It is often mournfully reiterated that the present age is not an age
of great men, and I have sometimes wondered if it is true. In the
first place I do not feel sure that an age is the best judge of its own
greatness; a great age is generally more interested in doing the things
which afterwards cause it to be considered great, than in wondering
whether it is great. Perhaps the fact that we are on the look-out for
great men, and complaining because we cannot find them, is the best
proof of our second-rateness; I do not imagine that the Elizabethan
writers were much concerned with thinking whether they were great or
not; they were much more occupied in having a splendid time, and in
saying as eagerly as they could all the delightful thoughts which came
crowding to the utterance, than in pondering whether they were worthy
of admiration. In the annals of the Renaissance one gets almost weary of
the records of brilliant persons, like Leo Battista Alberti and Leonardo
da Vinci, who were architects, sculptors, painters, musicians, athletes,
and writers all in one; who could make crowds weep by twanging a lute,
ride the most vicious horses, take standing jumps over the heads of tall
men, and who were, moreover, so impressionable that books were to them
as jewels and flowers, and who "grew faint at the sight of sunsets and
stately persons." Such as these, we may depend upon it, had little time
to give to considering their own effect upon posterity. When the sun
rules the day, there is no question about his supremacy; it is when we
are concerned with scanning the sky for lesser lights to rule the night
that we are wasting time. To go about searching for somebody to inspire
one testifies, no doubt, to a certain lack of fire and initiative. But,
on the other hand, there have been many great men whose greatness their
contemporaries did not recognise. We tend at the present time to honour
achievements when they have begun to grow a little mouldy; we seldom
accord ungrudging admiration to a prophet when he is at his best.
Moreover, in an age like the present, when the general average of
accomplishment is remarkably high, it is more difficult to detect
greatness. It is easier to see big trees when they stand out over a
copse than when they are lost in the depths of the forest.
Now there are two modes and methods of being great; one is by largeness,
the other by intensity. A great man can be cast in a big, magnanimous
mould, without any very special accomplishments or abilities; it may
be very difficult to praise any of his faculties very highly, but he
is there. Such men are the natural leaders of mankind; they effect
what they effect not by any subtlety or ingenuity. They see in a wide,
general way what they want, they gather friends and followers and
helpers round them, and put the right man on at the right piece of work.
They perform what they perform by a kind of voluminous force, which
carries other personalities away; for lesser natures, as a rule, do not
like supreme responsibility; they enjoy what is to ordinary people
the greatest luxury in the world, namely, the being sympathetically
commandeered, and duly valued. Inspiration and leadership are not common
gifts, and there are abundance of capable people who cannot strike out
a novel line of their own, but can do excellent work if they can be
inspired and led. I was once for a short time brought into close contact
with a man of this kind; it was impossible to put down on paper or to
explain to those who did not know him what his claim to greatness was. I
remember being asked by an incredulous outsider where his greatness
lay, and I could not name a single conspicuous quality that my hero
possessed. But he dominated his circle for all that, and many of them
were men of far greater intellectual force than himself. He had his
own way; if he asked one to do a particular thing, one felt proud to
be entrusted with it, and amply rewarded by a word of approval. It
was possible to take a different view from the view which he took of a
matter or a situation, but it was impossible to express one's dissent
in his presence. A few halting, fumbling words of his were more weighty
than many a facile and voluble oration. Personally I often mistrusted
his judgment, but I followed him with an eager delight. With such men
as these, posterity is often at a loss to know why they impressed their
contemporaries, or why they continue to be spoken of with reverence and
enthusiasm. The secret is that it is a kind of moral and magnetic
force, and the lamentable part of it is that such men, if they are not
enlightened and wise, may do more harm than good, because they tend to
stereotype what ought to be changed and renewed.
That is one way of greatness; a sort of big, blunt force that overwhelms
and uplifts, like a great sea-roller, yielding at a hundred small
points, yet crowding onwards in soft volume and ponderous weight.
