BOOK II
CHAPTER ITHE NATURE AND DEGREES OF THE SUPERIORITIES OF GREAT MENThat great men are true causes of progress is admitted by Mr. Spencer himself to be the natural opinion of mankind. What has been done, then, in the preceding book is not much more than this:—a sound popular judgment, which is of the highest sociological importance, has been rescued from the discredit cast on it by the sophisms of modern theorists. These very theorists themselves, when they reason as practical men, have been shown to the reader blowing all their disproofs of it to the winds, and holding and appealing to it as tenaciously and as passionately as anybody; and it is consequently given back to us, with its old authority unimpaired. Sound popular judgments, however, are not science. They lack what is the essence of science—that is to say, analytical precision. We must now, therefore, take this judgment with regard to the great man, and endeavour to invest it with a meaning exact and full enough to enable us to apply it to the detailed phenomena of society.And here Mr. Herbert Spencer shall once more{112}help us; for this remarkable writer, though he fails to recognise what he is doing, not only appeals on many critical occasions to the great-man theory as an explanation of the most important social phenomena, but he is repeatedly calling attention throughout his sociological writings to those facts of human nature of which the great-man theory is the expression. It will be sufficient to quote a few passages only.Let us turn, then, to the opening pages of Mr. Spencer’sStudy of Sociologyand consider what is contained in them. We shall find that they are entirely devoted to describing the abject mental condition of by far the largest portion of all classes of English society, from the labourer, the farmer, and the Nonconformist minister with his Bible, up to “men called educated” and the most illustrious of our historians and philosophers. All of them, says Mr. Spencer, “are slaves to unwarranted opinions”; “proximate causes” are all that the majority of them are able to understand. Nor does he represent this as some accidental result, due to prejudices or deficiencies in education peculiar to our own country. He represents it as an inevitable result of the character of the human race. In his “Postscript” to the same volume he takes care to make his meaning plain. “Most people,” he says, “conclude quickly from small evidence,” and are incapable “of comprehending in their totality assembled propositions.” Indeed, those whose mental constitution is such that they can take a{113}rational view of “human affairs” are, he proceeds to say, merely “a scattered few.” He elsewhere divides society into “the capable and the incapable,” the “worthy and the unworthy”; and in the “Postscript” just alluded to he mentions as an admitted fact that in every social aggregate “the inferior form the majority.” But a yet more caustic passage remains to be mentioned. In this same work,The Study of Sociology, he is ridiculing—and very justly—the socialistic idea that the State can be endowed with any talent or wisdom beyond what happens to be possessed by the individual functionaries who compose the State. These functionaries, he says, are merely “a cluster of men,” which, like any other cluster taken at hap-hazard, will comprise “a few clever individuals, many ordinary, some decidedly stupid”; and he devotes pages to showing by means of multiplied examples, how incapable the ordinary statesman, to say nothing of the decidedly stupid, has been of promoting progress in even the simplest ways.Mankind at large, then, according to Mr. Spencer, may, roughly speaking, be divided into three classes—the “clever” who are few, the “ordinary” who are the bulk of the population, and the “decidedly stupid” who form a considerable residuum; and it will appear from what he says of that representative “cluster,” the State, that whilst all real progress is the work of the clever few, the “ordinary men” do nothing to promote it, and “the decidedly stupid men” impede it.{114}Now it must be perfectly obvious to the reader that in this description of mankind we have the fundamental facts before us which the great-man theory formulates. For let us begin by supposing that the entire human race contained no individuals superior to the “decidedly stupid,” who, whenever they are placed in official positions, do nothing, Mr. Spencer declares, but commit the most pernicious blunders, either by their irrational conservatism, or their still more irrational innovations. It is obvious that in this case the world would never have progressed at all. Let us next suppose that in addition to the “decidedly stupid” men, the human race comprises also a large proportion of “ordinary” men, but not a single man who deserves to be called more than “ordinary.” Could social progress, as we know it, have taken place even then? Could thought, for example, ever have made any advances, had everybody been as incapable as Mr. Spencer’s “ordinary” man is of taking a rational view of human affairs—had everybody been enslaved, like him, “to unwarranted opinions,” and been, like him, entirely lacking in the faculty which enables a man to comprehend “assembled propositions in their totality”? Or to put the whole matter in terms of a single instance, could Mr. Spencer’s own system of philosophy have been written if he himself had not been immensely superior not only to “ordinary” men, but even to those rival thinkers whom, in every one of his volumes, he treats with such supreme disdain?