2 September: Boreham on Greatness

An Extinct Species
Have we run short of giants? From several quarters there come complaints that, in our hour of need, the stock of giants is lamentably low. It was Robert Browning who, with characteristic fervour, prayed that a day might dawn on this planet when the giant would be as extinct as the moa or the dodo. He makes Paracelsus cry:

Make no more giants, Lord,
But elevate the race!

The aspiration seemed plausible enough in the day in which it was penned. In times when there are no tasks calling for the exercise of a giant's strength, a giant may be an awkward commodity to have on hand. Like an elephant in a farmyard, he creates consternation among the smaller fry without himself achieving anything worthy of his powers or proportionate to the cost of his keep. But the moment that a situation arises for which ordinary men are obviously unequal, we breathe a sigh of relief on discovering that a few giants still survive.

But this raises a further question—What is greatness? for, clearly, there is the greatness that simply represents the best we have and there is the greatness that towers above everything, the greatness that dwarfs and dominates everything about it. It is like Goldsmith's tall cliff

. . . . . . . . . . . . . that lifts its awful form,
Swells from the vale and
midway leaves the storm,
Though round its breast the rolling clouds are
spread,
Eternal sunshine settles on its head.

Men of this Homeric stamp are usually the peculiar product of a particular period. Such a man invariably appears in days of crisis. His masterful personality matches the moment; he fits the need of the hour. Of him it may be said, as Cassius said of Caesar, that he

. . . . . . doth bestride the narrow world
Like a colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable
graves.

Such men, however, are altogether exceptional. The lives of giants of this mammoth stature do not constitute the history of a nation.

English History And Its Big Four
It is at this point that many of our historians have gone astray. The old-fashioned chronicler made history an interminable, and not altogether edifying, procession of big men and crowned heads. It has often been pointed out that, even in Shakespeare, history is merely an affair of kings and coronets, and the people enter, for the most part, only as comic episode. Later historians, recognising the blunder that their predecessors had made, went to the opposite extreme, omitted the personal note altogether and became absurdly abstract. The one class prated only of men; the other talked only of movements. The former forgot that the kingmaker is necessarily greater than the king; the latter forgot that things do not move until some vigorous hand sets them in motion. And so both sets of historians lost their way.

Mr. Frederic Harrison once attempted to assess the value to the community as a whole of the dominant individual. He admits that great men have their place but he insists that their place is a very limited place. And, in any case, he goes on to say, really great men have always been extremely scarce. Resounding names, he thinks, have been given too much prominence in the annals of the ages. "In eight centuries," he declares, "our country has known but four great creative statesmen—men who have been founders or creators of a new order of things. William the Conqueror made all England an organic nation; Edward the First conceived and founded Great Britain; Oliver Cromwell made the United Kingdom and founded our Sea Power; the elder Pitt made the Colonial System and became the author of the Empire." Mr. Harrison is too conservative. To avoid the mistake of Carlyle, which would make giants as common as blackberries, and the mistake of Mr. Harrison, which would make the giant as rare as a white crow, we must make up our minds what we mean by greatness.

The Ultimate Test Of Greatness
Hazlitt, in one of his racy and delightful essays, contrasts greatness with cleverness and then hazards a definition. He describes an Indian juggler tossing and catching two balls, then three, and at last four. "None of us," says Hazlitt, "could do it to save our lives. To catch the balls in succession in less than a second of time; to throw them behind his back and twine them round his neck; to do what appears an impossibility, and to do it with all the ease, the grace, the carelessness imaginable—there is something in all this which he who does not admire may be quite sure he never really admired anything." It is wonderfully clever, and yet, the essayist argues, it is not great.

And why? Because, he points out, it achieves nothing. The man who juggles, either with golden balls or silvery phrases, compasses no great end. And Hazlitt lays it down as his final conclusion that no act terminating in itself constitutes greatness; greatness is the application of great powers to great purposes. Froude carried the matter a step further. In estimating greatness, whether in art, science, religion, or public life, Froude insists that, to be really great, a man must have the capacity to forget himself in his passion for his work. No man can do anything really great, he insists, whose dominant thought is his own gain or his own aggrandisement. Greatness he defines as the dedication of great powers, from pure motives, to exalted purposes, and there we may very well leave it.

F W Boreham

Image: Greatness?