each man is, as it were, a block of marble in which the ideal man
is buried. The purpose of the educator ought to be to cut the form
out, perikoptein, as Plato has it.

What a lofty and beautiful thought! To feel about oneself that the
perfect form is there, and that the experience of life is the
process of cutting it out--a process full of pain, perhaps, as the
great splinters and flakes fly and drop--a rough, brutal business
it seems at first, the hewing off great masses of stone, so firmly
compacted, fused and concreted together. At first it seems
unintelligible enough; but the dints become minuter and minuter,
here a grain and there an atom, till the smooth and shapely limbs
begin to take shape. At first it seems a mere bewildered loss, a
sharp pang as one parts with what seems one's very self. How long
before the barest structure becomes visible! but when one once gets
a dim inkling of what is going on, as the stubborn temper yields,
as the face takes on its noble frankness, and the shapely limbs
emerge in all the glory of free line and curve, how gratefully and
vehemently one co-operates, how little a thing the endurance of
mere pain becomes by the side of the consciousness that one is
growing into the likeness of the divine.



May 23, 1889.


when Goethe was writing Werther he wrote to his friend Kestner, "I
am working out my own situation in art, for the consolation of gods
and men." That is a fine thing to have said, proceeding from so