The plain truth is that no one can become great by taking thought, and still less by desiring greatness.  It is not an attainable thing; fame only is attainable.  A man must be great in his own quiet way, and the greater he is, the less likely is he to concern himself with fame.  It is useless to try and copy some one else’s greatness; that is like trying to look like some one else’s portrait, even if it be a portrait by Velasquez.  Not that modesty is inseparable from greatness; there are abundance of great men who have been childishly and grotesquely vain; but in such cases it has been a greatness of performance, a marvellous faculty, not a greatness of soul.  Hazlitt says somewhere that modesty is the lowest of the virtues, and a real confession of the deficiency which it indicates.  He adds that a man who underrates himself is justly undervalued by others.  This is a cynical and a vulgar maxim.  It is true that a great man must have a due sense of the dignity and importance of his work; but if he is truly great, he will have also a sense of relation and proportion, and not forget the minuteness of any individual atom.  If he has a real greatness of soul, he will not be apt to compare himself with others, and he will be inclined to an even over-generous estimate of the value of the work of others.  In no respect was the greatness of D. G. Rossetti more exemplified than in his almost extravagant appreciation of the work of his friends; and it was to this royalty of temperament that he largely owed his personal supremacy.

I would believe then that the lack of conspicuous greatness is due at this time to the overabundant vitality and eagerness of the world, rather than to any languor or listlessness of spirit.  The rise of the decadent school in art and literature is not the least sign of any indolent or corrupt deterioration.  It rather shows a desperate appetite for testing sensation, a fierce hunger for emotional experience, a feverish ambition to impress a point-of-view.  It is all part of a revolt against settled ways and conventional theories.  I do not mean that we can expect to find greatness in this direction, for greatness is essentially well-balanced, calm, deliberate, and decadence is a sign of a neurotic and over-vitalised activity.

Our best hope is that this excessive restlessness of spirit will produce a revolt against itself.  The essence of greatness is unconventionality, and restlessness is now becoming conventional.  In education, in art, in literature, in politics, in social life, we lose ourselves in denunciations of the dreamer and the loafer.  We cannot bear to see a slowly-moving, deliberate, self-contained spirit, advancing quietly on its discerned path.  Instead of being content to perform faithfully and conscientiously our allotted task, which is the way in which we can best help the world, we demand that every one should want to do good, to be responsible for some one else, to exhort, urge, beckon, restrain, manage.  That is all utterly false and hectic.  Our aim should be patience rather than effectiveness, sincerity rather than adaptability, to learn rather than to teach, to ponder rather than to persuade, to know the truth rather than to create illusion, however comforting, however delightful such illusion may be.