There is a whole race of beings to-day whose passion is to keep their names in the newspapers, no matter under what heading, "arrivals and departures," "personal paragraphs," "interviews"—gossip, even scandal will suit them if nothing better is to be had. Guiteau, Garfield's assassin, is an example of the extremity to which this craving for notoriety may go in a pathological case. The newspapers bounded his mental horizon; and in the poor wretch's prayer on the scaffold, one of the most heartfelt expressions was: "The newspaper press of this land has a big bill to settle with thee, O Lord!"[2]
[Footnote 2: James: loc. cit., vol. I, p. 308.]
As was pointed out in connection with praise and blame, more of our actions than we should care to admit are determined by this desire for recognition. The loud, the vulgar, the notoriety seekers are merely extreme illustrations of a type of self that most of us are some of the time.
Self-sufficient modesty. The other extreme is exhibited by the type of personality that is markedly averse to display and shrinks from observation. In its intensest and possibly least appealing form it is exhibited by people who become awkwardly embarrassed in the presence of a stranger, however fluent and vivacious they may be with their friends. This type at its best may be described by the epithet of self-sufficient modesty. To be such a person may be said to be an achievement rather than a weakness. To be self-sufficient and modest at the same time means that one is going about one's business, that one is too absorbed in one's work to be continually and anxiously noting what sort of figure one cuts in the world. To quote Matthew Arnold's well-known lines:
"Unaffrighted by the silence round them,
Undistracted by the sights they see,
These demand not that the things without them
Yield them love, amusement, sympathy."[1]
[Footnote 1: Self-Dependence.]
There are in every great university quiet great men who steadily pursue vital and difficult researches without the slightest reference or desire for cheap conspicuousness. In every profession and business there are known to the discriminating men who are experts, even geniuses in their own field, but who shrink back from the loudness of publicity as from a plague. There are a number of wealthy philanthropists in all our large cities who consistently and steadily do good works in almost complete anonymity. One finds in almost every department of human activity these types of self-effacing men who find their fulfillment in the work they do rather than in moving in the aura of other people's admiration.
The positive and flexible self. But in order to be effective in affairs, some positive force must be displayed, and modesty need not mean pusillanimity. A frequently observable type of personality—and socially one of a highly desirable sort—is the type of man who, himself standing for positive convictions, ideas, and principles of action, and not casually to be deflected from them, has sufficient flexibility and sensitivity to the feelings of others, to accept modification. Such a self not only has its initial force and momentum, but gains as it goes by the experience of others. A personality must be positive to contribute to the solution of difficulties and the management of enterprises, but it must be receptive in order to benefit by the ideas of others and coöperate with them. To have power and humility at once is sometimes sufficient to make a leader among men. Humility prevents us from rushing headlong along the paths of our own dogmatic errors; it enables us further to deal with other people who would be simply antagonized by our flat-footed insistence on every detail of our own initial position. The history of great statesmanship is in part, at least, the history of wise compromise. Nor does this mean sordid temporizing and opportunism. As John Morley puts it:
It is the worst of political blunders to insist on carrying an ideal set of principles into execution, where others have rights of dissent, and those others persons whose assent is as indispensable to success as it is difficult to attain. But to be afraid or ashamed of holding such an ideal set of principles in one's mind in their highest and most abstract expression, does more than any other one cause to stunt or petrify those elements of character to which life should owe most of its savor.[1]
[Footnote 1: Morley: On Compromise, p. 123.]