It is the duty of those who are great, or to whom great destinies of joy or sorrow have been dealt, to wear their distinctions for the world to see.  It is good for the world, which in its crude way indicates the rudiments of this dramatic art of life, when it decrees that the bride shall walk radiant in orange blossom, and the mourner sadden our streets with black—­symbols ever passing before us of the moving vicissitudes of life.

The mourner cannot always be sad, or the bride merry; the bride indeed sometimes weeps at the altar, and the mourner laughs a savage cynical laugh at the grave; but for those moments in which they awhile forget parts more important than themselves, the tailor and the dressmaker have provided symbolical garments, just as military decorations have been provided for heroes without the gift of looking heroic, and sacerdotal vestments for the priest, who, like a policeman, is not always on duty.

In playing his part the conscientious artist in life, like any other actor, must often seem to feel more than he really feels at a given moment, say more than he means.  In this he is far from being insincere—­though he must make up his mind to be accused daily of insincerity and affectation.  On the contrary, it will be his very sincerity that necessitates his make-believe.  With his great part ever before him in its inspiring completeness, he must be careful to allow no merely personal accident of momentary feeling or action to jeopardise the general effect.  There are moments, for example, when a really true lover, owing to such masterful natural facts as indigestion, a cold, or extreme sleepiness, is unable to feel all that he knows he really feels.  To ‘tell the truth,’ as it is called, under such circumstances, would simply be a most dangerous form of lying.  There is no duty we owe to truth more imperative than that of lying stoutly on occasion—­for, indeed, there is often no other way of conveying the whole truth than by telling the part-lie.

A watchful sincerity to our great conception of ourselves is the first and last condition, of our creating that finest work of art—­a personality; for a personality, like a poet, is not only born but made.

THE ARBITRARY CLASSIFICATION OF SEX

In an essay on Vauvenargues Mr. John Morley speaks with characteristic causticity of those epigrammatists ’who persist in thinking of man and woman as two different species,’ and who make verbal capital out of the fancied distinction in the form of smart epigrams beginning ’Les femmes.’  It is one of Shakespeare’s cardinal characteristics that he understood woman.  Mr. Meredith’s fame as a novelist is largely due to the fact that he too understands women.  The one spot on the sun of Robert Louis Stevenson’s fame, so we are told, is that he could never draw a woman.  His capacity for drawing men counted for nothing,