XIII

AMBITION

I am afraid that Milton’s great line about ambition,

     “That last infirmity of noble minds,”

is responsible for a good deal of harm, because it induces high-minded persons of inexact ideas to think ambition a noble infirmity, or at least to believe that they need not try to get rid of their personal ambitions until they have conquered all their other evil dispositions.  I suppose that what Milton meant was that it was the hardest of all faults to get rid of; and the reason why it is so difficult to eject it, is because it is so subtle and ingenious a spirit, and masquerades under such splendid disguises, arrayed in robes of light.  A man who desires to fill a high position in the world is so apt to disguise his craving to himself by thinking, or trying to think, that he desires a great place because of the beneficent influence he can exert, and all the good that he will be able to do, which shall stream from him as light from the sun.  Of course to a high-minded man that is naturally one of the honest pleasures of an important post; but he ought to be quite sure that his motive is that the good should be done, and not that he should have the credit of doing it.  I have burnt my own fingers not once nor twice at the fire of ambition, and the subject has been often in my mind.  But my experiences were so wholly unlike anything that I had anticipated, though I suppose they are in reality normal enough, that I will venture to set them down here.  The first curious experience was how, on a nearer survey of the prospect of obtaining an important post, all the incidental advantages and conveniences of the position sank into nothingness.  This was a quite unexpected development; I had imagined that a prospect of dignity and importance would have had something vaguely sustaining about it.  A brilliant satirist once said that a curate did not as a rule desire to be a bishop that he might exercise a wide and useful influence, but primarily that he might be called “my lord.”  I myself was brought, as a child, in contact with one who was somewhat unexpectedly called to a high office.  I was much with him in the days when his honours first invested him, and I confess with a certain shame that it did undoubtedly seem to me that the dignity of the office, the sense of power, the obvious respect paid to him by people of position, were things that must pleasantly sweeten a mortal cup.  The other day I was in the company of an eminent prelate; there were three curates present:  they hovered round the great man like bees round a flower; they gazed with innocent rapture upon his shapely legs, somewhat strangely swathed, as Carlyle said, his bright, grotesque hat; and I could not help feeling that they thought how well such raiment would become themselves.  It is of course a childish view; but then how long our childish views survive, though hidden under grave pretences!  To see a