in proportion as more people come by it.  Further, the difficulty of winning fame by any given work stands in reverse ratio to the number of people who are likely to read it; and hence it is so much harder to become famous as the author of a learned work than as a writer who aspires only to amuse.  It is hardest of all in the case of philosophical works, because the result at which they aim is rather vague, and, at the same time, useless from a material point of view; they appeal chiefly to readers who are working on the same lines themselves.

It is clear, then, from what I have said as to the difficulty of winning fame, that those who labor, not out of love for their subject, nor from pleasure in pursuing it, but under the stimulus of ambition, rarely or never leave mankind a legacy of immortal works.  The man who seeks to do what is good and genuine, must avoid what is bad, and be ready to defy the opinions of the mob, nay, even to despise it and its misleaders.  Hence the truth of the remark, (especially insisted upon by Osorius de Gloria), that fame shuns those who seek it, and seeks those who shun it; for the one adapt themselves to the taste of their contemporaries, and the others work in defiance of it.

But, difficult though it be to acquire fame, it is an easy thing to keep when once acquired.  Here, again, fame is in direct opposition to honor, with which everyone is presumably to be accredited.  Honor has not to be won; it must only not be lost.  But there lies the difficulty!  For by a single unworthy action, it is gone irretrievably.  But fame, in the proper sense of the word, can never disappear; for the action or work by which it was acquired can never be undone; and fame attaches to its author, even though he does nothing to deserve it anew.  The fame which vanishes, or is outlived, proves itself thereby to be spurious, in other words, unmerited, and due to a momentary overestimate of a man’s work; not to speak of the kind of fame which Hegel enjoyed, and which Lichtenberg describes as trumpeted forth by a clique of admiring undergraduates—­the resounding echo of empty heads;—­such a fame as will make posterity smile when it lights upon a grotesque architecture of words, a fine nest with the birds long ago flown; it will knock at the door of this decayed structure of conventionalities and find it utterly empty!—­not even a trace of thought there to invite the passer-by.

The truth is that fame means nothing but what a man is in comparison with others.  It is essentially relative in character, and therefore only indirectly valuable; for it vanishes the moment other people become what the famous man is.  Absolute value can be predicated only of what a man possesses under any and all circumstances,—­here, what a man is directly and in himself.  It is the possession of a great heart or a great head, and not the mere fame of it, which is worth having, and conducive to