اولین سایت نشانه شناسی شوهر آهو خانم

Not in that he leaves something behind him, but in that he works and enjoys and stirs others to work and enjoyment, does man’s importance lie.

GOETHE

Chapter 13

Success and Fame

The struggle of the artist against the art-ideology, against the creative impulse, and even against his own work shows itself also in his attitude towards success and fame; indeed, these two phenomena are but an extension, socially, of the process which we saw beginning in subjective form with the vocation and creation of the personal ego to be an artist. In this entire creative process, which begins with this selfnomination to be an artist and concludes in the fame of posterity, two fundamental tendencies—one might almost say, two personalities of the individual —are throughout in continual conflict: the one which wishes to eternalize itself in artistic creation, the other which wants to spend itself in ordinary life —in a word, the mortal man and the immortal soul of man. This universal human conflict, which was resolved through many thousands of years by religion and the art which rested upon its ideology, has become more and more acute and difficult with the growth of individual art, until with modern artists it has taken on a form very like that of a neurosis. The conflict was always particularly intense in the artist, and this of course is one of the reasons why he was obliged to seize hold of ideological means for its settlement. For because of its “totality-tendency” the creative type is inclined, in this struggle between life and creation, to give up the one wholly in favour of the other, and this naturally intensifies the conflict rather than solves it. We have already discussed in detail how this conflict spreads itself over experience and production. I should like to add, in outline at least, how the same fundamental conflict is reflected in that most remarkable relation between achievement and success, which are often indeed in the harshest opposition. This problem falls within the bounds of our present investigation in point of subject—seeing that it concerns the artist and his creativity — but even in method it does not go beyond them, since we are once again concerned with interaction of individual and society. Nevertheless, I can only deal with it in outline because, whereas the history of religion and art provided a basis for the arguments in our earlier chapters, in this case the collective phenomenon which stands opposed to the individual — namely, the group or community — has been very inadequately studied hitherto. There is in fact no really useful social psychology which deals with the relation of the individual to the group, and vice versa, in a way which we could draw upon for the study of the special relation of the artist to his public and of the attitude of posterity to his work. We should therefore have ourselves to lay the foundations of a social psychology before we could apply it to our special problem; and this is obviously far beyond the scope of this investigation, which is, indeed, only a preliminary towards a social psychology. The problems of a group, of the crowd and its leader, with which we are here concerned, have been so inadequately treated hitherto that even Lange-Eichbaum, who, so far as I know, has provided the best collection of material, complains equally that he can find no basis of social psychology for his chapters on the effect of works of art and on the fame of the artist. Independently, in my book Modern Education, 1 had found myself compelled to give a sketch of a psychology of leadership, because in the very little literature existing I found nothing of use. In fact, there is a complete lack of a fundamental study of social psychology, which has always been one-sidedly treated as art has, either by the psychologists in terms of the individual or by the ethnologists and sociologists in terms of the group; and there is no real common ground. Even these one-sided studies are of course useful as preliminaries, but they cannot be turned to account here, since they are merely peripheral and we have to study the particular relation of the artist to the world around and after him — though this study itself may of course provide another stone for the edifice of a future social psychology, which will have to take the relation of the individual to the group as its basic principle. We shall therefore begin by trying to show, in the light of our own study and without any regard for the ordinary views of social psychology, what seems to be the relation of the artist to his public and to posterity, and their attitude to him and his work. It seems to be quite certain that primitive art, in contrast to modern, was collectivist —though doubt begins immediately with the conclusion that Hirn draws, that the driving power of primitive artistic creation was not individual but social: namely, the imparting of pleasure. We are the less in a position to say this in that we know nothing of the individuality of primitive artists ; while it does appear on the contrary that primitive body-ornament, which is the preliminary to art and artistic creation, indicates strong subjective motives and forces. Probably both tendencies, the individual and the social, have always been at work, though naturally in different measure and with different emphasis. For just as primitive body-ornament indicates subjective tendencies in the otherwise collective view of primitive man, so also we find in the most subjective and egocentric modern artist a need to communicate himself, to rouse applause or at least to make an impression on others — in a word, to win success. This very rough schematization of the development-history has further to be toned down by the fact that artists emphasize the one or the other aspect, according to the times, from personal motives; and we must not be misled by the fashionable generalizations and slogans of the day concerning the artist’s exhibitionism and the like into forgetting that almost every productive type is also possessed of an opposite tendency to secrecy, which can in some cases be just as pathological a tendency as exhibitionism is in others. Even in judging this exhibitionism we must be careful not to take it at its face value, for what the artist exhibits in this apparently frank way is not his real, certainly not his whole, self, of which he only gives away part that he may keep the rest the more secretly for himself. Nor is it even simply that the artist always shows us his best side, in order to conceal his weakness and deficiencies. Experience has shown that man often has the opposite tendency to show his worst side and keep the best for himself. Without going here into the deeper individual-psychological reason for this attitude (for it is far from being explained by the concept of “ self-punishment”*) I should like to show here how this parsimony of oneself may affect actual creation and influence both success and fame. We can naturally study only the one side, that tendency in the artist which we have called the struggle of the artist against art, his work and success, and must ignore for the present the opposite tendency to want effect and success. From this one-sided standpoint the artist obviously creates for himself; we do not mean this in a narrow egoistic sense, but as primitive art was part of collective life, so modern artistic creation is an expression of individual life. The artist creates in the same way as he eats and breathes; that is one of his forms of life-expression, which — by chance, one might almost say — results in a work which happens to be of significance for others. But here begins in the history of the work a sort of second chapter, which we might call the discovery of the work of art: not by patrons or dealers, but by the artist himself, who discovers to his surprise that what he is producing has zsthetic qualities and artistic value. The attitude of the artist towards this discovery is of course determined by his personality, but in its turn it decides, to a considerable extent, the destiny of the work and therefore that of its creator also. For the creation was a liberating process of life, a bringing to light—a birth if one likes — which, though of great, is not of final significance for the future of the child.

