light--against them. If Shakespeare, whose folios he has, and Keats,
whose "Endymion" he owns, or Milton, whose "Paradise Lost" he keeps in
his safe, were all to assail him at once, were to bear down upon that
set look in Pierpont Morgan's eyes--try to get them to turn one side a
second and notice that they--Shakespeare and Milton and Keats--were
there, there would not be a flicker or shadow of movement. They are eyes
that are set like jaws, like magnificent spiritual muscles, on
Something. Neither do they reveal light or receive it.

* * * * *

It will be some time before the crowd will find it possible to hand in
an account and render a full estimate of the value of the service that
Pierpont Morgan has rendered to our modern world; but the service has
been for the most part rendered now and while the world, in its mingled
dismay and gratitude at the way he has hammered it together, is
distributing its praise and blame, there are some of us who would like
to step one side a little and think quietly, if we may, not about what
Pierpont Morgan has done, which we admit duly, but about the blindness
in his eyes. It is Pierpont Morgan's blindness that interests the crowd
more than anything else about him interests them now. It is his
blindness--and the chance to find out just what it is that is making
people read his book. His blindness (if we can fix just what it is) is
the thing that we are going to make our next Pierpont Morgan out of. The
next Pierpont Morgan--the one the crowd is getting ready now--will be
made out of the things that this Pierpont Morgan did not see. What are
these things? We have been looking for the things in Carl Hovey's book,
peering in between the lines on every page, and turning up his
adjectives and looking under them, his adverbs and qualifications, his
shrewdness and carefulness for the things that Pierpont Morgan did not
see. Pierpont Morgan himself would not have tried to hide them, and
neither has his biographer. His whole book breathes throughout with a
just-mindedness, a spirit of truth, a necessary and inevitable honesty,
which of itself is not the least testimony to the essential validity and
soundness of Morgan's career. Pierpont Morgan's attitude toward his
biography (if, in spite of his reticence, it became one of the
necessities--even one of the industrial necessities, of the world that
he should have one) was probably a good deal the attitude of Walt