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, will carefully consider themselves, their gifts and possibilities, study to discover their artistic raison d’etre and how best to fulfil it.  He or she will say:  Here am I, a creature of great gifts and exquisite sensibilities, drawn by great dreams, and vibrating to great emotions; yet this potent and exquisite self is as yet, I know, but unwrought material of the perfect work of art it is intended that I should make of it—­but the marble wherefrom, with patient chisel, I must liberate the perfect and triumphant ME!  As a poet listening with trembling ear to the voice of his inspiration, so I tremulously ask myself—­what is the divine conception that is to become embodied in me, what is the divine meaning of ME?  How best shall I express it in look, in word, in deed, till my outer self becomes the truthful symbol of my inner self—­till, in fact, I have successfully placed the best of myself on the outside —­for others besides myself to see, and know and love?

What is my part, and how am I to play it?

Returning to the latter image, there are two difficulties that beset one in playing a part on the stage of life, right at the outset.  You are not allowed to ‘look’ it, or ‘dress’ it!  What would an actor think, who, asked to play Hamlet, found that he would be expected to play it without make-up and in nineteenth-century costume?  Yet many of us are in a like dilemma with similar parts.  Actors and audience must all wear the same drab clothes and the same immobile expression.  It is in vain you protest that you do not really belong to this absurd and vulgar nineteenth century, that you have been spirited into it by a cruel mistake, that you really belong to mediaeval Florence, to Elizabethan, Caroline, or at latest Queen Anne England, and that