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THE SOUL OF ACHIEVEMENT
"I wonder where he got the idea?"
You have heard this when people thrilled at a great human photoplay. You have heard it as men have stood before a great piece of architecture. You have heard it as women contemplated some universally useful household invention. You have heard it asked after the strategy which won a great battle.
The old saw, "Genius is perspiration," is only half true. Nothing worth while is accomplished without hard, painstaking work, but the psychics have yet to account for that illuminating flash of the mind in which everything worth while, from Edison's incandescent lamp to Kipling's "Recessional," has been conceived. Is it some whisper from the Infinite — or is it the sudden crystallization of earnest desire into the fact of accomplishment? But today we only acclaim What Is; we will let the psychics wonder, Why?
The Soul of Achievement is Inspiration.
Edgar Allen Poe once wrote a mechanically glittering essay in which he proved that there is no such thing as Inspiration ; that all that is worth while came into being through orderly, almost mathematical processes of thought. That argument is the only stone in his magnificent, melancholy and purely inspirational tower of achievement which today seems treacherous and crumbling.
The best we can make of Inspiration is the comforting thought that Something — call it God if you will — helps those who help themselves. Not every man can do everything. It would be a lop-sided world if this were so. But to every man is given the power to do something a little better than his fellows — if he will fight disappointment, surmount obstacles, and keep everlastingly at it. The Wonderful Whisper will come to him some day. It must come.
Every photoplay that is worth while, in its authorship, its acting or its direction, bears proof that this is true.
— Photoplay Magazine.