the material in which he [the literary artist] works is no more a creation of his own than the sculptor’s marble

the art of the scholar is summed up in the observance of those reflections demanded by the nature of his medium.

For in truth all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage, from the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing away the last particle of dust, back to the earliest divination of the finished work to be, lying somewhere, according to Michelangelo’s fancy, in the rough-hewn block of stone

—

Pater

1895

p.16