For this peculiarity in politics there are three reasons. One is that the connection between measures and the general welfare of the community is by no means so close or immediate as the connection between a watchmaker’s tool and the wheel or pinion to which he applies it. Social effects follow on measures slowly, and the tendencies of bad measures are neutralised by other causes. The second reason is that, as Mr. Spencer rightly insists—agreeing in this judgment with the wisdom of Dr. Johnson—the social ills which governments “can cause or cure” are far less numerous than many thinkers imagine; and the third reason is one with which we are already familiar, that the power of the many in determining what measures shall be adopted is, although not an illusion, less considerable than it appears to be. But whatever their power in this respect, the great point to remember is that it cannot exert itself or exist for any practical purpose unless the few provide it with the means of doing so, any more than a rudder has power to guide a ship unless some other power shall have set the ship in motion. The popular demand for measures, or the popular {248} choice between them, alike presupposes the few who will make the supply a possibility.
And if the power of the many over supply is thus limited even in the domain of politics, in the domain of economic production it is more limited still, and in the domain of intellectual progress it is absolutely non-existent. Their true power is in their demand for completed results—for knowledge which they can assimilate, for dogmas logically stated, which reveal to them clearly what they already believe dimly, for food they can enjoy, for clothes that please their eyes, for commodities and appliances that minister to their comfort and convenience, for social security, for freedom, and for personal and national prosperity. In other words, the truth, when properly understood, is a truism. The many are all powerful in determining the quality of progress and civilisation because it is their own tastes and wants to which civilisation must minister, and their own qualities which civilisation must draw out; but of initiating civilisation, of advancing it, or even maintaining it, the many are absolutely incapable unless they have the few to guide them. They contain within themselves the things that have to be developed, but they cannot themselves provide themselves with the conditions of their own development. Without the few to assist them they could no more progress than a train of railway carriages could progress in the absence of the locomotive.
It is impossible, however, to state these {249} conclusions plainly without realising that in some quarters violent objections will be taken to them; nor is it difficult to see on what grounds the objections will rest. These shall accordingly be discussed in the next chapter; and it shall be shown that the conclusions to which our inquiry has brought us thus far really contain in them nothing inconsistent with the sentiments, or incompatible with the objects, of even those extreme reformers who will certainly feel impelled to attack them.
CHAPTER III THE QUALITIES OF THE ORDINARY, AS OPPOSED TO THE GREAT, MAN
The objections which will be taken to the conclusion arrived at in the preceding chapter resolve themselves into two groups, one of which rests on general and more or less sentimental considerations, the other on practical. We will deal with the former first.
This group of objections will, by those persons who entertain them, be probably first expressed in an outburst of fine indignation at the wrong which the conclusions just epitomised do to the average man; for such persons will at once take them as implying that the average man is a miserable and helpless creature, with only enough intelligence to carry out blindly the orders which his betters are condescending enough to give him; and this implication will strike them as a wanton insult. They will think over various men in private and humble life who were never thought by themselves or others to be above the average level, but who yet were gifted with intelligence, {251} taste, and skill equal to any possessed by the men who are called great. They will reflect that these men represent not the few, but the many; and they will angrily reject a theory which frankly denies to the many any of those forces which specifically make for progress.
But this class of objections, which was already briefly glanced at when we were considering the precise points by which the great man is distinguished from the average man, will disappear altogether when we take the matter conversely and consider the precise points in which the average man differs from the great man.
In any discussion that aims at scientific precision it is necessary to give to the principal terms used a far more definite meaning than is given to them when they are used ordinarily; for most words when used ordinarily have several meanings, but when used technically they must have only one. Any term, then, when used technically will of necessity specifically exclude a number of ideas—and it may be very important ones—which are frequently attached to it when it is used in conversation or general literature. This observation, as the reader will readily perceive, has a special application to our use of the term great man. The greatness of the great man, regarded as an agent of progress, is a quality, as has been said, which is to be measured by its overt results; and its overt results consist of, and are brought about by, not what he does in his own person, but what he makes others do. It is needless to insist {252} upon this truth again, as it has been explained at great length already, and it is impossible that any reader can misunderstand it. What it is necessary for us here to explain and insist upon is its converse—namely, that if the essence of technical greatness is so to influence the actions or thoughts of other men that the productivity of human labour is increased or the scope of human thought enlarged, no man is technically great who is not in this way influential.
When we come to reflect closely on this definition, some of the results will strike us as not a little curious; for if we exclude from the class of great men and relegate to the class of ordinary men all those whose greatness begins and ends with themselves, and does not tend to communicate itself to any one beside themselves, so as to make others think or act more efficiently than they would unaided, ordinary men, or the many, in our present technical sense of the words, will include a number of men of the most brilliant capacities and accomplishments.
The greatest poets, for instance, will in this way be classed as ordinary men, whilst the inventor of machinery for making good boots cheaply will be classed as a great man. And the reason is as follows. A great inventor is great as an agent of progress because when the apparatus invented by him is in process of being manufactured, and a thousand workmen are shaping or multiplying its separate parts, or again, when ten thousand other workmen are using the machines when completed, he makes each workman do precisely what he would {253} do himself if he were performing their several tasks actually with his own hands. But a great poet—let us say Shakespeare—could not in a similar way so influence a thousand ordinary writers that they should all of them be producing plays like Macbeth or Hamlet. Indeed, the greater the poet is, the more absolutely incommunicable is his gift. Shakespeare may have so far contributed to progress as to have aided in the development of literary English generally, but he has not, in the course of some three hundred years, brought into existence one dramatist comparable to himself.[†] In art, in fact, after a certain point has been passed, it can hardly be said that there is any progress at all.