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1 See my latest technical work: Die Analyse des Analytikers (2931).

The next problem which confronts the artist is that of giving on his part, and of accepting on that of the public. Obviously I do not mean supply and demand in the market, but a purely spiritual problem, which is one of the deepest there is: the problem, that is, how far the artist is willing and capable of “ weaning” this work which he created by and for himself, and how far he tends to keep it for himself, or at least refuse to impart it to others. We must leave aside here the important economic and practical motives which force the artist to overcome his opposition to public demand, though they may often be so strong or so emphasized that they overshadow all others. Indeed, many artists feel in this regard that they only produce for the public. This of course is true in part of successful artists; but psychologically what they do is to use the fact to justify their own need to create. But however the artist may settle this problem of publishing his work, the decision, coupled with other motives, affects his future creation. Whatever the admitted or hidden incentive, one motive for further creation is certainly the need to keep something for himself which others do not yet possess. That this work is meant to be something better is due not only to obvious artistic ambition, but to the already mentioned egoistic tendency to keep something better for oneself alone, to keep it away from others. For from the moment when the work is taken over and recognized by the public, or even merely offered to the public, it ceases to be the possession of the artist, not only economically but spiritually. Just as the artist created it from his own needs, the public accepts it to alleviate its own wants, and, whatever they may make of it, it never remains what it was originally; it ceases to be the personal achievement of the individual and becomes a symbol for others and sheir spiritual demands. This “ misunderstanding,” which the artist feels, is inevitable and the price at which fame is bought. While we have here an important motive of the struggle against fame, which is to him almost a depersonalization, we can trace in the artist an opposition to success which is perhaps still stranger. The artist or his circle may complain unceasingly of lack of success and yet they will often reveal motives which impede or delay that success. We have already mentioned one such in what we said above about fame: the retention of individuality, which is meant here not only ideologically, but personally. Achievement and success are seen to be psychologically representative of the two basic tendencies that struggle against one another in the artist, the individual and the social. Achievement is ideological, success is personal; and the more the artist achieves in idea, the less disposed will he be to follow this up by personal success; we might say, indeed, the less need also, since the great achievement finally transforms itself into success without the help of the artist. Our interest here is in the psychological attitude of the artist-type which has diverted the creative impulse away from its own person into art and its ideology. Here we come upon the same antagonism which lies at the root of life and creativity; for success, even when it is won by artistic means, implies a personal success in life and is thus that very life from which the artist had originally fled to art as a refuge. Gustav Ichheiser therefore is quite right to distinguish, in his subtle study: Kritik des Erfolges (Leipzig, 1930), between “achievement-competence” and “ success-competence,” though he does not go far enough beyond the social phenomena. He comments tellingly on the fact that with many individuals social success is automatically ascribed to personal achievement, whereas it implies rather that a man is skilful at “putting a thing across” than a really productive activity."

