Those Who Write for Immortality

Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

The Fame Tradition

The desire for fame is so ubiquitous among writers that it is sometimes described as "innate" in them. Certainly they write and talk about it a lot. Apparently they always have: the literature of fame is abundant in the Western world. But the familiarity even to tedium of the theme and the simplicity of the word mask a complex reality. What does "fame" mean? Where did the idea come from? How has it evolved? Does it have the same significance for writers as it does for other ambitious people? And if writers now, or in the past, seem to have been obsessed with it, were they all (it seems unlikely) of one mind about it? Did they all mean the same thing when they embraced or denounced it? Though the coming-to-fame of Romantic writers provides the main content of this book, this opening chapter, unlike the others, contains no reception history. It aims simply to set the scene by introducing a traditional cluster of ideas about fame—descended from ancient writings, domesticated in the Christian world, transmitted to generation after generation of schoolboys through the classical curriculum, and so widely disseminated as to seem second nature by the end of the eighteenth century when Blake, Wordsworth, Austen, and Keats were born. Given that the idea of literary fame emerged out of debates about fame in general, I start with a wide perspective and gradually narrow down. In the interest of brevity, and wanting besides to remain faithful to the earliest formulations, I have resisted the temptation to add illustrations from Romantic and modern sources, but they are legion.

Present and Future Fame

Though "fame" is hard to improve on as a general term for being widely known, its multiple meanings need to be disentangled from one another. "Fame" stems from Greek and Latin words meaning "to speak": those who are famous are often spoken about; their names are in many mouths. Hence we have the tradition of fame as Rumor (Pheme or Fama), a powerful and fearsome goddess personified in Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses. She has many eyes, ears, and tongues; she heedlessly mixes truth and lies. She is a creature of the present moment, a vehicle of contemporary opinion, notoriously fickle. Moralists and common sense alike warn against getting involved with her, and yet the desire for recognition and approval is so strong, and the rewards are so gratifying, that there has never been a shortage of contenders jostling for her attention.

Present fame, fame in one's lifetime, has much to recommend it—not least the material benefits of success, such as wealth and honors. Even serious thinkers allow that the seemingly universal, unquenchable urge to be known and talked about motivates great efforts and exceptional achievements and is thus, as ambition, a stimulus to emulation and progress in all areas of endeavor. According to Xenophon, Agesilaus the Spartan king "was in love with glory and won more of it than any man of his age," confident that if he were a good king he would "gain high renown both in life and after death." "'Rivalry is good,'" said Pliny the Younger, applying a phrase from Hesiod to the human condition, "when friends stimulate each other by mutual encouragement to desire immortal fame."

For the purposes of this study I shall be using "renown" to refer to present fame and "reputation" for the posthumous kind. (The distinction is familiar and significant nowadays, especially in a literary context, though it was not always so.) "Fame" itself can then be used, in keeping with common practice, as an umbrella term denoting either or both. Of other terms that have been used for ephemeral, present, or what might be called "mortal" fame, "notoriety" too often implies being known for wrongdoing. "Celebrity" is heavily freighted with Hollywood associations, and in any case is—with perhaps two exceptions, Byron and Scott—too strong a word to use for the status of writers during the Romantic period, no matter how successful they were. "Popularity," on the other hand, is not strong enough, though it does convey an important truth, which is that fame depends on numbers, a critical mass of persons to whom the name is known outside the private circle of acquaintance. The famous are public figures. It might seem obvious that there should be a direct correlation between numbers and success—the more the better—but conventional wisdom has swung the other way, as we shall see, favoring a substantial but smaller body of expert judges. One reason for the preference for smaller numbers is embedded in the etymology of "popularity": it comes from populus, the mass of ordinary or common people, a concept that easily shades over into vulgus, meaning likewise ordinary or common people but with more negative attributes—the ignorant, the uneducated, the lower classes, whose good opinion is not worth having. But the numbers issue is perennially and interestingly contentious, and social class is not the only concern.

Present fame or "renown" might or might not be worth striving for; it is in any case very often elusive. Those who, like Agesilaus, achieved it to a high degree could expect the continuing reward of memorialization after their deaths. But even those who failed in the contest might entertain the possibility of posthumous recognition. History celebrates many who were unappreciated or even persecuted by their contemporaries—s aints, prophets, pioneers. Socrates, for instance: in the first century, Phaedrus declared that he would not refuse to die Socrates' death if he could achieve Socrates' after-fame and vindication. He also said that if envy should deprive him in his lifetime of the honors won by his model Aesop, still he would find comfort in the consciousness of having deserved them and the hope that eventually Fortune would put things right. So from very early on, faith in the future offered consolation for disappointment in the present.

