In
homely parlance, I knew that I had "got them" at the moment when I spoke
the speech beginning, "You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand."
"What can this be?" I thought. "_Quite_ this thing has never come to me
before! _This is different!_ It has never been quite the same before."
It was never to be quite the same again.
Elation, triumph, being lifted on high by a single stroke of the mighty
wing of glory--call it by any name, think of it as you like--it was as
Portia that I had my first and last sense of it. And, while it made me
happy, it made me miserable because I foresaw, as plainly as my own
success, another's failure.
Charles Coghlan, an actor whose previous record was fine enough to
justify his engagement as Shylock, showed that night the fatal quality
of _indecision_.
A worse performance than his, carried through with decision and attack,
might have succeeded, but Coghlan's Shylock was not even bad. It was
_nothing_.
You could hardly hear a word he said. He spoke as though he had a sponge
in his mouth, and moved as if paralyzed. The perspiration poured down
his face; yet what he was doing no one could guess. It was a case of
moral cowardice rather than incompetency. At rehearsals no one had
entirely believed in him, and this, instead of stinging him into a
resolution to triumph, had made him take fright and run away.
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