It was during this engagement in 1902 that a young actor who was watching us coming in at the stage-door at His Majesty’s one day is reported to have said:  “Look at Mr. Tree between his two ’stars’!”

“You mean Ancient Lights!” answered the witty actress to whom the remark was made.

However, “e’en in our ashes burn our wonted fires,” or, to descend from the sublime to the ridiculous, and from the poetry of Gray to the pantomime gag of Drury Lane and Herbert Campbell, “Better to be a good old has-been than a never-was-er!”

But it was long before the “has-been” days that Mrs. Kendal decided not to bring her consummately dexterous and humorous workmanship to the task of playing Portia, and left the field open for me.  My fires were only just beginning to burn.  Success I had had of a kind, and I had tasted the delight of knowing that audiences liked me, and had liked them back again.  But never until I appeared as Portia at the Prince of Wales’s had I experienced that awe-struck feeling which comes, I suppose, to no actress more than once in a lifetime—­the feeling of the conqueror.  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.

People felt that they were witnessing a great play with a great part cut out, and “The Merchant of Venice” ran for three weeks!

It was a pity, if only because a more gorgeous and complete little spectacle had never been seen on the English stage.  Veronese’s “Marriage in Cana” had inspired many of the stage pictures, and the expenditure in carrying them out had been lavish.

In the casket scene I wore a dress like almond-blossom.  I was very thin, but Portia and all the ideal young heroines of Shakespeare ought to be thin.  Fat is fatal to ideality!