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.

† 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.

The general or the sentimental objections, then, which might not unnaturally arise in the minds of many when the claims of the great man to be the sole agent of progress are first broadly asserted, are found to disappear altogether when the meaning of these claims is more fully considered. But sentimental objections, as has been said already, are by no means the only objections which these claims have {262} to encounter. Objections will be raised against them which are economic rather than sentimental, and which, moreover,—this is a still more important fact—rest solely upon a practical, and have no theoretical basis.

In order to see what these objections are it will be well to consider them in their extremest and most uncompromising form. We will accordingly consider them as put forward by the socialists. That the objections of the socialists to the claims made for the great man are not grounded in any theory that consistently disallows them, is sufficiently shown by the fact that even the most extreme socialists, no less than the members of every other militant party, are always extolling the exceptional qualities of their own leaders. Agitators, thinkers, and writers like Karl Marx, Lassalle, and Engels have been extolled by their followers as though in their own way equal to Cæsar and Napoleon, to Aristotle, Galileo, and Bacon; and their works are continually called “marvels of reasoning,” and described as evincing “such powers of thought as are given to only a few men in the course of five hundred years.” The arguments, therefore, which are employed by socialistic thinkers to convince them that the great man is not essential to social progress, and plays no real part in it—those arguments to the examination of which the first chapters of this work were devoted, do not really convince even those who lay most stress on them, so far as they are applicable to social progress generally. For the {263} socialists in practice are forced to limit the application of them to two kinds of social action only; and these are social activity in the domains of political government and of wealth-production. They are, moreover, applied to the latter of these with so much more strictness than to the former, that the objections to the special claims of the great man as a wealth-producer are the only ones that here require our attention.

Now even here we shall find that the objections in question are originated not by theoretical, but by practical considerations only; for one of the most curious features in the history of socialistic thought, from the time when socialists claim that it first began to be scientific till to-day, has been the unwilling replacement, in their theory of production and progress, of that factor or element—and this factor is the great man—which Karl Marx, with his doctrine of labour as the sole creator of value, had eliminated. Under one disguise or another the great or exceptional man, as distinct from the average labourer whose productivity is measured by time, has been put back in the place from which the theory of Marx had ousted him; and the inventors, the men of enterprise, the organisers and capitalists of to-day—or, as Mr. Sidney Webb calls them, “_the monopolists of business ability_”—are given back to us in the guise of officials of the bureaucratic State, armed by the State with the industrial powers of slave-owners. It is true that socialistic theorists still do their utmost to hide from themselves and their followers the nature {264} of this change, by means of those curious arguments which find their chief exponent in Mr. Spencer, and which have rendered sociology thus far so useless as a practical science. But the change is but partly hidden, nevertheless, even from themselves.

Why, then, should they endeavour to hide it at all? Why should they shrink from a perfectly frank avowal—an avowal which they are constantly compelled to make by implication—that the great man’s power in wealth-production is what has been described, and that every increase in the wealth of civilised communities is due to him? They shrink from making this avowal for one reason only. This reason is that their main practical object is to represent the possessions of the great man, or of the few, as a treasure to which the few have no theoretical right, and which can be, and ought to be, divided amongst the many. They are therefore compelled, by the necessities of popular agitation, to obscure the part that the few have played in producing it, and to pretend, so far as possible, that it is produced by the undifferentiated many. If it were not for its promise to the many of some indefinite pecuniary gain, it may safely be said that socialism would have been never heard of; and if this pecuniary promise were made good, the demands of the socialists, as a practical party, would be satisfied.

And now having considered this, let the reader look back at the claims that have, in our present argument, been advanced for the great man thus far. It will be seen that not a single claim has been {265} advanced on his behalf to which, on practical grounds, any socialist could object. We have not assumed that out of all the wealth he produces he shall take a larger, or even so large a share, as the least efficient of his workmen. On the contrary, we have assumed that his contributions to the national wealth find their way into the pockets of those around him, and that for him nothing is left but the bare means of subsistence. It has indeed been shown that he must necessarily have the control of capital, and be free to use it in the way that he thinks best; but this is only because the control of capital affords the sole means by which, amongst free men, industrial discipline can be enforced and the productive genius of the few be communicated to the muscles of the many. For all that has been said thus far to the contrary, the great man himself may derive from his control of it no advantage whatsoever. We have assumed only that by his use of it he shall concentrate his exceptional faculties on the practical business of wealth-production with as much intensity and devotion as he would do if the whole of what he produced were to go into his own coffers. We have, in fact, been regarding the great man as being socially the servant of the ordinary men, though in technical matters he is their master.

So far, then, as our argument has up to this point proceeded, we have merely in our theory assigned to the great man functions which are implicitly assigned to him in the reasonings of the more recent socialists themselves, whilst in practice we have {266} assumed the realisation of the very conditions at which socialism aims. For let us consider very briefly what these conditions are. The more carefully the theoretical admissions and the practical promises of the more recent socialists are examined, the more clear does it become that the sole essential change which socialism would introduce into the existing economic _régime_ would consist not in getting rid of the great man, but in securing his activity on totally new terms. The socialists aim, in fact, at securing the best industrial masters and treating them like the worst servants. This, as social reformers, is their fundamental peculiarity. For whilst they propose to secure an equal distribution of products, they implicitly admit that the producers may be divided into three classes—the men of exceptional ability who produce an exceptional amount of wealth; the mass of average men who produce a normal amount; and the idle, the refractory, and the worthless, who produce less than the normal amount; and they propose accordingly to apportion the products as follows. To the average man they would give twice as much as he produces; to the idle and the worthless man they would give a hundred times as much as he produces; and to the great man, on whose talents the fortunes of all the others depend, they would give from a hundredth to a thousandth part of what he produces.

Now, whatever the reader may think of this economic programme, there is nothing in the present work, thus far, to show that it is impossible; and if {267} the object of socialists is to level social conditions, to abolish all differences of rank, and to confiscate all exceptional incomes, this book up to the present point might be accepted as a handbook of socialism. For the reader will recollect that when it was said that the great man’s activity involved the existence of motives which would lead him to develop his faculties, and that without such motives these faculties would be practically non-existent, the question of what these motives were was for the time altogether waived, and we assumed the development and the subsequent exercise of his abilities as something that would take place no matter under what conditions. The question, however, which we then put on one side must now be taken up and submitted to a careful examination. It being granted that the activity of the great man is necessary, on what conditions can his activity be secured? Can it be secured on the conditions that are proposed by socialism, or on any others that even remotely resemble them?

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