“The swift rush of the words, the personal rush, should carry you off the stage.  It is in reality as easy as shelling peas, if you will only go by the right method instead of by the wrong.  You have overcome far greater difficulties than this, yet night after night you go on suffering ignoble defeat at this point.  Come, courage!  You took a leaf out of Reade’s dictionary at Manchester, and trampled on two difficulties—­impossibilities, you called them.  That was on Saturday, Monday you knocked the poor impossibilities down.  Tuesday you kicked them where they lay.  Wednesday you walked placidly over their prostrate bodies!”

The difficulty that he was now urging me to knock down was one of pace, and I am afraid that in all my stage life subsequently I never quite succeeded in kicking it or walking over its prostrate body!

Looking backward, I remember many times when I failed in rapidity of utterance, and was “pumped” at moments when swiftness was essential.  Pace is the soul of comedy, and to elaborate lines at the expense of pace is disastrous.  Curiously enough, I have met and envied this gift of pace in actors who were not conspicuously talented in other respects, and no Rosalind that I have ever seen has had enough of it.  Of course, it is not a question of swift utterance only, but of swift thinking.  I am able to think more swiftly on the stage now than at the time Charles Reade wrote to me, and I only wish I were young enough to take advantage of it.  But youth thinks slowly, as a rule.

Vary the pace. Charles Reade was never tired of saying this, and, indeed, it is one of the foundations of all good acting.

“You don’t seem quite to realize,” he writes in the letter before me, “that uniformity of pace leads inevitably to languor.  You should deliver a pistol-shot or two.  Remember Philippa is a fiery girl; she can snap.  If only for variety, she should snap James’ head off when she says, ‘Do I speak as if I loved them!’”

My memories of the part of Philippa are rather vague, but I know that Reade was right in insisting that I needed more “bite” in the passages when I was dressed as a boy.  Though he complimented me on my self-denial in making what he called “some sacrifice of beauty” to pass for a boy, “so that the audience can’t say, ’Why, James must be a fool not to see she is a girl,’” he scolded me for my want of bluntness.

     “Fix your mind on the adjective ‘blunt’ and the substantive
     ‘pistol-shot’; they will do you good service.”

They did!  And I recommend them to anyone who finds it hard to overcome monotony of pace and languor of diction.