able of anything of the kind. From some inquiries I have made in schools, and from my own observation, I believe that those who are endowed with this natural artistic talent do not exceed, even if they come up to, one per cent of the whole population.
The variations in the amount of artistic faculty are certainly very great, even if we do not take the extremes. The gradations of power between the ordinary man or woman "who does not draw," and whose attempts at representing any object, animate or inanimate, would be laughable, and the average good artist who, with a few bold strokes, can produce a recognisable and even effective sketch of a landscape, a street, or an animal, are very numerous; and we can hardly measure the difference between them at less than fifty or a hundred fold.
The musical faculty is undoubtedly, in its lower forms, less uncommon than either of the preceding, but it still differs essentially from the necessary or useful faculties in that it is almost entirely wanting in one-half even of civilised men. For every person who draws, as it were instinctively, there are probably five or ten who sing or play without having been taught and from mere innate love and perception of melody and harmony.[1] On the other hand, there are probably about as many who seem absolutely deficient in musical perception, who take little pleasure in it, who cannot perceive discords or remember tunes, and who could not learn to sing or play with any amount of study. The gradations, too, are here quite as great as in mathematics or pictorial art, and the special faculty of the great musical composer must be reckoned many hundreds or perhaps thousands of times greater than that of the ordinary "unmusical" person above referred to.
It appears then, that, both on account of the limited number of persons gifted with the mathematical, the artistic, or the musical faculty, as well as from the enormous variations in its development, these mental powers differ widely from those which are essential to man, and are, for the most part, common to him and the lower animals; and that they could
- ↑ I am informed, however, by a music master in a large school that only about one per cent have real or decided musical talent, corresponding curiously with the estimate of the mathematicians.
