On the other hand, it is by no means certain that, if
the choice of a stage for our performance were offered to the most
contented among us, we should be satisfied to speak our parts and go
through our actor'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.
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