{115}The answer of course is No. Under such conditions progress would have been quite impossible. Our simple argument will accordingly run thus. It is evident that those triumphs of thought, enterprise, and invention, to which social progress is due, could never have been made had the whole of each generation been as stupid and void of character as its lowest and weakest members. Therefore progress must be due to men who are superior to the “decidedly stupid.” Here we have the great-man theory in embryo. But it is equally evident that we can go a step farther, and say that progress could never have taken place had there been no individuals who in will, originality, and intellect were superior to “ordinary men.” Social progress, therefore, must be due to this third class—the class which alone is capable of taking “a rational” view of things; but this class, as Mr. Spencer tells us, consists of a “scattered few,” and here we have, in Mr. Spencer’s own language, neither more nor less than the great-man theory developed. We have it developed in the form of a distinct general proposition that progress is due not to mankind at large, but to a minority of exceptional individuals, and in this form, which Mr. Spencer has assisted us in giving it, it is brought into actual accordance with the facts of social life, and, unlike the wild exaggerations of Carlyle, it will be found to accord the more closely with them the more fully it is analysed.The error of writers like Carlyle was that they took a part for the whole. They recognised no{116}great men at all except great men of the greatest kind—heroic figures which appeared once or twice in a century; and as for the rest of mankind, they treated them, in accordance with Mr. Spencer’s formula, as a mass of units, approximately equal in capacity. The truth of the case is, on the contrary, this:—that whatever is done by great men of the heroic type, something similar, if not so striking, is done by a number of lesser great men also; that whilst the action of the heroic great men is intermittent, the action of the lesser great men is constant; and that the latter, as a body, although not individually, do incalculably more to promote progress than the former.Let us accordingly make it perfectly clear that when we describe great men as being a minority, or a “scattered few,” we do not mean that out of every thousand men there are nine hundred and ninety-nine “ordinary” men and one genius; or that there are (let us say) seven hundred who can be described for all purposes as “ordinary,” and two hundred and ninety-nine who can be for all purposes described as “stupid”; and that there is one “clever” or “great” man who towers over them like an oak tree over bramble bushes. Nor, again, do we mean that “greatness” is some single definite quality, which marks its possessor out like a white man amongst negroes. Believers in extreme democracy, who very rightly discern in the great-man theory the destruction of their favourite enthusiasms, will instinctively seek to attribute some meaning such as this to its exponents. But the great-man{117}theory, when properly analysed and explained, will be found to comprise no such absurdities as the foregoing. When we speak of “greatness” we mean a great variety of efficiencies, which, though grouped together because they are all exceptional in degree, are nevertheless indefinitely various in kind; and, moreover, the degrees to which they are exceptional are indefinitely various also, the degree being in many cases so low that it is difficult to say whether it should be classed as exceptional at all. In short, there are as many degrees of greatness as there are of temperature; and it is as difficult to draw a line between ordinary men and men whose greatness is of a very low degree, as it is to draw a line between coldness, coolness, and low degrees of heat. But though it may be questionable whether we should call a day cool when the thermometer is at fifty-nine, and whether we should call it hot when the thermometer is at sixty-one, everybody admits that it is hot when the thermometer is at eighty-five, and cold when the thermometer registers twenty degrees of frost. In the same way, though there will be a certain number of people who may be classed as great by one judge and classed as ordinary by another, there is a certain number whose capacities, however unequal amongst themselves, set their possessors apart as indubitably greater than the majority; and we are speaking with sufficient, though we cannot speak with absolute precision, when we say that progress depends on the action of this minority.{118}How great the inequality is between the natural powers of men is perhaps most clearly evidenced by the case of art, and more especially the art of poetry. In certain domains of effort it may be urged that unequal results are caused by unequal circumstances, quite as much as by unequal capacities. But about poetry, at all events, this cannot be said. Some of the greatest poets the world has ever known—it is enough to instance the cases of Burns and Shakespeare—have been men of no wealth and of very imperfect education. Obviously, therefore, in poetry one man has as good a chance as another. It is no doubt often argued—and this argument has already been examined—that great poets, of whom Shakespeare is a favourite example, owe part of their greatness not to themselves, but to their age. But this does nothing to explain the differences between poets who belong to the same age, and who, all of them, in this respect, start with the same advantage. Let us confine our comparisons then to men who were each other’s contemporaries, and ask what made Burns a better poet than Pye, Shakespeare a greater poet than the feeblest of his forgotten rivals, Pope than Ambrose Philips, Byron than “the hoarse Fitzgerald”? There is only one answer possible. These men in respect of poetry had been made giants by nature; those were condemned by nature to live and to die dwarfs.And the same inequality that exhibits itself in the domain of poetry will be found in every other domain of human effort. What can be more{119}unequal than the gifts of different singers? In every school and university we see multitudes of young men and boys whose opportunities of learning are not only similar but