sway you in turn. Why then is the martyr, who sacrifices everything to
one attraction, distinguished from the criminal or the fool, who do
the same thing? Evidently because the spirit that in the martyr
destroys the body is the very spirit which the body is stifling in the
rest of us; and although his private inspiration may be irrational,
the tendency of it is not, but reduces the public conscience to act
before any one else has had the courage to do so. Greatness is
spontaneous; simplicity, trust in some one clear instinct, are
essential to it; but the spontaneous variation must be in the
direction of some possible sort of order; it must exclude and leave
behind what is incapable of being moralised. How, then, should there
be any great heroes, saints, artists, philosophers, or legislators in
an age when nobody trusts himself, or feels any confidence in reason,
in an age when the word _dogmatic_ is a term of reproach? Greatness
has character and severity, it is deep and sane, it is distinct and
perfect. For this reason there is none of it to-day.

There is indeed another kind of greatness, or rather largeness of
mind, which consists in being a synthesis of humanity in its current
phases, even if without prophetic emphasis or direction: the breadth
of a Goethe, rather than the fineness of a Shelley or a Leopardi. But
such largeness of mind, not to be vulgar, must be impartial,
comprehensive, Olympian; it would not be greatness if its miscellany
were not dominated by a clear genius and if before the confusion of
things the poet or philosopher were not himself delighted, exalted,
and by no means confused. Nor does this presume omniscience on his
part. It is not necessary to fathom the ground or the structure of
everything in order to know what to make of it. Stones do not
disconcert a builder because he may not happen to know what they are
chemically; and so the unsolved problems of life and nature, and the