FAME
FAME AS SURVIVAL—SYMBOLISM THE ROOT OF FAME—PRESENT SIGNIFICANCE
ESSENTIAL—THE ELEMENT OF MYTH—INFLUENCE OF THE LITERARY CLASS—THE
GROUP FACTOR—IS FAME JUST?—IS IT DECAYING?
Fame, I suppose, is a more extended leadership, the man’s name acting as
a symbol through which a personality, or rather the idea we form of it,
is kept alive and operative for indefinite time. As ideas about persons
are the most active part of our individual thought, so personal fames
are the most active part of the social tradition. They float on the
current of history not dissolved into impersonality but individual and
appealing, and often become more alive the longer the flesh is dead.
Biography, real or imaginary, is what we care for most in the past,
because it has the fullest message of life.
Evidently fame must arise by a process of survival; if one name has it
and another does not, it is because the former has in some way appealed
more effectively to a state of the human mind, and this not to one
person or one time only, but again and again, and to many persons, until
it has become a tradition. There must be something about it perennially
life-giving, something that has power to awaken latent possibility and
enable us to be what we could not be without it. The real fames, then,
as distinguished from the transitory reputations of the day, must have a
value for human nature itself, for those conditions of the mind that are
not created by passing fashions or institutions, but outlive these and
give rise to a permanent demand.
Or, if the appeal is to an institution, it must be to one of a lasting
sort, like a nation or the Christian Church. As Americans we cherish the
names of Washington and Lincoln because they symbolize and animate the
national history; but even these are felt to belong in the front rank
only in so far as they were great men and not merely great Americans.
The one great reason why men are famous is that in one way or another
they have come to symbolize traits of an ideal life. Their names are
charged with daring, hope, love, power, devotion, beauty, or truth, and
we cherish them because human nature is ever striving after these
things.
It will be hard to find any kind of fame that is wholly lacking in this
ideal element. All the known crimes and vices can be found attached to
famous names, but there is always something else, some splendid
self-confidence, some grandiose project, some faith, passion, or vision,
to give them power. It may not be quite true to say,
“One accent of the Holy Ghost
The heedless world hath never lost”;
but it is certain that there is nothing to which the ear of the world is
so sensitive as to such accents, or which, having heard, it is less
willing to forget. Every scrap of real inspiration, whether in art or
conduct, is treasured up, when once it has been recorded, and is fairly
certain to prove _ære perennius_.
A great vitality belongs, however, to anything which can bring the ideal
down out of its abstractness and make it active and dramatic. A dramatic
appeal is an appeal to human nature as a whole, instead of to a
specialized intellectual faculty, to plain men as well as educated, and
to educated men through that plainer part of them which is, after all,
the most fully alive. So men of action have always a first lien on fame,
other things being equal—Garibaldi, for example, with his picturesque
campaigns, red shirt and childlike personality, over the other heroes of
Italian liberation. And next to this comes the advantage of being
preserved for us in some form of art which makes the most of any
dramatic possibilities a man may have, and often adds to them by
invention. Gibbon, Macaulay, Scott, not to speak of Shakespeare, have
done much to guide the course of fame for English readers.
Perhaps it was this survival of salient personal traits, often trivial
or fictitious, that Bacon had in mind when he remarked “for the truth
is, that time seemeth to be of the nature of a river or stream, which
carrieth down to us that which is light and blown up, and drowneth that
which is weighty and solid.”[25] But, after all, traits of personality
may be as weighty and solid as anything else; and where they are
inspiring it is right that they should be immortal. The merely trivial,
of this kind, seldom endures except by association with something of
real significance.
It is noteworthy that what a man did for humanity in the past is not the
chief cause of fame, and not sufficient to insure it unless he can keep
on doing something in the present. The world has little or no gratitude.
If the past contribution is the only thing and there is nothing
presently animating in the living idea of a man, it will use the former,
without caring where it came from, and forget the latter.
The inventors who made possible the prodigious mechanical progress of
the past century are, for the most part, forgotten; only a few names,
such as those of Watt, Stephenson, Fulton, Whitney, and Morse being
known, and those dimly, to the public. Some, like Palissy the potter,
are remembered for the fascination of their biography, their heroic
persistence, strokes of good fortune or the like; and probably it is
safe to conclude that few men of this class would be famous for their
inventions alone.
