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...