The slender, dark-haired novelist of your imagination, with
epigrammatic points to his mustache, suddenly takes the shape of a
short, smoothly-shaven blond man, whose conversation does not sparkle
at all, and you were on the lookout for the most brilliant of verbal
fireworks. Perhaps it is a dramatist you have idealized. Fresh from
witnessing his delightful comedy of manners, you meet him face to face
only to discover that his own manners are anything but delightful.
The play and the playwright are two very distinct entities. You grow
skeptical touching the truth of Buffon's assertion that the style is the
man himself. Who that has encountered his favorite author in the flesh
has not sometimes been a little, if not wholly, disappointed?
After all, is it not expecting too much to expect a novelist to talk
as cleverly as the clever characters in his novels? Must a dramatist
necessarily go about armed to the teeth with crisp dialogue? May not a
poet be allowed to lay aside his singing-robes and put on a conventional
dress-suit when he dines out? Why is it not permissible in him to be as
prosaic and tiresome as the rest of the company? He usually is.
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