As Doctor Johnson remarks in The Rambler,[26] the very fact that an idea
is wholly successful may cause its originator to be forgotten. “It often
happens that the general reception of a doctrine obscures the books in
which it was delivered. When any tenet is generally received and adopted
as an incontrovertible principle, we seldom look back to the arguments
upon which it was first established, or can bear that tediousness of
deduction and multiplicity of evidence by which its author was forced to
reconcile it to prejudice and fortify it in the weakness of novelty
against obstinacy and envy.” He instances “Boyle’s discovery of the
qualities of the air”; and I suppose that if Darwin’s views could have
been easily accepted, instead of meeting the bitter and enduring
opposition of theological and other traditions, his popular fame would
have been comparatively small. He is known to the many chiefly as the
symbol of a militant cause.
It is, then, present function, not past, which is the cause of fame, and
any change which diminishes or enhances this has a parallel effect upon
reputation. Thus the fame of Roger Bacon was renewed after an obscurity
of six centuries, because it came to be seen that he was a significant
forerunner of contemporary scientific thought; and Mendel, whose
discovery of a formula of heredity was at first ignored, became famous
when biology advanced to a point where it could appreciate his value.
There are many cases in the annals of art of men, like Tintoretto or
Rembrandt, whose greatest fame was not attained until the coming of a
later generation more in harmony with them than were their
contemporaries.
It is because fame exists for our present use and not to perpetuate a
dead past that myth enters so largely into it. What we need is a good
symbol to help us think and feel; and so, starting with an actual
personality which more or less meets this need, we gradually improve
upon it by a process of unconscious adaptation that omits the
inessential and adds whatever is necessary to round out the ideal. Thus
the human mind working through tradition is an artist, and creates types
which go beyond nature. In this way, no doubt, were built up such
legendary characters as Orpheus, Hercules, or King Arthur, while the
same factor enters into the fame of historical persons like Joan of Arc,
Richard I, Napoleon, and even Washington and Lincoln. It is merely an
extension of that idealization which we apply to all the objects of our
hero-worship, whether dead or living.
And where a historical character becomes the symbol of a perennial
ideal, as in the case of Jesus, his fame becomes a developing
institution, changing its forms with successive generations and modes of
thought, according to the needs of the human spirit. This, apparently,
is the genesis of all life-giving conceptions of divine personality.
There are aspects of fame that cannot be understood without considering
the special influence upon it of the literary class. This class has
control of the medium of communication through which fame chiefly works,
and so exerts a power over it somewhat analogous to the power of the
financial class over trade; in both cases the forces of demand and
supply are transformed by the interests of the mediating agent.
One result of this is that literary fame is, of all kinds, the most
justly assigned. Candidates for it, of any merit, are rarely overlooked,
because there is always a small society of inquiring experts eager and
able to rescue from oblivion any trait of kindred genius. They are not
exempt from conventionalism and party spirit, which may make them unjust
to contemporaries, but a second or third generation is sure to search
out anything that deserves to survive, and reject the unworthy. “There
is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict
upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when
it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to
be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man’s title to
fame. Only those books come down which deserve to last.”[27] In this
way, by the reiterated selection of an expert class with power to hand
on their judgments, there is a sure evolution of substantial fame.
“Was glaenzt ist für den Augenblick geboren,
Das Echte bleibt der Nachwelt unverloren.”[28]
The popular judgment of the hour has little to do with the matter, one
way or the other. An author may be a “best seller,” like Walter Scott,
or almost unread, like Wordsworth, and fare equally well with the higher
court; though in this as in all departments of life most contemporary
reputations prove transitory, because their “fitness” is to a special
and passing phase of the human mind, and not to its enduring needs.
However, literary reputation also has its symbolism, and a name may come
to be remembered as the type of a school or a tendency rather than
strictly on its own merits. Sainte-Beuve, an authority on such a matter,
remarks in his essay on Villon: “But the essential thing, I see clearly,
even in literature, is to become one of those names convenient to
posterity, which uses them constantly, which employs them as the
_résumé_ of many others, and which, as it becomes more remote, not being
able to reach the whole extent of the chain, measures the distance from
one point to another only by some shining link.”
