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.




ON EARLY RISING

A CERTAIN scientific gentleman of my acquaintance, who has devoted years
to investigating the subject, states that he has never come across a
case of remarkable longevity unaccompanied by the habit of early rising;
from which testimony it might be inferred that they die early who lie
abed late. But this would be getting out at the wrong station. That the
majority of elderly persons are early risers is due to the simple
fact that they cannot sleep mornings. After a man passes his fiftieth
milestone he usually awakens at dawn, and his wakefulness is no credit
to him. As the theorist confined his observations to the aged, he easily
reached the conclusion that men live to be old because they do not sleep
late, instead of perceiving that men do not sleep late because they are
old. He moreover failed to take into account the numberless young lives
that have been shortened by matutinal habits.