THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1910. THE PASSING OF THE GREAT FIGURE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9719, 15 February 1910, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1910. THE PASSING OF THE GREAT FIGURE.

The "English Review," which is now one of the most stimulating of the monthlies, contends "that the great figure as a factor in life has passed almost out of the sphere of things. Of the Victorian guard of great figures there remain to us only Mr Frederic Harrison and, perhaps", Mr Thomas Hardy. But Mr Thomas Hardy until towards the end of his writing life never made any moral appeal. He was just t a writer she left alone the Riddle of the Universe. And, at bottom, it was by force of crving out, 'Be moral, and you will have a good time in 0110 world or another,' or it was by force of providing an alternative for the dogma of a seven-day creation, that the yictorian great figure gained its prodigious hold upon the hearts of the people. Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskm, Gladstone, Disraeli, Cobden, Bright, Darwin, John ! Stuart Mill, Cadinal Newman, or Mr Frith, whose death occurred only recently—of all these great figures it would be absurd to say that they did better work in their several departments than is being . done to-day. But they had, as dis- ' tinguished from the actual work that they did, a certain extraneous faculty —the faculty of appeal. They were : able, that is to say. to make a great 1 deal of noise apart from the actual work thnt they got througn. Thus [ Darwin, who has done more to change ' 'the psychology of the Western world than any man sine-! Jean Jacques Rousseau—Darwin, as far as the out side world is eniicerneri, very secondarily, ; stooci fbr was 'the 1 ownfall of priestcraft Similarly, ;rMr Gladstone was not to much a jrreav Chance W of

the Exchequer or the introducer of certain measures into the House of Commons; he was a man who preached ; who stood for virtues of a certain order. Mill stood for liberty far more I than for political economy, Carlyle for physical force and public efficien- | cy. than for historic sense; Browning was the prophet of optimism, Tennyson the singer of middle-class altruism, Cardinal Newman was at belovtd ascetic rather than an efficient Churchman, the Prince Consort was Albert the Good. Nowadays it is the work itself which counts. It counts in the eyes of the worker; in the eyes of the public, it counts for I very little. For the public Is always I looking out for the great figure. \ That is why Mr Chamberlain is the only gentleman whom everyone knows—for Mr Chamberlain does stand for an enormous principle. He pays comparatively little attention to detail; he never did pay much attention to detail. The note which he sounded wh*;n he was a Radical was one of emotional common sense. The note which he sounds to day is that of emotional patriotism. But the emotion which he used then, as now, was not an emotion of altruism. It was one of a rather black, a rather bitter aggressiveness. For it should have been visible to the Darwinians and to the Victorians that when, fairly efficiently, they slew priestcraft and revealed religion, they scotched also several of the things for which priestcraft and revealed religion seemed to stand. Thus, if, as has been said, Protestantism is dead, so also is altruism. We do not wish to assert finally that either of these factß is the case. But we are fairly certain that for the time being and until others arise, the great Victorian figures were the last of the | priests. ■