diligence without genius, nor genius without education will produce anything thorough,” as we read in Horace.  Other people with marked aptitude for musical expression have reproductive rather than creative endowments.  To them belongs talent in a greater or less degree, and they are adapted to promulgate the message which genius formulated for mankind.  Talent may be ripened and brightened by suitable environments and fostering care.

There are besides persons led by genius or talent into other avenues than those of the tone-world, and the great public with its diverse grades of emotional and intellectual gifts.  The cultivation of the aesthetic tastes is profitable to all, and no agency contributes so freely to it as music.  Too many people engaged in purely scientific or practical pursuits have failed to realize this.  In those nations known as musical, and that have become so through generations occupied with the art, music study is placed on an equal footing with any other worthy pursuit and no life interest is permitted to exclude musical enthusiasm.

Unless disabled by physical defects, every one displays some sense of musical sound and rhythmic motion.  It is a constant occurrence for children, without a word of direction, to mark the time of a stirring tune with hands, feet and swaying motions of the body.  A lullaby will almost invariably soothe a restless infant, and most children old enough to distinguish and articulate groups of tones will make some attempt at singing the melodies they have often heard.  The average child begins music lessons with evident pleasure.

It should be no more difficult to strengthen the musical instincts than any other faculties.  On the contrary, it too often chances that a child whose early song efforts have been in excellent time and tune, and not without expression, who has marched in time and beat time accurately, will, after a period of instruction, utterly disregard sense of rhythm, sing out of tune, play wrong notes, or fail to notice when the musical instrument used is ever so cruelly out of tune.  Uneducated people, trusting to intuitive perceptions, promptly decide that such or such a child, or person, has been spoiled by cultivation.  This is merely a failure to trace a result to its rightful cause, which lies not in cultivation, but in certain blunders in music study.

These blunders begin with the preliminary course on the piano or violin, for instance, when a child, having no previous training in the rudiments of music, starts with one weekly lesson, and is required to practice a prescribed period daily without supervision.  To the difficulties of an introduction to a musical instrument are added those of learning to read notes, to locate them, to appreciate time values and much else.  The teacher, it may be, knows little of the inner life of music, still less of child nature.  Manifold perplexities arise, and faltering through these the pupil acquires a halting use of the musical vocabulary, with other bad habits equally hard to correct.  A constant repetition of false notes, wrong phrasing, irregular accents, faulty rhythms and a meaningless jumble of notes dulls the outer ear and deadens the inner tone-sense.  Where there is genius, or decided talent, no obstacle can wholly bar the way to music.  Otherwise, it retreats before the blundering approach.