon has been in the city." Upon this hint Miss Mitchell endows Fanchon with the subdued costume and cheap graces of a city maiden, and the best suggestion we can otfer for it is, that the change is not a happy one; that the Cricket is now much less charming, blithe and winsome, than when she danced her elfish dance and sang her merry song in the light of the moon.

Yet even in her new character there occurs an occasional flash of her old fire and vitality; but, generally, she walks through the balance of the part as if her