The progress of any individual depends upon his ability to pass through these sloughs of despond,—­to set his face resolutely to the task and persevere.  It would be the idlest folly to lead children to believe that success or achievement or even passing ability can be gained in any other manner.  And this is the danger in the sugar-coating process.

But motivation does not mean sugar-coating.  It means the development of purpose, of ambition, of incentive.  It means the development of the willingness to undergo the discipline in order that the purpose may be realized, in order that the goal may be attained.  It means the creating of those conditions that make for strength and virility and moral fiber,—­for it is in the consciousness of having overcome obstacles and won in spite of handicaps,—­it is in this consciousness of conquest that mental strength and moral strength have their source.  The victory that really strengthens one is not the victory that has come easily, but the victory that stands out sharp and clear against the background of effort and struggle.  It is because this subjective contrast is so absolutely essential to the consciousness of power,—­it is for this reason that the “sloughs of despond” still have their function in our new attitude toward drill.

But do not mistake me:  I have no sympathy with that educational “stand-pattism” that would multiply these needlessly, or fail to build solid and comfortable highways across them wherever it is possible to do so.  I have no sympathy with that philosophy of education which approves the placing of artificial barriers in the learner’s path.  But if I build highways across the morasses, it is only that youth may the more readily traverse the region and come the more quickly to the points where struggle is absolutely necessary.

You remember in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda the story of Gwendolen Harleth.  Gwendolen was a butterfly of society, a young woman in whose childhood drill and discipline had found no place.  In early womanhood, she was, through family misfortune, thrown upon her own resources.  In casting about for some means of self-support her first recourse was to music, for which she had some taste and in which she had had some slight training.  She sought out her old German music teacher, Klesmer, and asked him what she might do to turn this taste and this training to financial account.  Klesmer’s reply sums up in a nutshell the psychology of skill: 

“Any great achievement in acting or in music grows with the growth.  Whenever an artist has been able to say, ’I came, I saw, I conquered,’ it has been at the end of patient practice.  Genius, at first, is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.  Singing and acting, like the fine dexterity of the juggler with his cup and balls, require a shaping of the organs toward a finer and finer certainty of effect.  Your muscles, your whole frame, must go like a watch,—­true, true, true,