I remember once having a conversation with a man of very great gifts – not only of intellectual power, but with some touch of that heavenly thing which we know as wisdom, that quality which, like Love, is both old and young, calm and fiery. He had not, however, been a conspicuously successful man – though he had achieved what many people would call success – because, I think, of a rather noble lack of the faculty of practical prudence; but he had been appointed, on the day on which I spoke with him, to a post of high dignity and leisure, worthy of him, and indeed singularly enviable. I congratulated him with heart felt pleasure, and said something about the satisfaction of seeing a man for once ideally placed. He smiled very sweetly, but perhaps a little sadly, and said: ” Ah, yes; but if you knew what my dreams had once been!”

I have since often reflected how clumsily and awkwardly the world interprets the thoughts and feelings of the people who are held to be successful; I believe that it very often happens that, when such are envied and congratulated, they feel far more in need of sympathy and even compassion; that, when we think of them as strong and secure, they are often conscious far more of weakness and anxiety. We reserve our sympathy for those who fail, for those who are afflicted. But I believe that success is sometimes a heavier burden than failure, and that it often brings with it a sense of loneliness and dismay rather than a sense of satisfaction. I may be allowed, I think, to give, as an instance, the case of a man whose life I saw very close at hand – my own father – because I have already told the story of his life as frankly as I could. He may be said, judged by ordinary standards, to have been a supremely successful man. He founded and established a great public school, and a flourishing Theological College; he organized a new Bishopric, and in the prime of his life he was put at the head of the Anglican Church. I may say candidly that I never saw any one whose success was so little of a personal pleasure to him. He rejoiced in the prosperity of the institutions over which he presided; but he never manifested the smallest pride in his achievements; he enjoyed to the full the venerable traditions and the historical associations of the posts he held, but I do not think that he ever took to himself the smallest credit for the success of his organizations, nor felt the least proud of having attained, without wealth or influence or connections, his high office. In fact, his one feeling was a sense of deep, constant and anxious responsibility, that the great interests entrusted to him should not suffer in his hands. He enjoyed whole-heartedly much of his work; but one would have thought sometimes, to hear him speak of his task, that his chief feeling was that he was unequal to it, with a sense that was almost terror at his own inadequacy and unworthiness. He would gladly have remained all his life as a Canon of Lincoln; he would have even more gladly stayed at Truro, as Bishop; and he used to look forward at times, with a sense of relief, to a day when he might be allowed to lay down the burden of the Primacy.

This partly came from his sense of the unique significance and importance of the particular work in which he was engaged; so that he always felt like Atlas, in the old mythology, bearing the weight of the heavens upon his shoulders; and like Atlas, too, he felt terribly alone on the mountain-top, and hankered all his days after a quiet life of leisure and privacy – for which, I may add, he would have been wholly unfit.

But I am sure that he was painfully conscious at all times of his loneliness. He had many friends and trusted counsellors; but he realized that, after all, the responsibility of decision and action was his alone, and that whatever line he ultimately took, he would have to bear the brunt of opposition and possible misrepresentation. Yet he was essentially a strong man, with a personality which affected every one who came in contact with him. It was hard to differ from him, impossible to contradict him; and yet he was deeply sensitive to any coldness or hostility. It certainly could not be called a consciously happy life, though his temperament was so eager and even buoyant that he had much unconscious happiness.

Of course, temperaments vary greatly, and there are no doubt many men who owe their success to a robust tranquility of nature, who are not disturbed by criticism and who enjoy both influence and responsibility. Indeed, there is some truth in the comment made by one who had been spending an evening in the company of several highly distinguished men, and who, on coming away, said that he was led to believe that the only requisite for success was perfect physical health.

I once had a curiously frank and intimate talk with a leading statesman, who had just effected an extraordinary change in a complex political situation by a speech of great eloquence and persuasiveness. I ventured to say to him that it must be an immense satisfaction to have achieved what he had achieved, and to have made a speech that would be memorable in the annals of debate. The great man smiled and said, ” Do you know, I think it rather the other way; to have reached a certain standard entails upon one the necessity of seeing that one never falls below it; and it is more depressing, I think, to fail where one has once succeeded, than never to succeed at all.” I am sure that this is a very true statement. If a man has made a name as an orator, or an artist, or a writer, any subsequent failures are blamed rather than compassionated. It is supposed and freely said that he has no business to fail; that he could do better if he chose, and that the failure must be due to inadequate preparation or to undue self-confidence; and thus the successful man, if he is also a sensitive man, has the added strain of feeling that whatever happens he must not fall below his best, and disappoint his admirers.

Of course the philosopher would intervene, and allege that it does not matter what people say; but popular approval is a good rough test of all but the highest kinds of success; and the faint reverberation of distant plaudits is as pleasant a sound in the ears of the generous man, who would fain do something to serve and please his kind, as the phantom music that comes sweetly and cheerily out of the crags, when one sings aloud the notes of a chord in a valley shut in by tall precipices. We like, all of us, to feel that we move among friends, and it is a sore trial, and one which a man need not be ashamed of dreading, when the voice of the applauding throng becomes the thin buzzing of wasplike foes.

