Winds of Doctrine | Page 8

its own way, and
a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all. In those days
men recognised immortal gods and resigned themselves to being mortal.
Yet those were the truly vital and instinctive days of the human spirit.
Only when vitality is low do people find material things oppressive and
ideal things unsubstantial. Now there is more motion than life, and
more haste than force; we are driven to distraction by the ticking of the
tiresome clocks, material and social, by which we are obliged to
regulate our existence. We need ministering angels to fly to us from
somewhere, even if it be from the depths of protoplasm. We must bathe
in the currents of some non-human vital flood, like consumptives in
their last extremity who must bask in the sunshine and breathe the
mountain air; and our disease is not without its sophistry to convince us
that we were never so well before, or so mightily conscious of being
alive.
When chaos has penetrated so far into the moral being of nations they
can hardly be expected to produce great men. A great man need not be
virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a
distinctive, luminous character; if he is to dominate things, something
must be dominant in him. We feel him to be great in that he clarifies
and brings to expression something which was potential in the rest of
us, but which with our burden of flesh and circumstance we were too
torpid to utter. The great man is a spontaneous variation in humanity;
but not in any direction. A spontaneous variation might be a mere

madness or mutilation or monstrosity; in finding the variation
admirable we evidently invoke some principle of order to which it
conforms. Perhaps it makes explicit what was preformed in us also; as
when a poet finds the absolutely right phrase for a feeling, or when
nature suddenly astonishes us with a form of absolute beauty. Or
perhaps it makes an unprecedented harmony out of things existing
before, but jangled and detached. The first man was a great man for this
latter reason; having been an ape perplexed and corrupted by his
multiplying instincts, he suddenly found a new way of being decent, by
harnessing all those instincts together, through memory and
imagination, and giving each in turn a measure of its due; which is
what we call being rational. It is a new road to happiness, if you have
strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you
in turn. Why then is the martyr, who sacrifices everything to one
attraction, distinguished from the criminal or the fool, who do the same
thing? Evidently because the spirit that in the martyr destroys the body
is the very spirit which the body is stifling in the rest of us; and
although his private inspiration may be irrational, the tendency of it is
not, but reduces the public conscience to act before any one else has
had the courage to do so. Greatness is spontaneous; simplicity, trust in
some one clear instinct, are essential to it; but the spontaneous variation
must be in the direction of some possible sort of order; it must exclude
and leave behind what is incapable of being moralised. How, then,
should there be any great heroes, saints, artists, philosophers, or
legislators in an age when nobody trusts himself, or feels any
confidence in reason, in an age when the word dogmatic is a term of
reproach? Greatness has character and severity, it is deep and sane, it is
distinct and perfect. For this reason there is none of it to-day.
There is indeed another kind of greatness, or rather largeness of mind,
which consists in being a synthesis of humanity in its current phases,
even if without prophetic emphasis or direction: the breadth of a
Goethe, rather than the fineness of a Shelley or a Leopardi. But such
largeness of mind, not to be vulgar, must be impartial, comprehensive,
Olympian; it would not be greatness if its miscellany were not
dominated by a clear genius and if before the confusion of things the
poet or philosopher were not himself delighted, exalted, and by no

means confused. Nor does this presume omniscience on his part. It is
not necessary to fathom the ground or the structure of everything in
order to know what to make of it. Stones do not disconcert a builder
because he may not happen to know what they are chemically; and so
the unsolved problems of life and nature, and the Babel of society, need
not disturb the genial observer, though he may be incapable of
unravelling them. He may set these dark spots down in their places, like
so many caves or wells