IV. JOANNA’S CARE 551

77. I pause again to distinguish this noble pride of a man of unerring genius, in the power which all his life has been too short to attain, up to the point he conceives of,-from the base complacency of the narrow brain and dull heart, in their own chosen ways of indolence or error.

The feeling comes out more distinctly still, three pages forward, when his wife tells him,

“‘The gentleman is a gentleman, Willie; ye maunna speak that gate to him, hinnie.’ ‘The devil I maunna!’ said Willie,* ‘and what for maunna I? If he was ten gentles, he canna draw a bow like me, can he?’”

78. I need to insist upon this distinction, at this time in England especially, when the names of artists, whose birth was an epoch in the world’s history, are dragged through the gutters of Paris, Manchester, and New York, to decorate the last puffs written for a morning concert, or a monthly exhibition. I have just turned out of the house a book in which I am told by the modern picture dealer that Mr. A., B., C., D., or F. is “the Mozart of the nineteenth century”; the fact being that Mozart’s birth wrote the laws of melody for all the world as irrevocably as if they had been set down by the waves of Solway; and as widely as the birth of St. Gregory in the sixth century fixed to its date for ever the establishment of the laws of musical expression. Men of perfect genius are known in all centuries by their perfect respect to all law,

* Joanie tells me she has often heard the fame of the real Wandering Willie spoken of: he was well known in travel from the Border right into Galloway, stopping to play in villages and at all sorts of out-of-the-way houses, and, strangely, succeeded by a blind woman fiddler, who used to come led by a sister; and the chief singing lessons in Joanie’s young days were given through Galloway by a blind man, who played the fiddle to perfection; and his ear was so correct that if in a class of fifty voices one note was discordant, he would stop instantly, tap loudly on the fiddle with the back of his bow, fly to the spot where the wrong note came from, pounce on the person, and say, ‘It was you, and it’s no use denying it; if I can’t see, I can hear!’ and he’d make the culprit go over and over the phrase till it was conquered. He always opened the class with a sweeping scale, dividing off so many voices to each note, to follow in succession.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]