Democracy does not in the least alter the fact that literary fame is
assigned by a small but perpetual group of experts. In one sense the
process is always democratic; in another it is never so: there is
democracy in that all may share in the making of fame who have
discrimination enough to make their opinion count, but the number of
these is always small, and they constitute, in this field, a kind of
self-made aristocracy, not of professed critics alone, but of select
readers intelligently seeking and enjoying the best. The fame of men of
letters, philosophers, artists, indeed of nearly all sorts of great men,
reaches the majority only as the people outside the grounds hear the
names of the players shouted by those within. We know who it was that
was great, but just why he was so we should, if put to it, be quite
unable to tell.
This certainty and justice of literary fame, which distinguish it
sharply from other kinds, depend not only upon the literary class but
upon the precision of the record—the fact that the deed upon which the
fame rests is imperishable and unalterable—and also upon the extremely
personal and intimate character of the achievement itself, which makes
it comparatively independent of external events, and capable of being
valued for its own sake at any time and by anybody competent to
appreciate it. It is more fortunate in this respect than political
achievement, which is involved with transient institutional conditions.
For similar reasons the other and non-literary sorts of fame are certain
and enduring very much in proportion as they interest the literary
class. The latter, being artists or critics of art, have a natural
predilection for other arts as well as their own, and cherish the fame
of painters, sculptors, actors, and musicians. Actors, especially, whose
art leaves no record of its own, would scarcely be remembered were it
not for the enthusiasm of literary admirers, like Lamb and Hazlitt and
Boswell. As to painting or sculpture, thousands of us who have little
direct knowledge or appreciation of the great names have learned to
cherish them at second hand through the fascination of what has been
written by admiring men of letters. On the other hand, the comparative
neglect of inventors, engineers, and the captains of industry and
commerce is due in great part to their not appealing strongly to the
literary type of mind.
If one’s work has no universal appeal to human nature, nor any special
attraction for the literary class, it may yet survive in memory if there
is a continuing technical group, with a recorded tradition, to which it
is significant. Professions, like law, surgery, and engineering; the
branches of scientific research, as astronomy, geology, and
bacteriology; long-lived practical interests, like horticulture and
breeding; even traditional sports and pastimes, like golf, yachting,
pugilism, and football, have their special records in which are
enshrined the names of heroes who will not be forgotten so long as the
group endures. A tradition of this kind has far more power over time
than the acclaim of all the newspapers of the day, which indeed, without
the support of a more considerate judgment, is _vox et præterea nihil_.
I can see no reason to expect that the men of our day who are notable
for vast riches, or even for substantial economic leadership in addition
to riches, will be remembered long after their deaths. This class of
people have been soon forgotten in the past, and the case is not now
essentially different. They have no lasting spiritual value to preserve
their names, nor yet do they appeal to the admiration and loyalty of a
continuous technical group. Their services, though possibly greater than
those of statesmen and soldiers who will be remembered, are of the sort
that the world appropriates without much commemoration.
A group which is important as a whole, and holds the eye of posterity
for that reason, preserves the names of many individual members of no
great importance in themselves. They help each other to burn, like
sticks in a heap, when each one by itself might go out. English
statesmen and men of letters have a great advantage over American in
this respect, because they belong to a more centralized and interrelated
society. To know Burke and Goldsmith and Johnson is also to know Garrick
and Boswell, and Mrs. Thrale, Fox, North, Pitt, Sheridan, Walpole, and
many others, who, like characters in a play, are far more taken together
than the mere sum of the individuals. Indeed a culture group and epoch
of this kind _is_ a sort of play, appealing to a complex historical and
dramatic interest, and animating personalities by their membership in
the whole. We love to domesticate ourselves in it, when we might not
care greatly for the individuals in separation.
So every “great epoch”—the Age of Pericles in Athens, of Augustus in
Rome, of the Medici in Florence, of Elizabeth in England, gives us a
group of names which shine by the general light of their time. And in
the same way a whole nation or civilization which has a unique value for
mankind may give immortality to a thousand persons and events which
might otherwise be insignificant. Of this the best illustration is, no
doubt, the Hebrew nation and history, as we have it in the Bible, which
unites patriarchs, kings, prophets, apostles and minor characters in one
vast symbol.
