MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL.* IT is a difficult task to see
through Mrs. Patrick Campbell's naive records of her life the qualities that made her unapproach- ably great in her art. In the account of her childhood we have something to build on : there is a plain picture of a rebel- lious, imaginative, red-haired, warm-hearted girl. We can follow sympathetically, too, the labours and troubles of her early career. It must have been discouraging to be greeted when she first took to the stage with this letter from an old friend : " Poor, unfortunate child, may God help you, if, as you say, the die for evil is cast. I can only pray, as the only chance to save you, that you make too decided a failure ever to try again. Good God, how could you think I could. write and wish you success ? How thankful I feel that it was not with me that you took the wrong turning. . . . I told Charley you had some secret plan in view of exquisite joy.' I said, almost with bated breath, ' Is it the stage—an actress ? ' He looked grave, and said I had no right to imagine such a thing. Beatrice was frivolous, but he knew you better than that your nature would ever let you sink to that, so low. . . . May your health never break down (or who knows ? that might be the best thing)." It must have been heart- breaking to play in her first important engagement with her baby son ill. under the stress of her fears to forget her part, and to hear Sir George Alexander murmur, " The woman's drunk." But after this we have mainly a repetition of the facts of her life—rehearsal, performance, and adulation. We see an affectionate mother, a generous woman, and a hard worker in her profession; But the subtlety, the power, the per- suasiveness, the tension of mind, that we know were hers ? Mrs. Campbell has not the facility in writing to set these before us.
Even from the letters that notable men have written to her we gather little of her personality. Most of them are too much occupied in paying her sincere, merited, and vague compliments ; Mr. Yeats is away among his esoteric theories ; Sir James Barrie is exploiting the immaterial whimsicality of the good letter-writer. Only in the clean, clear, magni- ficently posturing honesty of Mr. Bernard Shaw do we find a real and adorable Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Twenty-five pages of his letters are given : they are an overwhelming evidence of the genius of both.
• My Life and Some Letters. By Mrs. Patrick Campbell. London : Hutchinson and Co. L248. net.]
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