In those days men
recognised immortal gods and resigned themselves to being mortal. Yet
those were the truly vital and instinctive days of the human spirit.
Only when vitality is low do people find material things oppressive
and ideal things unsubstantial. Now there is more motion than life,
and more haste than force; we are driven to distraction by the ticking
of the tiresome clocks, material and social, by which we are obliged
to regulate our existence. We need ministering angels to fly to us
from somewhere, even if it be from the depths of protoplasm. We must
bathe in the currents of some non-human vital flood, like consumptives
in their last extremity who must bask in the sunshine and breathe the
mountain air; and our disease is not without its sophistry to convince
us that we were never so well before, or so mightily conscious of
being alive.
When chaos has penetrated so far into the moral being of nations they
can hardly be expected to produce great men. A great man need not be
virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a
distinctive, luminous character; if he is to dominate things,
something must be dominant in him. We feel him to be great in that he
clarifies and brings to expression something which was potential in
the rest of us, but which with our burden of flesh and circumstance we
were too torpid to utter.
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