The great man with the great end to pursue
Dies ere he knows it.
Robert Browning very tersely puts the case thus. We have only to alter his language in one respect. Seeing that the results we have now in view are realised results or nothing, the “mean man,” as an agent of material progress, will be the “great man,” and the “great man” will be the little.
So, too, with regard to the man who affects {125} the history of his country by formulating and popularising some particular political demand—the secret of such a man’s success, in four cases out of five, will be found to lie in the greatness, not of his intellect, but of his will—in an exceptionally sanguine temperament, in exceptional courage and energy, and very likely in an exaggerated belief in his own nostrums, which, instead of being a sign of great intellectual acuteness, is incompatible with it.
No doubt social progress, as a whole, has required and does require for its production intellectual powers of the highest and rarest kind. The point here insisted on is that it is not produced by intellectual powers alone, and that intellectual powers alone would be quite unable to produce it. Thus the sorrows and disappointments of the unfortunate inventor are proverbial; and the reason is that great inventive powers are frequently accompanied by a very feeble will and a fantastic ignorance of the world; the inventor, though strong as a mind, being pitiably weak as a man. He can do everything with his inventions except make them useful to anybody. He might be practically far greater were he to lose some of his intellectual powers, could he thereby develop some of the humbler qualities in which he is wanting. As it is, he resembles a chronometer which is without a main-spring, and which is useless when compared with a ten-and-sixpenny watch. Hence the inventor has so frequently to ally himself with the man of {126} enterprise, and only becomes great, as a social force, by doing so. Such unions are often sufficiently strange in appearance. We see some man whose intellect is the finest machine imaginable, but he is only redeemed from absolute and grotesque uselessness by his partner, who is little better than an inspired bagman. But such a bagman’s gifts, however the inefficient theorist may despise them, are, though less striking than the inventor’s, often quite as rare. No doubt many great inventors have the practical gifts as well as the intellectual, and their greatness, in such cases, is comprehended completely in themselves. It remains, however, an equally composite thing, no matter whether it takes two men or only one to complete it; and exceptional intellect is only one of its elements. The other qualities with which it requires to be allied, and which alone give it its practical value, such as determination, shrewdness, and a certain thickness of skin, though often remarkable individually for the exceptional degree to which they are developed, just as often unite to produce practical greatness, not because of the exceptional degree to which they are developed, but of the exceptional proportions in which they are combined. Some of the most essential of them, indeed, need not be exceptional at all, except from the fact of their association with others that are so. Much greatness, for instance, of the most powerful kind, consists mainly of very ordinary sense in conjunction with extraordinary energy; and energy is often, as has already been pointed out, in proportion {127} to the narrowness rather than to the width of the imagination.
Greatness, in short, as an agent of social progress, is in most cases not a single quality, but a peculiar combination of many; its composition varies according to the character of the results in the production of which the great men are severally more efficient than the majority; and it often depends less on the extent to which any special faculty is developed, in comparison with the same faculty as possessed by ordinary men, than it does on the degree to which each faculty is developed as compared with the others possessed by the great man himself.
When we speak of greatness, then, in the sense here attributed to the word—when we speak of great men as agents of social progress—we do not mean that the world is divided into ordinary men and heroes. The members of that minority whom we group together as great men, though some of them are, no doubt, of noble and heroic proportions, are for the most part great in relation to special results only; even in relation to these special results they are great in very various degrees, and many of them in other relations may be ordinary, or even less than ordinary. It must therefore be clearly understood that greatness, as an agent of social progress, is not an absolute thing, and that to say of any one man that he possesses more greatness than another is a statement which, taken by itself, has no definite meaning. When we {128} say that a man is great we mean that he is exceptionally efficient in producing some particular result, which is either implied or specified—that he is great in commanding armies, or in managing hotels, or in conducting public affairs, or in cheapening and improving the manufacture of this or that commodity; and when we say that such and such a man possesses the quality of greatness to such and such a degree we mean that he produces results of a given kind, which are in such and such a degree better or more copious than results of the same kind which are produced by other people.
The inequality of men, then, in natural capacity being an obvious fact, and the nature and the degrees of their inequalities having been now generally explained, we may re-state, with a meaning more precise than was formerly possible, the fundamental proposition implied in the great-man theory, when that theory is raised from a rhetorical to a scientific formula. Progress of an appreciable kind, in any department of social activity and achievement, takes place only when, and in proportion as, some of the men who are working to produce such and such a result are more efficient in relation to that class of result than the majority; or conversely, if a community contained no man with capacities superior to those possessed by the greater number, progress in that community would be so slow as to be practically non-existent.
We must now go on to inquire what is the {129} precise way in which the men who are superior to the majority bring progress about; and we shall find that, however various they may be in other respects, they all promote progress in a way that is fundamentally similar.