Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
and Wordsworth could predict that he would never die because he had written a song of a sparrow—
And in this bush one sparrow built her nest
Of which I sang one song that will not die.
Keats, it is true, lamented that his name was “writ in water,” but behind the lament we see the lurking hope that it was destined for immortality.
Burns, in a letter to his wife, expresses the same comfortable confidence. “I'll be more respected,” he said, “a hundred years after I am dead than I am at present;” and even John Knox had his eye on an earthly as well as a heavenly immortality. So, too, had Erasmus. “Theologians there will always be in abundance,” he said; “the like of me comes but once in centuries.”
Lesser men than these have gone to their graves with the conviction that their names would never pass from the earth. Landor had a most imperious conceit on the subject. “What I write,” he said, “is not written on slate and no finger, not of Time itself who dips it in the cloud of years can efface it.” And again, “I shall dine late, but the dining-room will be well-lighted, the guests few and select.” A proud fellow, if ever there was one. Even that very small but very clever person, Le Brun-Pindare, cherished his dream of immortality. “I do not die,” he said grandly; “I quit the time.” And beside this we may put Victor Hugo's rather truculent, “It is time my name ceased to fill the world.”
But no one stated so frankly, not only that he expected immortality, but that he laboured for immortality, as Cicero did. “Do you suppose,” he said, “to boast a little of myself after the manner of old men, that I should have undergone such great toils by day and night, at home, and in service, had I thought to limit my glory to the same bounds as my life? Would it not have been far better to pass an easy and quiet life without toil or struggle? But I know not how my soul, stretching upwards, has ever looked forward to posterity as if, when it had departed from life, then at last it would begin to live.” The context, it is true, suggests that a celestial immortality were in his thought as well as a terrestrial; but earthly glory was never far from his mind.
Nor was it ever forgotten by Boswell. His confession on the subject is one of the most exquisite pieces of self-revelation to be found in books. I must give myself the luxury of transcribing its inimitable terms. In the preface to his “Account of Corsica” he says:—
For my part I should be proud to be known as an author; I have an ardent ambition for literary fame; for of all possessions I should imagine literary fame to be the most valuable. A man who has been able to furnish a book which has been approved by the world has established himself as a respectable character in distant society, without any danger of having the character lessened by the observation of his weaknesses. (Oh, you rogue!) To preserve a uniform dignity among those who see us every day is hardly possible; and to aim at it must put us under the fetters of a perpetual restraint. The author of an approved book may allow his natural disposition an easy play (”You were drunk last night, you dog“), and yet indulge the pride of superior genius when he considers that by those who know him only as an author he never ceases to be respected. Such an author in his hours of gloom and discontent may have the consolation to think that his writings are at that very time giving pleasure to numbers, and such an author may cherish the hope of being remembered after death, which has been a great object of the noblest minds in all ages.