The desire for a draught of the waters of Lethe is the trait of mediocre or inferior natures. And however much a really great man, as Goethe says, may condemn and abhor his past failings, and although he sees others clinging fast to theirs, he will never smile at those past actions and failings of his own, or make merry over his early mode of life and thought.
The class of persons, now so much in evidence, who claim to have “conquered” their pasts, have the smallest possible claim to the word “conquer.” They are those who idly relate that they formerly believed this or the other, but have now “overcome” their beliefs, whereas they are as little in earnest about the present as they were about the past. They see only the mechanism, not the soul of things, and at no stage what they believe themselves to have conquered was deep in their natures.
In contrast with these it may be noticed with what painful care great men render even the, apparently, most minute details in their own biographies: for them the past and present are equal; with others neither of the two are real.
The famous man realises how everything, even the smallest, most secondary, matters played an important part in his life, how they have helped his development, and to this fact is due his extraordinary reverence for his own memoirs. And such an autobiography is not written all at once, as it were, with one event treated like another, and without meditation; nor does the idea of it suddenly occur to a man; the material for such a work by a great man, so to speak, is always at hand.
His new experiences acquire a deeper significance because of the past, which is always present to him, and hence the great man and only the great man, feels that he himself is in very truth a “man of destiny.” And so it comes that great men are always more “superstitious” than average men. To sum up, I may say:
A man is himself important precisely in proportion that all things seem important to him.
In the course of further investigation this dictum will be seen to have a deep significance even apart from its bearing on the universality, comprehension, and comparison exhibited by the genius.
The position of woman in these matters is not difficult to explain. A real woman never becomes conscious of a destiny, of her own destiny; she is not heroic; she fights most for her possessions, and there is nothing tragic in the struggle as her own fate is decided with the fate of her possessions.