the marble wherefrom, with patient chisel, I must liberate the
perfect and triumphant ME! As a poet listening with trembling ear to the
voice of his inspiration, so I tremulously ask myself--what is the
divine conception that is to become embodied in me, what is the divine
meaning of ME? How best shall I express it in look, in word, in deed,
till my outer self becomes the truthful symbol of my inner self--till,
in fact, I have successfully placed the best of myself on the outside
--for others besides myself to see, and know and love?

What is my part, and how am I to play it?

Returning to the latter image, there are two difficulties that beset one
in playing a part on the stage of life, right at the outset. You are not
allowed to 'look' it, or 'dress' it! What would an actor think, who,
asked to play Hamlet, found that he would be expected to play it
without make-up and in nineteenth-century costume? Yet many of us are in
a like dilemma with similar parts. Actors and audience must all wear the
same drab clothes and the same immobile expression. It is in vain you
protest that you do not really belong to this absurd and vulgar
nineteenth century, that you have been spirited into it by a cruel
mistake, that you really belong to mediaeval Florence, to Elizabethan,
Caroline, or at latest Queen Anne England, and that you would like to be
allowed to look and dress as like it as possible. It is no use; if you
dare to look or dress like anything but your own tradesmen--and other
critics--it is at your peril. If you are beautiful, you are expected to
disguise a fact that is an open insult to every other person you look
at; and you must, as a general rule, never look, wear, feel, or say what
everybody else is not also looking, wearing, feeling, or saying.

Thus you get some hint of the difficulty of playing the part of yourself
on this stage of life.

In these matters of dressing and looking your part musicians seem
granted an immunity denied to all their fellow-artists. Perhaps it is
taken for granted that the musician is a fool--the British public is so
intuitive. Yet it takes the same view of the poet, without allowing him
a like immunity. And, by the way, what a fine conception of his part had
Tennyson--of the dignity, the mystery, the picturesqueness of it!
Tennyson would have felt it an artistic crime to look like his
publisher; yet what poet is there left us to-day half so
distinguished-looking as his publisher?

Inde