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Contents |
BOOK TWO
LETTING THE CROWDS BE GOOD
CHAPTER XV
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, [174]
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 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 [175]
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 [176]
in the western nations all about us to-day.
We can die on crosses in our Western world as well as anyone
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, man 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 [177]
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 dis-
eases 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 per-
fection 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 on truth where men go forth and walk
alone with God hundreds of years ahead.
CHAPTER XVI
THE MEN AHEAD PULL
WRITING a hopeful book about the human race with the
New York Sun, Wall Street, Downing Street and Bernard
Shaw looking on is uphill work.
Sometimes I wish there were another human race I could
refer to when I am writing about this one, one everyone knows.
The one on Mars, for instance, if one could calmly point to it
in the middle of an argument, shut people off with a wave of
one's hand and say, "Mars this " and "Mars that" would be
convenient.
The trouble with the human race is that when one is talking
to it about itself, it thinks it is It.
It is not It yet.
The earth and everything on it is a huge Acorn, tumbling
softly through the sky.
Our boasted Christianity (crosses, and resurrections and
cathedrals and all) is a Child crying in the night.
. . . . . . .
It is not necessary for me to prove to the satisfaction of the
New York Sun and Bernard Shaw that the Golden Rule has
not reached the superior moral stage of being taken as a plati-
tude by all of our people who are engaged in business. It is
enough to submit that the most creative and forceful business
men—the men who set the pace, the foremen of the world, are
taking it so, and that others are trying to be as much like them
as they can. Wickedness in this world is not going to stop with
a jerk. It is merely being better distributed. Possibly this is
all there is to the problem, getting sin better distributed. [179]
The Devil has never had a very great outfit or any great weight,
but he has always known where to throw it, and he has always
done an immense business on a small capital and the only way
he has managed to get on at all, is by organizing, and by
getting the attention of a few people at the top. Now that the
moral sense of the world has become quickened, and that
rapid transit and newspapers and science and the fact-spirit
have gained their hold, the sins of the world are being rapidly
distributed, not so much among the men who determine things
as among those who cannot.
Everything is following the fact-spirit. The modern world
and everything in it, is falling into the hands of the men who
cannot be cheated about facts, who get the facts first and
who get them right.
The world cannot help falling, from now on, slowly—a little
ponderously perhaps at first—into the hands of good men.
To say that the world is falling into the hands of men who
cannot be cheated and to say that it is falling into the hands of
good men is to say the same thing.
The men who get the things that they want, get them by
seeing the things as they are. Goodness and efficiency both
boil down to the same quality in the modern man, his faculty
for not being a romantic person and for not being cheated.
A good man may be said to be a man who has formed a habit,
an intimate personal habit of not being cheated. Everything
he does is full of this habit. The sinful man, as he is usually
called, is a man who is off in his facts, a man who does not know
what he really wants even for himself. In a matter-of-fact
civilization like ours, he cannot hope to keep up. If a man can
be cheated, even by himself—of course other people can cheat
him and everybody can take advantage of him. He naturally
grows more incompetent every day he lives. The men who are
slow or inefficient in finding out what they really want and slow
in dealing with themselves are necessarily inefficient and behind
hand in dealing with other people. They cannot be men who [180]
determine what other people shall do.
It is true that for the moment, it still seems—now that
science has only just come to the rescue of religion, that evil
men in a large degree are the men who still are standing in the
gate and determining opportunities and letting in and letting
out Civilization as they please. But their time is limited.
The fact-spirit is in the people. We enjoy facts. Facts are
the modern man's hunting, his adventure and sport. The men
who are ahead are getting into a kind of two-and-two-are-four
habit that is like music, like rhythm. It becomes almost a
passion, almost a self-indulgence in their lives. Being honest
with things, having a distaste for being cheated by things,
having a distaste for being cheated by one's self and for cheating
other people, runs in the blood in modern men. The nations
can be seen going round and round the earth and looking one
another long and earnestly in the eyes. The poet is turning
his imagination upon the world about him and upon the fact
that really works in it. The scientific man has taken hold of
religion and righteousness is being proved, melted down in the
laboratory, welded together before us all and riveted on to
the every day, on to what really happens, and on to what really
works. Goodness in its baser form already pays. Only the
biggest men may have found it out, but everybody is watching
them. The most important spiritual service that any man can
render the present age is to make goodness pay at the top
(in the most noticeable place) in some business where nobody
has made it pay before. Anybody can see that it almost pays
already, that it pays now here, now there. At all events, any-
body can see that it is very noticeable that the part of the world
that is most spiritual is not merely the part that is whining or
hanging on crosses. It is also the part that is successful. One
knows scores of saints with ruddy cheeks. It is getting to be
a matter of principle almost in a modern saint—to have ruddy
cheeks.