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1 Of the earlier literature on this subject I would mention here: Norbert Einstein Der Erfolg. Ein Beitrag zur Frage der Vergesellschaftung (1919); Julian Hirsch: Die Genesis des Rubmes (Leipzig, 1914); and the literary essays of Remy de Gourmont: “’ La Gloire et l'idée d' immortalité’’ and ‘' Le Succds et l'idée de beauté’’ (ago1), both in Le Chemin de velours; the last work particularly has a very modern analysis of the social réle of art. Philosophic thoughts on the greatness of historical persons, as well as of artists, in Burckhardt’s Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (see the special edition under the title Grosse, Glick und Ungliick in der Weltgeschichte Insel-Biicherei, No. 126). I would mention also that Max Dessoir’s Asthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft differentiates the type of man who accomplishes and the type who creates.

In artistic success or fame the process at work is indeed usually the reverse; for the artist’s competence is credited with, or directly associated with, his “deserved” success. In other words, the gaining of fame does for the artist what he cannot or will not do for himself: it hands back creative power from the ideological work to the individual, who can indeed nominate himself to be an artist, and even ideologically make himself one, but whose power of achievement does not include that of imposing himself. In this the artist, with all his opposition to pushing and publicity, is dependent on critics and dealers, who usually represent the complementary type of successcompetence without exhibiting any particular achievementcompetence. This successful type, which is usually centred on personal effectiveness, is in other ways too the psychological counterpart to the artist, whose only desire, indeed, is to achieve indirectly through his work. It differs from the artist particularly in the fact that his “ identification” faculty remains concentrated on persons and does not extend to ideologies as it does with the creative type; it is thus from this point of view much more personal than the artist-type, just as it is more personal, direct, and immediate in the assertion of its own ego. This brings us, however, to an essential quality of the public

