Mediocre men have this in their favor, that it is relatively easy to classify them. Not only may they be readily assigned to their several occupations, and conveniently pigeon-holed as butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers, but it is a comparatively simple task to group them under single adjectives, as good and bad, black and white, tall and short, fat and lean, old and young, intelligent and stupid. The process is less easy with really great men. There is always an admirable element of human inconsistency in men of large mold which would be intolerable in lesser personalities. It has been truly said that no man becomes really great and influential who is not a good subject for caricature. The sublime is own sister to the ridiculous. Genius is next akin to insanity. The men who do really great things are a perpetual puzzle to those who possess only commonplace standards of classification. A commonplace villain is a villain, first, last, and all the time; but a villain like Milton's Satan, Napoleon, or the late German Kaiser is so great a villain as to be half a hero. The two hundred seventy-six dripping men who struggled through the surf at Malta one stormy morning rather more than eighteen hundred years ago and gathered shivering round the fire, were quickly classified, for the most part, into four convenient companies, of sailors, soldiers, passengers, and prisoners; but when one of them shook off a viper into the fire and showed no sign of hurt, it was quite certain that he was either a murderer or a god. Opinions might differ and did differ as to which of the two extremes might properly be claimed for him, but no one proposed to find a place for him in middle ground. The strength of great men lies in their possession and their counterpoise of opposing qualities. Over against the monotonous uniformity, the stupid consistency, of those common people whom Lincoln said God must love because He made so many of them, this quality displays itself as a peculiar possession of genius. Now and then it is given to a great man sufficiently so to subordinate the inconsistencies without which real greatness could not exist as to incarnate some outstanding principle of which he becomes the exponent. Abraham Lincoln did this; and the world, or that small part of the world which can lay claim to any considerable measure of moral discernment, has redefined its conception of certain high qualities, its measure of the moral significance of certain notable achievements, in terms of his personality. This process is highly desirable as well as inevitable; but the elements of inconsistency are not thereby removed from the character itself. Of him we might say: "_His life was gentle, and the elements So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up, And say to all the world: This was a man!_" --_Julius Caesar, V, 5._