what is
he? It is desirable that we should know. Men will not get to heaven
because they lie under one or other of these predicables. What is that
supreme type of character which is in itself good or great, unqualified
with any farther _differentia_? Is there any such? and if there be,
where is the representative of this? It may be said that the generic man
exists nowhere in an ideal unity--that if considered at all, he must be
abstracted from the various sorts of men, black and white, tame or
savage. So if we would know what a great man or a good man means, we
must look to some specific line in which he is good, and abstract our
general idea. And that is very well, provided we know what we are about;
provided we understand, in our abstracting, how to get the essential
idea distinctly out before ourselves, without entangling ourselves in
the accidents. Human excellence, after all the teaching of the last
eighteen hundred years, ought to be something palpable by this time. It
is the one thing which we are all taught to seek and to aim at forming
in ourselves; and if representative men are good for anything at all, it
can only be, not as they represent merely curious combinations of
phenomena, but as they illustrate us in a completely realised form, what
we are, every single one of us, equally interested in understanding. It
is not the 'great man' as 'man of the world' that we care for, but the
'man of the world' as a 'great man'--which is a very different thing.
Having to live in this world, how to live greatly here is the question
for us; not, how, being great, we can cast our greatness in a worldly
mould. There may be endless successful 'men of the world' who are mean
or little enough all the while; and the Emersonian attitude will confuse
success with greatness, or turn our ethics into a chaos of absurdity. So
it is with everything which man undertakes and works in. Life has grown
complicated; and for one employment in old times there are a hundred
now. But it is not _they_ which are anything, but _we_. We are the end,
they are but the means, the material--like the clay, or the marble, or
the bronze in which the sculptor carves his statue. The _form_ is
everything; and what is the form? From nursery to pulpit every teacher
rings on the one note--be good, be noble, be men. What is goodness then?
and what is nobleness? and where are the examples? We do not say that
there are none. God forbid! That is not what we are meani