, that facile successes are easily made and as
easily obliterated. What so many people admire is not greatness, but the
realisation of greatness and its tangible rewards. The result of this is
that men who show any faculty for impressing the world are exploited and
caressed, are played with as a toy, and as a toy neglected. And then,
too, the age is deeply permeated by social ambitions. Men love to be
labelled, ticketed, decorated, differentiated from the crowd. Newspapers
pander to this taste; and then the ease and rapidity of movement tempt
men to a restless variety of experience, of travel, of society, of
change, which is alien to the settled and sober temper in which great
designs are matured. There is a story, not uncharacteristic, of modern
social life, of a hostess who loved to assemble about her, in the style
of Mrs. Leo Hunter, notabilities small and great, who was reduced to
presenting a young man who made his appearance at one of her gatherings
as "Mr. ----, whose uncle, you will remember, was so terribly mangled
in the railway accident at S----." It is this feverish desire to be
distinguished at any price which has its counterpart in the feverish
desire to find objects of admiration. Not so can solid greatness be
achieved.

The plain truth is that no one can become great by taking thought, and
still less by desiring greatness. It is not an attainable thing; fame
only is attainable. A man must be great in his own quiet way, and the
greater he is, the less likely is he to concern himself with fame. It is
useless to try and copy some one else's greatness; that is like trying
to look like some one else's portrait, even if it be a portrait by
Velasquez. Not that modesty is inseparable from greatness; there are
abundance of great men who have been childishly and grotesquely vain;
but in such cases it has been a greatness of performance, a marvellous
faculty, not a greatness of soul. Hazlitt says somewhere that modesty is
the lowest of the virtues, and a real confession of the deficiency
which it indicates. He adds that a man who underrates himself is justly
undervalued by others. This is a cynical and a vulgar maxim. It is true
that a great man must have a due sense of the dignity and importance
of his work; but if he is truly great, he will have also a sense of
relation and proportion, and not forget the minuteness of any individual
atom. If he has a real greatness of soul, he will not be apt to compare
himself w