reason is that we wish to be unique.  Do not tell Fernandez that he is one of the most talented Spaniards of the younger generation, for though he will affect to be gratified by the eulogy he is really annoyed by it; if, however, you tell him that he is the most talented man in Spain—­well and good!  But even that is not sufficient:  one of the worldwide reputations would be more to his liking, but he is only fully satisfied with being esteemed the first in all countries and all ages.  The more alone, the nearer to that unsubstantial immortality, the immortality of the name, for great names diminish one another.

What is the meaning of that irritation which we feel when we believe that we are robbed of a phrase, or a thought, or an image, which we believed to be our own, when we are plagiarized?  Robbed?  Can it indeed be ours once we have given it to the public?  Only because it is ours we prize it; and we are fonder of the false money that preserves our impress than of the coin of pure gold from which our effigy and our legend has been effaced.  It very commonly happens that it is when the name of a writer is no longer in men’s mouths that he most influences his public, his mind being then disseminated and infused in the minds of those who have read him, whereas he was quoted chiefly when his thoughts and sayings, clashing with those generally received, needed the guarantee of a name.  What was his now belongs to all, and he lives in all.  But for him the garlands 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.