But my first steps toward its realization were to begin with the short story of _Miss Bretherton_, published in 1884, and then the translation of Amiel's _Journal Intime_, which appeared in 1885. _Miss Bretherton_ was suggested to me by the brilliant success in 1883 of Mary Anderson, and by the controversy with regard to her acting--as distinct from her delightful beauty and her attractive personality--which arose between the fastidious few and the enchanted many. I maintained then, and am quite sure now, that Isabel Bretherton was in no sense a portrait of Miss Anderson. She was to me a being so distinct from the living actress that I offered her to the world with an entire good faith, which seems to myself now, perhaps thirty years later, hardly less surprising than it did to the readers of the time. For undoubtedly the situation in the novel was developed out of the current dramatic debate. But it became to me just _a_ situation--_a_ problem. It was really not far removed from Diderot's problem in the _Paradoxe sur le Comédien_. What is the relation of the actor to the part represented? One actress is plain--Rachel; another actress is beautiful, and more than beautiful, delightful--Miss Anderson. But all the time, is there or is there not a region in which all these considerations count for nothing in comparison with certain others? Is there a dramatic _art_--exacting, difficult, supreme--or is there not? The choice of the subject, at that time, was, it may be confessed, a piece of naïveté, and the book itself was young and naïve throughout. But something in it has kept it in circulation all this while; and for me it marks with a white stone the year in which it appeared. For it brought me my first critical letter from Henry James; it was the first landmark in our long friendship.