identical, but of whom, in respect to assimilating what they are taught, not one in ten rises appreciably above a certain level, and not one in a hundred rises above it signally. We have Virgil at one end of the scale, and Bavius and Mævius at the other; at one end Patti, and the other the vocalist of the street; at one end a Scaliger and a Newton, and at the other the idler and the dunce, who can hardly conjugate τυπτω or stumble across the Asses’ Bridge. And in practical life the same phenomenon repeats itself. Let us take any department of social activity or production, on the results of which the welfare of society at any given time depends. Let us take, for instance, the work of government, or invention, or commercial enterprise. In each of these we shall find a large number of men, each doing what is in him to subserve some particular end; and we shall find a few producing results which are great both for themselves and others, and the many producing results which are uniform in their individual pettiness.It is perfectly true that in these great departments of practical life there may not be so obvious or so widely extended an equality of opportunity as that which prevails amongst poets, or amongst scholars in the same seminary, but in each department there will be a large number, at all{120}events, whose opportunities are as equal as human ingenuity could make them. This is so in the French army, in the English House of Commons, and in the world of business and industry; and yet of men thus equally placed we see some doing great things, and doubling their opportunities by using them; others doing little or nothing, and throwing their opportunities away. We have accordingly in every domain of activity a sufficient number of persons with the same external advantages, to show by the extraordinary difference between the results accomplished by them how great the natural inequality between men’s capacities is, and how far the efficiency of a few exceeds that of the majority. It is therefore nothing to the purpose to attribute, as many reformers do, men’s inequality in efficiency to the fact that equality of opportunity is not at present as general as it theoretically might be. To extend this equality further might produce good results or bad; but in neither case would it tend to make men’s capacities equal. The utmost it would do in this particular respect would be merely to widen the area of their realised inequality—to increase the number of the mountains, not to produce a plain.It will doubtless be objected by those who would minimise natural inequalities that a man may be contemptible in one capacity—that of a poet, for instance—and yet be greater as a man than men who in one capacity are superior to him. It may, for example, be said that Frederick of Prussia, in spite of his{121}bad poetry, was a greater man than Voltaire. This is perfectly true; but it is necessary to explain clearly that it in no way contradicts what is being here asserted. It is, on the contrary, part of it. It cannot be too emphatically said that greatness, in the only sense in which we are here considering it—that is to say, as an agent of social progress—is a quality which we attribute to a man not with reference to his whole nature, but with reference solely to the objective results produced by him, so that in one domain of activity a man may be great, in another ordinary, in another decidedly stupid. What, then, we here mean by a great man is merely a man who is superior to the majority in his power of producing some given class of result, whereas the average man and the stupid are not superior to the majority in their powers of producing any.The reader must thus entirely disabuse himself of the idea that greatness, as an agent of social progress, has any necessary resemblance to greatness as conceived of by the moralist. A man may be a great saint or a noble “moral character” who passes his life in obscurity, stretched on a bed of sickness, and incapable even of rendering the humblest help to others. He is great in virtue not of what he does, but of what he is. But greatness, as an agent of social progress, has nothing whatever to do with what a man is, except in so far as what he is enables him to do what he does. If two doctors were confronted by some terrible epidemic, and the one met it by tending the poor{122}for nothing, and died in his unavailing efforts to save his patients, whilst the other fled from the infected district, and solacing himself at a distance with a mistress and an excellent cook, invented a medicine by which the disease could be warded off, and proceeded to make a large fortune by selling it, though the former as a man might be incalculably better than the latter, the latter as an agent of progress would be incalculably greater than the former. Again, if two doctors tried to invent such a medicine, and whilst the first succeeded the second failed, the second, though he might have exerted himself far more than the first, and have failed only owing to some minute flaw in his faculties, would be not only less great as an agent of progress than the first, but he would not be practically an agent of progress at all, any more than a man is an agent in saving another from drowning if he merely stretches a hand which the drowning man cannot reach, and actually himself tumbles into the water in doing so.This truth, which sounds brutal when plainly stated, but is really little more than a sociological truism, is constantly overlooked, and even indignantly denied, by thinkers whose emotions are more powerful than their minds. The way in which such persons reason is very easily understood. They see that a number of men by whom great social results are produced—men who make successful inventions and who found great businesses—are narrow-minded, uncultivated, and contemptible in{123}general conversation, and that a number of other men who produce no such results