In Paradise: A Novel. Vol. I.

by Paul Heyse

As the street, which was not especially lively even on a weekday, reposed to-day in the most profound Sunday quiet, Felix wondered what it could have been that had held his attention there, especially when he noticed that the actor, who was generally so ready and self-possessed, showed evident signs of embarrassment as he hastened forward to welcome him, and, as if to keep him away from the window, forced him to take a seat upon the sofa.

But he soon recovered his easy bearing again.

"You are looking at the walls," said he, "and are wondering that I still preserve these mementoes of my stage days, these pictures of great actors and my pretty colleagues of the fair sex, and even the obligatory laurel-wreath, with its satin ribbons, that is never lacking in any true actor's domicile. If my present employer should ever by chance condescend to visit his clerk, I should, it is true, have done far better had I hung up a bulletin of the stock boards instead of the lithograph of Seydelmann as Mephistophiles. But, as I am safe up here from all haute finance, I think I may be allowed, without injury to my reputation as a sound accountant, to surround myself with all those relics that I hold sacred, even that all-too-flaming sword over there, that drove me from my paradise of the footlights."

He pointed to a rapier that hung on the wall opposite the sofa, arranged with a few pistols and fencing-gloves in the form of a trophy, underneath which hung a picture in water colors representing Elfinger in the costume of Hamlet.

"Yes," he continued, with a quiet smile; "if the point of that sword had not slipped in the hands of an unskillful Laertes, and entered the eye of the unfortunate Hamlet, I should hardly have had the pleasure of seeing you in my chambers just at this particular moment. I should probably have been sitting in my dressing-room at the theatre, painting myself to fit the character of an Alba or a Richard III., for this evening's performance. Whether the public has lost much by it, I can't say. At all events, there is no doubt that I have gained."

"I am amazed that you can speak so cold-bloodedly of something that any other man would regard as the great misfortune of his life. After the high opinion of your talents that I was led to form by your performance of yesterday--"

"Do not allow yourself to be deceived by a little bit of coarse humor, my excellent friend. A man, can rid himself of any other kind of homesickness sooner or later; but no one who has once felt himself at home behind the footlights can ever be free from homesickness for the stage. I must confess that I felt a real pang of envy when I took my little troupe of yesterday out of their box, and rigged them out for the play. Now, does not that positively border on insanity? But reason counts for nothing in such a case. I know that I, with my average talent, could never have attained the highest point of eminence, and that for that reason I ought to feel nothing but gratitude toward my friend Laertes for pushing me back into that obscurity where I can plod comfortably along on the golden, path of mediocrity. And yet all my philosophy oozes away the moment the conversation turns upon the theatre."

"But should not this be so? and since you are justified in thinking yourself a born actor, what reason have you for believing that the highest distinction would have been denied you? Why should not your fate strike you as a tragical one?"

"Because with all my good qualifications, especially for declamation, I am not only a born actor but also a born German, which, I admit, sounds like a very palpable paradox. But just consider our race a moment. In spite of some rare exceptions, that stand out almost like miracles and that merely prove the rule, it may be said to possess scarcely a single qualification that would enable it to reach any decided greatness in the art! Ought not the actor to be able to shed his own skin when he slips into that of another? And when did a true German ever exist that could put himself in another's place? When was he ever untrue to himself?--when did he ever deny his personal virtues and faults? Don't you see, the very thing that makes our people so respectable stands in the way of our acting. We are not a people given to impersonation, to posing, and to representation. We are sublime in our earnestness, and silly in our trifling. We like best to sit still in our private corner behind the stove, and we grow red and awkward if we have to pass through a room where there are ten unknown men, or even as many ladies, watching us. Only the highest problems of tragic poetry give us wings to lift us over these chasms. When we attempt to walk with metrical feet, which are shod with winged shoes, we get on very well. But on our own flat every-day extremities, we stumble so wretchedly that an ordinary Frenchman or Italian, who can neither read nor write, appears like a prince of the blood beside us."

"I wish I were able to deny all this," said Felix. "Unfortunately we have no real society; and where we have the germs of one, actors are as a rule excluded from it. But though that part of your art that has to do with the representation of human beings and a characteristic imitation of life suffers from this, the higher branches still continue to be our domain; and if you compare the art of tragedy among the Italians or the French with our representations of Shakespeare and Goethe--"