But one has to ask oneself what exactly an imaginative man means by
success, and what it is that attracts him in the idea of it.
Putting aside the more obvious and material advantages,--wealth,
position, influence, reputation,--a man of far-reaching mind and
large ideas may well be haunted by a feeling that if he had entered
public life, he might by example, precept, influence, legislation,
have done something to turn his ideas and schemes into accomplished
facts, have effected some moral or social reform, have set a mark
on history. It must be remembered that a great writer's fame is
often a posthumous growth, and we must be very careful not to
attribute to a famous author a consciousness in his lifetime of his
subsequent, or even of his contemporary, influence. It is
undoubtedly true that Ruskin and Carlyle affected the thought of
their time to an extraordinary degree. Ruskin summed up in his
teaching an artistic ideal of the pursuit and influence of beauty,
while Carlyle inculcated a more combative theory of active
righteousness and the hatred of cant. But Ruskin's later years were
spent in the shadow of a profound sense of failure. He thought that
the public enjoyed his pretty phrases and derided his ideas; while
Carlyle felt that he had fulminated in vain, and that the world was
settling down more comfortably than ever into the pursuit of
bourgeois prosperity and dishonest respectability.

And yet if, on the other hand, one compares the subsequent fame of
men of action with the fame of men of letters, the contrast is
indeed bewildering. Who attaches the smallest idea to the
personality of the Lord Lichfield whom Dr. Johnson envied? Who that
adores the memory of Wordsworth knows anything about Lord Goderich,
a contemporary prime minister? The world reads and re-reads the
memoirs of dead poets, goes on pilgrimage to the tiny cottages