In the Tusculan Disputations of 45 BCE, Cicero used this kind of calculation about the future as evidence in favor of the immortality of consciousness, speculating that the soul after death might continue to be aware of goings-on on earth. So many illustrious men have given their lives for their country, he observes. Would they have done so without "good hope of immortality" based on "a sort of deeply rooted presentiment of future ages"? They must have expected that their names would live on and that they would be aware of the fact. Nor is it only soldiers and statesmen who think this way: he is able to give examples of poets and artists whose work bears signs of the same expectation. Nay, even philosophers "inscribe their names upon the actual books they write about contempt of fame." Cicero concludes that "inasmuch as all the best characters do most service for posterity [maxime posteritati serviat], the probability is that there is something of which they will have sensation after death."

"Posterity" is a key word here—with continuing resonance, as indicated in this book's preface. Those who deliberately seek lasting fame look beyond their own time and the people of their own time for a final judgment, in a kind of posterity worship that is paradoxically allied to ancestor worship (insofar as they find inspiration in famous people of remote generations whose names continue to be recognized and revered). Classical writers generally conceived of winning fame as an organic process in which the relatively narrow circles of recognition in one's lifetime widened steadily after death, renown growing into reputation as a name continued in circulation—though in some cases the process might not start early enough for the subject to enjoy it. Martial urged his friend Faustinus to publish his writings and not hesitate "to let Fame in when she is standing at the door"; after all, "Glory comes late to the grave." Cicero frankly courted both present and future glory when he encouraged Lucceius to write about him, and Pliny reveled in the prospect of being celebrated by Tacitus, which would be to his immediate advantage as well as giving him a share in the immortality he prophesied for Tacitus himself. It was also Pliny who described supreme happiness as residing "in the foretaste of an honest and abiding fame, the assurance of being admired by posterity, the realization, while yet alive, of future glory," and who admitted that the desire for an immortal reputation spurred him to work hard rather than spend his life at ease.12 Ideally—even normally—then, renown and reputation would form an unbroken continuum, but if they did not, if fame did not emerge in one's lifetime, looking to the future kept ambition burning.

Cicero and Public Glory

Reflecting on fame throughout his illustrious career, Cicero adopted various perspectives, from austere contempt to positive encouragement. His works form the root of a vigorous line of thought in political theory and were standard reading for many generations of statesmen and public figures. One of the most familiar passages occurs in "Scipio's Dream," where he expresses the belief that the soul, which is immortal, is released from the body at death into a transcendent realm "where eminent and excellent men find their true reward." Rather than pursue worldly success, then, the great man will aim to do right for its own sake. The spirit of Scipio Africanus urges the dreamer to "keep your gaze fixed upon these heavenly things, and scorn the earthly. For what fame [celebritatem] can you gain from the speech of men, or what glory that is worth the seeking?" In conclusion he reiterates the lesson: "Therefore, if you will only look on high and contemplate this eternal home and resting place, you will no longer attend to the gossip of the vulgar herd [sermonibus vulgi] or put your trust in human rewards for your exploits. Virtue herself, by her own charms, should lead you on to true glory." The chief point here is that the values and ambitions of earthly life appear trivial in belief systems that include a spiritual afterlife; earthly glory, whenever it might come, before or after death, is not the real thing. The persistence of this position, neatly summed up by Leo Braudy as "bad fame on earth and good fame in eternity," is a reminder that the idea is deeply invested in supernaturalism. Without denying Richard Terry's point that it can be seen as a secular alternative and therefore as a threat to orthodox religion, I would argue that insofar as the nexus of ideas mimicked that of orthodoxy and ran parallel to it, fame is a faith-based concept.

An important endorsement of Cicero's idea of "true glory" dating from the second century is that of Marcus Aurelius. He describes different degrees or levels of fame—none, or lifetime renown, or a measure of posthumous reputation, or "everlasting remembrance"—but then marks a difference not of degree but of kind between worldly glory and the reward for doing right for its own sake:

For all things quickly fade away and become legendary, and soon absolute oblivion encairns them. And here I speak of those who made an extraordinary blaze in the world. For the rest, as soon as the breath is out of their bodies, it is Out of sight, out of mind. But what, when all is said, is even everlasting remembrance? Wholly vanity. What then is it that calls for our devotion? This one thing: justice in thought, in act unselfishness and a tongue that cannot lie and a disposition ready to welcome all that befalls as unavoidable, as familiar, as issuing from a like origin and fountainhead.

