hat not one of us can boast of having done
what he has; namely, electrified some six or eight hundred people with
one spark; but let everybody have his due. Your piece is good,
Sylvester; but you must admit that the admirable rendering was what
gave it its wings. You must really have been greatly satisfied with the
actors, were you not?"

"I certainly was," said Sylvester, "although at the same time it is
very difficult to please the author of a play with the performance of
it. You see, he is himself each of the characters of the piece; and all
their most intimate peculiarities, with all their necessary conditions,
have taken their origin in his own brain; and it seems impossible to
him that any other person shall so appropriate, and make his own, those
intimate thoughts of his which are peculiar to and innate in the
character as to be able to bring them forth into actual life. The
author, however, insists in his own mind upon this being done; and the
more vividly he has conceived the character, the more is he
discontented with the very slightest shortcoming, or alteration in it,
which he can discover in the actor's rendering of it. Certain is it
that the author suffers an anxiety which destroys all his pleasure in
the representation, and it is only when he can manage to soar above
this anxiousness, and see his character, the character which he has
invented, portrayed before his eyes, just as he saw it rise before his
mental vision, that he is able to enjoy, to some extent, seeing his
piece represented."

"Still," said Ottmar, "any annoyance which a playwright may feel, when
he sees other characters, quite dissimilar from his own, represented
instead of them, is richly compensated for by the applause of the
public, to which no author can, or should, be indifferent."

"No doubt," said Sylvester; "and as it is to the actor who is playing
the part that the applause is, in the first instance, given, the
author, who from his distant seat is looking on with trembling and
anxiety, yea, often with anger and disgust, at last becomes convinced
that the character (not at all his character) which is speaking the
speeches of his one on the stage, is, at all events, not so very bad
after all as might have been. Also it is quite true, and no reasonable
author, who is not entirely shut up in himself, will deny it, that many
a clever actor, who has formed a vivid conception of a character,
develops features in that character which he