at, and it is quite certain that a ban
of being ludicrous always falls on any playwright who has been
(theatrically speaking) 'damned'; and he never shakes it off in all his
lifetime. Even future success is a most questionable affair, and many a
man who has had this misfortune happen to him, has fled in his despair
to the doleful wilderness of those productions which possess the
outward appearance of theatrical pieces, but, as their authors solemnly
assure us, are not meant for representation."

"I," said Theodore, "can corroborate you both most thoroughly from my
own experience, that it is a most hazardous matter to put a work on to
the stage. What it really amounts to is, that you are committing a
property of yours to the mercy of the winds and the waves. When one
remembers how many thousand accidental contingencies the effect of a
work depends upon, how very often the deeply considered and carefully
contrived effect of some passage is shipwrecked by the blunder, the
unskilfulness, or the mistake of a singer or instrumentalist; how
often--"

Vincent here interrupted with a vigourous cry of "hear! hear!"

"I cry 'hear! hear!'" he explained, "as the noble lords in the English
Parliament do when one of them is just going to let the cat out of the
bag. Theodore's head is full of nothing but the opera which he put upon
the stage a few years ago. At the time, he said, 'When I had attended a
dozen rehearsals which were more or less useless and pretty much
burked, and when the last one came, and the conductor evidently had
very little real idea of my score, or about the piece as a whole, I
gave things up, and felt quite calm in my mind as to the very dubious
destiny which was hanging over my production like a most threatening
thunder-cloud.' I said, 'If it is failure, a failure let it be; I am
far away aloft above all an author's anxieties and uneasinesses.' With
other pretty speeches of a like nature. But when I saw my friend on the
day of the performance, and when it came to be time to go to the
theatre, he suddenly turned as white as a sheet (though he smiled and
laughed a great deal, nobody quite knew at what), and gave us the most
eager assurances that he had almost forgotten that that was the night
when his opera was to be given--tried, when putting on his greatcoat,
to stick his right arm into the left sleeve, so that I had to help him
on with it--and then ran off across the street like one possessed,
without a word