Fame is valuable simply as the test of excellence; and there is a
certain kind of popularity, sudden alike in its rise and subsidency,
which deserves not the other and lasting name, for it fails to soothe
that intellectual conscience which a great writer has declared to exist
equally with the moral conscience. After all, it is a question whether
fame is as precious to the celebrated during their lifetime as it is to
those who love them, or who are attached to them by interest.
There are persons who die and are forgotten, when their exit from the
stage of human affairs is a source of advantage to their survivors.
Witness those possessed of large fortunes, which they have it in their
power to bequeath, and over whose dwellings of mortality vigilant
relations hover like the carrion-fowl above the dying battle-steed. I
remember a good story to this effect, in which a lady and gentleman took
a grateful vow to pic-nic annually, on the anniversary of his death, at
the tomb of a relation who had greatly enriched them. They did so,
actually, _once_; succeeding years saw them no more at the solemn tryst.
Even as to those who have excelled in art, or portrayed in language the
imaginative side of life, it may be that their works abide and they not
be recognized in them, that their words may be echoed in many tongues
while the writer is put out of the question almost as entirely as he who
carved the first hieroglyph on the archaic stone.
Pages:
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330