But the position adopted by Marcus Aurelius and by Cicero in "Scipio's Dream" is not necessarily at odds with the one quoted earlier from the Tusculan Disputations. "Scipio's Dream" offers an idealized view of human conduct, the Disputations a realistic one. The two can be reconciled by accepting that if it is too much to ask that people should act upon the principles of virtue for their own sake, the motive of desire for fame (present or future) may still, as second best, stimulate them to great achievements. That is precisely the compromise proposed in the final dialogue of Cicero's De finibus, that "whereas the Wise ... make right action their aim, on the other hand men not perfect and yet endowed with noble characters often respond to the stimulus of honour [gloria], which has some show and semblance of Moral Worth." Juvenal echoes this idea in his tenth satire, giving it a sardonic twist: "how much more intense is the thirst for fame than for goodness." And Pliny, who freely acknowledged his appetite for fame, at the same time admitted that if he were a better man, he would labor for the sake of virtue alone, for fame is ideally the product, not the purpose, of good conduct.

The sublime message of "Scipio's Dream" exposes some of the flaws in the concept of reputation or "immortal" fame. No less than its supposedly inferior counterpart, renown, it reflects the opinions of mere mortals, albeit mortals of ages yet to come. It presumes a kind of stability in the future that is unknown to the present; why should it? And its favorite epithets of "immortal" and "eternal" misrepresent even the best possible outcome, for if fame depends upon human witness, mortals sustain it, and they will die. Put the case that mortals collectively could be said to be immortal, as Keats's nightingale, "not born for death," can be addressed as "immortal bird" (the race living on though individuals die off); even so, the race could come to an end, and there would be an end to fame with it. In the human realm, then, "immortal" and "eternal" are hyperbolical epithets—figures of speech, remnants of supernaturalism in the natural world.

Horace and Literary Fame

Writers were comparative latecomers to the hope of an eternal reward in this world. First up were saviors of their country and benefactors of their race, particularly monarchs and military heroes. In the oral tradition that produced the Iliad, it was the warrior Hector who anticipated eternal renown for himself. His exploits would be reported over and over again, and the tales of those who had died at his hands would reinforce the message: "my fame will be kept alive forever." The name lives on and is carried around the world. Reputation is thus a substitute for personal immortality, and the fame system either complements or competes with other supernatural beliefs. Eventually, the promise could be extended to heroes of lower ranks and to peacetime virtues, for words had the power to immortalize statesmen and lovers as well as kings and queens. Homer could be said to have led the way, though with a legendary character: in the Odyssey, the spirit of Agamemnon prophesies of Penelope that "her glory will not fade with the years, but the deathless gods themselves will make a song for mortal ears, to grace Penelope the constant queen." Centuries later, Ovid addressed a poem to his loyal wife, offering her consolation from his place of exile: "so far as my praise has power, thou shalt live for all time in my song." Virgil likewise had Aeneas respond gallantly to Dido's offer of hospitality: "While rivers run into the sea ... ever shall thy honour, thy name, and thy praises endure." But still it was the words and the subject of the words that were expected to live; the writer was merely the mortal instrument of that process. Writers had to see their own kind greatly honored before they could aspire to eternal life themselves.

That moment came in Rome in the first century BCE, when writers were elevated to a place among the immortals, notably in works by Cicero, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid that came to form the core of the school curriculum, so that their ideas spread as received wisdom into the general population. After their deaths, a well-known essay by Plutarch entitled "Were the Athenians More Famous in War or in Wisdom?" (or more simply "The Glory of the Athenians") asked whether it could be right to celebrate writers as much as military heroes, and answered firmly that it couldn't. All writing, Plutarch notes, is secondary to action. Men of action keep writers in business, so writers at best enjoy only a reflected glory. Poets and writers of fictions such as myths, epics, and tragedies are inferior to historians, who at least tell the truth; poetry is no more than "a childish pastime" in comparison with war. Critics disagree with one another about whether Plutarch held these views seriously. Perhaps he was just trying them out. Nevertheless, the very fact that he wrote against the idolization of writers is a sign that it was already happening—as it was, for example, during his lifetime through the set of lives of the poets in which Suetonius included Virgil, Horace, and Ovid.

Fame for writers, literary fame, was not altogether an easy fit with preexisting models of greatness and memorialization. The problem was not just that it was a latecomer, but that it was a special case. In the first place, literary prowess is harder to gauge than success in war or government. What would be the writerly counterpart to winning a battle, or even to an eminent act of virtue? In the absence of clear-cut proofs, how were great writers to be distinguished and rewarded—and by whom, who was to judge them? What course were ambitious writers to follow; whom should they aim to please; what policies or practices gave them the best chances of securing lasting fame? The rewards system might also prove to be problematic where writers were concerned. The customary indicators of success (prizes, triumphs, statues, monuments, shrines) were not obviously appropriate, and less tangible but more durable forms of memorialization through the words of historians, biographers, and poets might appear compromised, since writers already dominated the realm of language that is the ultimate medium of fame.