idea of what success itself means, what it stands for to us, what
proportion of our real life it represents. Success is the watchword of
American life--one might almost, indeed, say that it is made the test of
our national life to a far greater degree than in any other country.
The elements are well defined in Emerson's phrase of "the _flowing_
conditions of life." They are, indeed, more than merely plastic and
malleable; they are fluid, flowing, and the constant advance into higher
states of life is precisely in proportion to the mental and moral force
of the individual brought to bear upon them. Even this assertion,
however, is to hold in the light of the true conception of success
itself. We see a man whose life is conspicuously that of mental and
moral force, working faithfully and ably day by day, year by year, and
yet never being free from certain financial anxieties, if not financial
needs; while his neighbor, who is neither very learned nor able, nor yet
in any wise remarkable in his moral development, is living much after
the fashion of Midas, whose touch turned everything to gold. But is gold
the test of success?
The panorama of life is a complicated one. It used to be the fashion of
the novelists to represent the world of riches and fashion as the world
devoid of sympathy and love, and often, indeed, as devoid even of moral
principle; while the world of poverty and toil was held up as composed
of men and women whose lives were all unselfishness and sacrifice, and
as those who truly followed the example of Him who was meek and lowly of
heart. But the panorama of actual life reveals no such sharply defined
divisions as that. Virtue and vice are not checked off into special and
separate regions; wealth has its greatness of mind and beneficence of
sympathy and love, and poverty has its selfishness and cruelty and
injustice. Other things being equal, the command of unlimited means may
be so used as to make it one of the great blessings of life, and this
fact is attended and illustrated by such an increasing array of evidence
as to make the statement merely the trite one of every-day fact. Again,
that prominence in affairs that we call position is good if rightly
used, and to an increasing degree it is so used. _Noblesse oblige_ is
the watchword of modern life.
"Success in thyself, which is best of all."
That line from a poem of Emerson's most clearly defines true success.
The "power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power
of beauty, and the power of social life and manners,"--to achieve such
power as is thus enumerated by Matthew Arnold, and adding to it that
which is greater than all, and that without which all else is useless
and unvitalized, the power of the Divine energy received through
prayer,--these are the powers and achievements that tend to the true and
only success,--the success of character.
New conceptions of the old watchwords of life are in the air. In
"Culture" President Eliot of Harvard sees new points of view; he finds a
new definition of the cultivated man, who is not, in this
Twentieth-Century reading of the term, to be "a weak, critical,
fastidious creature, vain of a little exclusive information or of an
uncommon knack in Latin verse or mathematical logic; he is to be a man
of quick perceptions, broad sympathies, and wide affinities, responsive
but independent, self-reliant but deferential, loving truth and candor,
but also moderation and proportion, courageous but gentle, not finished
but perfecting."
"The situation that has not its ideal was never yet occupied by man,"
well said Goethe; and perhaps one of the greatest aids to both
achievement and happiness would be to recognize this ideal as the
standard placed before one, the model after which he is to fashion his
life, because he is, now and here, in the Divine Presence, because now
and here he "stands before God." Nor is this too sublime a test for the
trivialities of every day. As a matter of truth, nothing is trivial that
has to do with the life of the spirit. The petty irritations,
impatience, vexations, and disappointments of life are things that
affect one's spiritual quality, that make or mar his higher self, that
accelerate or retard his progress in the upward way, according as these
feelings are allowed to take control or are resolutely conquered. The
occurrences that excite them are, to the life of the spirit, like the
"gifts" in a kindergarten,--they are the object lessons by means of
which growth and progress are attained. Now, if one can conceive of his
life, every day, every hour, as lived in the very presence of the
Divine; if he can realize himself at all times as "standing before God,"
how this recognition transforms all the conditions and circumstances!
The drama of living is instantly lifted up to a higher plane. That which
was hard becomes easy; that which was sad, or dull, or unattractive,
becomes invested with interest. One is living, not unto himself, but
unto God. He is living within that marvellous, all-enfolding charm and
radiance. He is an actor in the great spiritual drama, and he feels the
stimulus of playing his part nobly and well.
And they who have gone behind the curtain come forth and minister to
him. He is aware of the courage of companionship.
"'Mortal,' they softly say,
'Peace to thy heart.
We, too, yes, mortal,
Have been as thou art.'"
Voices unheard by the outer ear speak to the soul; presences unseen by
the eye are yet felt, giving their sympathy and stimulus.
It is good to remember that it is not only after death that the soul
stands before God; that here and now is the heavenly test to which life
must be held amenable; here and now must one make his thought and his
acts those that know only the ideals of love and generosity and
sweetness and courage. One may thus call up all his higher forces to
meet misunderstandings with patience and with love: to meet adverse
fortune with courage and with stronger and more intense endeavor; to
live above the tide of jar or fret so as to dwell in perpetual radiance
and sunshine of spirit. This is to "stand before God" here and now,
through the days and the experiences of the life that is, as well as to
anticipate standing before His Presence in that which is to come.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Open Door.]
