Disraeli, it is said, “was a mystery man by instinct and policy,” and we all know others in our own circle of acquaintances.

So with the expression of personality in literature. A book which is perfectly clear at the first cursory reading is by that fact condemned as commonplace. If there were anything vital in it, it would appear at least a little strange, and would not be fully understood until it had been for some time inwardly digested. At the end of that time it would have done its best service for us and its ascendency would have waned. It is always thus, I imagine, with writers who strongly move us; there is first mystery and a sense of unexplored life, then a period of assimilative excitement, and after that chastened affection, or perhaps revulsion or distrust. A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies. It was a maxim of Goethe that where there is no mystery there is no power; and something of the perennial vitality of his writings may be attributed to the fact that he did not trouble himself too much with the question whether people would understand him, but set down his inmost experiences as adequately as he could, and left the rest to time. The same may be said of Browning, and of many other great writers.

Something similar holds true of power in plastic art. The sort of mystery most proper and legitimate in art, however, is not an intellectual mystery—though some artists have had a great deal of that, like Leonardo, who “conquered by the magnetism of an incalculable personality”^[90]—but rather a sensuous mystery, that is to say a vague and subtle appeal to recondite sources of sensuous impression, an awakening of hitherto unconscious capacity for harmonious sensuous life, like the feeling we get from the first mild weather in the spring. In this way, it seems to me, there is an effect of mystery, of congenial strangeness, in all powerful art. Probably everyone would recognize this as true of music, even if all do not feel its applicability to painting, sculpture and architecture.

The well-known fact that mystery is inseparable from higher religious idealism may be regarded as a larger expression of this same necessity of associating inscrutability with personal power. If the imagination cannot be content with the definite in lesser instances, it evidently cannot when it comes to form the completest image of personality that it can embrace.

Although ascendency depends upon what we think about a man rather than what he is, it is nevertheless true that an impression of his reality and good faith is of the first importance, and this impression can hardly outlast close scrutiny unless it corresponds to the fact. Hence, as a rule, the man who is to exercise enduring power over others must believe in that for which he stands. Such belief operates as a potent suggestion upon the minds of others.

If we divine a discrepancy between a man’s words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted. Nothing, therefore, is more fatal to ascendency than perceived insincerity or doubt, and in immediate intercourse it is hard to conceal them. When Luther came to Rome and saw what kind of a man the Pope was, the papacy was shaken.

How far it is possible for a man to work upon others through a false idea of himself depends upon a variety of circumstances. As already pointed out, the man himself may be a mere incident with no definite relation to the idea of him, the latter being a separate product of the imagination. This can hardly be except where there is no immediate contact between leader and follower, and partly explains why authority, especially if it covers intrinsic personal weakness, has always a tendency to surround itself with forms and artificial mystery, whose object is to prevent familiar contact and so give the imagination a chance to idealize. Among a self-reliant, practical people like ours, with much shrewdness and little traditional reverence, the power of forms is diminished; but it is always great. The discipline of armies and navies, for instance, very distinctly recognizes the necessity of those forms which separate superior from inferior, and so help to establish an unscrutinized ascendency in the former. In the same way manners, as Professor Ross remarks in his work on “Social Control,”^[92] are largely used by men of the world as a means of self-concealment, and this self-concealment serves, among other purposes, that of preserving a sort of ascendency over the unsophisticated.

As regards intentional imposture, it may be said in general that all men are subject to be duped in matters of which they have no working knowledge and which appeal strongly to the emotions. The application of this principle to quack medicine, to commercial swindles, and to the ever-reappearing impostures relating to supposed communication with spirits, is too plain to be enlarged upon. While it is an advantage, even to a charlatan, to believe in himself, the susceptibility of a large part of us to be duped by quacks of one sort or another is obvious enough, and shows that the work of free institutions in developing shrewdness is by no means complete.

Probably a close and candid consideration of the matter would lead to the conclusion that everyone is something of an impostor, that we all pose more or less, under the impulse to produce a desired impression upon others. As social and imaginative beings we must set store by our appearance; and it is hardly possible to do so without in some degree adapting that appearance to the impression we wish to make. It is only when this adaptation takes the form of deliberate and injurious deceit that much fault can be found with it. “We all,” says Stevenson in his essay on Pepys, “whether we write or speak, must somewhat drape ourselves when we address our fellows; at a given moment we apprehend our character and acts by some particular side; we are merry with one, grave with another, as befits the nature and demands of the relation.” If we never tried to seem a little better than we are, how could we improve or “train ourselves from the outside inward”? And the same impulse to show the world a better or idealized aspect of ourselves finds an organized expression in the various professions and classes, each of which has to some extent a cant or pose, which its members assume unconsciously, for the most part, but which has the effect of a conspiracy to work upon the credulity of the rest of the world. There is a cant not only of theology and of philanthropy, but also of law, medicine, teaching, even of science—perhaps especially of science, just now, since the more a particular kind of merit is recognized and admired, the more it is likely to be assumed by the unworthy. As theology goes down and science comes up, the affectation of disinterestedness and of exactness in method tends to supplant the affectation of piety.

