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.