Visions and enthusiasms are the only true guides in life. To keep true
to the ideal dream that in some rare and exalted moment falls upon the
soul, is to set one's steps toward that success which lies in
fulfilment. Such dreams may be obscured by passing clouds; they may
become entangled with the transient and the trivial; but nothing that is
temporary holds over them any power to disintegrate or to destroy, for
they are made of heavenly revealings and illuminations.
The ideal that reveals itself in a sudden vision of the higher harmonies
and achievements possible to human life is but another name for the
Opportunity which Shakespeare defines,--the opportunity that, if one
fail to accept it, vanishes, to leave all the remainder of life "bound
in shallows and in miseries."
There is something about hesitation and reconsiderations that is
curiously fatal to successful achievement. Good fortune is in going
on,--not in going back. The parable of Lot's wife, who turned into a
pillar of salt because she looked back, is by no means inapplicable to
the life of to-day. Let one on whom the vision has shone look backward
instead of forward and he becomes paralyzed and immovable. He has
invoked inimical influences. He is impeded by the shallows and the
miseries. He has withdrawn himself from all the heavenly forces that
lead him on. The fidelity to the vision is the vital motor. It gives
that exhilaration of energy which makes possible the impossible.
"The Americans have many virtues," said Emerson, "but they have not
Faith and Hope. I know no two words whose meaning is more lost sight of.
We use these words as if they were as obsolete as Selah. And yet they
have the broadest meaning and the most cogent application. The opening
of the spiritual senses," continues Emerson, "disposes men even to
greater sacrifices, to leave their signal talents, their means and skill
of procuring a present success, their power and their fame,--to cast all
things behind in the insatiable thirst for divine communications. A
purer fame, a greater power, rewards the sacrifice."
Each recurring New Year is an open door. However arbitrary are the
divisions of Time, there is inspiration and exaltation in standing on
the threshold of an untried year, with its fresh pages awaiting record.
It is, again, the era of possibilities. The imaginative faculty of the
soul must, indeed, be "fed with objects immense and eternal." Life
stretches before one in its diviner unity,--even in the wholeness of the
life that is and that which is to come. There is not one set of motives
and purposes to be applied to this life, and another set to that which
awaits us. This is the spiritual world, here and now, and it is the
business of man to live divinely in it; to be responsive to the
enthusiasms that enchant his thought; to be faithful to the vision that
beckons him on. It is well to drop the old that one may seize the new.
Progress lies in a successive series of new conditions. Let one give all
and ask for nothing,--let him yield himself wholly to the overpowering
enthusiasm; let him not look backward from his vision of the Morning
Star and the Promised Land, and thus shall the New Year fulfil itself in
ever widening glory and that enchanting loveliness which invests the
higher fulfilments of life.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Interruptions as Opportunities.]
"To work, to help and to be helped, to learn sympathy through suffering,
to learn faith by perplexity, to reach truth through wonder,--behold!
this is what it is to prosper, this is what it is to live," said
Phillips Brooks. When Herbert Spencer produced his great "Data of
Ethics" he did not consider in it the ethics of interruptions which
sometimes assume a formidable place in the strenuous life. One is
perhaps exceptionally patient and tolerant when it is a question of
great trial or calamity, and not infrequently very impatient with the
trifling annoyances and demands and interruptions that occur. Yet, is
there not just here a richness of opportunity in the aim to "do good to
all men" that may often be unrecognized? A writer who may be pressed for
time finds in his mail-matter a number of personal requests from
strangers. One package contains manuscripts, perhaps, which a woman in
Montana entreats shall be read and returned with advice or suggestion.
Some one in Texas wants a paragraph copied that he may use it in
compiling a calendar. An individual in Indiana has a collection of
autographs for sale and begs to know of the ways and means for disposing
of them. And an author in Arizona desires that a possible publisher be
secured for her novel; and so the requests run on. Strictly speaking,
perhaps, no one of these has any real right to thus tax the time and
energy of a stranger; but is there not another side to it? Here are an
array of interruptions, but why not give them another name--that of
opportunities? One has, perhaps, his theories and his convictions
regarding the service of humanity. He holds it to be a duty,--a
privilege. He believes that it is through entering into this service
that he may even co-operate with God in the onward progress. To "help
humanity" is a very attractive and high-sounding term. But what is
humanity? Is it not, after all, composed of individuals? And here are
individuals to be helped; here they are, with their several individual
requests, and the injunction of the apostle suggests itself, "_As ye
have therefore opportunity_, ... do good unto all men." Do not the
interruptions assume a new form, and are they not, thereby, transfigured
into glad and golden opportunity?