in general, which is also decisive for its attitude to the creative type and his work. The average man has great difficulty in dealing with ideologies; he needs concrete personifications — in religion, for instance, or myths or leadership —and his preference for a definite concrete person is something that even such spiritual movements as Christianity cannot evade. It is here, and not merely in a curiosity and sensationalism, that the origin of the public’s interest in the person of the artist lies. This interest, moreover, cannot be satisfied with the usually dull facts of the artist’s external life, for his personality is inquired into, not for human or psychological reasons, but in order that he may be made the concrete representation of his work. In this also the public completes the process of artistic self-creation which the artist alone cannot achieve and would not if he could. For the residue of human nature which lies between his person and his work is his life in actuality, and it disturbs the harmonious unitary picture of work and creator which the hero-worshipping public demands. And we see at once the similarity between this and the creation of a god, a process which has been so magnificently successful because the god could be abstracted from the creation without even a cinder being left. But though the artist, at least at the summit of his ideological development, is far less dependent on concrete personalities than the masses, yet he cannot wholly dispense with them and is therefore dependent on men for a link between his artistic creations, however vital, and real life. In this need to make real and actual, humanly and through the public, the unreality of his creation and of the immortality impulse which is its symbol lies the deepest root of his striving after success and fame — since it is they that give his individual and ideal creation a completion in accord with reality and the truth of life—and it is this necessity that enables him to overcome the individual resistances, of which we have spoken, to the fame which collectivizes him. Here again we have the two root tendencies, individual and collective immortality, of which the second is seen to be the only permanent form and to which the first must be surrendered. But such a collective immortality is no longer religious, but social, however many religious elements may infiltrate into the psychology of fame and success. We must now deal with the relation of achievement and success, but particularly that of success and fame. Without committing ourselves to definitions of these very vague terms, I should like to refer success to the living and fame to the dead, or, more loosely, to understand by success something which means something actual to the creative artist (I do not mean merely material gain) — whereas fame, like work itself, has a more ideological significance and concerns the work rather than the artist. No matter how far this distinction is justified, it at least opens up the possibility of approach to the actual psychological problem, which is what chiefly interests us here. Fame, which we have taken as a collective continuation of the artistic creative process, is not always, certainly not necessarily, connected with the greatness of a work; it often attaches to an achievement whose chief merit is not its high quality but some imposing characteristic, sensational either in itself or in its topical circumstances. Putting it roughly, we might say that an achievement marked by supreme quality tends to bring success, and one marked by something other than this quality to bring rather fame, both then and thereafter; not only because the masses are probably inaccessible to the supreme quality and can only be gradually educated up to it, but because the qualitatively supreme achievement leaves nothing for the public to do— at most, to imagine another equally perfect creator. The one-sided or (psychologically speaking) compensatory work is more amenable to the catch-phrases of a fashion or movement, but to attain to such importance it needs certain favourable circumstances, whereas the supreme work can wait in peace, since the valuation it awaits will always supervene. In the other case, what the work lacks to make it complete is added to it by the social acquisition of fame. After all, society and posterity are far more concerned in this than in the original creator and his work, which is only more or less annexed by some collective need, as a means of giving concrete expression to some general trend, and at the same time to invest it with the sanction of genius. Seen thus, fame not only is a hollow thing, because it is almost a depersonalization, but is transitory, since it is dependent on definite circumstances which give it birth and with which it often perishes, even though later ages may give it a new life for other purposes."

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1 Well-known instances are the revival of Aristotle in the Middle Ages and of Plato in the present as the expression and justification of similar ideologies. Shakspere was unheeded for nearly a century and a half after his death, till the Romantics made him their ideal of the poetic genius. Goethe's influence originally, in Gatg and Werther, worked over wide areas quite anonymously; later in Weimar he was only admired as a poet by a small group of friends. It was only later still that he became the national hero of Germany, symbolized especially in Faust. Lange-Eichbaum has referred (op. cit., p. 195 et seq.) to the transformation in the poet in the growth of his fame. Luther, being pathological, becomes a hero type, the melancholy Mozart a lively contemporary of Rococo, One of the most interesting examples of this kind in the history of art is Virgil, who appears in the Middle Ages as a magician, a true predecessor of the black magician Doctor Faustus, whom Goethe again transformed into the type of the struggling poet's soul

