women who come to them with money in their hands, demanding to be made into famous artists and musicians, not having been born with genius.  Some of these unfortunates spend years of time and thousands of dollars in money attempting to fit themselves for careers, only to end in utter failure.  Some, even after they have made a comparative failure of their education, eke out a tortured existence, hoping against hope for the golden crown of fame and fortune.

In sober truth the fatal lack in most of these disappointed seekers is not that they have no talent, but that they are too lazy mentally to make a real success of the natural aptitudes they have.  They lack “the infinite capacity for taking pains.”  They are deluded by the idea that success depends upon inspiration—­that there is no perspiration.  Yet every great writer, every great musician, every great actor, every great author, knows that there is no fame, there is no possibility of success, except through the most prolonged and painstaking drudgery.

“LIFE IS BRIEF—­ART IS LONG”

Perhaps no actor of modern times had greater dramatic talents inborn than Richard Mansfield, yet here is the story of how Richard Mansfield[6] worked, toiled, starved and suffered in achieving success in his art: 

His friends crowded St. George’s Hall for his first appearance.  It was observed, as he uttered the few lines of the Beadle, that he was excessively nervous.  When, later in the evening, he sat down at the piano and struck a preliminary chord, he fainted dead away.

[Footnote 6:  From “Richard Mansfield,” by Paul Wilstach.  Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.]

Mr. Reed relieved him of his position at once.  In discharging him, he said:  ‘You are the most nervous man I have ever seen,’ It was not all nervousness, however.  Mansfield had not eaten for three days.  He had fainted from hunger.

“Mansfield was now on evil days, indeed.  He moved into obscure quarters and fought the hard fight.  It was years before he would speak of these experiences.  In fact, he rarely ruminated on the past in the confidences of either conversation or correspondence.  Memory troubled him little and by the universal quotation it withheld its pleasures.  He dwelt in the present, with his eyes and hopes on the future.  It was always the future with him.  No pleasure or attainment brought complete satisfaction.  He looked to the past only in relation to the future; for experience, for example, for what to avoid.

“Once, when at the meridian of his fame, he was asked to lecture before the faculty and students of the University of Chicago.  For his subject he chose, ‘On Going on the Stage.’  That he might exploit to those before him the reality of the actor’s struggle, he lifted for the first time a corner of that veil of mystery which hung between his public and his past, and told of these early London days: