fect on either you or me--but it certainly ruined the old
backgrounds, sort of killed individualism out of our generation."

Tom looked up in surprise.

"Yes it did," insisted Amory. "I'm not sure it didn't kill it out of the
whole world. Oh, Lord, what a pleasure it used to be to dream I might be
a really great dictator or writer or religious or political leader--and
now even a Leonardo da Vinci or Lorenzo de Medici couldn't be a real
old-fashioned bolt in the world. Life is too huge and complex. The world
is so overgrown that it can't lift its own fingers, and I was planning
to be such an important finger--"

"I don't agree with you," Tom interrupted. "There never were men placed
in such egotistic positions since--oh, since the French Revolution."

Amory disagreed violently.

"You're mistaking this period when every nut is an individualist for
a period of individualism. Wilson has only been powerful when he has
represented; he's had to compromise over and over again. Just as soon
as Trotsky and Lenin take a definite, consistent stand they'll become
merely two-minute figures like Kerensky. Even Foch hasn't half
the significance of Stonewall Jackson. War used to be the most
individualistic pursuit of man, and yet the popular heroes of the war
had neither authority nor responsibility: Guynemer and Sergeant York.
How could a schoolboy make a hero of Pershing? A big man has no time
really to do anything but just sit and be big."

"Then you don't think there will be any more permanent world heroes?"

"Yes--in history--not in life. Carlyle would have difficulty getting
material for a new chapter on 'The Hero as a Big Man.'"

"Go on. I'm a good listener to-day."

"People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we
no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or
philosopher--a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than
the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand
prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get
sick of hearing the same name over and over."

"Then you blame it on the press?"

"Absolutely. Look at you; you're on The New Democracy, considered the
most brilliant weekly in the country, read by the men who do things and
all that. What's your business? Why, to be as clever, as interesting,
and as brilliantly cynical as possible about every man, doctrine, book,
or policy that is assigned you to deal with.