Fame seems to attach itself to men and achievements which we call “epoch-making,” but when a creation of the moment is recognized and rewarded with fame, it is really conditioned by an epoch already in course of growth. Again, fame seems to come to men and achievements which do in some sense make history, or help to make it, exercise (or are subject to) some practical influence; in a word, act on life immediately and more directly than the higher artist-type who creates purely ideologically, whereas the epoch-making artist is something that the masses can develop further themselves, since this type stands nearer to life and practical success. I do not mean necessarily actual practical success, but the ultimately practical success of a whole movement, to represent which he has been summoned by the masses. For there would appear to be another contradiction here, between actual personal success and the renown attaching to epoch-making, just as a man who is personally very successful is often ideologically higher and draws no practical advantage from being recognized. Men whose work has been epoch-making and who have later become famous, whose work has had great practical influence, have often been dreamers and phantasts — and all the better material for the formation of legends (Columbus). It almost seems as though there were an economic law that only one party can extract something from a great achievement, either the man himself or others, either his contemporaries or posterity. From this it is clear that the chances for the creator to get something for his work are one against three, and that even the first possibility is never perfectly fulfilled, because he must in any case share his success and fame with others, and thus has to give up a-share not only in his work but of his own self, for collective valuation in terms of success and fame. These last remarks lead us once more to the actual problem of artistic success, which we have unwillingly lost sight of in this discussion of success and fame as social phenomena.

Artistic success, concerned with essentially ideal values — which indeed are ultimately the only epoch-making values, or at least used to be — is less disputed than success in other social spheres, and the person of the artist, in spite of all the public interest, vanishes to a very large extent behind his work. The building up of fame is a collective creation of the community, and thus the artist, with his work, becomes the material for a new creative achievement of the community. In the course of this process the individual work is incorporated socially in a particular community-group, which may in some cases extend to the whole of humanity, and in any case is oriented towards a common assertion of the immortality of the individual artist. When contemporaries or posterity grant an artist immortality, they participate in that immortality, just as burial in a royal tomb or a similar-intentioned burial in the church (as the grave of Christ) gives the ordinary mortal a share in divine immortality. The artist, therefore, not merely creates collective values from his individual need, but is himself finally collectivized, since out of the totality of his existence the community makes a new collective work, which survives as posthumous fame. From this point of view art is unintelligible without a consideration of its effect on its contemporaries and posterity — meaning thereby not its esthetic but its social and cultural effect." The continued existence of art through successive generations shows that the individual creative process, even its actual product in work, is no more than the precondition of collective creation, which selects and transforms whatever in individual work can maintain itself as an expression of the contemporary general ideology. The artist in himself provides in his work the raw material which the community uses in the creation of biographies and fame as an expression of its own eternalization. This partially explains the mysterious agreement between the great achievement and the prevailing general ideology — especially when we consider that this process always begins in the lifetime of the artist, who often anticipates this collective transformation by adapting his creation to a great extent to the needs of the community.

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1 As du Prel effectively remarks, the co-operation of the recipient begins even with the zsthetic pleasure, in which the individual annexes the work just as the community does in the creation of fame.

