at discouraged at the result of
some of his Fiume adventures said: "We are the only Idealists left."
This remark may have been made in a moment of careless impulse, but if
it is taken at its face value, the moment it was made that moment his
idealism started downhill. A grasp at monopoly indicates that a sudden
shift has taken place from the heights where genius may be found, to
the lower plains of talent. The mind of a true idealist is great enough
to know that a monopoly of idealism or of wheat is a thing nature does
not support.

A newspaper music column prints an incident (so how can we assume that
it is not true?) of an American violinist who called on Max Reger, to
tell him how much he (the American) appreciated his music. Reger gives
him a hopeless look and cries: "What! a musician and not speak German!"
At that moment, by the clock, regardless of how great a genius he may
have been before that sentence was uttered--at that moment he became
but a man of "talent." "For the man of talent affects to call his
transgressions of the laws of sense trivial and to count them nothing
considered with his devotion to his art." His art never taught him
prejudice or to wear only one eye. "His art is less for every deduction
from his holiness and less for every defect of common sense." And this
common sense has a great deal to do with this distinguishing difference
of Emerson's between genius and talent, repose and truth, and between
all evidences of substance and manner in art. Manner breeds
partialists. "Is America a musical nation?"--if the man who is ever
asking this question would sit down and think something over he might
find less interest in asking it--he might possibly remember that all
nations are more musical than any nation, especially the nation that
pays the most--and pays the most eagerly, for anything, after it has
been professionally-rubber stamped. Music may be yet unborn. Perhaps no
music has ever been written or heard. Perhaps the birth of art will
take place at the moment, in which the last man, who is willing to make
a living out of art is gone and gone forever. In the history of this
youthful world the best product that human-beings can boast of is
probably, Beethoven--but, maybe, even his art is as nothing in
comparison with the future product of some coal-miner's soul in the
forty-first century. And the same man who is ever asking about the most
musical nation, is ever discovering the most musical man o