[SECTION SIXTH].
It so happened that some irresistible psychic force had impelled Sylvester back to town, although, as a rule, nothing in the world would induce him to leave the country at the time of year when the weather was at its pleasantest. A little theatrical piece which he had written was going to be produced, and it seems an impossibility for an author to miss a first performance of one of his pieces, even though he may have to contend with a world of trouble and anxiety in connection with it. Moreover, Vincent, too, had emerged from the crowd, so that, for the time at least, the Serapion Brotherhood was fairly reestablished; they held their meeting in the same pleasant public-garden where they had last assembled.
Sylvester was not like the same man; he was in better spirits and more talkative than when he was last seen, and taking him all over, like one who had experienced some piece of great good fortune.
"Was it not well," said Lothair, "that we put off our meeting until our friend's piece had been produced? otherwise we should have found our good brother preoccupied, uninterested in our conversation, oppressed as with a heavy burden. His piece would have been haunting him like some distressful spectre, but now that it has burst its chrysalis and fluttered away like a beautiful butterfly into the empyrean, and has not sued for universal favour in vain, everything is clear and bright within him. He stands glorified in the radiance of deserved applause which has fallen so richly to his share, and we won't, for a moment, take it ill of him that he looks down upon us with the least bit of pardonable pride, seeing that 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 himself did not think of, at least not distinctly, and which he must nevertheless admit to be good and appropriate. The author sees a character which was born in his own most inmost elements, appearing before him in a shape new and strange to him. Yet this shape is by no means foreign to the elements of the genesis of the character, nay it does not seem now possible that it could have assumed a different form; and he feels a glad astonishment over this thing, which is really his own, although it seems so different; just as if he had suddenly come upon a treasure in his garret, whose existence he had not dreamt of."
"There," said Ottmar, "spoke my dear kind-hearted Sylvester, who does not know the meaning of the word 'vanity,' that vanity which has stifled many a great and true talent. There is one writer for the stage who once said, without the slightest hesitation, that there are no actors capable of understanding the soul which dwells within him, or of representing the characters which he creates. How wholly otherwise was it with our grand and glorious Schiller, who once got into that state of delighted surprise of which Sylvester speaks, when he saw his Wallenstein performed, and declared that it was then, for the first time, that he had seen his hero visibly in flesh and blood before his eyes. It was Fleck, the for ever unforgettable hero of our stage, who played Wallenstein then."
"On the whole," said Lothair, "I am convinced, and the instance which Ottmar has given confirms me, that the writer on whom, in the depths of his soul, the true recognition and comprehension of art, and with them, that worship which they give to the creating formative spirit of the universe, have arisen in light, cannot lower himself to the degraded idol-cult, which worships only its own self as being the Fetish that created all things. It is very easy for a great talent to be mistaken for real genius. But time dispels every illusion: talent succumbs to the attacks of time, but they have no effect on true genius, which lives on in invulnerable strength and beauty. But, to return to our Sylvester, and his theatre-piece, I must declare to you that I cannot understand how any one can come to the heroic decision to permit a work, for which he is indebted to his imagination, and to fortunate creative impulses, to be acted before him on the slippery, risky, uncertain boards of the stage."
The friends laughed, thinking that Lothair was, after his wont, going to utter some quaint, out-of-the-way opinion.