This obviously does not mean in the case of great artists a concession to the masses, but something of a deeper kind, a strong sympathy with the spiritual ideals of his public. On the other hand there is always a distinct reaction of the artist not only against every kind of collectivization, but against the changing of his own person, his work, and his ideology into an eternalization-symbol for a particular epoch. This resistance of the artist to his absorption into the community will show itself in more than his objection to success and fame; it will also influence his further activity so far as the assertion of his own individuality is concerned, and become a strong stimulus to further creativity in general. Certainly this will be the case with the great artist, who always tries to escape this collectivizing influence by deliberate new creations, whereas the weaker talent succumbs to a conscious concession to the masses or becomes mere raw material for the collective perpetuation instinct. These diverse outcomes of the struggle of the artist against success and fame explain, too, why many of the greatest geniuses only attained fame after their own time, and, on the other hand, why mediocre gifts enjoy a seemingly undeserved success. A strong-willed creator lends himself far less to collective influence than a merely talented artist, whose work may easily be made the material for a mass creation that genius opposes. But we see too in this matter of success and fame that the struggle of the artist against the art-ideology and his own creative dynamism is objectified and becomes a struggle of the artist against the community of living men and against posterity. The struggle is carried on on both sides and is so obstinate because it is at bottom again that opposition of individual and community which was the original source of all artistic productivity. The individual artist wants to free himself by his own creativity from the spiritual immortality-idea of the community, while the recognition of his achievement, manifested as fame, amounts to an incorporation of his own personality in that of the community. Thus general recognition of the artist and his work is the spiritual counterpart to his own asserted claim to be an artist; the latter is a gesture of independence, whereas fame, which is something granted to him, again makes him dependent. Success stands, in a sense, half-way, since it is both deserved and won by the self, but leads easily to the fame which must be bestowed by others. This brings us also to the positive side of the whole problem, which we have hitherto kept in the background, because it could only be understood after considering the artist’s disinclination to fame. The assumption that the artist seeks only success and fame originates with the unproductive type, who may not only be eager for it himself, but also be actuated by a belief that the artist wants to become famous, whereas really he himself wants to make him famous so as to participate in his immortality. It would be an exaggeration, of course, to deny that the artist is attracted by success and fame, but his motives are other than the motives of those who grant it to him. For the artist, success is a way of returning to life when the work is completed, and fame is a sort of collective after-existence which even the greatest cannot dispense with, since there is no more individual after-existence. The tragedy lies in the fact that the collective continuation of existence which every individual aims at extends in the artist’s case to a complete depersonalization in his work, or at least to its radical transformation into a collective product: in any case, leads far beyond the goal that the artist himself aimed at. Success gives him both, the individual justification of his work and its collective recognition, whereas fame stamps both himself and his work as a creature of the community. These observations indicate that the desire for success and fame may at first act as a stimulus to the creative impulse, but that later, when the artist approaches success or has attained it, other social ideologies must take its place. In any case this change in the social relation of the artist decisively affects his art-ideology, and the success-fame motif turns from a stimulus to creation into the material of creation and may thereafter as such determine the artist’s life as well. It would be fascinating to follow out in art — and especially in literary history — the relations between the personal success of the artist and the representation of success as a theme in his work, as well as the effect which the success attained has, not only on his creation, but on his life. The successful artist will evolve a quite different personal and artistic ideology from that of those who are not a success during their own lives. Many artists return, artistically or at least spiritually, to an earlier period of their struggle for success, as we can see from the well-known dreams of great poets and other successful artists, in which they seem to be set back in their modest beginnings. Here there is obviously a rejuvenation-wish, for fame has a flavour of death, and immortality is only distinguished by two small letters from the arch-evil they dread. But fame not only threatens the personal immortality of the artist by making it collective; it is moreover directly hostile to life, since it forces the artist to stay officially in the groove that he has chosen for himself. This is seen in success, of which we said above that it was a sort of “return of the artist to life.” It is a return which disappoints the artist because it does not give him freedom of experience, but compels him to further artistic creation. Success is therefore a stimulus to creativity only so long as it is not attained — which means, as long as the artist believes he can regain life by his success and so free himself from the bondage of creating. Bitterly, then, he finds out that success only strengthens the need for creating, and that fame, which is the end of it, leads to depersonalization during his lifetime and is of no use for life if it comes after death. The artist does not create, in the first place, for fame or immortality; his production is to be a means to achieve actual life, since it helps him to overcome fear.

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1‘In this context belongs Goethe's well-known remark about his repeated adolescences.

