The experience of this Japanese girl is the old ordeal over again, of woman’s sacrifice and anguish, when giving all for love. Something of Shakespeare’s _Juliet_ is in that heroine, something of Goethe’s _Margaret_, something of the many passionate, wayward, mournfully beautiful ideals of woman’s sacrifice that are immortal in story and song. She is a loving and sorrowing woman, true, tender, faithful forever, and celestial alike in her [Illustration: BLANCHE BATES AS THE _PRINCESS YO-SAN_, IN “THE DARLING OF THE GODS” Photograph by Livingston Platt. Belasco’s Collection. ] love, her temptation, and her grief. The character of _Yo-San_ combines some of the finest components of womanhood and, indeed, exemplifies virtues such as redeem the frailty of human nature--purity of heart and life, true love, endurance, heroism of conduct, and devoted integrity of spiritual faith. Blanche Bates gained the greatest success of her professional career by her impersonation of _Yo-San_. She was an entirely lovely image of ardent, innocent, ingenuous, noble womanhood--such an image as irresistibly allured by piquant simplicity, thrilled the imagination by an impartment of passionate vitality, and by its exemplification of eternal constancy in love,--the immortal fidelity of the spirit,--captured the heart. Her facility of action and fluency of expression were continuously spontaneous, and she was delightful both to see and to hear. Indeed, the acting of Miss Bates, which, from the first of her performances on the New York Stage, had shown a charming wildness and freedom, was, in the character of _Yo-San_, more unconventional than ever. Her appearance was beautiful, her action graceful, alert, vigorous, and free from all restraint of self-consciousness and finical prudery. The clear, keen, healthful north wind was suggested by it, the reckless dash of a mid-ocean wave, the happy sea-bird’s flight. There was no ostentation about it, no parade, no assumption of the moral mentor. Her personation of Belasco’s _Juliet_ of Japan came in a time of dreary “problems,” “sermons,” “lessons,” “arguments,” “symbols,” and the flatulent nonsense of siccorized novels and dirty farces, and it came as a relief and a blessing--the authentic representative of youth, health, strength, love, and hope.