THE SUCCESSFUL TEMPERAMENT
I also, Gentle Reader, have despised and do despise "success."
I also have stood, like you, perhaps, and I am standing now in that ancient, outer court, where I can keep seeing every day The Little Great Men with all their funny trappings on,—their hoods, and their ribbons, and their train-bearers, drive up before us all and go in to The Great Door. I have gone by in the night and have heard the buzz of their voices there. I have looked, like you, up at the great lighted windows of Prosperity from the street.
And in the broad daylight I have seen them too. I have stood on the curb in the public way with all the others and watched silently the parade of The Little Great go by.
I have waited like you, Gentle Reader, and smiled or I have turned on my heel sadly, or wearily or bitterly or gayly and walked away down my own side street of the world and with the huzzahs of the crowd echoing faintly in my ears have gone my way.
But I keep coming back to the curb again.
I keep coming back because, every now and then among all the gilt carriages and the bowing faces in them, or among all the big yellow vans or cages with the great beasts of success in them, the literary foxes, the journalist-juggernauts, the Jack Johnsons of finance, the contented, gurgling, wallowing millionaires—I cannot help standing once more and looking among them, for one, or for possibly two, or three or four who may be truly successful men. Some of them are merely successful-looking. I often find as I see them more closely, that they are undeceived, or humble, or are at least not being any more successful-looking than they can help, and are trying to do better.
They are the men who have defied success to succeed and who will defy it again and again.
They are the great men.
The great man is the man who can get himself made and who will get himself made out of anything he finds at hand.
If success cannot do it, he makes failure do it. If he cannot make success express the greatness or the vision that is in him, he makes failure express it.
But this book is not about great men and goodness. It is about touching the imagination of crowds with goodness, about making goodness democratic and making goodness available for common people.
A stupendous success in goodness will advertise it as well as a stupendous failure.
Goodness has had its cross-redeemers to attract the attention of half a world.
Possibly it is having now its success-redeemers to attract the attention of the other half.
The people the success-redeemers reach would turn out to be, possibly, very much more than half.
The Cross, as a means of getting the attention of crowds, or of the more common people in our modern, practical-minded Western world, was apparently adapted to its purpose as long as it was used for church purposes or as long as it was kept dramatic or sensational or remote, or as long as it was a cross for some one else, but as a means of attracting the attention of crowds of ordinary men and women to goodness in common everyday things, it is very doubtful if failure—in the power of steady daily pulling on men's minds, has done as much for goodness as success.
It is doubtful if, except as an ideal or conventional symbol the cross has ever been or ever could be what might be called a spiritually middle-class institution. It has been reserved for men of genius, pioneers and world-designers to have those colossal and glorious crosses that have been worshipped in all ages, and must be worshipped in all ages as the great memorials of the human race.
But the more common and numerous types of men, the men who do not design worlds, but who execute them, build them, who carry the new designs of goodness out, who work through the details and conceive the technique of goodness are men in whom the spiritual and religious power takes the natural form of success.
It seems to be the nature of the modern and the western type of man to challenge fatalism, to defy a cross. He would almost boast that nobody could make him die on it. This spirit in men too is a religious spirit. It is the next hail of goodness. Goodness posts up its next huge notice on the world:
| SUCCESS |
It is going to make the more rudimentary everyday people notice it, and it is going to make them notice it in everyday things. It does not admit that goodness is merely for the spiritual aristocrats for those greater souls that can search out and appreciate the spiritual values in failure.
It believes that goodness is for crowds. It has discovered that crosses, to common people in common things, seem oriental and mystical. The common people of the western world instead of being born with dreamy imaginations are born with pointed and applied ones. It is not impossible that the comparative failure of the Christian religion in the western world and in the later generations is that it has been trying to be oriental and aristocratic in appealing to what is really a new type of man in the world—the scientific and practical type as we see it in the western nations all about us to-day.
We can die on crosses in our Western world as well as any one and we can do it in crowds too as they do in India, but we propose if crosses are expected of us to know why in crowds. Knowing why makes us think of things and makes us do things. It is the keynote of our temperament.
And it is not fair to say of us when we make this distinction that we do not believe in the cross. But there are times when some of us wish that we could get other people to stop believing in it. We would all but die on the cross to get other people to stop dying on one for platitudes, to get them to work their way down to the facts and focus their minds on the practical details of not dying on a cross, of forming a vision of action which will work. It goes without saying that as long as crowds are in the world crosses will not go by, but it is wicked not to make them go by as fast as possible, one by one. They were meant to be moved up higher. We are eager not to die on the same cross for the same thing year after year and century after century. It seems to us that the eagerness that always goes with the cross always was and always will be the essential, powerful and beautiful thing in it.
And it is this new eagerness in the modern spirit, a kind of hurrying up of the souls of the world that is inspiring us to employ our western genius in inventing and defending and applying the means of goodness and in finding ways of making goodness work. We will not admit that men were intended to die on crosses from a sheer, beautiful, heavenly shiftlessness, vague-mindedness, mere unwillingness to take pains to express themselves or unwillingness to think things out and to make things plain to crowds. It does not seem to us that it is wicked to employ success as well as failure, to state our religion to people. It seems to us that it goes naturally with the scientific and technical temperament of the people that we should do this. It is not superior and it is not inferior. It is temperamental and it is based upon the study of the psychology of attention, on a knowledge of what impresses a certain kind of man and of what really is conclusive with crowds and with average men and women. It is the distinctive point of view of the pragmatic temperament, of the inductive mind. The modern mind is interested in facts and cannot make a religion out of not knowing them. There was a time once when people used to take their bodily diseases as acts of God. We have made up our minds not to have these same bodily diseases now. We have discovered by hard work and constant study that they are not necessary. The same is true of our moral diseases and of our great social maladies.
It is going to be the same with crosses. It is a sin and a slander and affront to human nature and to God to die on a cross if it can be helped by hard work and close thinking, or by touching the imaginations of others.
Most of us acting in most things are not good enough to die on crosses. We are not worthy, it would not be humble in us to. Crosses are only reserved for the newest and most rare truths, and for the newest and most rare men. They are still, and they still can be made to be, a means of grace and of perfection to people who have gifts of learning things by suffering, but as a means of making other people and people in crowds see things, the right to use a cross is not for those of us who are merely lumbering spiritually along, trying to catch up to a plain, simple-hearted old platitude, eighteen hundred years late like the Golden Rule. The right to a cross is reserved for those who are up on the higher reaches, those great bleak stretches or moors of truth where men go forth and walk alone with God hundreds of years ahead.