"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."