Representative Men | Page 9

very fast, in our
personal moods, from dignity to dependence. And if any appear never to assume the chair,
but always to stand and serve, it is because we do not see the company in a sufficiently
long period for the whole rotation of parts to come about. As to what we call the masses,
and common men;--there are no common men. All men are at last of a size; and true art is
only possible, on the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis somewhere. Fair play,
and an open field, and freshest laurels to all who have won them! But heaven reserves an
equal scope for every creature. Each is uneasy until he has produced his private ray unto
the concave sphere, and beheld his talent also in its last nobility and exaltation.
The heroes of the hour are relatively great: of a faster growth; or they are such, in whom,
at the moment of success, a quality is ripe which is then in request. Other days will
demand other qualities. Some rays escape the common observer, and want a finely
adapted eye. Ask the great man if there be none greater. His companions are; and not the
less great, but the more, that society cannot see them. Nature never sends a great man into
the planet, without confiding the secret to another soul.
One gracious fact emerges from these studies,--that there is true ascension in our love.
The reputations of the nineteenth century will one day be quoted to prove its barbarism.
The genius of humanity is the real subject whose biography is written in our annals. We
must infer much, and supply many chasms in the record. The history of the universe is
symptomatic, and life is mnemonical. No man, in all the procession of famous men, is
reason or illumination, or that essence we were looking for; but is an exhibition, in some
quarter, of new possibilities. Could we one day complete the immense figure which these
flagrant points compose! The study of many individuals leads us to an elemental region
wherein the individual is lost, or wherein all touch by their summits. Thought and feeling,
that break out there, cannot be impounded by any fence of personality. This is the key to
the power of the greatest men,--their spirit diffuses itself. A new quality of mind travels
by night and by day, in concentric circles from its origin, and publishes itself by unknown
methods: the union of all minds appears intimate: what gets admission to one, cannot be
kept out of any other: the smallest acquisition of truth or of energy, in any quarter, is so
much good to the commonwealth of souls. If the disparities of talent and position vanish,
when the individuals are seen in the duration which is necessary to complete the career of
each; even more swiftly the seeming injustice disappears, when we ascend to the central
identity of all the individuals, and know that they are made of the same substance which
ordaineth and doeth.
The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The qualities abide; the men
who exhibit them have now more, now less, and pass away; the qualities remain on
another brow. No experience is more familiar. Once you saw phoenixes: they are gone;

the world is not therefore disenchanted. The vessels on which you read sacred emblems
turn out to be common pottery; but the sense of the pictures is sacred, and you may still
read them transferred to the walls of the world. For a time, our teachers serve us
personally, as metres or milestones of progress. Once they were angels of knowledge, and
their figures touched the sky. Then we drew near, saw their means, culture, and limits;
and they yielded their places to other geniuses. Happy, if a few names remain so high,
that we have not been able to read them nearer, and age and comparison have not robbed
them of a ray. But, at last, we shall cease to look in men for completeness, and shall
content ourselves with their social and delegated quality. All that respects the individual
is temporary and prospective, like the individual himself, who is ascending out of his
limits, into a catholic existence. We have never come at the true and best benefit of any
genius, so long as we believe him an original force. In the moment when he ceases to
help us as a cause, he begins to help us move as an effect. Then he appears as an
exponent of a vaster mind and will. The opaque self becomes transparent with the light of
the First Cause.
Yet, within the limits of human education and agency, we may say, great men exist that
there may be greater men. The