that we and others possibly do not and cannot see.  The blindness in the eyes is so complete and set in such a full array that it acts at first on one almost like a kind of vision.  The eyes hold themselves like pictures of eyes, like little walls, as if real eyes were in behind them.  One wonders if there is any one who could ever manage to break through them, fleck up little ordinary human things—­personality, for instance, atmosphere, or 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 Whitman when he told Traubel, “Whatever you do with me, don’t prettify me”; and if there were things in Mr.