ualist. Catch-words, the illusions of the poets, the streets paved with gold, have drawn these great bodies into this great city. And, inasmuch as the Philosopher is a person who accepts the accomplished things, he must accept along with it the Corporations, the gradual death of altruisms, of creeds, of humanities and of the individual as a factor of public life. The great figures of the last century—like the Ruskins, the Bismarcks, the Napoleons, the Tennysons, the Gladstones—have passed away, because no man can now appeal largely enough to affect the immense public. What single great figure is there in the world of whom it could be said that the noise of his death being cried in a suburban street of liver-coloured brick boxes would cause half a dozen blinds to be pulled down, or half a dozen figures to come to the doors to hear the news? There is no such name.[1]
So it seems as if the Great Figure as a human factor has gone, and it seems as if London will never again know another Dr. Johnson, although at a hundred street corners you might meet men as wise, as mordant, as dogmatic, as unhappy, as vivacious, as great Figures.
This, however, is not an indictment of London. It
- ↑ This of course is an exaggeration on the part of the Philosopher, who looking too closely at the present forgets that one of his young friends—or he himself—may stand revealed to Posterity as a great figure. But, except, perhaps, for a single politician, it is difficult to find one man whose name to-day would be familiar in every street of this London.
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