I submit this fact respectfully to Bernard Shaw, Wall Street, [181]
Downing Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, and even to the
New York Sun, that vast machine for laughing at a world down
in its snug quarters in Park Row—that the saint with
ruddy cheeks is a totally new and disconcerting fact in our
modern life. He is the next fact the honest pessimist will
have to face.
I submit that this saint with ruddy cheeks is here, that he is
lovable, imperturbable, imperious, irrepressible, as interesting
as sin, as catching as the Devil and that he has come to stay.
He stays because he is successful and can afford to stay.
He is successful because he is good.
Only religion works.
I am aware that the New York Sun might quarrel with just
exactly this way of putting it.
I might put it another way or possibly try to say it again
after saying something else first. Viz.: The man who is
successful in business is the man who can get people to do as
much as they can do and a great deal more than they think
they can do.
Only a very lively goodness, almost a religion in a man, can
do this. He has to have something in him very like the power
of inventing people or of making people over.
To be specific: In some big department stores, as one goes
down the aisle, one will see over and over again the clerks
making fun of customers.
One by one the customers find it out and the more permanent
ones, those who would keep coming and who have the best
trade, go to other stores.
How could such a thing be stopped in a department store by
a practical employer? Can he stop it successfully by turning
on his politeness?
Of course he can make his clerks polite-looking by turning
on his politeness. But politeness in a department store does not
consist in being polite-looking. Being polite-looking does not
work, does not grip the customer or strike in and do things and [182]
make the customer do things.
A machine like a department store, made up of twenty-five
hundred human beings, which is carving out its will, its nature,
stamping its pattern on a city, on a million men, or on a nation,
cannot be made to work without religion. If the clerks are
making fun of people, only religion can stop it.
Perhaps you have been made fun of yourself, Gentle Reader?
You have observed, perhaps, that in making fun of people
(making fun of you, for instance), the assumption almost
always is, that you are trying to be like the Standard Person,
and that this (they look at you pleasantly as you go by) is
as near as you can get to it! If an employer wishes to make his
clerk an especially valuable clerk, if he wishes to make his clerk
an expert in human nature or a good salesman, one who sees
a customer when he comes along as he really is, and as he is
trying to be, he will only be able to do it by touching something
deep down in the clerk's nature, something very like his religion
—his power of putting himself in the place of others. He can
only do it by making a clerk feel that this power in him of doing
as he would be done by, and seeing how to do it, i.e., the religion
in him, is what he is hired for.
It is visionary to try to run a great department store, a great
machine of twenty-five hundred souls, a machine of human
emotions, of five thousand eyes and ears, a huge loom of enthusi-
asm, of love, hate, covetousness, sorrow, disappointment, and
joy without having it full of clerks who are experts in human
nature, putting themselves in the place of crowds of other
people, clerks who are essentially religious.
So we watch the men who are ahead driving one another into
goodness. The man who is not able to create, distribute or
turn on, in his business establishment, goodness, social insight,
and customer-insight in it, can only hope to-day to keep ahead
in business by having competitors as inefficient as he is.
The man who is ahead has discovered himself. Everything
the man ahead is doing eight hours a day, is seen at last narrow- [183]
ing him down, cornering him into goodness.
Of course as long as people looked upon goodness as a
Sunday affair, a few hours a week put in on it, we were
naturally discouraged about it.
It is still a little too fresh looking and it may be still a little
too clever for everybody, but slowly, irrevocably, we see it
coming. We can look up almost any day and watch some
goodness—now—at least one specimen or so, in every branch
of business.
We watch daily the men who are ahead, pulling on the
goodness of the world and the Crowds pushing on it.
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