Two interesting examples of this impressive and indescribable greatness
seem to have been Arthur Hallam and the late Mr. W. E. Henley. In the
case of Arthur Hallam, the eulogies which his friends pronounced upon
him seem couched in terms of an intemperate extravagance. The fact that
the most splendid panegyrics upon him were uttered by men of high
genius is not in itself more conclusive than if such panegyrics had been
conceived by men of lesser quality, because the greater that a man is
the more readily does he perceive and more magniloquently acknowledge
greatness. Apart from In Memoriam, Tennyson's recorded utterances about
Arthur Hallam are expressed in terms of almost hyperbolical laudation.
I once was fortunate enough to have the opportunity of asking Mr.
Gladstone about Arthur Hallam. Mr. Gladstone had been his close friend
at Eton and his constant companion. His eye flashed, his voice gathered
volume, and with a fine gesture of his hand he said that he could only
deliberately affirm that physically, intellectually, and morally, Arthur
Hallam approached more nearly to an ideal of human perfection than
any one whom he had ever seen. And yet the picture of Hallam at Eton
represents a young man of an apparently solid and commonplace type, with
a fresh colour, and almost wholly destitute of distinction or charm;
while his extant fragments of prose and poetry are heavy, verbose, and
elaborate, and without any memorable quality. It appears indeed as if
he had exercised a sort of hypnotic influence upon his contemporaries.
Neither does he seem to have produced a very gracious impression upon
outsiders who happened to meet him. There is a curious anecdote told
by some one who met Arthur Hallam travelling with his father on the
Continent only a short time before his sudden death. The narrator says
that he saw with a certain satisfaction how mercilessly the young
man criticised and exposed his father's statements, remembering how
merciless the father had often been in dealing summarily with the
arguments and statements of his own contemporaries. One asks oneself in
vain what the magnetic charm of his presence and temperament can have
been. It was undoubtedly there, and yet it seems wholly irrecoverable.
The same is true, in a different region, with the late Mr. W. E. Henley.
His literary performances, with the exception of some half-a-dozen
poetical pieces, have no great permanent value. His criticisms were
vehement and complacent, but represent no great delicacy of analysis
nor breadth of view. His treatment of Stevenson, considering the
circumstances of the case, was ungenerous and irritable. Yet those
who were brought into close contact with Henley recognised something
magnanimous, noble, and fiery about him, which evoked a passionate
devotion. I remember shortly before his death reading an appreciation
of his work by a faithful admirer, who described him as "another Dr.
Johnson," and speaking of his critical judgment, said, "Mr. Henley is
pontifical in his wrath; it pleased him, for example, to deny to De
Quincey the title to write English prose." That a criticism so arrogant,
so saugrenu, should be re-echoed with such devoted commendation is a
proof that the writer's independent judgment was simply swept away by
Henley's personality; and in both these cases one is merely brought face
to face with the fact that though men can earn the admiration of the
world by effective performance, the most spontaneous and enduring
gratitude is given to individuality.
The other way of greatness is the way of intensity, that focuses all
its impact at some brilliant point, like a rapier-thrust or a flash of
lightning. Men with this kind of greatness have generally some supreme
and dazzling accomplishment, and the rest of their nature is often
sacrificed to one radiant faculty. Their power, in some one single
direction, is absolutely distinct and unquestioned; and these are the
men who, if they can gather up and express the forces of some vague and
widespread tendency, some blind and instinctive movement of men's minds,
form as it were the cutting edge of a weapon. They do not supply the
force, but they concentrate it; and it is men of this type who are often
credited with the bringing about of some profound and revolutionary
change, because they summarise and define some huge force that is
abroad. Not to travel far for instances, such a man was Rousseau. The
air of his period was full of sentiments and emotions and ideas; he was
not himself a man of force; he was a dreamer and a poet; but he had
the matchless gift of ardent expression, and he was able to say
both trenchantly and attractively exactly what every one was vaguely
meditating.
