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).