Success
It is sometimes hard to divine what a certain period in the past was all about, what its principal aim was, if indeed it had one. But the retrospective investigator of some hundred years hence will surely have no difficulty in discovering what our period was about. Discarding (since we assume him to be intelligent) whatever we may have produced of permanent and therefore universal and therefore uncharacteristic of any single epoch, he will devote himself to our ephemeral literature, once the last word in modernity, in his day totally forgotten, but preserved in the British Museum and the Congressional Library. He will also, to even better effect, pore delightedly over such bound volumes of our weekly and monthly magazines as he can obtain. And he will know with a most beautiful certainty that what our period was about was Success.
We can hardly miss the fact ourselves, since our novels do little but exalt success or revile it, and our magazines glorify it, and all our advertisements canonize it. We live in a utilitarian epoch (it is possible that this has been said before), and results are what people demand.
Well, results are surely important, and if one sets out for results it is of no interest, or of little, why he fails to obtain them. The fable known as A Message to Garcia is admirably typical of the spirit of the age we live in.
A Message to Garcia, if devoured eagerly by half a world, was an American fable. It is, in fact, America (however resentful older countries feel about this) that more and more sets the pace and the standard to-day. And possibly it is just the ability to succeed (less characteristic of the mass of Americans than they would have us believe, but at any rate characteristic of what they would like to be) which is most influencing the rest of the world.
The admirable things about success are so obvious as hardly to demand mention. Courage, determination, impatience with ineffectiveness and vacillation, refusal to acknowledge defeat, and a kind of drastic simplification of the facts, are among the virtues inherent in the doctrine.
It is, however, equally obvious that if nothing is to matter but success, the attainment of results, the results for which everything is thus sacrificed, and for which innumerable complex side-issues are swept away, must be of the highest importance. Yet extraordinarily little of the energy and intelligence so lavishly employed appears to be directed toward ascertaining the quality of the results to be striven for. That is assumed almost as a matter of course. All the magnificent effort is devoted to achieving them. It is as though in the midst of a terrific blizzard, with the roads impassable and no trains running, people all about me were to say: ‘It is very important that you should go somehow from New York to New Haven and buy a certain kind of lead-pencil made only there,’ and I should reply, though my lips were white: ‘Yes, it is very important that I should go get that lead-pencil made only in New Haven,’ and then should, in fact, at the risk of my life, make that journey on foot through snow-drifts—and procure the pencil. But the oddest thing of all would be if then New York and New Haven were both to ring with my praises, and there were not a soul, not even half-dead me, to ask whether a lead-pencil was really worth all that effort.
Well, any sustained heroic effort is admirable for its own sake. We quite properly admire explorers of poisonous forests and climbers of difficult peaks, even when there is little of value to be obtained by their reaching their goal. Yes, but this particular merit has nothing to do with the matter, but, indeed, runs counter to it, is one of those side-issues to be brushed away. ‘Results! Get results!’ is the cry. There is no way out of it: if the cry has significance it can only be because the results are important.
I wonder whether they are. The quality of our current civilization does not appear especially high. There is a cheapness about it that was lacking not only in more leisurely epochs, such as the first half of the eighteenth century, but also in others as fervent as this. The same splendid intensity of effort pervaded the civilization of the Renaissance as pervades our own; yet the quality of the former civilization was incomparably finer than that of ours. Since the energy is equally admirable in either period, it can only be the nature of the results striven for that renders one period fine and the other cheap. Neither do I think that this was because the Renaissance was All for Art and Art for All (a thesis of which I am profoundly sceptical), whereas our own is—what it is. No, one cannot dismiss current civilization loftily by calling it ‘money-getting.’ When did people not desire money—all the money they could possibly get? Read the letters of great painters of the Renaissance. Their social status was equivocal, and their demands were difficult to enforce, but they drove the hardest bargains they could, and cared every bit as much for money as do modern realtors. The problem goes deeper than that.
What is this success, for which all are striving with magnificent energy, to achieve which brings wide acclaim, and to fail of achieving which relegates one to contemptuous indifference? As I have suggested, it is not merely money-making. We, too, have our artists, and (a more important fact) in business itself, to which most men turn perforce, there are other aims than just that one. To build up a flourishing business from a decrepit one results of course in money-making, must be tested by money-making; but it is the building-up, rather than the financial profit, that is recognized as success.
‘Recognized as success.’ Here we are getting warm. The recognition is essential. You cannot in our modern American-led civilization be a success without being recognized as one. And recognized by whom? By majority opinion. In other words, it is not sufficient that a small heterogeneous minority, who more or less understand the kind of thing you are trying to do, should consider you to have succeeded. The recognition must come from the large homogeneous majority. A man may do something sensitive and significant in one of a dozen fields, but unless he obtains this recognition he is set down as a failure.
