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Success—that is the royal road we all want to tread, for the echo off its flagstones sounds pleasantly in the mind. It gives to man all that the natural man desires: the opportunity of exercising his activities to the full; the sense of power; the feeling that life is a slave, not a master; the knowledge that some great industry has quickened into life under the impulse of a single brain.
To each his own particular branch of this difficult art. The artist knows one joy, the soldier another; what delights the business man leaves the politician cold. But however much each section of society abuses the ambitions or the morals of the other, all worship equally at the same shrine. No man really wants to spend his whole life as a reporter, a clerk, a subaltern, a private Member, or a curate. Downing Street is as attractive as the oak-leaves of the field-marshal; York and Canterbury as pleasant as a dominance in Lombard Street or Burlington House.
For my own part I speak of the only field of success I know—the world of ordinary affairs. And I start with a contradiction in terms. Success is a constitutional temperament bestowed on the recipient by the gods. And yet you may have all the gifts of the fairies and fail utterly. Man cannot add an inch to his stature, but by taking thought he can walk erect; all the gifts given at birth can be destroyed by a single curse.
Like all human affairs, success is partly a matter of predestination and partly of free will. You cannot make the genius, but you can either improve or destroy it, and most men and women possess the assets which can be turned into success.
But those who possess the precious gifts will have both to hoard and to expand them.
What are the qualities which make for success? They are three: Judgment, Industry, and Health, and perhaps the greatest of these is judgment. These are the three pillars which hold up the fabric of success. But in using the word judgment one has said everything.
In the affairs of the world it is the supreme quality. How many men have brilliant schemes and yet are quite unable to execute them, and through their very brilliancy stumble unawares upon ruin? For round judgment there cluster many hundred qualities, like the setting round a jewel: the capacity to read the hearts of men; to draw an inexhaustible fountain of wisdom from every particle of experience in the past, and turn the current of this knowledge into the dynamic action of the future. Genius goes to the heart of a matter like an arrow from a bow, but judgment is the quality which learns from the world what the world has to teach and then goes one better. Shelley had genius, but he would not have been a success in Wall Street—though the poet showed a flash of business knowledge in refusing to lend money to Byron.
In the ultimate resort judgment is the power to assimilate knowledge and to use it. The opinions of men and the movement of markets are all so much material for the perfected instrument of the mind.
MODERATION
Judgment, Industry, and Health, as the instruments of success, depend largely on a fourth quality, which may be called either restraint or moderation. The successful men of these arduous days are those who control themselves strictly.
Those who are learned in the past may point out exceptions to this rule. But Charles James Fox or Bolingbroke were only competing with equals in the art of genteel debauchery. Their habits were those of their competitors. They were not fighting men who safeguarded their health and kept a cool head in the morning. It is impossible to imagine to-day a leader of the Opposition who, after a night of gambling at faro, would go down without a breakfast or a bath to develop an important attack on the Government. The days of the brilliant debauchee are over. Politicians no longer retire for good at forty to nurse the gout. The antagonists that careless genius would have to meet in the modern world would be of sterner stuff.
The modern men of action realise that a sacrifice of health is a sacrifice of years—and that every year is of value. They protect their constitutions as the final bulwark against the assault of the enemy. A man without a digestion is likely to be a man without a heart. Political and financial courage spring as much from the nerves or the stomach as from the brain. And without courage no politician or business man is worth anything. Moderation is, therefore, the secret of success.
And, above all, I would urge on ambitious youth the absolute necessity of moderation in alcohol. I am the last man in the world to be in favour of the regulation of the social habits of the people by law. Here every man should be his own controller and law-giver. But this much is certain: no man can achieve success who is not strict with himself in this matter; nor is it a bad thing for an aspiring man of business to be a teetotaller.
Take the case of the Prime Minister. No man is more careful of himself. He sips a single glass of burgundy at dinner for the obvious reason that he enjoys it, and not because it might stimulate his activities. He has given up the use of tobacco. Bolingbroke as a master of manoeuvres would have had a poor chance against him. For Bolingbroke lost his nerve in the final disaster, whereas the Prime Minister could always be trusted to have all his wits and courage about him. Mr. Lloyd George is regarded as a man riding the storm of politics with nerves to drive him on. No view could be more untrue. In the very worst days of the war in 1916 he could be discovered at the War Office taking his ten minutes’ nap with his feet up on a chair and discarded newspapers lying like the debris of a battle-field about him. It would be charitable to suppose that he had fallen asleep before he had read his newspapers! He even takes his golf in very moderate doses. We are often told that he needs a prolonged holiday, but somewhere in his youth he finds inexhaustible reserves of power which he conserves into his middle age. In this way he has found the secret of his temporary Empire. It is for this reason that the man in command is never too busy to see a caller who has the urgency of vital business at his back.
Possibly, indeed, he has escaped a grave danger; for if, in the impressionable period of youth, attention is given to one kind of knowledge, it may very likely be withdrawn from another. A life of sheltered study does not allow a boy to learn the hard facts of the world—and business is concerned with reality. The truth is that education is the fruit of temperament, not success the fruit of education. What a man draws into himself by his own natural volition is what counts, because it becomes a living part of himself. I will make one exception in my own case—the Shorter Catechism, which was acquired by compulsion and yet remains with me.
My own education was of a most rudimentary description. It will be difficult for the modern English mind to grasp the parish of Newcastle, New Brunswick, in the ’eighties—sparse patches of cultivation surrounded by the virgin forest and broken by the rush of an immense river. For half the year the land is in the iron grip of snow and frost, and the Miramichi is frozen right down to its estuary—so that “the rain is turned to a white dust, and the sea to a great green stone.”
It was the seasons which decided my compulsory education. In the winter I attended school because it was warm inside, and in the summer I spent my time in the woods because it was warm outside.
