[†] Of course the great poet, like the great religious teacher, may have an effect on the thoughts and imaginations of his readers, and he may be a great man or an agent of progress in this way. But he is not, in the technical sense of the word, a great man in reference to his own art. He does not promote progress amongst other poets.
It is still more important to observe that what is true of the arts is also true of the crafts, or, in other words, those kinds of manual work whose special characteristic is rare personal skill. Manual skill, though essential to material progress no less than unskilled labour is, does not, except during the earlier stages of civilisation, itself constitute an actively progressive principle. That is to say, at a very early stage in the development of productive industry manual skill reaches its utmost limits, and thenceforward remains stationary, whilst industry continues to progress. Thus the skill which is evidenced by the {254} gem-engraving of the Greeks and Romans has rarely been equalled since, and has certainly never been surpassed. But we need not stop short at the antiquity of the Greeks and Romans. Many of the implements made by the prehistoric lake-dwellers could not, so far as mere manual workmanship is concerned, be better made by any workman or mechanic of to-day. Indeed, so far is the progress of material civilisation from depending on or coinciding with any progress in manual skill, that it actually depends on a getting rid of the necessity, not certainly of all skill, but of skill of the rarer kinds. If any machine, for example, depended for its successful operation on an accurate finish in certain essential parts which only one workman in half a million could give, such a machine would be practically almost worthless. A productive machine is of use in the service of society generally in proportion as the machines or processes by which it is itself manufactured obviate the necessity for any skill in manufacturing it beyond such as can be obtained with considerable ease and constancy.
Many sentimentalists—and it is difficult not to sympathise with them—regret the manner in which manufacture is thus superseding craftsmanship, or that kind of production in which the beauty or excellence of the product is the direct result and expression of the skill of one producer. But this natural regret, though most frequently expressed by socialists, is defensible only on grounds of the narrowest social exclusiveness. That the {255} artist-craftsman who gives his talents directly to each particular commodity in the production of which he is concerned—a silver cup, or a lamp, or a curiously-designed carpet, or a printed volume—will produce objects having a charm which is wanting in similar objects produced by the methods of the manufacturer is, no doubt, true. But great artist-craftsmen being few in number, the beautiful objects they make by the craftsman’s methods are few in number also, and are consequently obtainable by a few persons only; whilst the objects inferior, but approximately similar to them, which the great manufacturer multiplies in indefinite quantities, are accessible to the many, who, under any social system, must either have these or have nothing of the kind at all. An artist-craftsman, for example, such as the late Mr. William Morris, or a transcriber and illuminator in a mediæval monastery, could produce a volume indefinitely more beautiful than any product of the steam printing-press; but a book which the methods of the manufacturer would admit of being sold for sixpence might cost, if produced by the craftsman, twice that number of pounds; and it is easy to see that, supposing a study of the Bible to be desirable, a village comprising four hundred and eighty families would be benefited more by each family having a sixpenny Bible of its own than it would by the existence of one sumptuous copy chained to a desk in the village church or reading-room.
Rare manual skill, in short, does not promote progress, or help to maintain civilisation at any {256} given level, unless it can metamorphose itself—as in many cases it can do by means of patterns or otherwise—into a series of orders which men who have less skill can execute, and thus affects commodities not directly, but indirectly. So long as it resides in exertions of the craftsman’s hand, applied directly to each commodity produced, it has on the progress of the arts generally no effect at all. The man or men who invented the slide rest communicated a new power to every one of the innumerable artisans now using it; but an artisan who should produce exceptionally accurate work owing to the exceptional accuracy and steadiness of his own hand, could no more add anything to the faculties of even one of his fellows than a beautiful woman can, by means of her own beauty, improve the eyes, nose, or hair of her plainer sisters. Material progress, then, as has just been said, is so far from being dependent on the growth of rare manual skill that it takes place in proportion as the necessity for such skill is eliminated.
And now let us turn from the consideration of human capacities, as applied to and expressing themselves in the production of particular commodities or results, and consider them as they reveal themselves in ordinary life and conversation. We shall find ourselves confronted by a similar set of facts here. We shall see that many of the talents and qualities which, when possessed by our friends or by ourselves, elicit our strongest admiration, and give an interest to human nature, do nothing to {257} advance or to maintain civilisation at all. No one, for example, who knows anything of English society will deny that conversational wit is one of the rarest faculties to be met with in it, and earns for its possessor the reputation of an exceptionally brilliant man; but its possession by one man does not cause its existence in others. The wit leaves the rest of society precisely where he found it. The same is the case with private goodness and wisdom. They may indeed affect an exceedingly small circle, but there is in their influence nothing certain or lasting. The most highly moral parents have often the most dissipated sons; it requires almost as much wisdom to take sound advice as to give it; even if the sensible and the excellent exert a good influence on their own friends, they have no tendency to inaugurate any general moral advance; and a man whose life is rendered interesting by an exceptionally romantic passion may illustrate the capacities of human nature, but he does nothing to expand them.