Now let us take some of the chief departments of human effort, some of
the provinces in which men attain supreme fame, and consider what
kinds of greatness we should expect the present day to evoke. In the
department of warfare, we have had few opportunities of late to discover
high strategical genius. Our navy has been practically unemployed,
and the South African war was just the sort of campaign to reveal the
deficiencies of an elaborate and not very practical peace establishment.
Though it solidified a few reputations and pricked the bubble of some
few others, it certainly did not reveal any subtle adaptability in our
generals. It was Lord North, I think, who, when discussing with his
Cabinet a list of names of officers suggested for the conduct of a
campaign, said, "I do not know what effect these names produce upon you,
gentlemen, but I confess they make me tremble." The South African war
can hardly be said to have revealed that we have many generals who
closely corresponded to Wordsworth's description of the Happy Warrior,
but rather induced the tremulousness which Lord North experienced.
Still, if, in the strategical region, our solitary recent campaign
rather tends to prove a deficiency of men of supreme gifts, it at all
events proved a considerable degree of competence and devotion. I could
not go so far as a recent writer who regretted the termination of the
Boer War because it interrupted the evolution of tactical science, but
it is undoubtedly true that the growing aversion to war, the intense
dislike to the sacrifice of human life, creates an atmosphere
unfavourable to the development of high military genius; because great
military reputations in times past have generally been acquired by men
who had no such scruples, but who treated the material of their armies
as pawns to be freely sacrificed to the attainment of victory.
Then there is the region of statesmanship; and here it is abundantly
clear that the social conditions of the day, the democratic current
which runs with increasing spirit in political channels, is unfavourable
to the development of individual genius. The prize falls to the
sagacious opportunist; the statesman is less and less of a navigator,
and more and more of a pilot, in times when popular feeling is
conciliated and interpreted rather than inspired and guided. To be
far-seeing and daring is a disadvantage; the most approved leader is the
man who can harmonise discordant sections, and steer round obvious
and pressing difficulties. Geniality and bonhomie are more valuable
qualities than prescience or nobility of aim. The more representative
that government becomes, the more does originality give place to
malleability. The more fluid that the conceptions of a statesman are,
the greater that his adaptability is, the more acceptable he becomes.
Since Lord Beaconsfield, with all his trenchant mystery, and Mr.
Gladstone, with his voluble candour, there have been no figures of
unquestioned supremacy on the political stage. Even so, the effect in
both cases was to a great extent the effect of personality. The further
that these two men retire into the past, the more that they are
judged by the written record, the more does the tawdriness of Lord
Beaconsfield's mind, his absence of sincere convictions appear, as well
as the pedestrianism of Mr. Gladstone's mind, and his lack of critical
perception. I have heard Mr. Gladstone speak, and on one occasion I had
the task of reporting for a daily paper a private oration on a literary
subject. I was thrilled to the very marrow of my being by the address.
The parchment pallor of the orator, his glowing and blazing eyes, his
leonine air, the voice that seemed to have a sort of physical effect
on the nerves, his great sweeping gestures, all held the audience
spellbound. I felt at the time that I had never before realised the
supreme and vital importance of the subject on which he spoke. But when
I tried to reconstruct from the ashes of my industrious notes the
mental conflagration which I had witnessed, I was at a complete loss
to understand what had happened. The records were not only dull, they
seemed essentially trivial, and almost overwhelmingly unimportant. But
the magic had been there. Apart from the substance, the performance had
been literally enchanting. I do not honestly believe that Mr. Gladstone
was a man of great intellectual force, or even of very deep emotions.
He was a man of extraordinarily vigorous and robust brain, and he was a
supreme oratorical artist.
There is intellect, charm, humour in abundance in the parliamentary
forces; there was probably never a time when there were so many able and
ambitious men to be found in the rank and file of parliamentarians.
But that is not enough. There is no supremely impressive and commanding
figure on the stage; greatness seems to be distributed rather than
concentrated; but probably neither this, nor political conditions, would
prevent the generous recognition of supreme genius, if it were there to
recognise.
