All greatness is brought about
by a conspiracy of the imagination and the will. Our literature
certainly manifests beauty, but not greatness or majesty, for majesty
only arises where there is an orchestration of humanity by some mighty
conductor; and as a people we shall never manifest the highest
qualities in literature or life until we are under the dominion of one,
at least, of the great fundamental ideas which have been the inspiration
of races. Our feebleness arises from our economic individualism. We
continually neutralize each other's efforts. Yet there is no less power
in humanity today than there ever was. We see now clearly what untamed
elemental fires lay underneath the seeming placidity of the world.
There was a feeling in society that, just as the earth itself had
settled down to be a habitable globe, and was forgetting its ancient
ferocities of earthquake that opened up gulfs between land and land and
rended sea from sea, so, too, humanity was losing those wilder energies
we surmised in the cave-dweller or the hunters of mastodon, mammoth, and
cave-tiger.
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