"I only supposed quite a common case—I don't suspect bad motives behind everything, although I have a bad opinion of most things! Well, then, this desire of yours is so strong, that you would rather suffer want, humiliate yourself, allow yourself to be sucked dry by vampires, lose your social reputation, become bankrupt, go to the dogs—than turn back. Am I right?"
"Yes! How well you know me!"
"I once knew a young man—I know him no longer, he is so changed! He was fifteen years old when he left the penitentiary which every community keeps for the children who commit the outrageous crime of being born, and where the innocent little ones are made to atone for their parents' fall from grace—for what should otherwise become of society? Please remind me to keep to the subject! On leaving it he went for five years to Upsala and read a terrible number of books; his brain was divided into six pigeon-holes in which six kinds of information, dates, names, a whole warehouseful of ready-made opinions, conclusions, theories, ideas and nonsense of every description, were stored like a general cargo. This might have been allowed to pass, for there's plenty of room in a brain. But he was also supposed to accept foreign thoughts, rotten, old thoughts, which others had chewed for a life-time, and which they now vomited. It filled him with nausea and—he was twenty years old—he went on the stage. Look at my watch! Look at the second-hand; it makes sixty little steps before a minute has passed; sixty times sixty before it is an hour; twenty-four times the number and it is a day; three hundred and sixty-five times and it is only a year. Now imagine ten years! Did you ever wait for a friend outside his house? The first quarter of an hour passes like a flash! The second quarter—oh! one doesn't mind waiting for a person one's fond of; the third quarter: he's not coming; the fourth: hope and fear; the fifth: one goes away but hurries back; the sixth: Damn it all! I've wasted my time for nothing! the seventh: having waited so long, I might just as well wait a little longer; the eighth: raging and cursing; the ninth: One goes home, lies down on one's sofa and feels as calm as if one were walking arm in arm with death. He waited for ten years! Ten years! Isn't my hair standing on end when I say ten years? Look at it! Ten years had passed before he was allowed to play a part. When he did, he had a tremendous success—at once. But his ten wasted years had brought him to the verge of insanity; he was mad that it hadn't happened ten years before. And he was amazed to find that happiness when at last he held it within his grasp didn't make him happy! And so he was unhappy."
"But don't you think he required the ten years for the study of his art?"
"How could he study it when he was never allowed to play? He was a laughing-stock, the scum of the playbill; the management said he was no good; and whenever he tried to find an engagement at another theatre, he was told that he had no repertoire."
"But why couldn't he be happy when his luck had turned?"
"Do you think an immortal soul is content with happiness? But why speak about it? Your resolution is irrevocable. My advice is superfluous. There is but one teacher: experience, and experience is as capricious, or as calculating, as a schoolmaster; some of the pupils are always praised; others are always beaten. You are born to be praised; don't think I'm saying this because you belong to a good family; I'm sufficiently enlightened not to make that fact responsible for good or evil; in this case it is a particularly negligible quantity, for on the stage a man stands or falls by his own merit. I hope you'll have an early success so that you won't be enlightened too soon; I believe you deserve it."
"But have you no respect for your art, the greatest and most sublime of all arts?"
"It's overrated like everything about which men write books. It's full of danger and can do much harm! A beautifully told lie can impress like a truth! It's like a mass meeting where the uncultured majority turns the scale. The more superficial the better—the worse, the better! I don't mean to say that it is superfluous."
"That can't be your opinion!"