's business upon the boards of this world. Some would
prefer to take their properties, their player's crowns and robes, their
aspiring expressions and their finely expressed aspirations before the
audience of a larger planet; others, perhaps the majority, would choose,
with more humility as well as with more common sense, the shadowy scenery,
the softer footlights and the less exigent public of a modest asteroid,
beyond the reach of our earthly haste, of our noisy and unclean high-roads
to honour, of our furious chariot races round the goals of fame, and,
especially, beyond the reach of competition. But we have no choice. We are
in the world and, before we know where we are, we are on one of the paths
which we must traverse in our few score years between birth and death.
Moreover, each man's path leads up to the theatre on the one side and down
from it on the other. The inexorable manager, Fate, requires that each
should go through with his comedy or his drama, if he be judged worthy of
a leading part, with his scene or his act in another man's piece, if he be
fit only to play the walking gentleman, the dumb footman, or the
mechanically trained supernumerary who does duty by turns as soldier,
sailor, courtier, husbandman, conspirator or red-capped patriot. A few
play well, many play badly, all must appear and the majority are feebly
applauded and loudly hissed. He counts himself great who is received with
such an uproar of clapping and shout of approval as may drown the voice of
the discontented; he is called fortunate who, having missed his cue and
broken down in his words, makes his exit in the triumphant train of the
greater actor upon whom all eyes are turned; he is deemed happy who,
having offended no man, is allowed to depart in peace upon his downward
road. Yet none of these players need pride themselves much upon their
success nor take to heart their failure. Long before most of them have
slipped into the grave which waits at the foot of the hill, and have been
wrapped comfortably in the pleasant earth, their names are forgotten by
those who screamed with pleasure or hooted in disgust at their
performance, their faces are no longer remembered, their great drama is
become an old-fashioned mummery of the past. Why should they care? Their
work is done, they have been rewarded or punished, paid with praise and
gold or mulcted in the sum of their reputation and estate. Famous or
infamous, in honour or in disrepute, in r