It is often mournfully reiterated that the present age is not an age of great men, and I have sometimes wondered if it is true.  In the first place I do not feel sure that an age is the best judge of its own greatness; a great age is generally more interested in doing the things which afterwards cause it to be considered great, than in wondering whether it is great.  Perhaps the fact that we are on the look-out for great men, and complaining because we cannot find them, is the best proof of our second-rateness; I do not imagine that the Elizabethan writers were much concerned with thinking whether they were great or not; they were much more occupied in having a splendid time, and in saying as eagerly as they could all the delightful thoughts which came crowding to the utterance, than in pondering whether they were worthy of admiration.  In the annals of the Renaissance one gets almost weary of the records of brilliant persons, like Leo Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci, who were architects, sculptors, painters, musicians, athletes, and writers all in one; who could make crowds weep by twanging a lute, ride the most vicious horses, take standing jumps over the heads of tall men, and who were, moreover, so impressionable that books were to them as jewels and flowers, and who “grew faint at the sight of sunsets and stately persons.”  Such as these, we may depend upon it, had little time to give to considering their own effect upon posterity.  When the sun rules the day, there is no question about his supremacy; it is when we are concerned with scanning the sky for lesser lights to rule the night that we are wasting time.  To go about searching for somebody to inspire one testifies, no doubt, to a certain lack of fire and initiative.  But, on the other hand, there have been many great men whose greatness their contemporaries did not recognise.  We tend at the present time to honour achievements when they have begun to grow a little mouldy; we seldom accord ungrudging admiration to a prophet when he is at his best.  Moreover, in an age like the present, when the general average of accomplishment is remarkably high, it is more difficult to detect greatness.  It is easier to see big trees when they stand out over a copse than when they are lost in the depths of the forest.

Now there are two modes and methods of being great; one is by largeness, the other by intensity.  A great man can be cast in a big, magnanimous mould, without any very special accomplishments or abilities; it may be very difficult to praise any of his faculties very highly, but he is there.  Such men are the natural leaders of mankind; they effect what they effect not by any subtlety or ingenuity.  They see in a wide, general way what they want, they gather friends and followers and helpers round them, and put the right man on at the right piece of work.  They perform what they perform by a kind of voluminous force, which carries other personalities away; for lesser natures, as a rule, do not like supreme responsibility;