present the evidence that these individuals not only existed but had a decisive influence on their respective fields of activity. Further, they must be able to meet reasonably the challenge that if these individuals had not lived and worked as they did, their work would, in all likelihood, have been done by others.
At first glance the position seems to be quite easily established. Particularly in the arts and sciences, evidence pouring in from all sides makes it abundantly clear that the original patterns are created by a few great individuals and imitated by the merely talented many. A casual survey of some of the major cultural fields makes this plain. In what follows we shall present this survey as it might be made by a protagonist of a modified form of heroic determinism.
The titanic figures who dominate the history of literature and drama include Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Lucretius, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Proust, and Joyce. Other names may be added to this incomplete list, as well as to other incomplete lists in kindred fields. But whoever adds them will insist upon two things: that they are roughly of the same stature as the writers enumerated, and that there is a vast dimensional difference between them and the tens of thousands of poets, dramatists, and novelists whose minor excellences we enjoy without feeling the breath of greatness in their works. It matters little that no two lists will be identical. If we run the lists up to a hundred of the greatest individuals in the literature of western civilization, we need but select the names that are common to all the lists. No one will seriously gainsay the palpable differences between the few figures that appear on every list and the multitude of those who appear on no list. Nor is the point affected by the observation that great figures in literature, as in other fields, often emerge in clusters. Certain periods in history are undoubtedly more receptive to genius, that is, more stimulating or more sensitive, than others. They make it possible for genius to thrive as well as for more pedestrian spirits. But they do not produce these geniuses any more than a fertile plot of soil, on which both precious flowers and common weeds flourish, can be regarded as the creative source of the flowers.
Inexpugnable differences in taste enter into all survey of outstanding creation in every field. Shakespeare will be evaluated differently in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. But if we are interested in the question of influence rather than of
