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 happiness. Not fame, but that which