In the last North American Review, James F. Hudson, in an essay on “Modern Feudalism,” says:—
“The conquest of all departments of industry by the power of combination has just begun. But the mere beginning has imposed unwarrantable taxes on the fuel, light, and food of the masses. It has built up vast fortunes for the combining classes, drawn from the slender means of millions. It has added an immense stimulant to the process, already too active, of making the rich richer and the poor poorer. The tendency in this direction is shown by the arguments with which the press has teemed for the past two months, that the process of combination is a necessary feature of industrial growth, and that the competition which fixes the profits of every ordinary trader, investor or mechanic, must be abolished for the benefit of great corporations, while kept in full force against the masses of producers and consumers, between whom the barriers of these combinations are interposed.”
What is Intellectual Greatness?
A large amount of that which the world calls greatness is nothing more than vigorous and brilliant commonplace. Taine, who is the most splendid writer upon Bonaparte, ascribes to him intellectual greatness, but it was greatness on a common plane—the plane of animal life. He had a grand comprehension of physical and social forces, of everything upon the selfish plane, for he was absolutely selfish, but of nothing that belongs to the higher life of man, to the civilization of coming centuries. To him Fulton was a visionary and so was Gall. It was not in his intellectual range to see the steamships that change the world’s commerce, and the cerebral discoveries that are destined to revolutionize all philosophy.
The pulpit orator, Beecher, who has just passed away, was estimated by many as intellectually great; but Mr. Beecher never took the position of independence that any great thinker must have occupied. He never moved beyond the sphere of popularity. He never led men but where they were already disposed to go. Upon the great question of the return of the spirit, one of the most important and fundamental of all religious questions, Mr. Beecher was silent. That silence was infidelity to truth, for Mr. Beecher was not ignorant of the truth he concealed. Nor was he faithful to any true ideal of religion. With his princely salary he accomplished less than other men, living upon a salary he would have scorned. He lived for self—he spent thousands of dollars on finger rings, and a hundred thousand on a fancy farm, but little if anything to make the world better.
The Boston Herald estimates very fairly his intellectual status, saying: “He spoke easily. His stories were well told, his points well put. He invested people with a new atmosphere, but he did not set them to thinking, and can hardly be called a thinker himself. Much as he has done to forward the vital interests of humanity, he has contributed nothing to the vital thinking of his generation. The secret of his power is the wonderful combination of animalism, with a certain bright way of stating the thoughts which are more or less in the minds of all men. Few preachers have lived with their eyes and ears more open to the world, and few have better understood the art of putting things. Mr. Beecher knew supremely well two persons—himself and the man next to him. In interesting the man next to him he interested the multitude. He had in a great degree the same qualities which made Norman McLeod the foremost preacher of his day in the Scotch pulpit. Such a man lives too much on the surface to exhaust himself. He has only to keep within the sphere of commonplace to interest people as long as he lives…. Mr. Beecher lived on the surface of things. He never got far below the surface. If he ever was profound it was only for a moment at a time…. His work was to illustrate the ideas which were operative in the world at the time, not to originate or formulate them.”
This is a just estimate. Brilliant commonplace is not greatness, but the man who is thoroughly commonplace in his conceptions, who expresses well and forcibly what his hearers think, is the one to win applause and popularity. Had Beecher been a great thinker, a church of moderate size would have held his followers. But he was not and thinkers knew it. The Rev. George L. Perin, of the Shawmut Universalist Church, Boston, said of Beecher, “As we have tried to analyze the influence of his address we have said to ourselves, ‘There was nothing new in that, for I have thought the same thing a thousand times myself;’ and yet at the same time everything seemed new, and we have gone away thinking better of ourselves because he taught us to see what we were able to think but had not been able to express. He had the remarkable faculty of dressing up the things that everybody was thinking, and making us see that they were worth thinking. And there was something contagious about his wonderful faith in human nature. He believed in the divinity of man and made others believe in it.” In other words, he added much to the sentiment of his hearer, but little to his thought. This was greatness of character and personal power, but not intellectual greatness. Beecher was a great man, but not a great thinker. The great thinker overwhelms his hearers with new and strange thought. The multitude, fixed in habit, reject it all. Clear and dispassionate thinkers feel that they cannot reject it, but it is too new even to them to elicit their enthusiasm. They sympathize with him only so far as they had previously cherished similar thoughts.
Hence we see it is ordained that the teacher of great truths must struggle against great opposition; and in proportion to his resistance by his contemporaries is the grandeur of his reception by posterity; in proportion to the power arrayed against him is the remoteness of the century in which that power shall be extinct and his triumph complete.