It was the
first time I ever enjoyed working....
As we worked the Master talked ... talked with me as if he had known me
for years--as if I, too, were Somebody.
There was nothing he did not discuss, in memorable phrase and trenchant,
clever epigram. For he saw that I believed in him, worshipped
whole-heartedly at his shrine of genius, and he gave me, in return, of
his best. For the first time I saw what human language is for. I thought
of Goethe at Weimar ... Wilde's clever conversation in London....
Never since did I see the real man, Spalton, as I saw him then, the man
he might always have been, if he had had an old-world environment,
instead of the environment of modern, commercial America--the spirit of
which finally claimed him, as he grew more successful....
Modern, commercial America--where we proudly make a boast of lack of
culture, and where artistic and aesthetic feeling, if freely expressed,
makes one's hearers more likely than not, at once uneasy and restive.
* * * * *
That night, at supper, I caught my first glimpse of the Eoites in a
body. The contrast between them and my school-folk was agreeably
different. I found among them an atmosphere of good-natured greeting and
raillery, that sped from table to table. And when Spalton strode in,
with his bold, swinging gait (it seemed that he had just returned from a
lecture in a distant city early that afternoon), there was cheering and
clapping.
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