“Life of Schopenhauer: A German; very deep; but it was not really noticeable when he sat down. Life of Dante: An Italian; the first to introduce the banana and the class of street organ known as “Dante’s Inferno.” Peter the Great, Alfred the Great, Frederick the Great, John the Great, Tom the Great, Jim the Great, Jo the Great, etc., etc. It is impossible for a busy man to keep these apart. They sought a living as kings and apostles and pugilists and so on”.
From “A Manual of Education” by Stephen Leacock in “Literary Lapses”
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Some people, companies and organisations are good, but not quite great. They are solid, professional or profitable but just miss the mark when it comes to greatness. They have read the books and done the “Good to Great” training seminars but somehow greatness slips through their fingers and dribbles into the kitchen sink. They long to have been born great, they ache to achieve greatness or they itch to have greatness thrust upon them but it never opens its doors to them. They want to be suddenly declared great like the Welsh surgeon Clement Price Thomas who was knighted by a pyjama clad King George VI while the surgeon was doing a routine post operative checkup.*
Sportsmen who are good but not great include the cricketers whose best batting score is in the nineties but they never reach one hundred, or my football team which won the premiership back in 1966 but has struggled to reach the finals ever since. However we have achieved a kind of negative greatness by finishing last more often than any other club in the Australian Football League (27 times).**
Of course it is quite possible that your sporting hero, corporate conglomerate or corner store may tumble back down the hill like Jack and Jill and go from being great to merely good. The Great Barrier Reef in Australia, due to global warming and coral bleaching, may soon need to be renamed the Formerly Great Barrier Reef. Yes it is still great at being a reef and causing shipwrecks and massive oil spills as all good reefs do, but it will no longer be a great tourist destination if all the coral is dead and all the snorkelers can see is a coral graveyard littered with fish skeletons.
Note that there are different types of greatness just as there are different types of sadness or badness. Take the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was great because it was like a big hairy octopus of a depression affecting every nation and every person. It caused disastrous unemployment, homelessness and poverty. It was not good becoming great but rather it plumbed the depths of negative greatness as in the Grimmest Recession Experience of All Time. It was the Marianas Trench of underwater exploration, the Titanic of cruise liners, the worst movie ever made.
Some of us are born great and just assume that naturally, everyone else respects our greatness. Take Great Danes for example. I recently saw one “Bad Dogs” TV programme about a Great Dane who was absolutely sure of his greatness. He was so big, at 7 feet high when standing on his back legs, that he got whatever he wanted. He pushed the husband of the family out of the marital bed, out of the bedroom and was well on the way to pushing him out of the house before the dog trainer came to the rescue. He was great in size and power but not great in how to win friends and influence people. He was a Great Dane as in big but not great as in good. Personally I think dog breeders should breed up a “Good Dane” cross by adding some of the short legged fluffy goodness of say a West Highland terrier to a Great Dane. As it will have both Danish and Scottish forebears it will bark with a rich scottish brogue in a dark scandi-noir way with a hint of minimalist bagpipes. It could use its still considerable size and agreeable nature for good such as being a dog obedience school crossing supervisor or being a helpful concierge dog at a dog hotel.
Those who aspire to being called “Great” should carefully consider what they wish for. Once you are given the name great it can be a name to live up to or a poisoned chalice. The island of Great Britain was given the name “great” by another Geoff, Geoffrey of Monmouth, in 1136. Subsequently the name was promoted by British explorers and imperialists who enjoyed colouring the world map red for the sake of patriotism. And undoubtedly the British Empire did some great things. Surely it’s greatest achievement was bringing about cooperation, goodwill and illegal ball tampering by inventing and promoting the game of cricket. Cricket is played all over the world in places as diverse as Afghanistan and Australia, the West Indies and Zimbabwe. Even Botswana, Brazil and China have national cricket teams. What lasting influence Great Britain failed to establish by force, trade and fancy red military uniforms it achieved through the great game of cricket. The game promotes force in batting and bowling, trading of the best players for enormous prices and, in the short form of the game, fancy red uniforms as well as white, blue, green, gold and every other colour.
© Geoff Milton 2020
* BBC TV “Antiques Roadshow” Series 35 – Stowe House 2 – (see full episode).
** Wikipedia “St. Kilda Football Club”
