She had, but she despised so easy a conquest. This audience was like a
still pool. It trembled with pleasure as an impression was thrown into
it like a stone. She could only move its stillness, not touch its
heart. She despised what she was doing, but went through with it
loyally because she was pledged to it.

Her first scene with Prospero was applauded with an astonished
enthusiasm. Her youth, her simplicity, her grace, had given these
metropolitans a new pleasure, a new sensation. It was no more than
that. She knew it was no more. She was angry with the applause which
interrupted the play. The insensibility of the audience had turned her
into a spectacle. Her very quality had separated her from the rest of
the performance, and in her heart she knew that she had failed. There
was no play: there were only three personalities on exhibition--Sir
Henry Butcher, Charles, and herself. Shakespeare, as Charles had said,
had only turned in his grave. Shakespeare, who was the poet of these
people, was ignored by them in favour of the personalities of the
interpreters. There was no altering that. She had made so vivid an
impression that the audience delighted in her and not in her
contribution to the whole enchantment of the play. That was broken
even for her, and as the evening wore on she ceased even to herself to
be Ariel and was forced to be Clara Day, displayed in public.

She loathed it, and yet she had no sense of declension. No enchanted
illusion had been established. Charles Mann's scenery remained
only--scenery. Sir Henry Butcher and the rest of his company were only
actors--acting. A troupe of performing animals would have been more
entertaining: indeed, in her bitter disappointment, Clara felt that she
was one of such a troupe, the lady in tights who holds the hoops
through which the dogs and monkeys jump.... So powerful was this anger
in her that after a while she began to burlesque herself, to exaggerate
her movement, and to keep her voice down to a childish treble, and the
audience adored her. They turned her into a show, a music-hall turn,
at the expense of the magical poetry of Shakespeare's farewell to his
art.... She could not too wildly caricature herself, and as she often
did when she was angry she talked to herself in French:--'_Voila ce
qu'il vous faut_! Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!'--How they gulped down her
songs! How they roared and bellowed when she danced--the delicious,
wonderful