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, 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 and 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.

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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.