The role is easy;
there is none easier, save only the role of the man who sneers alike
at both criticism and performance.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the
strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them
better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives
valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is
no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive
to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions;
who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the
end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he
fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall
never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor
defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to
develop into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work
of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves
there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of
cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less
room is there for those who deride or slight what is done by those who
actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who
always profess that they would like to take action, if only the
conditions of life were not what they actually are.
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