are scholars, critics, thinkers, keen judges of men and things; and contrasting the brilliancy of those who have produced no great social results with the narrow ideas and dulness of those who have produced many, they proceed to argue that great social results cannot possibly require great men to produce them; or, in other words, that they might be produced by almost anybody.But the whole of this class of objections will altogether disappear when we more closely examine what the qualities are on which the production of given social results depends. Let us take a few of these results as examples. Let us take the formulation and the popularising of some particular political demand, by which the whole course of a country’s history is affected, and the increasing and cheapening the supply of some articles of popular consumption—sugar, let us say, or workmen’s boots and clothing. The persons who urge the objections we are now discussing assume that all greatness, other than physical strength and dexterity, must be necessarily ethical or intellectual, and be calculated to excite our ethical or intellectual admiration. But let them consider the qualities requisite to produce such results as have just been mentioned, and they will see that no assumption could be more wide of the truth.A man who should, without underpaying his employees, succeed in manufacturing for the poorer{124}classes boots, jackets, or shirts better in quality and very much less in price than those which they are accustomed to buy now, would probably have to devote a large part of his life to the consideration of a particular kind of seemingly sordid detail. To a man of wide culture and brilliant imagination, the concentration of his faculties on details such as these would be impossible; and if he wished to produce any of the results in question, he would soon discover that he could not. The men who do produce them are rendered capable of doing so, not by the width of their minds, but by the exceptional narrowness. The intellectual stream flows strongly because it is confined in a narrow channel, and thus what to the superficial observer seems a sign of their inferiority, is really, so far as the results are concerned, one of the chief causes of their greatness.The mean man with the little thing to doSees it and does it;The great man with the great end to pursueDies 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.
That great men are true causes of progress is admitted by Mr. Spencer himself to be the natural opinion of mankind. What has been done, then, in the preceding book is not much more than this:—a sound popular judgment, which is of the highest sociological importance, has been rescued from the discredit cast on it by the sophisms of modern theorists. These very theorists themselves, when they reason as practical men, have been shown to the reader blowing all their disproofs of it to the winds, and holding and appealing to it as tenaciously and as passionately as anybody; and it is consequently given back to us, with its old authority unimpaired. Sound popular judgments, however, are not science. They lack what is the essence of science—that is to say, analytical precision. We must now, therefore, take this judgment with regard to the great man, and endeavour to invest it with a meaning exact and full enough to enable us to apply it to the detailed phenomena of society.
And here Mr. Herbert Spencer shall once more{112}help us; for this remarkable writer, though he fails to recognise what he is doing, not only appeals on many critical occasions to the great-man theory as an explanation of the most important social phenomena, but he is repeatedly calling attention throughout his sociological writings to those facts of human nature of which the great-man theory is the expression. It will be sufficient to quote a few passages only.
Let us turn, then, to the opening pages of Mr. Spencer’sStudy of Sociologyand consider what is contained in them. We shall find that they are entirely devoted to describing the abject mental condition of by far the largest portion of all classes of English society, from the labourer, the farmer, and the Nonconformist minister with his Bible, up to “men called educated” and the most illustrious of our historians and philosophers. All of them, says Mr. Spencer, “are slaves to unwarranted opinions”; “proximate causes” are all that the majority of them are able to understand. Nor does he represent this as some accidental result, due to prejudices or deficiencies in education peculiar to our own country. He represents it as an inevitable result of the character of the human race. In his “Postscript” to the same volume he takes care to make his meaning plain. “Most people,” he says, “conclude quickly from small evidence,” and are incapable “of comprehending in their totality assembled propositions.” Indeed, those whose mental constitution is such that they can take a{113}rational view of “human affairs” are, he proceeds to say, merely “a scattered few.” He elsewhere divides society into “the capable and the incapable,” the “worthy and the unworthy”; and in the “Postscript” just alluded to he mentions as an admitted fact that in every social aggregate “the inferior form the majority.” But a yet more caustic passage remains to be mentioned. In this same work,The Study of Sociology, he is ridiculing—and very justly—the socialistic idea that the State can be endowed with any talent or wisdom beyond what happens to be possessed by the individual functionaries who compose the State. These functionaries, he says, are merely “a cluster of men,” which, like any other cluster taken at hap-hazard, will comprise “a few clever individuals, many ordinary, some decidedly stupid”; and he devotes pages to showing by means of multiplied examples, how incapable the ordinary statesman, to say nothing of the decidedly stupid, has been of promoting progress in even the simplest ways.
