His soul is brave, as becomes the soul porphyrogenetic. But, as it is also a sensitive soul, how it is wrung!
The trouble with our young Jones is that he was premature—not in thought, but in showing his thoughts. Only premature. The madness that ravaged him is in the plutocratic air. Many eyes are rolling, many fingers are twitching in the premonitory symptoms of the malady. A few years at our plutocracy’s present rate of progress, and Jones will be recognized as a martyr. “Jones was born a little too soon. Jones came to a climax a little before the season,” the dandies will say.
June is the time for roses. Jones came in April. Poor Jones! Poor April rose!
Such is the mode of the “born success”; now for the young man who is born with brains and appetites and ambitions only. He is determined to achieve a plutocratic success; looks about him for the road that leads to palaces, equipages, yachts—all that gives one title to a seat at the table of honor at this banquet of extravagant luxury. He sees at once that to become a multi-millionaire he must use his brains to force or to cajole the multi-millionaires to make him one of them.
He must pattern after those who are far on the way to achieving his kind of success: this corporation lawyer earning his hundred thousand or more a year as the legal servant of rich men; that railway president with his fifty thousand a year and perquisites, earned as the commercial servant of rich men; that manager getting a salary of one hundred and twenty-five thousand as a seeker of safe investments for surplus millions of income—again a servant of rich men; that bank president with salary and opportunities together netting him upward of two hundred thousand a year—again a servant of the rich; that broker who put by half a million last year as a result of his skill and assiduity in the service of rich operators; that doctor who made seventy-five thousand in fees and two hundred thousand in Wall Street last year on “tips” from grateful patients—again the rewards of service to the rich.
Our young candidate for success has brains to sell; he wants customers with money. He hopes ultimately to sell these brains at a very high price; he wants customers with lots of money, millions of money, in which he may presently share largely. He must ingratiate himself with the rich; must go where they are to be found, not only in business hours, but also in hours of relaxation. He must not only work hard; he must also play hard and high—must lead the life of the rich as far as possible. His air, his dress, his style of living, all must be such that he will be regarded as rich and progressive. To drudge and to economize and to keep away from the extravagance downtown and up will mean a small success, or at best one that will not lead to the lofty height of fashion and social position upon which he has fixed his eyes.
He may have a streak of incurable folly in him. His effort to be “a man of the world” may draw him from discreet dissipation into that vortex which swallows up all weaklings not secured by great wealth. But let us suppose that he is not a weakling and that he keeps clearly in mind that at the basis of all success lies clear-headed, incessant industry. He works steadily at his business, commercial or professional; he shows capacity and is advanced; he is soon getting four or five thousand a year. At the same time he has prospered in what may be called the uptown end of his business; he has made acquaintances among the rich socially; several women of importance are interested in him and are telling their husbands and their husbands’ friends that he has brains. The men are seeing that the women are not mistaken.
In any American city except New York or Chicago, our young man would now be regarded as a person of some consequence. In New York or Chicago he has merely reached the point at which he can, if he is sagacious, measure his insignificance. He has worked hard, but the real day’s toil has only begun. He has raised himself from the class that includes hundreds of thousands; but he is still in a class that includes tens of thousands.
Perhaps this discourages him, makes him feel that he can never attain the paradise of multi-millionaires, or that, if he did attain it, he would be too exhausted to enjoy it. Perhaps experience has given him a clearer insight into the real meaning of his ambitions, and he is disgusted with their pettiness and sordidness, and begins to long for self-respect and decency and manhood. Perhaps his dream of success has been interrupted by a dream of sentiment. He may decide to marry and settle down—he has found New York drearily cold and lonely.
In that event he gives up his bachelor apartments in the edge of the fashionable district; he is seen no more at his club—indeed, he has resigned from it; he is forgotten by his fashionable friends; he and his wife live obscurely in a flat or an apartment hotel far from the world of fashion, or in a cottage down in the country—a commuter’s cottage, as unlike as possible the multi-millionaire’s cottage of marble or limestone, of which he once dreamed. And as he is no longer of the world with which we are concerned, he drops out of sight—for the present.