Mysteries - Knut Hamsun [128]
There they go and make great men out of the most incidental experts who, quite by chance, improved the electrical condenser, or quite by chance had the muscle power to straddle their way through Sweden on a bicycle. And they let great men write books to promote the veneration of other great men! Heh-heh, it’s really amusing, it’s worth your money! In the end every village will have its great man, a law graduate, a novelist, a polar skipper of immense stature. And the earth will become perfectly flat and so simple and easy to survey—.
Dagny, it’s my turn now: I decline with thanks, I laugh you to scorn, I mock you; so what do you have to do with me? I’ll never be a great man.
But let us just suppose there is a multitude of great men, a legion of geniuses of this or that magnitude; why not! And so what? Should I be impressed by their number, perhaps? On the contrary, the more of a kind, the more ordinary they will be! Or should I do as the world does? The world is always true to form: here, too, it accepts what the world has accepted previously; it admires, falls on its knees, and runs at the heels of great men shouting hurrah. And should I do the same? What a farce! The great man walks along the street, and one mortal nudges another mortal in the ribs and says, There goes this or that great man! The great man sits in the theater, and one schoolmistress pinches another schoolmistress’ sexless thigh and whispers, Over there, in that white-tie box, sits this or that great man! Heh-heh. And he himself, the great man? He cashes in! He sure does. Those mortals are right, he thinks, accepting their tokens of esteem as his due; he doesn’t reject them, he doesn’t blush. Why should he? Isn’t he a great man?
But here Øien, the student, would protest. He is going to be a great man himself, he is working on a novel during the holidays. He would point out another inconsistency: Mr. Nagel, you’re not consistent, explain what you mean!
And I would explain what I meant.
But young Øien wouldn’t be satisfied; he would ask, So there really aren’t any great men, is that it?
Yes, that’s what he would ask, even after I’d explained what I meant! Heh-heh, that’s how it would look to him. Well, I would still answer him as best I could; feeling in my element, I would say, There is simply a legion of great men. Do you hear what I’m saying? There is a legion of them! But of the greatest men there aren’t, no, there aren’t many. That’s the difference, you see. Soon there will be a great man in every village, but of the greatest men there will probably never be one even in a thousand years. What the world means by a great man is quite simply a talent, a genius, and genius, after all, is a very democratic concept: a diet of so many pounds of beef a day will produce genius in the third, fourth, fifth, or tenth generation. Genius in the popular sense is not the unprecedented, but merely a human apropos: it makes you stop, but not rear up. Imagine the following: You are standing in an observatory some starry night, looking through a telescope at the Orion nebula. Then you hear Fearnley say, “Good evening, good evening!” You look around, Fearnley makes a deep bow—a great man has just come in, a genius, the gentleman in the white-tie box. You smile to yourself and go back to the Orion nebula, isn’t that right? This happened to me once.... Do you understand what I mean? I’m saying