hroughout the throng than
we had supposed.

It is, of course, very meet and very right and our bounden duty to
admire the world's standard, official heroes. But it is wrong to
revere them to the exclusion of folk less showy but perhaps no less
essential. It is almost as wrong as it would be for the judges at the
horse-show to put the dog-cart before the horse and then focus their
admiring glances so exclusively upon the vehicle that they forgot the
very existence of its patient and unself-conscious propeller.

It is especially fitting that we should awake to the worth of the
master by proxy just now, when the movement for the socialization of
the world, after so many ineffectual centuries, is beginning to engage
the serious attention of mankind. Thus far, one of the chief
reactionary arguments against all men being free has been that men are
so shockingly unequal. And the reactionaries have called us to witness
the gulf that yawns, for example, between the god-like individualist,
Ysaye, and the worm-like little factory girl down there in the
audience balanced on the edge of the seat and listening to the
violin--her rapt soul sitting in her eyes. Now, however, we know that,
but for the wireless tribute of creativeness that flashes up to the
monarch of tone from that "rapt soul" and others as humble and as
rapt--the king of fiddlers would then and there be obliged to lay down
his horsehair scepter and abdicate.

We have reached a stage of social evolution where it is high time that
one foolish old fallacy should share the fate of the now partially
discredited belief that "genius will out" in spite of man or devil.
This fallacy is the supposition that man's creativeness is to be
measured solely by its visible, audible, or tangible results.
Browning's old Rabbi made a shrewd commentary on this question when he
declared:

"Not on the vulgar mass
Called 'work,' must sentence pass,
Things done that took the eye and had the price....
But all the world's coarse thumb
And finger failed to plumb....
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped:
All I could never be,
All men ignored in me,
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped."

Yes, we are being slowly socialized, even to our way of regarding
genius; and this has been until now the last unchallenged stronghold
of individualism. We perceive that even there i