Very briefly indicated, these are some of the phases of the phenomenon that may easily be mistaken by the cherisher of traditions as the passing of first-rate acting. Though it is different in tone and method, and leads less often to extreme heights of public notice, acting to-day succeeds as well in its adaptation to the newer ideal of the primacy of the play as did the older school in the exaltation of the actor. It is a rather odd circumstance that while the English stage is rich in its actors and comparatively scantily supplied with excellent actresses, the reverse is true in America, so far as concerns the younger generation. Our civilization seems to breed actresses thickly at home, and to entice them from abroad. When Edward Sothern, Otis Skinner, David Warfield, Henry Miller, Robert Mantell, John Drew, William Gillette and even Mr. Hackett, Mr. Faversham and Mr. Daly shall have retired from the stage, who is to help Ernest Glendinning and the imported Mr. Lou-Tellegen maintain the honors of their sex? But when Mrs. Fiske and Maude Adams shall have followed Julia Marlowe into retirement, there still will be, even if Ethel Barrymore and Margaret Anglin should regrettably have left the stage, a considerable group of still younger actresses, none of whom may ever achieve stardom as it was once practiced, but each of whom fits with admirable ability into the newer order of things. Better than almost any one else, Miss Barrymore represents the dangers of the star system. The daughter of one of America’s best actors, Maurice Barrymore,[213] and the niece of another, John Drew, she was a marked victim from the beginning. Charles Frohman made her a star in 1900, when she was twenty-one. She had had a scant half dozen years of training in her uncle’s company in America and in Henry Irving’s company in England, and had not played more than a dozen parts in all. She was made a star simply on the strength of a pleasing personality, intelligence, a pretty face, and a working grasp of stage behavior. During the next decade, playing in pieces like _Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines_, _Cousin Kate_, and _Sunday_, she attracted and held a loyal public that liked to see her personality exploited in those comparatively insignificant plays, just as adoring theatregoers throng today to see Billie Burke and Marie Doro, whatever the slenderness and frothiness of the play. But let Miss Barrymore, in an effort to be a real actress, try her hand at submerging herself in an un-Barrymorelike character, in a play of any serious interest, and that adoring public was bewildered and disappointed and remained away from the theatre. Such are the fruits of thinking of the theatre in terms of the actor.