is after all now seen
to be a half-truth, and to contain the less edifying and the less
profitable half of the truth. The world will never be able to spare
its hero, and the man with the rare and inexplicable gift of genius
will always be as commanding a figure as he has ever been. What we see
every day with increasing clearness is that not only the wellbeing of
the many, but the chances of exceptional genius, moral or
intellectual, in the gifted few, are highest in a society where the
_average_ interest, curiosity, capacity, are all highest. The moral of
this for you and for me is plain. We cannot, like Beethoven or Handel,
lift the soul by the magic of divine melody into the seventh heaven of
ineffable vision and hope incommensurable; we cannot, like Newton,
weigh the far-off stars in a balance, and measure the heavings of the
eternal flood; we cannot, like Voltaire, scorch up what is cruel and
false by a word as a flame, nor, like Milton or Burke, awaken men's
hearts with the note of an organ-trumpet; we cannot, like the great
saints of the churches and the great sages of the schools, add to
those acquisitions of spiritual beauty and intellectual mastery which
have, one by one, and little by little, raised man from being no
higher than the brute to be only a little lower than the angels. But
what we can do--the humblest of us in this great hall--is by
diligently using our own minds and diligently seeking to extend our
own opportunities to others, to help to swell that common tide, on
the force and the set of whose currents depends the prosperous
voyaging of humanity. When our names are blotted out, and our place
knows us no more, the energy of each social service will remain, and
so too, let us not forget, will each social disservice remain, like
the unending stream of one of nature's forces. The thought that this
is so may well lighten the poor perplexities of our daily life, and
even soothe the pang of its calamities; it lifts us from our feet as
on wings, opening a larger meaning to our private toil and a higher
purpose to our public endeavour; it makes the morning as we awake to
it welcome, and the evening like a soft garment as it wraps us about;
it nerves our arm with boldness against oppression and injustice, and
strengthens our voice with deeper accents against falsehood, while we
are yet in the full noon of our days--yes, and perhaps it will shed
some ray of consolation, when our eyes are growing dim to it al