There are two instances that come prominently before the mind. One is the case of Ruskin, when he turned aside from his light-hearted work of transforming public taste, by persuading men with all his armory of bright epithets and shining sentences that they believed in beauty, to the heavy task of trying to mend some of the crying evils of society. What a storm of insolent abuse and incredulous obloquy fell upon him! People were as much shocked by his becoming serious and socialistic, as the old Dean was by the clergyman who talked about religion at the dinner-table. We know now that much of Ruskin’s art-teaching was erroneous, and that he only substituted one convention for another; while we see every day that his ideas about work and life, however fantastically arrayed, had a basis of true perception and sound sense.

Then again there is the case of William Morris, whose followers and friends were horrified when he left his looms and his dyeing-vats, his pretty tapestries of poetry and his charming upholstery, that he might write revolutionary tirades, and lecture at street corners to wholly indifferent audiences, who, so far from sympathizing with his views and hopes, did not even know to what he was alluding. It was a mistake, but a noble mistake; and Morris, who was essentially a dreamer, recovered his footing, and went back, we may be thankful, to what was his real work – to make life beautiful, and to set open unsuspected doors, leading straight into the old world of romance and chivalry, out of dusty streets and crowded thoroughfares. But Morris suffered, though not as Ruskin suffered; and what galled him most was the barrier that his theories erected between him and his closest friends, who, he says pathetically, instead of blaming him when he failed to follow truth and light, praised him for his failures, and made merry when he returned, like the household that welcomed the Prodigal Son in the parable.

But worse even than this kind of misunderstanding, which is perhaps inevitable in the case of all prophetic natures, is the isolation to which undoubted and unquestioned success often, in itself, condemns a man. He can depend on no one, he can take counsel with no one; none can help or sustain him; he is surrounded with envy, when he yearns for sympathy; he is praised for his strength, when he desires to confess his weakness. He sees comradeship and generous love lavished upon feeble and struggling persons; but people tend to feel that the successful man, like the Scribe and the Pharisee, has his reward; and under the praise and honor lavished upon him by his warmest admirers there runs an unexpressed condition, that he shall continue to lead and guide and inspire. The sense of responsibility that this engenders is not infrequently attended with disaster to a man’s best ideals. Instead of pursuing the singlehearted aims by which he won his praise, he tends to descend on to an ad captandum level; he comes to believe that he is not doing his best, unless it carries the popular verdict with it. Then, if he is a statesman, he has the grievous temptation of trying to see which way the current of popular feeling runs, and testing its strength, that he may be sure to sail along with it; if he is a painter or a writer, he begins to think what kind of art or what kind of writing will make a popular appeal. And in the case of an artist or a writer who belongs to the Anglo-Saxon race, the temptation often vitiates the aim of his art, because the Anglo-Saxon public are moralists at heart, love not artists but preachers, and do not care for pictures or books, unless they are of an improving or hortatory kind. Two instances which may be quoted are Millais and Tennyson. Millais, in his early days, loved art for its own sake, and produced pictures of the purest and most artistic beauty. But when he came to love art for the sake of success, he painted pictures in which he sacrificed art to melodramatic effect, and even to cheap sentiment. Tennyson too, whose early lyrics are of the purest gold of art, began to feel, as his audience grew, that he must deal with popular ideas, make science poetical and morality unimpeachable; by which he earned the gratitude of respectable people, and became a witness in the cause of orthodoxy.

But the true artist ought to be independent of such temptations. He need not assume that his art is deteriorating, because it is popular; but he must not be dismayed if he finds that it is unpopular. He must, as cheerfully as he can, be ready to suffer eclipse, if he diverges from popular tendencies. There is thus a special beauty about the work of such men as Keats and Shelley, who, it must be remembered, in their brief lives, never had the least popular success, a beauty which is absent from the lives of artists who grow to feel the responsibility of their art, and cannot bear to sacrifice influence for the sake of art.

It is difficult to find, among men notable for idealistic expression, in whatever region of life or art they upheld it, any instances of characters whose lives have not been, to a certain extent, impaired by popularity, just as it is rare to find instances of successful men who have known when they have said their say, and done their work, and when they ought to stop. And the reason is that men cannot, as a rule, bear the loneliness to which the best success is almost bound to conduct them, but must purchase sympathy at whatever cost.

And yet the strange thing is that it is rare to find successful men who are not disappointed by the quality of success when it comes. It seems, before a man gains it, so radiant, desirable and sustaining a thing; but seen close, it is apt to prove both wearisome and paltry. Only if a man values the great things of life, such as love and friendship, above the lesser things, such as honor and credit, can he keep his heart tender and pure. Then he does not lose the balance and the proportion of life, but wears his success only as a robe of state which he is sometimes bound wearily to assume, while his real life is hidden from the world, the real life, that is, of simple human emotions. Such an one is more grateful for being a man than for being a successful man, and realizes that glory is not a thing to be ensnared and pursued and captured, but that it rather comes unasked and unsought, not as the reward, but the consequence of being simply and sincerely himself, and of daring to say what he feels, rather than what the world will congratulate him upon and envy him for feeling.

Arthur C. Benson.