It will thus be seen that when we describe the majority of mankind as being so far passive with regard to the production of progress that unless there were a minority of men with faculties which the majority do not possess, no progress or civilisation would take place at all, we are not declaring that the larger part of mankind are stupid, foolish, unskilful, or void of resource, or that human nature as exemplified in the normal man or woman is not often noble and beautiful, and is not always interesting. On the contrary, the very reverse is the {258} case. What is really interesting in human life and in human nature is the universal and typical elements in it, not the exceptional; and we can show ourselves the truth of this in a very convincing way by looking into the mirror that is held up to nature by art. The most famous and interesting characters to be found in fiction or in the drama, though they may have been invested by their creators with exceptional circumstances and endowed with exceptional gifts, have interested and appealed both to the world and their creators through the qualities and experiences which they share with human beings generally, not through those which may incidentally make them peculiar. Very few men, for example, are as intellectual as Hamlet; but Hamlet has interested the world because, as has been well said of him, he is not “a man,” but “man.” If a great dramatist or novelist makes his heroes exceptional, he does so only because he can, by this device, more easily give a magnified representation of what is universal; and the universal elements which he magnifies excite universal interest, not because they are exhibited on more than a common scale, but because they are thus exhibited with a more than common clearness. What are the most beautiful love-poems that have made their writers immortal but an expression of what is felt by millions, though it can be expressed only by a few? Why is there life still in the two marriage songs of Catullus, if it were not for the living strings in the normal human heart which the magic of his hand still touches? {259}
But not only is the normal man the type of what is interesting and important in humanity. He is also the type of wise conduct in life, and secures amongst men in general a conformity to this conduct, not by means of advice given by exceptionally excellent individuals, but by the purely democratic pressure of cumulative class opinion. The force which this opinion exercises is commonly called “The World.” The details of its injunctions and prohibitions are different in different classes; and when it is called “The World,” reference is usually being made to the pressure exercised by it in the highest classes only. But this limitation of meaning is altogether arbitrary. Every class is “The World,” so far as regards itself. It has its own standards of manners, honour, prudence, dress, and also of moral judgment as applied to social conduct; and it is in respect of all of them incalculably wiser than most individuals who differ from it. In social life even the greatest genius is ridiculous, in so far as he is unusual in anything except his greatness.
It is, moreover, the same cumulative common sense, the same spontaneous identity of perception on the part of ordinary men, that forms, as Aristotle says, the fundamental test of what is real. The world of reality is distinguished from the world of dreams because the former is the same for all men. It is ὁ παᾶι δοκεῖ. The same fact is the foundation and the justification of trial by jury—an institution in which, as Sir Henry Maine has observed, we {260} have the very abstract and essence of all practicable democratic government.
It is true that even here we are brought sharply back again to those limitations by which the powers of the normal man are surrounded. The jury, who represent the normal man’s intelligence, require, as Sir Henry Maine points out, to have the facts on which they are to base their judgment, in exact proportion as these are obscure or complicated, reduced to order for them by advocates whose powers are more than normal. It is also true that, though it is the identity of ordinary men’s perceptions which shows the reality and the qualities of external objects, ordinary men’s perceptions would never have sufficed to show us that the earth was not the centre of the universe, and that the sun did not move round it. But the true moral of all that has been just insisted on is, that in denying to the masses of mankind those special powers which actively initiate and actively promote progress, and actively sustain the fabric of advanced civilisation, we are not denying to the masses of mankind great moral and great intellectual qualities generally. We are not asserting that the normal, the average, the ordinary man is incapable of being developed into a creature endowed with beliefs, thoughts, and feelings which are not only noble and correct, but which expand and improve as civilisation advances. We are merely asserting that the ordinary man, or the masses of mankind, which are simply the ordinary man multiplied, cannot provide themselves {261} with the conditions of their own progressive development; or, to put the matter in a still more comprehensive way, we are merely asserting that that particular form of greatness which improves those conditions or sustains them, by influencing, or compelling, or enabling masses of men to act or think as they would not act or think otherwise, constitutes a very small portion of human activity, and a still smaller portion of human life.
This truth has been lost sight of because modern social philosophers, led astray by political and other passions, have confused two distinct things—man as a moral being, moving in a circle of prescribed duties, and man as a being capable of public or social initiative; and the more we study the ordinary man, and the more fully we appreciate the varied possibilities of his nature, the more clearly shall we see, and the more ungrudgingly shall we recognise, how absolutely he is, so far as civilisation is concerned, dependent on the exceptional man for even those very powers in virtue of which the action of the exceptional man is controlled by him.