It does not interest a really inspired man—­inventing flying machines for people who have not time to notice the sky, wireless telegraph for people who have nothing to say, symphonies for tone-deaf crowds, or ambrosia for people who prefer potatoes.

This is the whole issue in a nutshell.  When people say that our inventors, or Crowd-Men or saviours, when they have fulfilled or saved themselves, cannot be trusted to save us, the reply that will have to be made is that only people who do not know how inventors feel or how they are made or what it is in them that drives them to do things, or how they do them, will be afraid to let men who give us worlds and who express worlds for us and who make us express ourselves in worlds the freedom to help shape them and run them.

Men who have the automatic courage, the helpless bigness and disinterestedness that always goes with invention, with creative power, can be trusted by crowds.

The prejudice against the hero is due to the fact that heroes in days gone by have been by a very large majority fighters, expressing themselves against the world, or expressing one part of the world against another.

The moment the hero becomes the artist and begins expressing himself and expressing the crowd together, the crowd will no longer be touched with fear and driven back upon itself by the Thomas Jefferson bug-a-boo.

EPILOGUE

France is threatened by her childless women, Germany by her machines, Russia is beginning the Nineteenth Century.  It is to England and America, struggling still sublimely with their sins, the nations look—­for the time being—­for the next big free lift upon the world.

Looked at in the large, in their historic import and their effect on the time, the English temperament and the American temperament are essentially the same.  As between ourselves, England and America are apt to seem different, but as between us and the world, we blend together.  One could go through in what I have been saying about Oxford Street and the House of Commons in this book, strike out all after Oxford Street and read Broadway, and all after the House of Commons and read Congress, and it would be essentially true with the necessary English or American modulation.  In the same way it would be possible to go through and strike out all after the President and read Prime Minister or the Government.

England and America have the individualistic temperament, and if we cannot make a self-expressive individualism noble, and if we are not men enough to sing up our individualism into the social and the universal, we perish.

It is our native way.  We are to be crowdmen or nobodies.

The English temperament or the American temperament, whichever we may call it, is the same tune, but played with a different and almost contrasting expression.

England is being played gravely and massively like a violoncello, and America—­played more lightly, is full of the sweeps and the lulls, the ecstasy, the overriding glory of the violins.