Mankind at large, then, according to Mr. Spencer, may, roughly speaking, be divided into three classes—the “clever” who are few, the “ordinary” who are the bulk of the population, and the “decidedly stupid” who form a considerable residuum; and it will appear from what he says of that representative “cluster,” the State, that whilst all real progress is the work of the clever few, the “ordinary men” do nothing to promote it, and “the decidedly stupid men” impede it.{114}
Now it must be perfectly obvious to the reader that in this description of mankind we have the fundamental facts before us which the great-man theory formulates. For let us begin by supposing that the entire human race contained no individuals superior to the “decidedly stupid,” who, whenever they are placed in official positions, do nothing, Mr. Spencer declares, but commit the most pernicious blunders, either by their irrational conservatism, or their still more irrational innovations. It is obvious that in this case the world would never have progressed at all. Let us next suppose that in addition to the “decidedly stupid” men, the human race comprises also a large proportion of “ordinary” men, but not a single man who deserves to be called more than “ordinary.” Could social progress, as we know it, have taken place even then? Could thought, for example, ever have made any advances, had everybody been as incapable as Mr. Spencer’s “ordinary” man is of taking a rational view of human affairs—had everybody been enslaved, like him, “to unwarranted opinions,” and been, like him, entirely lacking in the faculty which enables a man to comprehend “assembled propositions in their totality”? Or to put the whole matter in terms of a single instance, could Mr. Spencer’s own system of philosophy have been written if he himself had not been immensely superior not only to “ordinary” men, but even to those rival thinkers whom, in every one of his volumes, he treats with such supreme disdain?{115}
The answer of course is No. Under such conditions progress would have been quite impossible. Our simple argument will accordingly run thus. It is evident that those triumphs of thought, enterprise, and invention, to which social progress is due, could never have been made had the whole of each generation been as stupid and void of character as its lowest and weakest members. Therefore progress must be due to men who are superior to the “decidedly stupid.” Here we have the great-man theory in embryo. But it is equally evident that we can go a step farther, and say that progress could never have taken place had there been no individuals who in will, originality, and intellect were superior to “ordinary men.” Social progress, therefore, must be due to this third class—the class which alone is capable of taking “a rational” view of things; but this class, as Mr. Spencer tells us, consists of a “scattered few,” and here we have, in Mr. Spencer’s own language, neither more nor less than the great-man theory developed. We have it developed in the form of a distinct general proposition that progress is due not to mankind at large, but to a minority of exceptional individuals, and in this form, which Mr. Spencer has assisted us in giving it, it is brought into actual accordance with the facts of social life, and, unlike the wild exaggerations of Carlyle, it will be found to accord the more closely with them the more fully it is analysed.
The error of writers like Carlyle was that they took a part for the whole. They recognised no{116}great men at all except great men of the greatest kind—heroic figures which appeared once or twice in a century; and as for the rest of mankind, they treated them, in accordance with Mr. Spencer’s formula, as a mass of units, approximately equal in capacity. The truth of the case is, on the contrary, this:—that whatever is done by great men of the heroic type, something similar, if not so striking, is done by a number of lesser great men also; that whilst the action of the heroic great men is intermittent, the action of the lesser great men is constant; and that the latter, as a body, although not individually, do incalculably more to promote progress than the former.
