Page:Under the Microscope - Swinburne (1899).djvu/37

 would thrust a man forward to shriek out in reply some assertion of his own injured merit and the value of the work which he for instance has done for the world even in this much maligned generation. No man can prove or disprove his own worth except by his own work; and is it after all so grave a question to determine whether the merit of that be more or less? The world in its time will not want for great men, though he in his time be never so small; and if, small or great, he be a man of any courage or of any sense, he will find comfort and delight enough to last his time in the quite unmistakeably and indubitably great work of other men past or present, without any such irritable prurience of appetite for personal fame or hankering retrospection of regret for any foiled ambitions of his own. This temper of mind, which all men should be able to attain, must preserve him from the unprofitable and ignoble sufferings of fools and cowards; and self-contempt, the appointed scourge of all envious egotists, will have no sting for him. And once aware that his actual merit or demerit is no such mighty matter in the world's eye, and the success or failure of his own life's work in any line of thought or action is probably not of any incalculable importance to his own age or the next, the man who has learnt not to care overmuch about his real rank and relation to other workmen as greater or less than they, will hardly trouble himself overmuch