“And yet,” my friend said, commenting on these unguarded statements, “I believe he is the only person of his intimate circle who does not know that he would be hopelessly bored—that the things he decries are the very breath of life to him. There is absolutely no reason why he should not at once and forever realise his fancied ideal—and if his wife and children do not urge him to do so, it is only because they know that he would be absolutely miserable.” And this is true of many lives. If the “recognition,” of which I have spoken above, were only accorded to the really eminent, it would be a somewhat different matter; but nine-tenths of the persons who receive it are nothing more than phantoms, who have set themselves to pursue the glory, without the services that ought to earn it. A great many people have a strong taste for power without work, for dignity without responsibility; and it is quite possible to attain consideration if you set yourself resolutely to pursue it. The temptation comes in a yet more subtle form to men of a really high-minded type, whose chief preoccupation is earnest work and the secluded pursuit of some high ideal. Such people, though they do not wish to fetter themselves with the empty social duties that assail the eminent, yet are tempted to wish to have the refusal of them, and to be secretly dissatisfied if they do not receive this testimonial to the value of their work. The temptation is not so vulgar as it seems. Every one who is ambitious wishes to be effective. A man does not write books or paint pictures or make speeches simply to amuse himself, to fill his time; and they are few who can genuinely write, as the late Mark Pattison wrote of a period of his life, that his ideal was at one time “defiled and polluted by literary ambition.” Nevertheless, if there is to be any real attempt to win the inner peace of the spirit, such ambition must be not sternly but serenely resisted. Not until a man can pass by the rewards of fame _oculis irretortis_—“nor cast one longing, lingering look behind”—is the victory won. [Sidenote: PURE AMBITION] It may be urged, in my case, that the obscurity for which I crave was never likely to be denied me. True; but at the same time ambition in its pettiest and most childish forms has been and is a real temptation to me: the ambition to dominate and dazzle my immediate circle, to stimulate curiosity about myself, to be considered, if not a successful man, at least a man who might have succeeded if he had cared to try—all the temptations which are depicted in so masterly and merciless a way by that acute psychologist Mr. Henry James in the character of Gilbert Osmond in the _Portrait of a Lady_—to all of these I plead guilty. Had I not been gifted with sufficient sensitiveness to see how singularly offensive and pitiful such pretences are in the case of others, I doubt if I should not have succumbed—if indeed I have not somewhat succumbed—to them.