HERE is none, of course, if your beauty is all your stock. Beauty is not a handicap to nothingness. Even to that agreeable talent which aims only at doing the best possible with limited means in a hard world, it opens more doors than it bars. Let us admit at once that it is a handicap that all of us would like to try. What, then, is the complainant's charge?
When I speak of beauty's handicap, I am not joining the general chorus of beauty's detractors. The handicap I refer to is not that which will be only too readily granted me—the handicap from within, the temptation of one's mirror, the desire of loveliness to shine and dazzle. No, my fellows in the audience, the essential handicap is the handicap from without, the handicap of our making—nothing more or less than the public's terrible preoccupation with appearance; the very thing, of course, that is commonly supposed to work in beauty's favor.
We are all only too well acquainted with the perennial questions in the women's magazines: What is the first requisite for success on the stage? How far is a handsome appearance necessary? We know too well that the actress with the handsome appearance will reply that it is wholly unnecessary, all results depending upon health and hard work. And when the actress without the handsome appearance answers that it is the whole question, and that without it you have about as much chance to rise as a blind mute in a cellar with three-pile felt nailed over the hatchway, we all know how something in the weary acid of that retort bites the more convincingly into our nerves. Between the Scylla, then, of being too plain and the Charybdis of being too lovely, the steering is somewhat difficult—Scylla hung with the united warnings of the world in screaming crape while Charybdis flaunts the legend of popular conception, "Safe pilot into port!" It is against this popular misconception, this idea that a fair face carries all before it, no matter where it wishes to go, the somehow slurring indictment, "Beauty is nine tenths of the battle," that we should do well sometime to lift at least the challenge, What battle?
For if you are what Mr. Barnum used naïvely to advertise as a "ten-thousand-dollar beauty," and what you desire is to wear pretty clothes and marry a millionaire, then shove your beauty to its hilt. Personal loveliness, as I have said, is a handicap to the person who means business, not to the person who, as far as the stage is concerned, means nothing at all. But suppose that behind your beauty you bear the world the true dramatic gift, and insist upon its being "thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap-heap." If the beauty that you see is not your own, but glows like the bright face of variety and impersonation, so that you want to play neither Lady Lillian, the Hero's Bride, nor Goldy Locks, the Dressmaker's Delight, but, let us say. The Chorus Lady and Leah and Hedda, Salvation Nell, Topsy, and Meg Merrilies, Norah and Madame X and a reckless coster girl and the Thane of Cawdor's helpful spouse—well, since you are a ten-thousand-dollar beauty, then, as long as you are young, wear a veil, or a ring in your nose, or stain your skin and buy a hump and keep your head shaved, at the very least be sure to have your beauty scratched with briers; it will be the better for you in the end.
For then you will have kept yourself free—free, at least, of that rosy net we begin to weave for you at first sight. And by the time you are fifty you may get a quiet moment in which the stage is vacant of any other interest "to thrust one naked phrase like a lean knife between the ribs of Time." How you are to have lived up to that moment I cannot tell you.