Men Who Are Really Big

Waipa Post, Volume 44, Issue 3183, 28 May 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

Men Who Are Really Big

“ Some are bom great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” The Shakespearean aphorism enjoys a widespread currency. But, although it is true, it is not all-embracing. _ It does not allow for that very considerable company who are great only in their own imagination. Most people suffer in some measure from that form of delusion, but as long as it is kept in restraint others may not find it offensive. Some people, however, indulge the delusion so freely that it evolves from imagination into mania. The thing is so prevalent that it has been necessary to classify it; for that cause T the term “ megalomania ” has become familiar. One of the most persistent revelations of science is that mere bulk may have scant value; the philosophers are agreed that essential greatness does not consist in any kind of bigness. Children tend to think it does; the human race thought the same at its childhood stage. Warn-

ings against the notion appear early

in the literature of fable. The story >of the frog which, with explosive consequences, aspired to the proportions of the bull still conveys its lesson in many nurseries. The megalomaniac touch appears in numerous departments of history. The antediluvians established a big record in longevity, the Flood was a mammoth piece of rainfall, the tower of Babel was initially a species of architectural megalomania. The Pyramids bear witness that the ancient Pharaohs projected their megalomaniac notions forward to their funerals and their tombs.

It was inevitable that persons of warrior and kingly rank should be

most conspicuous victims. The function of the courtier was to foster the disease and to suggest ever fresh manifestations. Alexander the Great

did not consider that the earth afford-

, . ed his conquering military genius full * scope. In these bygone times the spirit of megalomania invaded even the boudoir. King Solomon’s domestic establishment was on an abnormally large scale; seven hundred wives indicated on the part of the proprietor an extremely large capacity for receiving and reciprocating conjugal . affection. All the ordinary appetites were indulged on an Homeric scale* men measured the greatness of a feast by the quantity of foods and fluids provided. Monarchs built spacious palaces rather than comfortable residences. The British Empire is a thing of natural growth and spontaneous accretion; the old world empires were expressions. of individual ambition. But although in the successive historical periods the forms of it change, the disease itself persists, and for

many of its largenscale forms no individual, or group of individuals, may be held responsible. As surely as the ancient world was, this present world is, in the grip of megalomania. Production is increasingly becoming a matter ofl mass; combines and car-

tels loom behind all the ramifications of commerce. The nations can hardly expect to go to war any more except on an all-inclusive scale, which is the

supreme reason why they should confer ©n an all-inclusive scale in order fto try to avoid it. Such manifestations of megalomania are dread, but to the average person they are abstract, and seem remote. It is when the disease besets the individual that its effects are most immediately visible, and that the victim in so many instances appears pitiable. One difficulty is that, in>'its incipient stages, the thing has merit. The young are

PHYSICAL POWER OR COMMERCIAL ! STRENGTH. ! , , I i FALSE STANDARDS OF GREATNESS. \ \ THE REALLY IMPORTANT VIRTUE IS MORAL \ STRENGTH.

encouraged in it; they are assured that the world is their battlefield, and they are exhorted to enter and to conquer. Since the material has always a greater drawing power than the* ethical or the intellectual, hosts of young people set themselves to win their triumphs on that plane. Nor do they deserve censure, since, as they look round, they perceive hosts of their seniors, men and women of them, frantically struggling to do the same. Tne desire to possess wealth, to wield power, to win fame—each is in itself commendable. The ever-present peril is that the ambition may be so exclusively pursued that, unrealised by the victims, it develops into an uncontrollable mania. Because their objectives are in essence material they disdain no means however doubtful to make their success tangible, visible. In their madness they strive to make the extent of it ever greater, hoping that others will thereby be impressed. They seek not their soul’s approval but the world’s applause. And verily they have their reward.

Within recent weeks men of balanced mind have had occasion to shake their heads over the tragic end of more than one financial megalomaniac. Insolvency and suicide at seventy was in one case the culminating reward. To the extent that their disease had got beyond their control they were deserving of sympathy, but their tragedy may well serve as a lesson in the need for keeping the instinct in check. Not infrequently the mania for power is greater than the mania for wealth. There are countries in Europe where the power megalomaniac to-day sits insecure. It may be necessary to remember that Napoleon ended on St. Helena, and that the ex-Kaiser has passed into oblivion, each an embodiment of the passion for external spectacular power. On humbler levels the spirit is rampant. In political, communal, and social circles there are individuals whose desire to possess power, or to have the appearance of possessing power, assumes forms that are to observers humorous, and that make the masqueraders ridiculous. As the tiny child raises its arms overhead to impress the admiring visitor with its increase in stature, so there are children of older growth constantly striving by all manner of crude or studied devices to impress society with their bigness. It is their tepid, paltry form of megalomania. There is practically no human sphere in which some phase of the disease may not be found, not exempting the religious. Even in it there are to be encountered individuals suffering from an excessive enlargement of the moral organs, and whose mania expresses itself in a conscious obtrusive unction. It is none the less true that megalomania in the moral sphere is rarely acute; a much more prevalent malady is moral atrophy. The defect in the grosser forms of megalomania is that matter, however speeificaally it be named, is assigned supremacy over mind. But Isaac Watts, himself a little man, long since coined the familiar lines: ‘‘Were I so tall to reach the pole, Or grasp the ocean in my span, I must be measured by my soul. The mind’s the standard of the man.” Despite all «hanging circumstances that measurement and that standard persist. Bigness of mind, bigness of soul, are things of which humanity has no need to live in dread. These are forms of megalomania that will never bring disaster either to those who possess them or to those who cultivate them.