And it is the will of God,--that great, resistless, and unceasing force,
working underneath all our human wills--it is the will of God
manifesting itself in small things as well as in those that seem
outwardly more important, that has grouped all these special things
together and sent them on an especially busy morning. Shall not one
rejoice and recognize that the need of another is brought as a privilege
to himself? The blessedness of giving is not limited to cheques and
bank-bills. There are gifts that far transcend these,--gifts of
patience, sympathy, thought, and counsel, and (such is the blessedness
of the Divine Law) these are gifts that the poorest can give. The need
on the one side may be the luxury on the other, for it invites
sympathetic comprehension and the enlargement of friendly relations. And
as for one's time,--even in a full and busy life,--it is not so much
time that one requires as it is right conditions. An hour will do the
work of a day, when the conditions are harmonious; and nothing so
increases the degree of spiritual energy as the glow and ardor and joy
of doing some little service for another. In this lies the real
blessedness, the real luxury of life, and one reads the profound
significance in the words of Maeterlinck: "It is well to believe that
there needs but a little more courage, more love, more devotion to life,
a little more eagerness, one day to fling open wide the portals of joy
and truth." These qualities redeem the temporal to the immortal, for
immortality is a condition of the soul, not a definite period in time.
The soul, now and here, may put on immortality. Life is, after all, an
affair of the immortal self, and it is the invisible powers which are
its stay, its guide, and its inspiration. We live and move and have our
being on the divine side of things. We only live--in any true sense--as
we are filled with the heavenly magnetism. "Thou hast made known to me
the ways of life; thou shalt make me full of joy with thy countenance,"
says the apostle. Here is the true gospel to live by. There _are_ "ways
of life;" even through toil and trial they shall be reached. The one is
eternal, the other temporal. It is unwise to lay too much stress on the
infelicities of the moment. Exaltation alone is real; depression is
unreal. The obstacle before one is not intended to stop progress, but to
stimulate new energies to the overcoming.
"By living so purely in thought and in deed as to prevent the
interposition of any barrier between his phenomenal and substantial
self; and by steadfastly cultivating harmonious relations between
these two,--by substantiating the whole of his system to the Divine
Central Will, whose seat is in the soul,--the man gains full access
to the stores of knowledge laid up in his soul, and attains to the
cognition of God and the universe."
Among the "devastators of a day" there is encountered, however, a vast
army of persons who advertise themselves vociferously as being
wonder-workers of human life. According to their insistent
proclamations, poverty is a "disease," and is to be cured by a course
of correspondence lessons; beauty, address, gifts and graces and power,
are secrets of which they hold the key; even death, too, is but another
mental malady and is easily to be overcome by their recipes. All these
fraudulent representations--as absurd as they are false--are but the
gross distortion of the underlying truth that thought creates conditions
and controls results. Thought cannot transform poverty into wealth by
means of six lessons; but the right quality of thought can set in motion
the causes which, carried on to fulfilment, result in an increasing
prosperity and welfare. One may thus achieve the top of his condition
through serenity and poise of spirit, and thus be enabled to see events
and combinations in their true perspective. He is not overwhelmed and
swept into abysses of despair because some momentary disaster has
occurred, but he regards it in its relative significance to the general
trend of matters, and thus remains master of the situation.
Still, if there are spurious claims to the power of the magician, and if
these claims, paraded by the idle, invade disastrously the realms of
the industrious in a continual procession of interruptions, there is
something, too, to be said on the side of another--and a very genuine
sort of wonder-working,--to transmute these interruptions into
opportunities.
Individuality is the incalculable factor in life, and it is one, too,
that must be fully allowed for, if one would proceed as harmoniously as
possible among the unseen brambles and pitfalls that may beset his
onward pathway. A very large proportion of the discords of life arise
from the failure to take into consideration the special qualities in
their special grouping that determine the person with whom one has to
do,--qualities which are, practically, unalterable, and must simply be
accepted and borne with as best one may. There is the person, for
instance, who is always and invariably behind time in every movement of
his life. He leaves undone the things that ought to be done, until there
is little use in doing them at all. He exhausts the patience and excites
the irritability of his friend, who is, by nature, prompt and always up
with the hour. There is the person who, from some latent cause in his
character, always manages badly; who reduces all his own affairs to
confusion; who contrives to waste more money, time, and energy than
industry and energy can produce; whose normal condition is a crisis of
disaster, and who, if extricated from this seventy times seven, will
contrive to fall into it again. All these, and a thousand variations on
characters of this type, we see around us, or within ourselves,
constantly, and a liberal proportion of the trial or discord incident to
family life, or to friendship and companionship, is simply in constantly
demanding of another that which he cannot give, which he does not
possess. To ask of the habitual procrastinator that he shall be prompt;
or of the defective manager that he shall keep his affairs in order and
make the most and the best out of his possessions, is totally useless.
