There are some men who have no individuality, just as there are some men who have no face.  These are to be described by generals, not by particulars.  They are thin, vapid, inconclusive.  They are important solely on account of their numbers.  For them the census enumerator labours; they form majorities; they crowd voting booths; they make the money; they do the ordinary work of the world.  They are valuable when well officered.  They are plastic matter to be shaped by a workman’s hand; and are built with as bricks are built with.  In the aggregate, they form public opinion; but then, in every age, public opinion is the disseminated thoughts of some half a dozen men, who are in all probability sleeping quietly in their graves.  They retain dead men’s ideas, just as the atmosphere retains the light and heat of the set sun.  They are not light—­they are twilight.  To know how to deal with such men—­to know how to use them—­is the problem which ambitious force is called upon to solve.  Personality, individuality, force of character, or by whatever name we choose to designate original and vigourous manhood, is the best thing which nature has in her gift.  The forceful man is a prophecy of the future.  The wind blows here, but long after it is spent the big wave which is its creature, breaks on a shore a thousand miles away.  It is curious how swiftly influences travel from centre to circumference.  A certain empress invents a gracefully pendulous crinoline, and immediately, from Paris to the pole, the female world is behooped; and neither objurgation of brother, lover, or husband, deaths by burning or machinery, nor all the wit of the satirists, are likely to affect its vitality.  Never did an idea go round civilisation so rapidly.  Crinoline has already a heavier martyrology than many a creed.  The world is used easily, if one can only hit on the proper method; and force of character, originality, of whatever kind, is always certain to make its mark.  It is a diamond, and the world is its pane of glass.  In a world so commonplace as this, the peculiar man even should be considered a blessing.  Humorousness, eccentricity, the habit of looking at men and things from an odd angle, are valuable, because they break the dead level of society and take away its sameness.  It is well that a man should be known by something else than his name; there are few of us who can be known by anything else, and Brown, Jones, and Robinson are the names of the majority.

In literature and art, this personal outcome is of the highest value; in fact, it is the only thing truly valuable.  The greatness of an artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself.  The great man is the man who does a thing for the first time.  It was a difficult thing to discover America; since it has been discovered, it has been found an easy enough task to sail thither.  It is this peculiar something resident in a poem