one day some
enterprise foredoomed to failure develops into a success. We all hear
of it. We all open our mouths and gape. Of the failures we have heard
nothing. Once the man has achieved success, the thing becomes a habit
with him. The difference between a success and a failure is often so
slight that a reputation for succeeding will ensure success, and a
reputation for failing will ensure failure. Chance plays an important
part in such careers, but not a paramount part. One can only say that
it is more useful to have luck at the beginning than later on. These
"men of success" generally have pliable temperaments. They are not
frequently un-moral, but they regard a conscience as a good servant
and a bad master. They live in an atmosphere of compromise.

There remains class C of success--the class of sheer high merit. I am
not a pessimist, nor am I an optimist. I try to arrive at the truth,
and I should say that in putting success C at ten per cent. of the sum
total of all successes, I am being generous to class C. Not that I
believe that vast quantities of merit go unappreciated. My reason for
giving to Class C only a modest share is the fact that there is so
little sheer high merit. And does it not stand to reason that high
merit must be very exceptional? This sort of success needs no
explanation, no accounting for. It is the justification of our
singular belief in the principle of the triumph of justice, and it is
among natural phenomena perhaps the only justification that can be
advanced for that belief. And certainly when we behold the spectacle
of genuine distinguished merit gaining, without undue delay and
without the sacrifice of dignity or of conscience, the applause of the
kind-hearted but obtuse and insensible majority of the human race, we
have fair reason to hug ourselves.

VIII

THE PETTY ARTIFICIALITIES

The phrase "petty artificialities," employed by one of the
correspondents in the great Simple Life argument, has stuck in my
mind, although I gave it a plain intimation that it was no longer
wanted there. Perhaps it sheds more light than I had at first imagined
on the mental state of the persons who use it when they wish to
arraign the conditions of "modern life." A vituperative epithet is
capable of making a big show. "Artificialities" is a sufficiently
scornful word, but when you add "petty" you somehow give the quietus
to the pretensions of modern life. Modern life had better hide its
dim