Here is part of the trouble. For majorities are always wrong—except when they are right for the wrong reasons. (Not a maxim of my own, but of Time’s). It is invariably a minority that is right. But there are many minorities, with as many varying minds, and most of them prove in the long run as hopelessly wrong as the majority itself. There was once a minority that considered Oscar Wilde a very great author, and another that thought Rossetti a very great painter. True, there is always a minority that turns out to have been right—I mean, what the centuries simmer down to approximate ‘right’—on whatever subject was in question; but how to recognize it—the more as it is a heterogeneous minority?
Fortunately, one does not have to. Even a minority is too much. There is one, and only one, judge of true success: the man who has succeeded—or failed. He is corrupted by vanity, he may desire avidly the acclaim of the multitude, he is full of falsities and pretences, but, all alone by himself, he has moments of clairvoyance when he knows, as no one else ever can, whether he has succeeded or failed in what he tried to do, and just how significant his success was, or how wretched his failure.
In this lies the difference between the Renaissance (or any other period of fine quality—I have no special brief for the Renaissance) and our own period. Then it was the individual who finally decided what was worth while. True, in the arts (to which one turns because after so many centuries they are what chiefly remains to us of the period) there was, perhaps, an unusually sensitive, intelligent and powerful minority opinion; but did the artists very much heed that opinion? Not they! It was not good enough. Throughout all his life Leonardo experimented. What did he care for the judgment of the minority?
We have come a long way from that point of view to-day. Success is no longer success without the sanction of the majority. More than that, at bottom, success is that sanction.
It is difficult to feel this condition of affairs as other than harmful. For while standardization of dress and behaviour are negligible evils, standardisation of thought comes pretty close to being the end, the abject death, of thought.
Take, too, that simplification of the facts, which I have mentioned as one of the essentials to modern success. Up to a certain point, and if the aim sought is worth while, it is admirable. The world is altogether too ‘full of a number of things’ not to demand their simplification for the attainment of a single purpose. Some of them must be lopped off. But the larger your majority, the more primitive the simplicity it demands, and the more drastic the pruning. It cuts off living branches along with the dead. Even so, if its aim were only significant! But what it is trying to do is to make a flag-staff out of an umbrella pine. An infinite number of instances, all richly different, capable of a hundred diverse developments—and the majority wants them all the same: one meagre jejune type that it can understand. A forest of flag-staffs!
Yet drill and organize them as we may, this sorry but infinitely exciting world continues, and will continue to eternity, to be made up of some hundreds of millions of individuals, each one, if we will let him be, blessedly different from all the others. Therefore, the effect on these of our present standards of success cannot conceivably be permanent. Neither, one surmises, can the standards themselves. But for the time being, while they endure, the effect is disastrous.
It is not only that the results of our civilization, by which it will be known to future generations, are essentially cheap. They, the future generations, will, it is to be hoped, accomplish other and better things. There is plenty of time. It is also that a finer, truer, if less transmittable form of success is rare to-day: I mean, the full, free, robust development of the individual, whether gifted or not. This, not objective results, is what it seems to me success should mean. If the individual is very gifted, his development will, indeed, bring with it results that may influence men even after his death; but that is by the way, the merest side-issue. It is not, in fact, about the very gifted individual that I am chiefly concerned. However unduly hampered, he will thrust his head up eventually into the free open air; he will develop somehow in his own way, despite majority opinion. But the man with one talent will go bury it in the ground. Every one will tell him he ought to, and he will readily see that he ought to himself. ‘Good Lord, man! Talents went out with the fall of the Roman Empire! Can you buy anything with a talent? Just so much dead weight. Some day when you’re in a hurry, carrying it about will mean just those two seconds or difference that will make you miss the eight-twelve train to business. Has Jones got a talent? Have I got one? Go bury it quick!’
At first glimpse, this majority-ruled civilization appears a terribly strong, ruthless machine. Conform or be damned! Is it not akin to the stern puritanism of the early New England colonies? So a number of writers deem it, and therefore hate it, and cry out desperately against it. I am not so sure. Its results are, indeed, thin and cruel, but I am unable to see it as that fearful Juggernaut; the legend of its harsh strength leaves me unconvinced. For what is this majority opinion to which all must bow?
If a hundred million people really thought alike, it would be possible, even probable, that they were right. Not right, of course, on specialized subjects such as the doctrine of Relativity, the achievement and failures of Cubist painting, or the merits and defects of the Federal Reserve banking system, since these are matters which only a comparative few have the ability and training to understand, but tolerably right on the universal problems common to all men. But have we in America (which I take only as a symbol) a hundred million people who really think alike? We have not. We have not got a hundred million people who think at all. When you overhear pert snappy retorts hurled by waitresses or shop-girls at impudent young men, or quick lines got off by flappers at country-club dances, do you imagine that such crackling wit spatters spontaneously from these young ladies’ alert brains? Then you must indeed be out of touch with our civilization. Gleaned from the comic strips, echoed from the dialogues of vaudeville, its aim not to be original but the very latent thing. ‘You poor fish’—or ‘prune’ would be a hopelessly bad retort, being yesterday’s slang; ‘Wet smack’ (at the moment I write) a good one, being to-day’s.
