“Circumstance!” cried the painter, impatiently.  “Good heavens! do you make no account of the spontaneous tendencies of genius?  Is Nature a mere vulgar cook, turning out men, like soups, from one common stock, with only a dash of flavoring here and there to give them variety?  No—­Nature is a subtle chemist, and her workshop, depend on it, is stored with delicate elixirs, volatile spirits, and precious fires of genius.  Certain of these are kneaded with the clay of the poet, others with the clay of the painter, the astronomer, the mathematician, the legislator, the soldier.  Raffaelle had in him some of ’the stuff that dreams are made of.’  Never tell me that that same stuff, differently treated, would equally well have furnished forth an Archimedes or a Napoleon!”

“Men are what their age calls upon them to be,” I replied, after a moment’s consideration.  “Be that demand what it may, the supply is ever equal to it.  Centre of the most pompous and fascinating of religions, Rome demanded Madonnas and Transfigurations, and straightway Raffaelle answered to the call.  The Old World, overstocked with men, gold, and aristocracies, asked wider fields of enterprise, and Columbus added America to the map.  What is this but circumstance?  Had Italy needed colonies, would not her men of genius have turned sailors and discoverers?  Had Madrid been the residence of the Popes, might not Columbus have painted altar-pieces or designed churches?”

Mueller, still sitting on the floor, shook his head despondingly.

“I don’t think it,” he replied; “and I don’t wish to think it.  It is too material a view of genius to satisfy my imagination.  I love to believe that gifts are special.  I love to believe that the poet is born a poet, and the artist an artist.”

“Hold!  I believe that the poet is born a poet, and the artist an artist; but I also believe the poetry of the one and the art of the other to be only diverse manifestations of a power that is universal in its application.  The artist whose lot in life it is to be a builder is none the less an artist.  The poet, though engineer or soldier, is none the less a poet.  There is the poetry of language, and there is also the poetry of action.  So also there is the art which expresses itself by means of marble or canvas, and the art which designs a capitol, tapers a spire, or plants a pleasure-ground.  Nay, is not this very interfusion of gifts, this universality of uses, in itself the bond of beauty which girdles the world like a cestus?  If poetry were only rhyme, and art only painting, to what an outer darkness of matter-of-fact should we be condemning nine-tenths of the creation!”

Mueller yawned, as if he would have swallowed me and my argument together.

“You are getting transcendental,” said he.  “I dare say your theories are all very fine and all very true; but I confess that I don’t understand them.  I never could find out all this poetry of bricks and mortar, railroads and cotton-factories, that people talk about so fluently now-a-days.  We Germans take the dreamy side of life, and are seldom at home in the practical, be it ever so highly colored and highly flavored.  In our parlance, an artist is an artist, and neither a bagman nor an engine-driver.”