pictures to be painted in vivid colours, and will have no neutral tints. This desire is natural enough, but it is adverse to the formation of a right judgment.
Great men are so called either because they expressed great ideas or because they did great actions. The danger in dealing with them is lest we clothe them too entirely with the idea, or associate them too absolutely with the action; indeed, we often make vast assumptions solely for the purpose of giving convenient names to things. There is no doubt about the greatness of an idea; it must be associated with some name, and the man who bears the name becomes accordingly great. There is no question that an important event occurred; some one must have done it; so the immediate agent has all the credit. Then, as soon as a man has been voted a great man, it is necessary that he be maintained in all things at the level of his imputed greatness.
This ordinary and obvious method of procedure is open to two dangers. First, it is possible, on one side, that the truth of the idea or the value of the act should suffer from the frailties of the individual with whom it is associated, and that great historic impulses should be made repugnant to some minds by the temper of their foremost exponent. For instance, there are people who fail to do justice to the intellectual and spiritual value of the Reformation movement in Germany, because of Luther's deficiency in the higher æsthetic perceptions.
Secondly, there is a danger that the real character of the hero should disappear before the persistent attempt to read him into a formula. This is a great