Perhaps the most remarkable instance of what self-education can do is to be found in the achievements of Mr. J.L. Garvin. He received no formal education at all in the public school or university sense, and he began to work for his living at an early age. Yet, not only is he, perhaps, the most eminent of living journalists, but his knowledge of books is, if not more profound than that of any other man in England, certainly wider in range, for it is not limited to any country or language. By his own unaided efforts he has gained not only knowledge, but style and judgment. To listen to his talk on literature is not merely to yield oneself to the spell of the magician, but to feel that the critic has got his estimate of values right.
Reading, indeed, is the real source both of education and of style. Read what you like, not what somebody else tells you that you ought to like. That reading alone is valuable which becomes part of the reader’s own mind and nature, and this can never be the case if the matter is not the result of self-selection, but forced on the student from outside.
Read anything and read everything—just as a man with a sound digestion and a good appetite eats largely and indifferently of all that is set before him. The process of selection and rejection, or, in other words, of taste, will come best and naturally to any man who has the right kind of brains in his head. Some books he will throw away; others he will read over and over again. My education owes much to Scott and Stevenson, stealthily removed from my father’s library and read in the hayloft when I should have been in school.
Lord Reading started his career on the Stock Exchange, where he failed utterly. No doubt experience would have brought him a reasonable measure of success; but it was equally clear that this was not the sphere for his preeminent abilities. He therefore broke boldly away and entered at the Bar, where his intellect secured him a reputation and an income, especially in commercial cases, which left his competitors divided between admiration and annoyance. In a single year he made L40,000. The peg had found the round hole. His eminence procured him the Attorney-Generalship. Yet with all his ability and his personal popularity he was not a real success in the House of Commons. Parliamentary warfare was not his aptitude. So he became Lord Chief Justice. His great personal character and reputation gave Lord Reading in his new position a certain reputation as a great Lord Chief. From my own limited experience I do not agree. I had to watch closely a certain case he was trying, and I did not think Lord Reading was a great judge. He failed to carry the jury with him; the final Court of Appeal ordered a new trial, which resulted in the reversal of the judgment. Such a thing might happen to any judge, but a strong one would have put a prompt end to proceedings which were obviously vexatious and entailed great cost by the delay on defendants, who had obviously been dragged improperly into the action. But his real opportunity came with his mission to the United States during the war. No ambassador had ever achieved such popularity and influence or brought back such rich sheaves with him. As a diplomatist, a man of law, and a man of business, he shone supreme. Once more, since his days at the commercial bar, he had found the real field for his talents.
From the Law Courts he has journeyed to a position of great responsibility in India. Some voices are already acclaiming the success of the new Viceroy. It will be wiser to wait until it is clear whether his versatile genius will find successful play in its new environment.
But the moral of Lord Reading’s career is plain. Do not despair over initial failure. Seek a new opening more suited to your talents. Fight on in the certain hope that a career waits for every man.
CONSISTENCY
Nothing is so bad as consistency. There exists no more terrible person than the man who remarks: “Well, you may say what you like, but at any rate I have been consistent.” This argument is generally advanced as the palliation for some notorious failure. And this is natural For the man who is consistent must be out of touch with reality. There is no consistency in the course of events, in history, in the weather, or in the mental attitude of one’s fellow-men. The consistent man means that he intends to apply a single foot-rule to all the chances and changes of the universe.
The more quickly youth breaks away from the prejudices of its surroundings, the more rapid will be its success. The harder that age fights against prepossessions, born of the past, which gather round to obstruct the free operation of its mind, the longer will be the period of a happy, successful, and active life.
Prejudice is a mixture of pride and egotism, and no prejudiced man, therefore, will be happy.
CALM
The last two essays have dealt with the more depressing sides of practical life—the sudden tempest which sweeps down on the business man, or the long period of depression which is the necessary prelude to the times in which optimism is justified. But it is on the note of optimism, and not of pessimism, that I would conclude, and after the storm comes the calm. What is calm to the man of experience in affairs? It is the end to which turbulent and ambitious youth should devote itself in order that it may attain to happiness in that period of middle-age which still gives to assured success its real flavour. Youth is the time of hope; old age is the time for looking back on the pleasures and achievements of the past—when success or failure may seem matters of comparative unimportance. Successful middle-age stands between the two. Its calm is not the result either of senility or failure. It represents that solid success which enables a man to adventure into fresh spheres without any perturbation. New fields call to him—Art, or Letters, or Public Service. Success is already his, and it will be his own fault if he does not achieve happiness as well.
Successful middle-age appears to me to be the ideal of practical men. I have tried to indicate the method by which it can be attained by any young man who is sufficiently resolute in his purpose. Finance, Commerce, and Industry are, under modern conditions, spheres open to the talent of any individual. The lack of education in the formal sense is no bar to advancement. Every young man has his chance. But will he practise industry, economy, and moderation, avoid arrogance and panic, and know how to face depression with a stout heart? Even if he is a genius, will he know how not to soar with duly restrained wings?
The secret of power is the method by which the fire of youth is translated into the knowledge of experience. In these essays I have suggested a short cut to that knowledge. I once had youth, and now I have experience, and I believe that youth can do anything if its desire for success is sufficiently strong to curb all other desires. I also believe that a few words of experience can teach youth how to avoid the pitfalls of finance which wait for the most audacious spirits. I write out of the conviction of my own experience.
But, above all, stands the attainment of happiness as the final form of struggle. Happiness can only be attained as the result of a prolonged effort. It is the result of material surroundings and yet a state of the inner mind. It is, therefore, in some form or another at once the consequence of achievement and a sense of calm. The flavour is achievement, but the fruit should be the assured sense of happiness.