While this man’s plan came on him in an evening, a study of his life shows that, unconsciously to himself, it had been growing for a long series of years.  It flowered out all at once, like the night-blooming cereus.  Caesar decided to cross the Rubicon on the instant?  Yes, but we cannot doubt that this imperial resolution had been formed the day when in the Forum, as Macaulay describes it, Caesar said that the future Dictator of Rome might be Pompey, or Crassus, or still somebody else whom nobody was thinking of (that somebody else being himself, of course).

And, indeed, Caesar would at that time have been the last that any Roman would have selected as the master of the world.  He was young.  He was small.  He seemed almost frail.  He was an unspeakable egotist.  He was fastidious in his dress.  I have read that he even used perfumes.  And how could the common eye discern, through all of these externals of frippery, the lion heart, the eagle vision, and the mind of conquest and empire?

There is a very great danger in the examples just cited.  These men were geniuses, and they are not to be imitated except as their methods may be applicable to the common man.  This paper is for common men—­for people like ourselves.  There are geniuses; but their high-wrought lives, tornado activity, and methods of lightning are not for us.  All the world’s real leaders, whether in the fields of thought or action, whether in the council-chamber of the statesman, on the battle-field of the warrior, in the study of the writer, or in the laboratory of the scientist—­all have been men of genius.  No mediocre man ever was a great leader in the historic sense.

With our habit of looking at to-day as though it were eternity, we consider men “leaders,” and use the adjectives “great,” “splendid,” etc., as applied to them, when historically these men will hardly be discernible.

But all the figures large enough to fill history’s perspective always have been and always will be geniuses—­men in whom the energy, the thought, the imagination, the power of hundreds of men are concentrated.  Let us not deceive ourselves, and reap misery and disappointment by thinking that we can, by any effort, equal them.  Alexander, Caesar, Richelieu, Napoleon, Bismarck, Washington, Darwin, Goethe, Shakespeare, Lincoln, Pasteur, Edison, Plato, Rhodes, Ito, Diaz, Peter the Great—­we cannot explain these phenomena of human intellect and character except by the word genius.

All our toil and patience and everything cannot seat us in the high places of these princes of Nature.  “Who, by taking thought, can add a cubit to his stature?” (The Bible again, you see; we cannot get away from the Bible.)

But these men never knew that they were geniuses.  They would have known it undoubtedly if they had stopped to think about it.  But they were too busy with their task.  A genius never thinks about his powers, any more than an eagle is concerned about the method of his royal flight from the mountain crag.  But for us, of the common mass of men, only those methods of genius are applicable which are within our reach.  Mostly for us are the slow and toilsome—­the sure, if gradual—­processes of patient labor and infinite pains.