have faded, and he believes himself to
have failed. He hears no more either the applause or the silent tremor
of the heart of those who go on reading him. Ask any sincere artist
which he would prefer, whether that his work should perish and his
memory survive, or that his work should survive and his memory perish,
and you will see what he will tell you, if he is really sincere. When a
man does not work merely in order to live and carry on, he works in
order to survive. To work for the work's sake is not work but play. And
play? We will talk about that later on.

A tremendous passion is this longing that our memory may be rescued, if
it is possible, from the oblivion which overtakes others. From it
springs envy, the cause, according to the biblical narrative, of the
crime with which human history opened: the murder of Abel by his brother
Cain. It was not a struggle for bread--it was a struggle to survive in
God, in the divine memory. Envy is a thousand times more terrible than
hunger, for it is spiritual hunger. If what we call the problem of life,
the problem of bread, were once solved, the earth would be turned into a
hell by the emergence in a more violent form of the struggle for
survival.

For the sake of a name man is ready to sacrifice not only life but
happiness--life as a matter of course. "Let me die, but let my fame
live!" exclaimed Rodrigo Arias in _Las Mocedades del Cid_ when he fell
mortally wounded by Don Ordonez de Lara. "Courage, Girolamo, for you
will long be remembered; death is bitter, but fame eternal!" cried
Girolamo Olgiati, the disciple of Cola Montano and the murderer,
together with his fellow-conspirators Lampugnani and Visconti, of
Galeazzo Sforza, tyrant of Milan. And there are some who covet even the
gallows for the sake of acquiring fame, even though it be an infamous
fame: _avidus malae famae_, as Tacitus says.

And this erostratism, what is it at bottom but the longing for
immortality, if not for substantial and concrete immortality, at any
rate for the shadowy immortality of the name?

And in this there are degrees. If a man despises the applause of the
crowd of to-day, it is because he seeks to survive in renewed minorities
for generations. "Posterity is an accumulation of minorities," said
Gounod. He wishes to prolong himself in time rather than in space. The
crowd soon overthrows its own idols and the statue lies broken at the
foot of the pedestal without anyone heeding it; but th