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When foreign critics have commented upon this, upon our superficiality, our commonplaceness, what they are pleased to call the weary level of our mediocrity, upon the raging unrest and race for fortune, and upon the tremendous pace of American life, we have said that this is incident to a new country and the necessity of controlling physical conditions, and of fitting our heterogeneous population to their environment.
Her tastes had been formed in this circle, and she had also been under the instruction of the Chevalier de Mere, a litterateur and courtier who had great vogue, was something of an oracle, and molded the character and manners of divers women of this period, among others the future Mme. de Maintenon. His confidence in his own power of bringing talent out of mediocrity was certainly refreshing.
When some extraordinary accident was not befalling Aunt Lizzie, who seemed the essence of mediocrity, she was always doing the unexpected, so little was thought of it after the first surprise at her rudeness, and the others shortly said good-night and retired also.
They stand in long rows on the cornices; they crowd the pediments; they poise on one leg above domes and arches; they shelter themselves in niches; they ride about on horseback; they sit or lounge on street corners or in garden walks; all with a mediocrity in the older sort which fails of any impression.
Notwithstanding, however, all this successful mystification, the Arch- Mediocrity who presided, rather than ruled, over this Cabinet of Mediocrities, became hourly more conscious that the inevitable transition from fulfilling the duties of an administration to performing the functions of a government could not be conducted without talents and knowledge.
Its creed was as absurd as every other creed, the Divine Right of Kings, the Infallibility of the Popes, Universal Suffrage, the Equality of Man, all equally absurd if one only considers them by their rational value and not in the light of the force by which they are animated. What did their mediocrity matter? Ideas have never conquered the world as ideas, but only by the force they represent.
Consequently, from that time to the present my work has necessarily been more or less independent and empirical in its nature, and, while I trust I am neither prejudiced nor intolerant in my attitude towards pianoforte education in its general aspect, I cannot help feeling that a great deal of natural taste is stifled and a great deal of mediocrity created by the persistent and unintelligent study of such things as an 'even scale' or a 'good tone.
Minds which have any claim to greatness are capable of divesting themselves of selfish considerations. They feel that they belong to the whole human race. Their views are directed to posterity. I am the wife of a virtuous man exposed to persecution. I was the friend of men who have been proscribed and immolated by delusion, and the hatred of jealous mediocrity.
Martial, however, was one of those men who are capable of reckoning on the future in the midst of their intensest enjoyment; he had already learned to judge the world, and hid his ambition under the fatuity of a lady-killer, cloaking his talent under the commonplace of mediocrity as soon as he observed the rapid advancement of those men who gave the master little umbrage.
Of 276 at one time in that institution, nearly all were below mediocrity, and 175 are represented as grossly ignorant, and, in point of education, scarcely capable of transacting the ordinary business of life. The preceding, it is believed, is no more than a fair specimen of the criminal statistics of this country and of the civilized world.
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