The greatest poets, for instance, will in this way be classed as ordinary men, whilst the inventor of machinery for making good boots cheaply will be classed as a great man. And the reason is as follows. A great inventor is great as an agent of progress because when the apparatus invented by him is in process of being manufactured, and a thousand workmen are shaping or multiplying its separate parts, or again, when ten thousand other workmen are using the machines when completed, he makes each workman do precisely what he would {253} do himself if he were performing their several tasks actually with his own hands. But a great poet—let us say Shakespeare—could not in a similar way so influence a thousand ordinary writers that they should all of them be producing plays like _Macbeth_ or _Hamlet_. Indeed, the greater the poet is, the more absolutely incommunicable is his gift. Shakespeare may have so far contributed to progress as to have aided in the development of literary English generally, but he has not, in the course of some three hundred years, brought into existence one dramatist comparable to himself.† In art, in fact, after a certain point has been passed, it can hardly be said that there is any progress at all. † Of course the great poet, like the great religious teacher, may have an effect on the thoughts and imaginations of his readers, and he may be a great man or an agent of progress in this way. But he is not, in the technical sense of the word, a great man in reference to his own art. He does not promote progress amongst other poets.