Our =social self-seeking=, in turn, is carried on directly through our
amativeness and friendliness, our desire to please and attract notice
and admiration, our emulation and jealousy, our love of glory,
influence, and power, and indirectly through whichever of the material
self-seeking impulses prove serviceable as means to social ends. That
the direct social self-seeking impulses are probably pure instincts is
easily seen. The noteworthy thing about the desire to be 'recognized' by
others is that its strength has so little to do with the worth of the
recognition computed in sensational or rational terms. We are crazy to
get a visiting-list which shall be large, to be able to say when any one
is mentioned, "Oh! I know him well," and to be bowed to in the street by
half the people we meet. Of course distinguished friends and admiring
recognition are the most desirable--Thackeray somewhere asks his readers
to confess whether it would not give each of _them_ an exquisite
pleasure to be met walking down Pall Mall with a duke on either arm. But
in default of dukes and envious salutions almost anything will do for
some of us; and there is a whole race of beings to-day whose passion is
to keep their names in the newspapers, no matter under what heading,
'arrivals and departures,' 'personal paragraphs,' 'interviews,'--gossip,
even scandal, will suit them if nothing better is to be had. Guiteau,
Garfield's assassin, is an example of the extremity to which this sort
of craving for the notoriety of print may go in a pathological case. The
newspapers bounded his mental horizon; and in the poor wretch's prayer
on the scaffold, one of the most heart-felt expressions was: "The
newspaper press of this land has a big bill to settle with thee, O
Lord!"
Not only the people but the places and things I know enlarge my Self in
a sort of metaphoric social way. '_Ça me connaît_,' as the French
workman says of the implement he can use well. So that it comes about
that persons for whose _opinion_ we care nothing are nevertheless
persons whose notice we woo; and that many a man truly great, many a
woman truly fastidious in most respects, will take a deal of trouble to
dazzle some insignificant cad whose whole personality they heartily
despise.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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