In art and literature, I am inclined to believe that we shall look back
to the Victorian era as a time of great activity and high performance.
The two tendencies here which militate against the appearance of the
greatest figures are, in the first place, the great accumulations of art
and literature, and in the second place the democratic desire to share
those treasures. The accumulation of pictures, music, and books makes
it undoubtedly very hard for a new artist, in whatever region, to gain
prestige. There is so much that is undoubtedly great and good for a
student of art and literature to make acquaintance with, that we are apt
to be content with the old vintages. The result is that there are a
good many artists who in a time of less productivity would have made
themselves an enduring reputation, and who now must be content to be
recognised only by a few. The difficulty can, I think, only be met by
some principle of selection being more rigidly applied. We shall have
to be content to skim the cream of the old as well as of the new, and
to allow the second-rate work of first-rate performers to sink into
oblivion. But at the same time there might be a great future before
any artist who could discover a new medium of utterance. It seems at
present, to take literature, as if every form of human expression had
been exploited. We have the lyric, the epic, the satire, the narrative,
the letter, the diary, conversation, all embalmed in art. But there is
probably some other medium possible which will become perfectly
obvious the moment it is seized upon and used. To take an instance from
pictorial art. At present, colour is only used in a genre manner, to
clothe some dramatic motive. But there seems no prima facie reason why
colour should not be used symphonically like music. In music we obtain
pleasure from an orderly sequence of vibrations, and there seems no real
reason why the eye should not be charmed with colour-sequences just as
the ear is charmed with sound-sequences. So in literature it would
seem as though we might get closer still to the expression of mere
personality, by the medium of some sublimated form of reverie, the
thought blended and tinged in the subtlest gradations, without the
clumsy necessity of sacrificing the sequence of thought to the barbarous
devices of metre and rhyme, or to the still more childish devices of
incident and drama. Flaubert, it will be remembered, looked forward to a
time when a writer would not require a subject at all, but would express
emotion and thought directly rather than pictorially. To utter the
unuttered thought--that is really the problem of literature in the
future; and if a writer could be found to free himself from all
stereotyped forms of expression, and to give utterance to the strange
texture of thought and fancy, which differentiates each single
personality so distinctly, so integrally, from other personalities, and
which we cannot communicate to our dearest and nearest, he might enter
upon a new province of art.
But the second tendency which at the present moment dominates writers
is, as I have said, the rising democratic interest in the things of the
mind. This is at present a very inchoate and uncultivated interest:
but in days of cheap publication and large audiences it dominates
many writers disastrously. The temptation is a grievous one--to take
advantage of a market--not to produce what is absolutely the best, but
what is popular and effective. It is not a wholly ignoble temptation. It
is not only the temptation of wealth, though in an age of comfort, which
values social respectability so highly, wealth is a great temptation.
But the temptation is rather to gauge success by the power of appeal. If
a man has ideas at all, he is naturally anxious to make them felt; and
if he can do it best by spreading his ideas rather thinly, by making
them attractive to enthusiastic people of inferior intellectual grip,
he feels he is doing a noble work. The truth is that in literature the
democracy desires not ideas but morality. All the best-known writers
of the Victorian age have been optimistic moralists, Browning, Ruskin,
Carlyle, Tennyson. They have been admired because they concealed their
essential conventionality under a slight perfume of unorthodoxy. They
all in reality pandered to the complacency of the age, in a way in which
Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats did not pander. The democracy
loves to be assured that it is generous, high-minded, and sensible.
It is in reality timid, narrow-minded, and Pharisaical. It hates
independence and originality, and loves to believe that it adores both.
It loves Mr. Kipling because he assures them that vulgarity is not a
sin; it loves Mr. Bernard Shaw because he persuades them that they are
cleverer than they imagined. The fact is that great men, in literature
at all events, must be content, at the present time, to be unrecognised
and unacclaimed. They must be content to be of the happy company of whom
Mr. Swinburne writes:--
"In the garden of death, where the singers, whose names are deathless,
One with another make music unheard of men."
