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.
BLACK-AND-WHITE
More than other peoples we Americans have faith in
short-cuts--short-cuts to health, happiness, knowledge, and, of course,
success. I can remember a period when the one passionate avocation of
American life appeared to be the search for the Perfect Breakfast Food.
If only it could be found, the problems of existence would at once be
solved; through its daily consumption not only would the body become
strong and beautiful, but the soul, too, one felt, would be healed, and
all at last be indeed right with the world. Then anaemic monthly
magazines were enriched with illustrated advertisements of a hundred
strange breakfast foods, the inventor--no, discoverer--of each of which
claimed, and perhaps believed, that in it he had found that perfect one.
Some swore by this one, some by that; but all felt secretly that they
had not yet found exactly IT, but that IT was there somewhere, just
around the corner, waiting for them. There was such fervour in the quest
that it was not even vulgar; it had a mystical side, like the mediaeval
search for the philosopher’s stone. And so, for a while, millions every
morning ate, hopefully, reverently, religiously, weird concoctions--of
flax-seed, of malt, of hops, of every known grain, kernels shot through
a gun, kernels exploded by incredible heat--until at last in a
nation-wide wave of indigestion the quest collapsed, like the Crusades.
It was a striking phenomenon, and, like all great, popular, idealistic
movements, faintly pathetic; but it does not stand alone. Before it,
history tells, there had been a period of even more dangerous faith in
patent medicines, and, since, there has been who does not know
what?--starvation, careful mastication, Coué-ism, and a score of other
short-cuts to health and happiness. Living abroad and returning to
America every two or three years, I am always struck, on arrival there,
by two things: first, that the one great secret of life has been
discovered; second, that the secret of year-before-last has been
forgotten as completely as the popular song of its period. The last time
I was there, the secret, the master-word, appeared to be Metabolism. I
don’t know what Metabolism is; but I was assured that it explained
everything, would (eventually) solve every problem of health.
Our faith in short-cuts is immense. If you take twelve--or is it
twenty-four?--lessons of a correspondence school, you will double, or
triple, or quadruple your salary automatically; if you read Wells’s
_Outline_ you will immediately know all about history; if you read the
_Book of Etiquette_ you will at once become suave, well-bred, and will
know how to entertain your employer at dinner in a manner certain to be
advantageous to you thereafter; and so on.
The characteristic is primitive and childlike; it amounts to a belief in
miracles, for what is a miracle but a short-cut? And it argues a
conviction that life is a very simple affair, all black and white, with
some one secret that you may at any moment hit upon if you are lucky.
The attitude of mind is that you are very ill or very ignorant or very
poor now, but may in a flash become very well or very wise or very rich;
never that you are not as well as you should be now, but may gradually
become somewhat better, or that you may through assiduous study
moderately improve your education or your financial position.
This black-and-white, miracle-spotted world in which we children of
faith believe, is in reality a poor and barren world, as is revealed by
our novels that exhibit it. I have no interest in the question of
whether our contemporary novelists are better than, for example, the
English, or theirs better than ours; but I do assert that the novel in
England is vastly richer than the novel in America--not glaringly
black-and-white, but full of half-tones, shadows and subtleties. To take
two British novelists of not very strong creative ability, Mr. J. D.
Beresford and Miss Ethel Sidgwick, where among American writers can you
parallel their fine balanced observation, their delicate study of
character? It is not that they are more talented than any one of a
number of our own novelists, only that the world they describe is a
richer world than the world as we see it or have ever seen it. For
years our novels were all sunny, optimistic and sweet; now they are all
drab, cynical and hopeless. Once the village was the abode of quaint,
but pure-souled and kindly people unspoiled by the wicked city; now it
is a horrid hole. Once our young girls were appallingly pure; now they
are appallingly impure. Mr. Wells alone among the English authors of
note lives in, and writes of, such a black-and-white, miraculous world.
He, too, has always some short-cut to offer, that, if adopted, would
transmute life into pure gold; and he, too, has always forgotten his
short-cut of the year-before-last. Which is no doubt the explanation of
the vastly greater esteem he enjoys in America than at home.
I have turned to the novel for an example simply because in it you get,
not by any means a true picture of American life as it is, but a very
perfect picture of the American attitude toward life. But you will see
the same thing, more directly if more fragmentarily, wherever you look.
I.W.W’s are all wicked; La Follette was either a hero or a villain; ‘_If
Winter Comes_ may well last as long as the poem from which it takes its
name’ (William Lyon Phelps).
When the war broke out, European countries, too, suddenly adopted (at
first quite sincerely) this black-and-white world; and America’s heart
went out to Europe--that is, to the shining white part of it. At last
America understood Europe. But as early as 1915 Europeans began to feel
that they had made a bitter mistake, and by now they have slipped back
into an even more perplexed, shadowy and complicated world than before;
and we, who never change, are further away from them than ever.