Sic transit Gloria mundi

From Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment. A very intriguing and rigorous discussion of what constitutes accomplishment, how do we measure it, and how do we explain it.

At the end of 1899, the editor of London's Daily Telegraph, with the assistance of learned consultants, selected the "100 Best Novels in the World" from all the novels in any language. In all, 61 authors were represented in the list of 100 best novels. Only 27 of them - fewer than half - qualified as significant figures in Human Accomplishment's inventory of Western literature. Seventeen of the 61 - 28 percent -were not mentioned even once by any of the 20 sources used to compile that inventory; not even by the most encyclopedic ones. And yet each of those 17 who are now ignored had written one of the supposedly 100 best novels of all times as judged in 1899. Sic transit Gloria mundi.

It is this sort of contemporaneous over-confidence that always makes me leery of the hoopla over the most recently discovered author or new gem of a book. Time tests them all and finds most wanting regardless of what experts and critics might opine.