In the evolutionary progress of life, he will probably, sometime and
somewhere, learn wisdom and do better; but habit and temperament are not
liable to meet a sea change into something new and strange all in the
flash of a moment, and it is worse than useless to demand this, or to be
irritated, or impatient, or even too sorrowful, because of this fact.
There are things that cannot be cured,--at least, not immediately.
Therefore they must be endured. When one once makes up his mind to the
acceptance of this theory it is astonishing to see how it simplifies the
problem. The philosophy is merely to do one's own part, but not to make
any superhuman effort to do the other person's part also. Let it go.
There is no use in making a _casus belli_ of the matter. Nothing is ever
helped by irritation over it,--even the irritation of generosity and
love, which seeks only the good of the other.
There is, for instance, the procrastinating correspondent. You write,
and you want a reply, and you want it straightway. On your own part you
would make it with the promptness and despatch of the United States mail
itself, but your correspondent is not constructed after the fashion of a
galvanic battery, and although he means to respond at once, he doesn't.
He has not the temperamental apparatus that works in that way. He has,
perhaps, a thousand qualities that are better, finer, more important,
but he does not happen to have that particular one. What then? Shall you
make his life and your own a burden with complaint and reproach? By no
means. Let it pass. It is a part of his individuality, and cannot--at
the moment, at least--be altered. This one must frankly accept as the
defect of his friend. But recognizing the defect need not blind one to
the thousand virtues that his friend possesses.
In fact, as we have each and all our individual sins, negligences, and
weaknesses, we may well limit our zeal for reform to our own needs, at
least until we have achieved such perfection that we are entitled to
require perfection on the part of our associates.
To the orderly, thrifty type of New England temperament nothing is more
incompatible with sympathy than the bad management of the person not
endowed with "faculty," as Mrs. Stowe well expresses it. And it must be
conceded that a lack of the power essential to dominate the general
affairs of life and keep them in due subordination and order, is an
unmistakable draft on the affections. It is a problem as to just how far
aid and sympathy do any good, and not infrequently the greater the real
care and affection, the greater, too, is the irritation and the
annoyance. But even the annoyance born of tender interest and love, it
is better not to feel too keenly. Let one do what he can,--do all that
is reasonable and right to assist in counterbalancing the ills that
arise from defective management, and then let it pass, and not take it
into his mind as a source of constant anxiety. We have all our lessons
to learn, and every failure brings its own discipline as the inevitable
result. "Regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer," as
Emerson so well says; "if not, attend to your own work, and already the
evil begins to be repaired."
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Charm of Companionship.]
Of society, in the true sense, social life offers comparatively little.
In the midst of ceremonial assembling one is starved for companionship.
One may live in the very heart of what is held to be a brilliant social
season and be as unutterably lonely as if in a desert solitude. Indeed,
the latter offers compensations which the former denies. There is a
great deal of companionship, however unrecognized, in the cloud of
witnesses that encompass us round about, and whose presence is less
vividly felt in the gleam and glitter of ceremonial society. The more
general assemblages of clubs, teas, and receptions are so incorporated
into the social system that no one could cancel these if he would, nor
would he if he could. They have their uses. All exchange of human
sympathies is good, even if it be somewhat superficial and spectacular.
The more exclusive dinners are not without their special charm as
occasions when conversation becomes possible on a less unsatisfactory
scale than the exchange of inanities in crowded receptions. Yet, with
due recognition of the stimulus and the brilliancy that may flash from a
select group of people, the deeper truth remains that it is only in a
more personal companionship that is found the supreme luxury of life,
and that companionship is a relation existing solely between two,
refusing its spell when that number is increased.
Nothing is less considered by society than companionship. It is
considered an unheard-of waste of time to devote an entire evening to
one guest, when, indeed, five, ten, or fifty might be warmed, lighted,
and fed in the same time. The fashionable hostess invites her friends to
pay off her social debts. If she can pay off fifty or five hundred--in
the time that she would give to one, she felicitates herself on her
clever management. The idea of inviting her friends because she really
wishes to talk with them would bewilder her. She does not converse; she
"receives." She arrays herself in her smartest gown, and her social
interchange with each guest consists in a graceful greeting and a no
less graceful adieu, followed by an epoch of private gratitude that the
required entertainment is over. She consults her visiting list and
conscientiously arranges for her next reception, or dinner, or dance, in
the fulfilment of what she is pleased to call her social duties. And all
this, however superficial or spectacular it may be, has its place, and
serves, with more or less success, to promote social meeting,
preliminary acquaintance, out of which the choicest friendships
sometimes spring. But it is quite possible to concede that certain
formalities and ceremonial observances have their legitimate place
without conceding that they monopolize the resources of social
enjoyment. When one comes to that--it is quite another matter.