III
LABELED COMIC
You would smile, I take it, at the thought of DeWolf Hopper as Lear or Hamlet or the hunchback Richard. Yet I was much more obviously equipped by nature for the heroic than for buffoonery, and it was by chance that I have sported the motley of the clown rather than worn the dark cloak of tragedy on the American stage these more than forty years.
The actor and the actress, I have said earlier, do not, like the most of mankind, drift into their life jobs by accident or inanition. They are obsessed by the stage and seek it out as June bugs do a street light. But once behind the footlights, their careers are subject to the same caprices of chance that dog the steps of Tom and Dick and Harriet.
There never was a clown, it is said, who did not yearn to make his audience weep or tremble. Miss Fannie Brice, for instance, who is one of the funniest women on our stage, is a positive genius
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