will carefully consider themselves, their gifts and possibilities, study
to discover their artistic _raison d'être_ and how best to fulfil it.
He or she will say: Here am I, a creature of great gifts and exquisite
sensibilities, drawn by great dreams, and vibrating to great emotions;
yet this potent and exquisite self is as yet, I know, but unwrought
material of the perfect work of art it is intended that I should make of
it--but 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 mediæval 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