ON THE LAST INFIRMITY
If you were to seek for the most irrational of all appetites, the one appetite for which you could not give any sort of reason, you would find it to be the strongest appetite of all: the appetite for posthumous fame.
Milton made a little fortune (in the literary sense of that word—and my fellow-hacks will know what sort of fortune that is) by calling it the last infirmity of noble minds. It is a very true saying, not only in its direct sense but in its implication. It is not only true that men who have conquered every other appetite hardly conquer this one; it is also true that there is something divine about the desire for fame, infirmity though it be. The mind remains well noble though still fully possessed of such a desire.
But explain the love of fame you cannot. It would be explicable if there were implanted in the mind of man everywhere and at all times a certitude, as strong as our certitude of the universe about us, that the individual soul survived death with a full, conscious, and continuous memory, and, on the top of that, would be more interested in what was going on here than in what was going on in its own place. No such certitude has been granted to man. On the contrary, those who hold the doctrine of immortality hold it as a special revelation and defend it perilously. The mass of men have been very vague or sceptical or negative about the whole affair. And as to the second part of the proposition, the idea that, even granted this personal, conscious and continuous survival, the soul would be more interested in things happening here on earth than in the things of its own place, no one has ever dreamt or could dream of saying anything so absurd. The farthest to which St. Augustine went (and he went as far as anybody) was to say that the soul, however blessed, retained the great human affections: men hope that this is true, though it is hardly doctrine. But neither St. Augustine nor any one else (that I know of) ever pretended that the damned or beatified soul was worrying about what Smith, Jones and Robinson thought about some verse it had produced, or was chagrined by their neglect—after it had got rid of the limitations of this world. Why, one does not even bother at fifty about what people may be saying of one's work at twenty-five. Most of us would rather it were forgotten, and some of us actually suppress it at great expense: buying up the first edition and leaving strict injunctions in our wills that any immature stuff shall not be reprinted after our death.
If this is our attitude towards a little development in the little space of half a little mortal life, what do you suppose old Homer cares, or the ever young Theocritus?
I say "young Theocritus." The adjective gives me pause. How old was he when he died? His verse was young ... yes!... but I have, at the moment of writing, no knowledge at all of the date when that remarkable littérateur gave up his trade. Bear with me a moment while I look it up in a book of reference.
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I find in my book of reference that he was born about 300 B.C., and that "he lived for a long time" at the Court of Alexandria. But my book does not tell me how long that "long time" was. Which reminds me of the parish priest of whom the story goes that he preached his sermon from this text: "Methuselah lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years and he died." He first quoted the text, then made a solemn pause, then added: "I have nothing more to say," and left the pulpit—a model to the rest of his order.
Anyhow Theocritus is dead, and he wrote in a very young fashion. But he would be a bold man who should say that Theocritus is caring now either for what I am writing about him here, or even for that magnificent sentence which Andrew Lang constructed in praise of him when he spoke of the "many-coloured flame of Theocritus."
No. The thing is inexplicable. On the other hand, it is extremely useful, as are hunger and thirst and several other little things of the same sort. It is useful to the end of the works of man. If it were not so, what works would man perform at all?