Another influence of similar character is the knowledge and feeling that
the fame in question is accepted and social, so that we are part of a
fellowship to be moved by it. I take it that much of the delight that
people have in reading Horace comes from the sense of being in the
company not only of Horace but of hundreds of Horace-spirited readers.
We love things more genially when we know that others have loved them
before us.
The question whether fame is just, considered as a reward to the
individual, must on the whole be answered: No, especially if, for the
reasons already given, we except the literary class. Justice in this
sense has little to do with the function of fame as a symbol for
impressing certain ideas and sentiments and arousing emulation. What
name best meets this purpose is determined partly by real service, but
largely by opportuneness, by publicity, by dramatic accessories, and by
other circumstances which, so far as the individual is concerned, may be
called luck. “So to order it that actions may be known and seen is
purely the work of fortune,” says Montaigne, “’tis chance that helps us
to glory.... A great many brave actions must be expected to be performed
without witness, and so lost, before one turns to account; a man is not
always on the top of a breach or at the head of an army, ... a man is
often surprised betwixt the hedge and the ditch; he must run the hazard
of his life against a hen-roost, he must dislodge four rascally
musketeers from a barn; ... and whoever will observe will, I believe,
find it experimentally true that occasions of the least lustre are ever
the most dangerous.”[29] It is no less true, I suppose, in the wars of
our day, and of a hundred soldiers equally brave and resourceful, only
one gets the cross of honor. In a high sense this is not only for the
man who happens to receive it, but for a company of nameless heroes of
whom he is the symbol.
And so in all history; it is partly a matter of chance which name the
myth crystallizes about, especially in those earlier times when the
critical study of biography was unknown. We are not certain that Solomon
was really the wisest man, or Orpheus the sweetest singer, or Sir Philip
Sidney the most perfect gentleman, but it is convenient to have names to
stand for these traits. In general, history is no doubt far more
individual, more a matter of a few great names, than is accomplishment.
Mankind does things and a few names get the credit. Sir Thomas Browne
expressed the truth very moderately when he said that there have been
more remarkable persons forgotten than remembered.
We hear rumors of the decay of fame: it is said that “modern life ...
favors less and less the growth and preservation of great
personalities”;[30] but I see no proof of it and doubt whether such a
decay is conformable to human nature. Other epochs far enough past to
give time for selection and idealization have left symbolic names, and
the burden of proof is upon those who hold that ours will not. I do not
doubt there is a change; we are coming to see life more in wholes than
formerly; but I conceive that our need to see it as persons is not
diminished.
Has there not come to be a feeling, especially during the Great War,
that the desire for fame is selfish and a little outgrown, that the good
soldier of humanity does not care for it? I think so; but it seems to me
that we must distinguish, as to this, between one who is borne up on a
great human whole that lives in the looks and voices of those about him,
like a soldier in a patriotic war, or a workman in the labor movement,
and one who is more or less isolated, as are nearly all men of unique
originality. The latter, I imagine, will always feel the need to believe
in the appreciation of posterity; they will appeal from the present to
the future and, like Dante, meditate _come l’uom s’eterna_.
The desire for fame is simply a larger form of personal ambition, and in
one respect, at least, nobler than other forms, in that it reflects the
need to associate ourselves with some enduring reality, raised above the
accidents of time. “Nay, I am persuaded that all men do all things, and
the better they are the more they do them, in hope of the glorious fame
of immortal virtue; for they desire the immortal.”[31]
It is the “last infirmity of noble minds,” if it be an infirmity at all,
and few of the greatest of the earth have been without it. All of us
would regard it as the mark of a superior mind to wish to _be_ something
of imperishable worth, but, social beings as we are, we can hardly
separate this wish from that for social recognition of the worth. The
alleged “vanity” of the desire for fame is vanity only in the sense that
all idealism is empty for those who can see the real only in the
tangible.
And yet it would be a finer thing to “desire the immortal” without
requiring it to be stained with the color of our own mortality.