Madge’s artistic experience thenceforth was varied, though her daily course was monotonous. Other tragedians came to Nottingham, but none nearly so terrible, nor, she reluctantly confessed, nearly so gifted as he who had taught her the scene from Hamlet. Some of them, indeed, objected to the trouble of rehearsing, and sent substitutes who imitated them in every movement and so drilled the company to act with them. Occasionally a part in a comedy of contemporary life enabled Madge to profit by her knowledge of fashionable society and her taste in modern dress. The next week, perhaps, she would have to act in a sensational melodrama, and, in a white muslin robe, to struggle in the arms of a pickpocket in corduroys, with his clothes and hands elaborately begrimed. Once she had to play with the wreck of a celebrated actress, who was never free from the effects of brandy, and who astonished Madge by walking steadily on the stage when she could hardly stand off it. Then Shakespeare, sensation drama, Irish melodrama, comic opera or pantomime, new comedy from London over again, with farce constantly. Study, rehearsal, and performance became part of her daily habits. Her old enthusiasm for the mock passions the stage left her, and was succeeded by a desire to increase her skill in speaking by acquiring as much resource in shades of meaning as Jack had given her in pure pronunciation, and to add as many effective gestures as possible to the stock she had already learnt. When she was not engaged at the theatre she was at her lodging, practicing the management of a train, trying to acquire the knack of disposing her dress prettily in the act of sitting down, or arranging her features into various expressions before a mirror. This last branch of her craft was the most troublesome to her. She had learned from Jack, much to her surprise, that she could not make her face express anger or scorn by merely feeling angry or scornful. The result of that method was a strained frown, disagreeable to behold; and it was long before she attained perfect control of her features, and artistic judgment in exercising it. Sometimes she erred on the side of exaggeration, and failed to conceal the effort which her studied acting required. Then she recoiled into tameness and conventionality. Then, waking from this, she tried a modification of her former manner, and presently became dissatisfied with that too, and re-modified it. Not until she had gone through two years of hard study and practice did she find herself mistress of a fairly complete method; and then indeed she felt herself an actress. She ridiculed the notion that emotion had anything to do with her art, and seriously began to think of taking a pupil, feeling that she could make an actress of any girl, the matter being merely one of training. When she had been some four months in this phase, she had a love affair with a young acting manager of a touring company. The immediate effect was to open her eyes to the fact that the people were tired of her complete method, and that she was tired of it too. She flung it at once to the winds for ever, and thenceforth greatly undervalued her obligations to the study it had cost her, declaring, in the teeth of her former opinion, that study and training were useless, and that the true method was to cultivate the heart and mind and let the acting take care of itself. She cultivated her mind by high reading and high thinking as far as she could. As to the cultivation of her heart, the acting manager taught her that the secret of that art was love. Now it happened that the acting manager, though pleasant-looking and goodnatured, was by no means clever, provident, or capable of resisting temptation. Madge never could make up her mind whether he had entangled her or she him. In truth love entangled them both; and Madge found that love suited her excellently. It improved her health; it enlarged her knowledge of herself and of the world; it explained her roles to her, thawed the springs of emotion that had never flowed freely before either on or off the stage, threw down a barrier that had fenced her in from her kind, and replaced her vague aspirations, tremors, doubts, and fits of low spirits with an elate enjoyment in which she felt that she was a woman at last. Nevertheless, her attachment to the unconscious instrument of this mysterious change proved transient. The acting manager had but slender intellectual resources: when his courtship grew stale, he became a bore. After a while, their professional engagements carried them asunder; and as a correspondent he soon broke down. Madge, did not feel the parting: she found a certain delight in being fancy-free; and before that was exhausted she was already dreaming of a new lover, an innocent young English-opera librettist, whom she infatuated and ensnared and who came nearer than she suspected to blowing out his brains from remorse at having, as he thought, ensnared her. His love for her was abject in its devotion; but at last she went elsewhere and, as her letters also presently ceased, his parents, with much trouble, managed to convince him at last that no she no longer cared for him.
It must not be supposed that these proceedings cost Madge her selfrespect. She stood on her honor according to her own instinct; took no gifts, tolerated no advances from men whose affections were not truly touched, absorbed all her passion in her art when there were no such deserving claimants, never sold herself or threw herself away. would content herself at any time with poetry without love rather than endure love without poetry. She rather pitied her married colleagues, knowing perfectly well that they were not free to be so fastidious, reserved, and temperate as her instinct told her a great artist should always be. Polite society pretended to respect her when it asked her to recite at bazaars or charity concerts: at other times it did not come into contact with her, nor trouble itself as to her conformity to its rules, since she, as an actress, was out of polite society from the start. The ostracism which is so terrible to women whose whole aim is to know and be known by people of admitted social standing cannot reach the woman who is busily working with a company bound together by a common co-operative occupation, and who obtains at least some word or sign of welcome from the people every night. As to the Church, it had never gained any hold on Madge: it was to her only a tedious hypocrisy out of all relation with her life. Her idea of religion was believing the Bible because God personally dictated it to Moses, and going to church because her father’s respectability required her to comply with that custom. Knowing from her secular education that such belief in the Bible was as exploded as belief in witchcraft, and despising respectability as those only can who have tasted the cream of it, she was perfectly free from all pious scruples. Habit, prejudice, and inherited moral cowardice just influenced her sufficiently to induce her to keep up appearances carefully, and to offer no contradiction to the normal assumption that her clandestine interludes of passion and poetry were sins. But she never had a moment of genuine remorse after once discovering that such sins were conditions of her full efficiency as an actress. They had brought tones into her voice that no teaching of Jack’s could have endowed her with; and so completely did she now judge herself by her professional powers, that this alone brought her an accession instead of a loss of self respect. She was humiliated only when she played badly. If one of the clergymen who occasionally asked her, with many compliments, to recite at their school fêtes and the like, had demanded instead what it could profit her to gain the whole world and lose her own soul, she might have replied with perfect sincerity from her point of view that she had given up the whole world of Mrs Grundy and gained her own soul, and that, whether he considered it judicious to mention it or not, the transaction had in fact profited her greatly.
But all this belonged to a later period than the novitiate of two and a half years which began at Nottingham. These thirty months did not pass without many fits of low spirits, during which she despaired of success and hated her profession. She remained at Nottingham until July, when the theatre there was closed for a time. She then joined a travelling company and went through several towns until she obtained an engagement at Leeds. Thence she went to Liverpool, where she remained for three months, at the expiration of which she accepted an offer made her by the the manager of a theatre in Edinburgh, and went thither with a salary of five pounds a week, the largest wage she had yet received for her services. There she stayed until August in second year of her professional life, when she acted in London for the first time, and was disgusted by the coldness of the metropolitan audiences which were, besides, but scanty at that period of the year. She was glad to return to the provinces, although her first task there was to support her old acquaintance the tragedian, with whom she quarrelled at the first rehearsal with spirit and success. Here, as leading lady, she attempted the parts of Beatrice, Portia, and Lady Macbeth, succeeding fairly in the first, triumphantly in the second and only escaping failure by her insignificance in the third. By that time she had come to be known by the provincial managers as a trustworthy, hardworking young woman, safe in the lighter sorts of leading business, and likely to improve with more experience. They hardly gave her credit enough, she thought, for what seemed