been found consistent with noble rank or honourable estate.
Christianity might be expected to spare some sympathy for a calling
that offers prizes to abandonment and self-immolation, but her eye
is fixed on a more distant mark than the pleasure of the populace,
and, as in gladiatorial Rome of old, her best efforts have been
used to stop the games. Society, on the other hand, preoccupied
with the art of life, has no warmer gift than patronage for those
whose skill and energy exhaust themselves on the mimicry of life.
The reward of social consideration is refused, it is true, to all
artists, or accepted by them at their immediate peril. By a
natural adjustment, in countries where the artist has sought and
attained a certain modest social elevation, the issue has been
changed, and the architect or painter, when his health is proposed,
finds himself, sorely against the grain, returning thanks for the
employer of labour, the genial host, the faithful husband, the
tender father, and other pillars of society. The risk of too great
familiarity with an audience which insists on honouring the artist
irrelevantly, at the expense of the art, must be run by all; a more
clinging evil besets the actor, in that he can at no time wholly
escape from his phantasmal second self. On this creature of his
art he has lavished the last doit of human capacity for expression;
with what bearing shall he face the exacting realities of life?
Devotion to his profession has beggared him of his personality;
ague, old age and poverty, love and death, find in him an
entertainer who plies them with a feeble repetition of the triumphs
formerly prepared for a larger and less imperious audience. The
very journalist--though he, too, when his profession takes him by
the throat, may expound himself to his wife in phrases stolen from
his own leaders--is a miracle of detachment in comparison; he has
not put his laughter to sale. It is well for the soul's health of