Then there is the region of Science, and here I am not qualified
to speak, because I know no science, and have not even taught it, as Mr.
Arthur Sidgwick said. I do not really know what constitutes greatness
in science. I suppose that the great man of science is the man who to a
power of endlessly patient investigation joins a splendid imaginative,
or perhaps deductive power, like Newton or Darwin. But we who stand at
the threshold of the scientific era are perhaps too near the light, and
too much dazzled by the results of scientific discovery to say who is
great and who is not great. I have met several distinguished men of
science, and I have thought some of them to be men of obviously
high intellectual gifts, and some of them men of inert and secretive
temperaments. But that is only natural, for to be great in other
departments generally implies a certain knowledge of the world, or at
all events of the thought of the world; whereas the great man of
science may be moving in regions of thought that may be absolutely
incommunicable to the ordinary person. But I do not suppose that
scientific greatness is a thing which can be measured by the importance
of the practical results of a discovery. I mean that a man may hit upon
some process, or some treatment of disease, which may be of incalculable
benefit to humanity, and yet not be really a great man of science, only
a fortunate discoverer, and incidentally a great benefactor to humanity.
The unknown discoverers of things like the screw or the wheel, persons
lost in the mists of antiquity, could not, I suppose, be ranked as great
men of science. The great man of science is the man who can draw
some stupendous inference, which revolutionises thought and sets men
hopefully at work on some problem which does not so much add to the
convenience of humanity as define the laws of nature. We are still
surrounded by innumerable and awful mysteries of life and being; the
evidence which will lead to their solution is probably in our hands and
plain enough, if any one could but see the bearing of facts which are
known to the simplest child. There is little doubt, I suppose, that
the greatest reputations of recent years have been made in science; and
perhaps when our present age has globed itself into a cycle, we shall be
amazed at the complaint that the present era is lacking in great men. We
are busy in looking for greatness in so many directions, and we are apt
to suppose, from long use, that greatness is so inseparably connected
with some form of human expression, whether it be the utterance of
thought, or the marshalling of armies, that we may be overlooking a more
stable form of greatness, which will be patent to those that come
after. My own belief is that the condition of science at the present day
answers best to the conditions which we have learnt to recognise in
the past as the fruitful soil of greatness. I mean that when we put our
finger, in the past, on some period which seems to have been producing
great work in a great way, we generally find it in some knot or school
of people, intensely absorbed in what they were doing, and doing it with
a whole-hearted enjoyment, loving the work more than the rewards of
it, and indifferent to the pursuit of fame. Such it seems to me is the
condition of science at the present time, and it is in science, I am
inclined to think, that our heroes are probably to be found.
I do not, then, feel at all sure that we are lacking in great men,
though it must be admitted that we are lacking in men whose supremacy is
recognised. I suppose we mean by a great man one who in some region of
human performance is confessedly pre-eminent; and he must further have
a theory of his own, and a power of pursuing that theory in the face
of depreciation and even hostility. I do not think that great men have
often been indifferent to criticism. Often, indeed, by virtue of a
greater sensitiveness and a keener perception, they have been profoundly
affected by unpopularity and the sense of being misunderstood. Carlyle,
Tennyson, Ruskin, for instance, were men of almost morbid sensibility,
and lived in sadness; and, on the other hand, there are few great men
who have not been affected for the worse by premature success. The best
soil for greatness to grow up in would seem to be an early isolation,
sustained against the disregard of the world by the affection and
admiration of a few kindred minds. Then when the great man has learned
his method and his message, and learned too not to over-value the
popular verdict, success may mature and mellow his powers. Yet of how
many great men can this be said? As a rule, indeed, a great man's best
work has been done in solitude and disfavour, and he has attained his
sunshine when he can no longer do his best work.