But he cannot get out of the bypath he has once trodden, which was to lead him back by means of his work to life. He is thus more and more deeply entangled in his creative dynamism, which receives its seal in success and fame. But along with all these expressions of the opposition of the artist to art-ideology, to the dynamism of creation and the final absorption of his individual immortality by the community, there must exist other, and even stronger, tendencies of surrender, self-renunciation, and self-sacrifice. These seem to be just as necessary for the artist as the tendencies of selfassertion and self-eternalization; and, indeed, we have had to assume that what is perhaps the most decisive part of creative dynamism originates in this conflict of opposing tendencies and their settlement in the harmony of the work. This conflict between self-assertion and self-surrender is a normal phenomenon in human psychical life, which in the artist is extraordinarily intensified and reaches gigantic, one might say macrocosmic heights. As the strong creative personality is driven to destroy a pre-existing ideology, instead of a mere individual, as his “ building-sacrifice”” before he may eternalize himself in a new one, the conflict between surrender and assertion, which otherwise takes place in relation to a person, is here manifested with society and its whole order as the player on the other side. The individual may, by his nomination to be an artist, have asserted his independence of the human community and rooted himself in self-sufficient isolation; but ultimately he is driven by the work he has autonomously produced to surrender again to that community. This creative self-suffcingness which generates the work out of oneself alone has misled us into thinking of the artist, at least spiritually, as a bisexual combination of the male and female principles, which create the work as it were hermaphroditically. But this view, which the artist himself often shares, is contradicted not only by the existence of definitely masculine or feminine types among artists, but by the complete lack of creative power in many hermaphroditic or homosexual types. In any case this explanation seems to me to be rather a metaphorical illustration of a much more complicated fact. I believe that we have here a deliberate denial of all dependence — in other words, a primary expression of an antisexual creative impulse which seeks to bring forth the world and itself from itself and without help. This tendency towards a self-suficing independence brings the individual into conflict with sexual life, of which the very essence is creation or generation by the help of another. But even the autonomously functioning artist, who may produce his work himself, is ultimately dependent on others for recognition, success, and fame, and even more so than the average man is dependent on his sexual partner. The artist therefore has to give himself the more and the more intensively and exhaustively in his work because he has created it the more independently of others. This seems almost a compensative justice, but is really only the result of a violent dynamism which wilfully alters a natural dependence of the individual into an apparent freedom in creation. Success and fame then supervene to assure the artist that for all his lordliness he is still dependent on the collective forces that he seeks to escape by autonomous creation. From our point of view, according to which an artist is made by the individual’s raising himself above nature and making himself eternal in his work, we might put it in this way: that success and fame make him once more a collective being, take him from his divine creative rdle and make him human again; in a word, make him mortal. However much he may like to return to earth and become human, he cannot do it at the price of his own immortality; and the paradox of the thing consists in the fact that success and fame, which make him collectively immortal, make him personally human once more and restore him to mortality. His work is taken from him by the community, as the child is taken from its parents, and in place of it he receives his title to fame, rewarded like a mother by a state hungry for soldiers. The artist, too, looks for this reward, but he hopes to return by his success to life, whereas fame condemns him often enough to spiritual death. If success is the result of an irresistible dynamism which gives success to that artist who achieves it, fame is in the same way the result of an irresistible dynamism in a community which is always hungry for material for its own eternalization. Every group, however small or great, has, as such, an “individual” impulse for eternalization, which manifests itself in, the creation of and care for national, religious, and artistic heroes. Yet this is impossible without the productive achievement of outstanding individuals, who then become the pioneers and victims of this collective immortality, whether they will it or not. In this sense success is a measure of the extent to which the individual paves the way for this collective eternity impulse; and fame might then be taken as an expression of regret on the part of the community which has annexed this man and his work as its own." In spite of this guilt-feeling, however, the community really only takes back what genius, by using collective ideology, had previously taken from it — magnified, it is true, by the personal achievement of the creator. And this is the more important since the community annexes the man and his work, depersonalizes him, and thus really robs him of the fruit of his work — in return for which he is offered the distinction of fame. Success and fame thus complete not only the work of the artist, but, far more than that, a vast circle in the eternal conflict between individual and group. The individual tries, by taking over a collective ideology which he creates anew in the personal sense, to assure his own immortality, and this is manifested in success; but the community, by the bestowing of fame, annexes for itself the immortality which had really been won by an individual, makes itself eternal in the work, and offers the artist in return its collective glory.

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1(Cf. a similar idea in Lange-Eichbaum, op. cit., p. 181.