In general it may be said that imposture is of considerable but always secondary importance; it is a sort of parasite upon human idealism and thrives only by the impulse to believe. A correct intuition on the part of mankind in the choice of their leaders is the only guaranty of the effectual organization of life in any or every sphere; and in the long run and on a large scale this correctness seems to exist. On the whole, the great men of history were real men, not shams, their characters were genuinely representative of the deeper needs and tendencies of human nature, so that in following them men were truly expressing themselves.

We have seen that all leadership has an aspect of sympathy and conformity, as well as one of individuality and self-will, so that every leader must also be a follower, in the sense that he shares the general current of life. He leads by appealing to our own tendency, not by imposing something external upon us. Great men are therefore the symbols or expressions, in a sense, of the social conditions, under which they work, and if these conditions were not favorable the career of the great man would be impossible.

Does the leader, then, really lead, in the sense that the course of history would have been essentially different if he had not lived? Is the individual a true cause, or would things have gone on about the same if the famous men had been cut off in infancy? Is not general tendency the great thing, and is it not bound to find expression independently of particular persons? Certainly many people have the impression that in an evolutionary view of life single individuals become insignificant, and that all great movements must be regarded as the outcome of vast, impersonal tendencies.

If one accepts the view of the relation between particular individuals and society as a whole already stated in various connections, the answer to these questions must be that the individual is a cause, as independent as a cause can be which is part of a living whole, that the leader does lead, and that the course of history must have been notably different if a few great men had been withdrawn from it.

As to general tendency, it is false to set it over against individuals, as if it were a separate thing; it is only through individuals that general tendency begins or persists. “Impersonal tendency” in society is a mere abstraction; there is no such thing. Whether idiosyncrasy is such as we all have in some measure, or whether it takes the form of conspicuous originality or genius, it is a variant element in life having always some tendency to innovation. Of course, if we believe in the prevalence of continuity and law, we cannot regard it as a new creation out of nothing; it must be a reorganization of hereditary and social forces. But however this may be, the person as a whole is always more or less novel or innovating. Not one of us floats quite inert upon the general stream of tendency; we leave the world somewhat different from what it would have been if we had been carried off by the croup.

Now in the case of a man of genius, this variant tendency may be so potent as to reorganize a large part of the general life in its image, and give it a form and direction which it could not have had otherwise. How anyone can look at the facts and doubt the truth of this it is hard to see. Would the life we receive from the last century have been the same if, say, Darwin, Lincoln, and Bismarck had not lived? Take the case of Darwin. No doubt his greatness depended upon his representing and fulfilling an existing tendency, and this tendency entered into him from his environment, that is from other individuals. But it came out of him no longer the vague drift toward evolutionary theory and experiment that it was before, but concrete, common-sense, matter-of-fact knowledge, thoroughly Darwinized, and so accredited by his character and labors that the world accepts it as it could not have done if he had not lived. We may apply the same idea to the author of Christianity. Whatever we may or may not believe regarding the nature of Christ’s spiritual leadership, there is, I take it, nothing necessarily at variance with a sound social science in the Christian theory that the course of history has been transformed by his life.

The vague instincts which it is the function of the leader to define, stimulate and organize, might have remained latent and ineffectual, or might have developed in a totally different manner, if he had not lived. No one can guess what the period following the French Revolution, or any period of French history since then, might have been without Napoleon; but it is apparent that all would have been very different. It is true that the leader is always a symbol, and can work only by using existing elements of life; but in the peculiar way in which he uses those elements is causation, is creation, in the only sense, perhaps, in which creation is definitely conceivable. To deny its importance is as absurd as to say that the marble as it comes from the quarry and the marble after Michelangelo is through with it, are one and the same thing.

Most, if not all, of our confusion regarding such points as these arises from the almost invincible habit of thinking of “society,” or “historical tendency,” as a distinct entity from “individuals,” instead of remembering that these general and particular terms merely express different aspects of the same concrete fact—human life. In studying leadership we may examine the human army one by one, and inquire why certain persons stand out from the rest as captains, colonels, or generals, and what, in particular, it is that they have to do; or, in studying social tendency, we may disregard individuality and look at the movements of the army, or of its divisions and regiments, as if they were impersonal wholes. But there is no separation in fact: the leader is always the nucleus of a tendency, and, on the other hand, all social movement, closely examined, will be found to consist of tendencies having such nuclei. It is never the case that mankind move in any direction with an even front, but there are always those who go before and show the way.

I need hardly add that leadership is not a final explanation of anything; but is simply one of many aspects in which human life, always inscrutable, may be studied. In these days we no longer look for final explanations, but are well content if we can get a glimpse of things in process, not expecting to know how they began or where they are to end. The leader is a cause, but, like all causes we know of, he is also an effect. His being, however original, is rooted in the past of the race, and doubtless as susceptible of explanation as anything else, if we could only get at the facts.