If this is our attitude towards a little development in the little space of half a little mortal life, what do you suppose old Homer cares, or the ever young Theocritus?
I say "young Theocritus." The adjective gives me pause. How old was he when he died? His verse was young ... yes!... but I have, at the moment of writing, no knowledge at all of the date when that remarkable _littérateur_ gave up his trade. Bear with me a moment while I look it up in a book of reference.
I find in my book of reference that he was born about 300 B.C., and that "he lived for a long time" at the Court of Alexandria. But my book does not tell me how long that "long time" was. Which reminds me of the parish priest of whom the story goes that he preached his sermon from this text: "Methuselah lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years and _he_ died." He first quoted the text, then made a solemn pause, then added: "I have nothing more to say," and left the pulpit--a model to the rest of his order.
Anyhow Theocritus is dead, and he wrote in a very young fashion. But he would be a bold man who should say that Theocritus is caring now either for what I am writing about him here, or even for that magnificent sentence which Andrew Lang constructed in praise of him when he spoke of the "many-coloured flame of Theocritus."
No. The thing is inexplicable. On the other hand, it is extremely useful, as are hunger and thirst and several other little things of the same sort. It is useful to the end of the works of man. If it were not so, what works would man perform at all?
There was a school which had half a dozen adherents in London, and two or three in Paris, genuinely attached to it (and many thousands repeating its formulæ insincerely), and this school said that the artist worked for his own sake or for the sake of art. Heaven knows their productions might have persuaded us even of that impossible theory. They were so bad; so very bad. But the artist, as we all know, does not work for the sake of art, still less for some secret pleasure of his own. He has that pleasure in working. He admires the chance which guides his hand. But his driving motive is fame. It is the driving motive, also, of all the failures--that is, of the great mass of men. And you have this ridiculous paradox about it, that immediate fame is everywhere suspected. Men everywhere have the uneasy sensation that if they are too much praised before death, they will hardly be sufficiently praised afterwards. And it is the longer praise afterwards that they seek. Endurance between the lips of men: The monument of the mind. That is, a fame of which they will know nothing, or for which, even if they know of it, they will hardly care. The poet says (at it again!)--