Let us accordingly make it perfectly clear that when we describe great men as being a minority, or a “scattered few,” we do not mean that out of every thousand men there are nine hundred and ninety-nine “ordinary” men and one genius; or that there are (let us say) seven hundred who can be described for all purposes as “ordinary,” and two hundred and ninety-nine who can be for all purposes described as “stupid”; and that there is one “clever” or “great” man who towers over them like an oak tree over bramble bushes. Nor, again, do we mean that “greatness” is some single definite quality, which marks its possessor out like a white man amongst negroes. Believers in extreme democracy, who very rightly discern in the great-man theory the destruction of their favourite enthusiasms, will instinctively seek to attribute some meaning such as this to its exponents. But the great-man{117}theory, when properly analysed and explained, will be found to comprise no such absurdities as the foregoing. When we speak of “greatness” we mean a great variety of efficiencies, which, though grouped together because they are all exceptional in degree, are nevertheless indefinitely various in kind; and, moreover, the degrees to which they are exceptional are indefinitely various also, the degree being in many cases so low that it is difficult to say whether it should be classed as exceptional at all. In short, there are as many degrees of greatness as there are of temperature; and it is as difficult to draw a line between ordinary men and men whose greatness is of a very low degree, as it is to draw a line between coldness, coolness, and low degrees of heat. But though it may be questionable whether we should call a day cool when the thermometer is at fifty-nine, and whether we should call it hot when the thermometer is at sixty-one, everybody admits that it is hot when the thermometer is at eighty-five, and cold when the thermometer registers twenty degrees of frost. In the same way, though there will be a certain number of people who may be classed as great by one judge and classed as ordinary by another, there is a certain number whose capacities, however unequal amongst themselves, set their possessors apart as indubitably greater than the majority; and we are speaking with sufficient, though we cannot speak with absolute precision, when we say that progress depends on the action of this minority.{118}
How great the inequality is between the natural powers of men is perhaps most clearly evidenced by the case of art, and more especially the art of poetry. In certain domains of effort it may be urged that unequal results are caused by unequal circumstances, quite as much as by unequal capacities. But about poetry, at all events, this cannot be said. Some of the greatest poets the world has ever known—it is enough to instance the cases of Burns and Shakespeare—have been men of no wealth and of very imperfect education. Obviously, therefore, in poetry one man has as good a chance as another. It is no doubt often argued—and this argument has already been examined—that great poets, of whom Shakespeare is a favourite example, owe part of their greatness not to themselves, but to their age. But this does nothing to explain the differences between poets who belong to the same age, and who, all of them, in this respect, start with the same advantage. Let us confine our comparisons then to men who were each other’s contemporaries, and ask what made Burns a better poet than Pye, Shakespeare a greater poet than the feeblest of his forgotten rivals, Pope than Ambrose Philips, Byron than “the hoarse Fitzgerald”? There is only one answer possible. These men in respect of poetry had been made giants by nature; those were condemned by nature to live and to die dwarfs.
And the same inequality that exhibits itself in the domain of poetry will be found in every other domain of human effort. What can be more{119}unequal than the gifts of different singers? In every school and university we see multitudes of young men and boys whose opportunities of learning are not only similar but identical, but of whom, in respect to assimilating what they are taught, not one in ten rises appreciably above a certain level, and not one in a hundred rises above it signally. We have Virgil at one end of the scale, and Bavius and Mævius at the other; at one end Patti, and the other the vocalist of the street; at one end a Scaliger and a Newton, and at the other the idler and the dunce, who can hardly conjugate τυπτω or stumble across the Asses’ Bridge. And in practical life the same phenomenon repeats itself. Let us take any department of social activity or production, on the results of which the welfare of society at any given time depends. Let us take, for instance, the work of government, or invention, or commercial enterprise. In each of these we shall find a large number of men, each doing what is in him to subserve some particular end; and we shall find a few producing results which are great both for themselves and others, and the many producing results which are uniform in their individual pettiness.
It is perfectly true that in these great departments of practical life there may not be so obvious or so widely extended an equality of opportunity as that which prevails amongst poets, or amongst scholars in the same seminary, but in each department there will be a large number, at all{120}events, whose opportunities are as equal as human ingenuity could make them. This is so in the French army, in the English House of Commons, and in the world of business and industry; and yet of men thus equally placed we see some doing great things, and doubling their opportunities by using them; others doing little or nothing, and throwing their opportunities away. We have accordingly in every domain of activity a sufficient number of persons with the same external advantages, to show by the extraordinary difference between the results accomplished by them how great the natural inequality between men’s capacities is, and how far the efficiency of a few exceeds that of the majority. It is therefore nothing to the purpose to attribute, as many reformers do, men’s inequality in efficiency to the fact that equality of opportunity is not at present as general as it theoretically might be. To extend this equality further might produce good results or bad; but in neither case would it tend to make men’s capacities equal. The utmost it would do in this particular respect would be merely to widen the area of their realised inequality—to increase the number of the mountains, not to produce a plain.
