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?

Indeed, curiously enough, among no set of men does the desire to look as
commonplace as the rest of the world seem so strong as among men of
letters. Perhaps it is out of consideration for the rest of the world;
but, whatever the reason, immobility of expression and general
mediocrity of style are more characteristic of them at present than even
the military.

It is surely a strange paradox that we should pride ourselves on
schooling to foolish insensibility, on eliminating from them every mark
of individual character, the faces that were intended subtly and
eloquently to image our moods--to look glad when we are glad, sorry when
we are sorry, angry in anger, and lovely in love.