Page:Postface to 114 Songs.djvu/8

POSTFACE in this way, but perhaps the prizes may do the donors more good than the donatees. Possibly the pleasure and satisfactory of the former in having done what they consider a good deed may be far greater than the improvement in the quality of the latter's work. In fact, the process may have an enervating effect upon the latter&mdash;it may produce more Roderick Hudsons than Beethovens. Perhaps something of greater value could be caught without this kind of bait. Perhaps the chief value of the plan to establish a "course at Rome" to raise the standard of American music (or the standard of American composers&mdash;which is it?) may be in finding a man strong enough to survive it. To see the sunrise a man has but to get up early, and he can always have Bach in his pocket. For the amount of a month's wages, a grocery-clerk can receive "personal instruction" from Beethoven and other living "conservatories." Possibly, the more our composer accepts from his patrons, "et al.," the less he will accept from himself. It may be possible that a month in a "Kansas wheat field" will do more for him than three years in Rome. It may be that many men&mdash;perhaps some of genius (if you won't admit that all are geniuses)&mdash;have been started on the downward path of subsidy by trying to write a thousand-dollar prize poem or a ten-thousand-dollar prize opera. How many masterpieces have been prevented from blossoming in this way? A cocktail will make a man eat more but will not give him a healthy, normal appetite (if he had not that already). If a bishop should offer a "prize living" to the curate who will love God the hardest for fifteen days, whoever gets the prize would love God the least&mdash;probably. Such stimulants, it strikes us, tend to industrialize art rather than develop a spiritual sturdiness&mdash;a sturdiness which Mr. Sedgwick says shows itself in a close union between spiritual life and the ordinary business of life, against spiritual feebleness, which shows itself in the separation of the two. And for the most of us, we believe, this sturdiness would be encouraged by anything that will keep or help us keep a normal balance between the spiritual life and the ordinary life. If for every thousand dollar prize a potato field be substituted, so that these candidates of Clio can dig a little in real life, perchance