It will doubtless be objected by those who would minimise natural inequalities that a man may be contemptible in one capacity—that of a poet, for instance—and yet be greater as a man than men who in one capacity are superior to him. It may, for example, be said that Frederick of Prussia, in spite of his{121}bad poetry, was a greater man than Voltaire. This is perfectly true; but it is necessary to explain clearly that it in no way contradicts what is being here asserted. It is, on the contrary, part of it. It cannot be too emphatically said that greatness, in the only sense in which we are here considering it—that is to say, as an agent of social progress—is a quality which we attribute to a man not with reference to his whole nature, but with reference solely to the objective results produced by him, so that in one domain of activity a man may be great, in another ordinary, in another decidedly stupid. What, then, we here mean by a great man is merely a man who is superior to the majority in his power of producing some given class of result, whereas the average man and the stupid are not superior to the majority in their powers of producing any.
The reader must thus entirely disabuse himself of the idea that greatness, as an agent of social progress, has any necessary resemblance to greatness as conceived of by the moralist. A man may be a great saint or a noble “moral character” who passes his life in obscurity, stretched on a bed of sickness, and incapable even of rendering the humblest help to others. He is great in virtue not of what he does, but of what he is. But greatness, as an agent of social progress, has nothing whatever to do with what a man is, except in so far as what he is enables him to do what he does. If two doctors were confronted by some terrible epidemic, and the one met it by tending the poor{122}for nothing, and died in his unavailing efforts to save his patients, whilst the other fled from the infected district, and solacing himself at a distance with a mistress and an excellent cook, invented a medicine by which the disease could be warded off, and proceeded to make a large fortune by selling it, though the former as a man might be incalculably better than the latter, the latter as an agent of progress would be incalculably greater than the former. Again, if two doctors tried to invent such a medicine, and whilst the first succeeded the second failed, the second, though he might have exerted himself far more than the first, and have failed only owing to some minute flaw in his faculties, would be not only less great as an agent of progress than the first, but he would not be practically an agent of progress at all, any more than a man is an agent in saving another from drowning if he merely stretches a hand which the drowning man cannot reach, and actually himself tumbles into the water in doing so.
This truth, which sounds brutal when plainly stated, but is really little more than a sociological truism, is constantly overlooked, and even indignantly denied, by thinkers whose emotions are more powerful than their minds. The way in which such persons reason is very easily understood. They see that a number of men by whom great social results are produced—men who make successful inventions and who found great businesses—are narrow-minded, uncultivated, and contemptible in{123}general conversation, and that a number of other men who produce no such results are scholars, critics, thinkers, keen judges of men and things; and contrasting the brilliancy of those who have produced no great social results with the narrow ideas and dulness of those who have produced many, they proceed to argue that great social results cannot possibly require great men to produce them; or, in other words, that they might be produced by almost anybody.
But the whole of this class of objections will altogether disappear when we more closely examine what the qualities are on which the production of given social results depends. Let us take a few of these results as examples. Let us take the formulation and the popularising of some particular political demand, by which the whole course of a country’s history is affected, and the increasing and cheapening the supply of some articles of popular consumption—sugar, let us say, or workmen’s boots and clothing. The persons who urge the objections we are now discussing assume that all greatness, other than physical strength and dexterity, must be necessarily ethical or intellectual, and be calculated to excite our ethical or intellectual admiration. But let them consider the qualities requisite to produce such results as have just been mentioned, and they will see that no assumption could be more wide of the truth.
A man who should, without underpaying his employees, succeed in manufacturing for the poorer{124}classes boots, jackets, or shirts better in quality and very much less in price than those which they are accustomed to buy now, would probably have to devote a large part of his life to the consideration of a particular kind of seemingly sordid detail. To a man of wide culture and brilliant imagination, the concentration of his faculties on details such as these would be impossible; and if he wished to produce any of the results in question, he would soon discover that he could not. The men who do produce them are rendered capable of doing so, not by the width of their minds, but by the exceptional narrowness. The intellectual stream flows strongly because it is confined in a narrow channel, and thus what to the superficial observer seems a sign of their inferiority, is really, so far as the results are concerned, one of the chief causes of their greatness.
The mean man with the little thing to doSees it and does it;The great man with the great end to pursueDies ere he knows it.
The mean man with the little thing to doSees it and does it;The great man with the great end to pursueDies ere he knows it.
The mean man with the little thing to do
Sees it and does it;
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.