materials--namely, our own bodies, sometimes including heart and brains.
One has often heard the complaint of a certain actor that he acts
himself. On the metaphorical stage of life the complaint and the implied
demand are just the reverse. How much more interesting life would be if
only more people had the courage and skill to act themselves, instead of
abjectly understudying some one else! Of course, there are supers on the
stage of life as on the real stage. It is proper that these should dress
and speak and think alike. These one courteously excepts from the
generalisation that the composer of the play, as Marcus Aurelius calls
him, has given each of us a certain part to play--that part simply
oneself: a part, need one say, by no means as easy as it seems; a part
most difficult to study, and requiring daily rehearsal. So difficult is
it, indeed, that most people throw up the part, and join the ranks of
the supers--who, curiously enough, are paid much more handsomely than
the principals. They enter one of the learned or idle professions, join
the army or take to trade, and so speedily rid themselves of the irksome
necessity of being anything more individual than 'the learned counsel,'
'the learned judge,' 'my lord bishop,' or 'the colonel,' names
impersonal in application as the dignity of 'Pharaoh,' whereof the name
and not the man was alone important. Henceforth they are the Church, the
Law, the Army, the City, or that vaguer profession Society. Entering one
of these, they become as lost to the really living world as the monk who
voluntarily surrenders all will and character of his own at the
threshold of his monastery: bricks in a prison wall, privates in the
line, peas in a row. But, as I say, these are the parts that pay. For
playing the others, indeed, you are not paid, but expected to
pay--dearly.

It is full time we turned to those on whom falls the burden of those
real parts. Such, when quite young, if they be conscientious artists,