In the season of 1880-81 Genevieve Ward made a remarkably brilliant hit with her embodiment of Stephanie De Mohrivart, in the play of _Forget Me Not_, by Herman Merivale, and since then she has acted that part literally all round the world. It was an extraordinary performance--potent with intellectual character, beautiful with refinement, nervous and steel-like with indomitable purpose and icy glitter, intense with passion, painfully true to an afflicting ideal of reality, and at last splendidly tragic: and it was a shining example of ductile and various art. Such a work ought surely to be recorded as one of the great achievements of the stage. Genevieve Ward showed herself to possess in copious abundance peculiar qualities of power and beauty upon which mainly the part of Stephanie is reared. The points of assimilation between the actress and the part were seen to consist in an imperial force of character, intellectual brilliancy, audacity of mind, iron will, perfect elegance of manners, a profound self-knowledge, and unerring intuitions as to the relation of motive and conduct in that vast network of circumstance which is the social fabric. Stephanie possesses all those attributes; and all those attributes Genevieve Ward supplied, with the luxuriant adequacy and grace of nature. But Stephanie superadds to those attributes a bitter, mocking cynicism, thinly veiled by artificial suavity and logically irradiant from natural hardness of heart, coupled with an insensibility that has been engendered by cruel experience of human selfishness. This, together with a certain mystical touch of the animal freedom, whether in joy or wrath, that goes with a being having neither soul nor conscience, the actress had to supply--and did supply--by her art. As interpreted by Genevieve Ward the character was reared, not upon a basis of unchastity but upon a basis of intellectual perversion. Stephanie has followed--at first with self-contempt, afterward with sullen indifference, finally with the bold and brilliant hardihood of reckless defiance--a life of crime. She is audacious, unscrupulous, cruel; a consummate tactician; almost sexless, yet a siren in knowledge and capacity to use the arts of her sex; capable of any wickedness to accomplish an end, yet trivial enough to have no higher end in view than the reinvestiture of herself with social recognition; cold as snow; implacable as the grave; remorseless; wicked; but, beneath all this depravity, capable of self-pity, capable of momentary regret, capable of a little human tenderness, aware of the glory of the innocence she has lost, and thus not altogether beyond the pale of compassion. And she is, in externals,--in everything visible and audible,--the ideal of grace and melody.