The question is whether the modern conditions of life are unfavourable
to greatness; and I think that it must be confessed that they are. In
the first place, we all know so much too about each other, and there
is so eager a personal curiosity abroad, a curiosity about the
smallest details of the life of any one who seems to have any power of
performance, that it encourages men to over-confidence, egotism,
and mannerism. Again, the world is so much in love with novelty and
sensation of all kinds, that facile successes are easily made and as
easily obliterated. What so many people admire is not greatness, but the
realisation of greatness and its tangible rewards. The result of this is
that men who show any faculty for impressing the world are exploited and
caressed, are played with as a toy, and as a toy neglected. And then,
too, the age is deeply permeated by social ambitions. Men love to be
labelled, ticketed, decorated, differentiated from the crowd. Newspapers
pander to this taste; and then the ease and rapidity of movement tempt
men to a restless variety of experience, of travel, of society, of
change, which is alien to the settled and sober temper in which great
designs are matured. There is a story, not uncharacteristic, of modern
social life, of a hostess who loved to assemble about her, in the style
of Mrs. Leo Hunter, notabilities small and great, who was reduced to
presenting a young man who made his appearance at one of her gatherings
as "Mr. ----, whose uncle, you will remember, was so terribly mangled
in the railway accident at S----." It is this feverish desire to be
distinguished at any price which has its counterpart in the feverish
desire to find objects of admiration. Not so can solid greatness be
achieved.
The plain truth is that no one can become great by taking thought, and
still less by desiring greatness. It is not an attainable thing; fame
only is attainable. A man must be great in his own quiet way, and the
greater he is, the less likely is he to concern himself with fame. It is
useless to try and copy some one else's greatness; that is like trying
to look like some one else's portrait, even if it be a portrait by
Velasquez. Not that modesty is inseparable from greatness; there are
abundance of great men who have been childishly and grotesquely vain;
but in such cases it has been a greatness of performance, a marvellous
faculty, not a greatness of soul. Hazlitt says somewhere that modesty is
the lowest of the virtues, and a real confession of the deficiency
which it indicates. He adds that a man who underrates himself is justly
undervalued by others. This is a cynical and a vulgar maxim. It is true
that a great man must have a due sense of the dignity and importance
of his work; but if he is truly great, he will have also a sense of
relation and proportion, and not forget the minuteness of any individual
atom. If he has a real greatness of soul, he will not be apt to compare
himself with others, and he will be inclined to an even over-generous
estimate of the value of the work of others. In no respect was the
greatness of D. G. Rossetti more exemplified than in his almost
extravagant appreciation of the work of his friends; and it was to this
royalty of temperament that he largely owed his personal supremacy.
I would believe then that the lack of conspicuous greatness is due
at this time to the overabundant vitality and eagerness of the world,
rather than to any languor or listlessness of spirit. The rise of the
decadent school in art and literature is not the least sign of any
indolent or corrupt deterioration. It rather shows a desperate appetite
for testing sensation, a fierce hunger for emotional experience, a
feverish ambition to impress a point-of-view. It is all part of a revolt
against settled ways and conventional theories. I do not mean that
we can expect to find greatness in this direction, for greatness is
essentially well-balanced, calm, deliberate, and decadence is a sign of
a neurotic and over-vitalised activity.
Our best hope is that this excessive restlessness of spirit will produce
a revolt against itself. The essence of greatness is unconventionality,
and restlessness is now becoming conventional. In education, in art,
in literature, in politics, in social life, we lose ourselves in
denunciations of the dreamer and the loafer. We cannot bear to see a
slowly-moving, deliberate, self-contained spirit, advancing quietly on
its discerned path. Instead of being content to perform faithfully and
conscientiously our allotted task, which is the way in which we can best
help the world, we demand that every one should want to do good, to
be responsible for some one else, to exhort, urge, beckon, restrain,
manage. That is all utterly false and hectic. Our aim should be patience
rather than effectiveness, sincerity rather than adaptability, to learn
rather than to teach, to ponder rather than to persuade, to know the
truth rather than to create illusion, however comforting, however
delightful such illusion may be.