LAST WEEK.
It is the fashion to say that the day of great men is at an end, and people discuss the subject much as follows. There is such a uniformity of education and of opportunity, that there is very little to distinguish A. from B. Hero-worship expired with the newspaper and the railway. In order that it may exist there must be a dim shadowy background. Men fall prostrate before a cloud; but where all is clear and palpable to the senses, they handle, they criticise, they discuss, they doubt. Hence the reverence for the heroes of antiquity. Imagine the Right Honourable Pericles, member for the Hymettus Burghs, to be well dissected from day to day in the “Clerkenwell Courier,” as the clear-sighted editor could dissect him when a War Peloponnesian, or other, was in progress, which the great statesman did not conduct exactly in conformity with the views of that eminent publicist. Fancy Demosthenes on the wrong side, or indeed on the right one, and how, to the eyes of party men, those roaring sentences, which we were all taught to admire in our youth, would degenerate into “miserable stuff,” “nisi-prius pleading,” “catchpenny trash,” and so forth. The man lived and spoke two thousand years and more ago. The human race have ceased to care about Philip of Macedon and his doings. Indeed the only remains now of what was once deemed so important are a few Klephts owning a doubtful allegiance to a Bavarian Kinglet (who was it lived at Munich when Demosthenes wore wig and gown?), and the tirades of eloquent abuse with which young gentlemen, struggling for First Classes, are so familiar. If our Own Correspondent had accompanied Julius Cæsar during his wars in Gaul, and Mr. Reuter had helped us hour by hour to the very latest intelligence of his doings amongst the Belgæ and others, how some amongst us would have cried him up as a “fine energetic fellow,” a “soldier to the back-bone;” but how the peace-party would have groaned over him, and dubbed him a monster in human form, a cat-o’-nine-tails in the right hand of Destiny! How his fame would have gone up and down exactly as he was fortunate or unfortunate in his operations. Excelsior is the motto of the bubble; it must soar upwards, and upwards still. Let it pause for a moment in its flight, and all that remains of its iridescence and its glory is a drop or two of soap and water, not over clean.
Such is the fashion of talk about modern greatness—or rather about the possibility of greatness in modern times. There is some truth and some untruth about the theory. That it can scarcely be altogether true would appear from the fact that there are three or four names just now which are uppermost in the minds of all, and the bearers of these famous names really are what the old Greek hexameter men would have called shepherds of the people. There is Joseph Garibaldi for one. Who will say that the days of hero-worship are gone by when we read of the homage paid to that great chief? Aspiring young men! the real trouble is not so much to get your greatness acknowledged as fairly to earn the acknowledgment by noble deeds enacted for the good of others, without selfish motive. It may well be that in very few cases the homage of the human race will be paid in so immediate and palpable a form as it now is to that great Italian leader. It is not allowed to every man to put on a red jersey—to conquer a kingdom—and to give it away for the greater happiness of all concerned within six months. Men, however, may be great in other ways. No doubt Michael Faraday in his laboratory—just on the eve, or on the morrow, of a great discovery—receives his reward as well as Joseph Garibaldi at the conclusion of a well-fought day. After all, the evvivas, and the laurel crowns, and the triumphal arches do not count for much. The thought that he has been the instrument in the hands of Providence to put an end to so much misery, must be that which makes such a man as Garibaldi feel happy in himself. There is something about his ways of going on which makes his detractors appear ridiculous. Even Dr. Paul Cullen squirts dirty water at him with an uncertain hand. The Papal people, who are rather adepts at cursing than otherwise, can’t get their curses to hold water when they curse Garibaldi. As you read the bead-roll of mediæval abuse, and the curses come rumbling out like potatoes out of a sack, you feel that they are quite out of place. It is Dr. Slop cursing Obadiah in his vitals, and in all the acts of his life, because he has tied a string round a bag in too complete a manner. Joseph Garibaldi is not “iniquitous,” “impure,” “the enemy of God and man,” because he dislikes Cardinal Antonelli, and would much prefer that Pio Nono should take up his residence somewhere else than at Rome. Garibaldi has been attacked in a far less virulent manner, and in a much more wholesome spirit by public writers in our own country. Of this there is no great reason to complain, because he has been handled just as any great Englishman would have been handled who was—what is the usual phrase?—“occupying a prominent position in public life.”
We do criticise the acts of our leaders in this country in a very unsparing way, and well is it for them and for us all that this is done, so that we may not fall into the senilities and anilities of hero-worship. But never in our time has this amende honorable been so quickly paid as in the case of Joseph Garibaldi. On Monday he was a kind of crazy buccaneer for going to Sicily. On Tuesday he was the remarkable man whose story was like an Arabian tale. On Wednesday our great thinkers wagged their fingers at him, after the fashion of the witches in Macbeth, for thinking of an attempt upon the mainland. The Sicilian rocket was to fall down by mere gravitation as the Neapolitan stick. On Thursday, the “remarkable-man theory” was brought to light once more. His acts stultified prophecy, and defied criticism. Dobbs admitted his error. On Friday it appeared that Dobbs was right after all. Garibaldi, who was at best a splendid partisan leader—a fact which Dobbs was free to admit—had attempted a bit of statesmanship—really now! Worse still, he was about to fight a battle against regular troops, and the result was not only to the ingenious Dobbs, but to every dear old gentleman in the Senior United Service Club, but a foregone