Rising to higher matters, do you fancy that a hundred million Americans calling in chorus for the Americanization of immigrants, the conservation of the Nordic Race, and the election of Calvin Coolidge, signifies that the hundred million have reached their belief in the desirability of these things through processes of thought? Nonsense! A few individuals have patiently, cleverly, and with deadly repetition told them dramatically about these things in words of one syllable; and they have taken up the cry immensely, much as an insensate mountain hurls back tumultuous echoes of a single slender voice.
Thus considered, what becomes of this majority opinion? It is revealed as, at bottom, itself only a very small minority opinion. And such a minority! An idea to be apprehended virtually without thought must be so simple that in a complex world it can have no more relation to truth than Rollo of the Rollo books had to a human boy; and since it must, to appeal, be melodramatic, it must also be cheap. From a few score individuals, all appallingly cheap, superficial and incompetent, from the Northcliffes, the Edward Boks, the Lloyd Georges of the world, springs this dread majority opinion. In personal contact they cannot for a moment hold their own with men of real ability, and are considered by these with disdain or, more often, with careless amusement, for they are without quality, and their thought is too superficial to deserve the name; but they have a knack of charlatanry (though mostly they are not intelligent enough to know it for this, but fancy themselves inspired voices of God—vox populi, vox Dei) which enables them to get across to the multitude their tawdry ideas and ideals.
Strong, a civilization based on the thinking of such mountebanks? A single clear truth, ringingly expressed, would slay it; though no doubt it would yet go along for some time, not knowing it had been hurt, like the neatly decapitated giant of the fairy-tale, till something shook it and its head tumbled off.
The conception of success is a good deal better than most of the pabulum on which these masters of a civilization feed the multitude, presumably because in this case a not inconsiderable portion of the majority have devoted some thought to the matter and evolved from it a sort of philosophy. There are those merits about what they mean by success. But, with truly Northcliffian repetition, I insist that if success is the ideal, it can be judged only by its results. If what is meant by success is good, then its results will be good. That is no more than saying the same thing twice in one sentence.
What are its results? Oh, not any longer on ‘civilization.’ That is too big and vague a word. Let us descend happily to the concrete, to the only indivisible reality. Estimate the results of success on individuals, enough individuals, and you will then, and only then, have a true test of its value.
No one can do this honestly save through his own personal experience, through his own sincere and careful estimates of other human beings. Obviously, any one man can know but a few of his fellows—so few that it is risky work drawing conclusions from that knowledge. Moreover, his own personal traits limit the amount and kind of knowledge he can, even so, acquire, and render his conclusions dubious. Yet, so far as I can see, there is no other way. So I will take my experience, and do you take yours.
Have you ever known an individual who appeared to you the better for having achieved popular acclaim, recognition in the great world of majority opinion,—success? I have not. I have never known any one whom it had not—or so I truly felt—at least a little harmed. Something of fineness and brave integrity was gone from the best of them. One could not any longer quite safely say to any one of them: ‘Just there what you’ve done is poor, unworthy of you,’ and have him fight the accusation out on its merits. Suppose the man a writer. Expressed or not, there arose unmistakably to his mind the thought: ‘A hundred thousand readers have not found it so. That very passage has been praised in a score of reviews.’ It is not a question of whether he or his accuser is right; it is the matter of the harm that has been done to the man’s open-mindedness. Of value only as himself, he has become a sort of institution. And institutions are at once absurd and distressing, whether they are the Harvard Commencement, The New Republic, Doney’s restaurant in Florence, or successful individuals.
Among all the men I have known, the ones whom I have most deeply esteemed were men to whom no imaginable stretching of the popular conception would concede success. But I think that what they have, diversely, achieved is precisely what success ought to mean, since it has benefited, not harmed, their character.
But the final saddest note of this homily remains to be sounded. The worst thing—and also the strangest—is not the evil effect of success on the individual who succeeds; for vanity and self-satisfaction are universal human traits easy to arouse, and, if deplored, should be readily pardoned. Moreover, an individual who has achieved success, as success is counted to-day, is likely to be of too poor quality to waste many tears over. No, the worst thing of all is the effect the success of an individual has on other individuals, even intelligent. Hardly ever can they see him as they saw him before; they cannot now meet him quite on an equality; they are a little humble, slightly awed (though they may disguise the emotion beneath pertness or cynicism). For he has been sanctioned, he has been anointed, he has been canonized.
And, dear heaven! when one thinks of how and by whom, one is oppressed by a sense of desolation beyond even the ministerings of the Ironic Spirit.