MEDIOCRITY AND GREATNESS

(March 17, 1902)

The remark recently made by a prominent college president to the effect that the Twentieth Century was opening upon a race devoid of great men has led to the usual variety of comments upon such assertions. The remark, as quoted in the Boston Transcript, is that the Twentieth Century has dawned upon a very mediocre race. "But mediocrity," says our Boston contemporary, “is a relative term; as much so as superiority. The superiority of one period may be the mediocrity of a succeeding or subsequent period. It is undoubtedly so in this case. It is unquestionably true that there is not such a widely separating chasm between the great and the small in the present year of grace as there was a hundred or even fifty years ago. There may be as many intellectual Mont Blancs now as then, but the inferior elevations have advanced in stature and reduced the lordly proportions of the monarch of the range by the process.'

This expresses a view which is widely accepted, but which is, in our judgment, radically false. There is no valid reason to suppose that the gap between the truly great man and the mediocre man is any less today than it ever was, nor that, given the same quality of greatness, and an equal stimulus and occasion for its exercise, the man who measures up to the historic standard of greatness would not be marked out with the same distinctness, and recog

nized with the same honors, in the Twentieth Century as in any previous age. What is true in regard to persons of what may be called mediocre distinction is not that they reach a higher standard than the corresponding class of former generations, but that there are more of them. Where there was one clever novelist fifty years ago, there are perhaps a score today; where there was one scientific discoverer or inventor, there are a hundred; where there was one capable essayist and journalist, there are dozens now. But all this does not lessen the difference between the author of the last "boom" novel and Thackeray; between the merely talented and assiduous experimenter and Faraday; between a fine writer in the magazines and Carlyle. Indeed, in the comparison of the mountain range, there is a lurking fallacy; what has risen is the general level of the knowledge and opportunities open to us all, not the height to which individuals rise in their own achievements.

A single example is almost sufficient to show that the essential place of individual greatness is the same as it has ever been. Take a glance at the literary figures that came into general notice in the English-speaking world during the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century. There was precisely oneone and no more-that was recognized as a great and original force. This was Rudyard Kipling. There were no end of good writers in the field, but not one of them was regarded as more than an able literary worker-an object of admiration and a source of pleasure, no doubt, but not a centre of influence, a factor to be reckoned with, a man or

when it exists in sufficient measure, constireatness.

, we have not the least notion that the final on Kipling will rank him with the great of English literature; but this only increases ce of the argument. He had something of the ain about him, and there was not the slightest ty in distinguishing him from the surrounds. It is unfortunate that the nearest approach eat figure that has recently been produced in rld of English literature should be one that o short of the highest standards. But the e to his achieving an illustrious rank resides the circumstance that his contemporaries are eat, but that he is not great enough. The tive quality of genius was swiftly recognized ; it needed but the thin little volume of "Plain From the Hills" to establish that. And, in f the sad disappointment to which he has since ed us, he still retains something of the peprerogative that has always attached to the E genius-to what Carlyle calls the hero. The is as much in need of the hero as ever it was; s as much room for him as ever there was; henever he appears, he will be found to tower his fellows just as distinctly as he did when

there were no telephones or electric lights, and when thousands of young people, whose descendants now have access to all the books in the world, felt it a rare and precious privilege to pore over the pages of Plutarch and Bunyan and Shakespeare.

onderful rapidity with which, largely through orts, that dream approached realization durlifetime. It was not destined to be a happy to the last, for it began to be seriously disand troubled at the time of the Jameson nd it was covered with a mist of blood and during the years of the Boer War. But he son to feel, even to the last, that his dream ew Africa, a South Africa vastly enlarged British, was to be made a reality, and he the assurance that he had not dreamed in

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political last will and testament" of the e-builder," which is about to appear in the an Review of Reviews, and of which copious s were published yesterday, shows that Mr. , besides being the possessor of a grand was himself possessed by a tremendous are. This was nothing less than the belief the world was engaged in a deadly struggle roy England by cutting her off from the ities of trade, and that the only way to prer annihilation was that of a federation of the -speaking people the world over. Not only that the way to secure such a federation was land making desperate and relentless com