FAILURES.
TN his speech at the Artists' Benevolent Institution 1 on Saturday last the Bishop of London raised some very interesting and curious points in regard to failure, and as to why certain men succeed while others come to grief. He was, we think, quite within the mark when he noted that half the men who succeed have a feeling that they had no real right to their success, or rather that they owed it to pure luck, and nothing else. It was impossible for them, said the Bishop, to discover the causes that made for success or failure, and those who had succeeded must very often wonder why they had done so, and must sometimes, in a cynical mood, think that the public taste was very incapable of proper discrimina- tion. " They must feel that there were many of the acquaint- ances of their youth who were really much better fellows, and who could do much better work in a great many ways, but who, somehow or other, had not succeeded, and who, it was felt, might have succeeded if they had had their due. In all classes and in every pursuit they had the same feelings." But just as it is impossible to say why men succeed, it is alleged that it is often quite as impossible to say why men fail. There is, as it were, a huge middle space in all professions and walks of life tenanted by the vast number of men and women who have neither failed nor succeeded, but who have managed to keep the water of life neither hot nor cold, but reasonably and comfortably warm. Above these are the men who have succeeded, some from obvious genius or the possession of qualities such as exceptional energy, perseverance, and determination, others apparently from pure luck; for as far as appearances go there is no quality upon which you can put your hand and say: This secured that man his success, and won him his place in the world.' Below the middle space come the failures. Here, in popular estimation, exactly the same con- ditions apply. There are obviously many men who are failures simply because they possess to perfection all the qualities which make failure inevitable. They are stupid, they are foolish, they are incapable of persevering in anything, they have neither belief in themselves, the power of originat- ing, nor the capacity of imitating. In a word, they are mentally, morally, and physically incapable. Next come the men who appear to have failed simply because they have had the luck against them. They seem to have all the qualities which would insure success, or at any rate preclude failure, and yet they are clear and hopeless failures, and the general notion is that they have failed, not because they were incapable of succeeding, but through pure ill-luck. We have no wish to seem hard upon the men who have not been able to win a place even in the middle space between failure and success, but we do not believe that the explanation of luck holds half so strongly in the case of failure as of success. Of course there are a few unfortunate people who always fall ill or break a limb whenever a chance of promotion comes to them, but these are rare exceptions. The real failures are, we believe, due to some hidden defect, some imperceptible crack in the vase. Ordinary ill-luck may keep a man back for years, may take away a great deal of happiness, but there are so many chances in life that it very seldom ruins him permanently. Even the most successful men have had back- waters in their lives, though they are forgotten in the ulti- mate successes. The man who lets a turn or two of ill-luck ruin him is not meant to succeed. Besides, are we not apt to call ill-luck a good deal which is not really ill-luck, but merely the logical consequence of perversity or fatuity ? When the poet Fletcher wrote the proud line, " A man is his own star," he stated a great moral truth. In nine cases out of ten a man is his own star, and what he calls fate but the consequences of his own actions. Bacon says that the King should beware of employing unlucky men, apparently on the ground that what we call their unluckiness is due to some hidden defect. But whether Bacon meant this or not, it is very true that so-called unluckiness is often the cloak of blundering and ineptitude. Two men are in peril. One escapes from, the other succumbs to, the sudden hidden danger, and we call them lucky and unlucky ; yet, in truth, it is very possible that our judgment ought to be that one showed ingenuity and presence of mind and so escaped, while the other was at the critical moment surprised into hesitation or inaction. Depend upon it, the hidden quality which pro- duces failure ie in the majority of cases merely an un- analysed element in the human character. Probably self- distrust is one of the readiest causes of failure. A man who, however much he conceals the fact from observation, feels in his heart of hearts that he is not capable of doing the work he has undertaken, is almost sure to fail. Ordinary diffidence as to one's powers is quite another matter, and by no means a necessary impediment to success. Such nervousness is often purely superficial, and merely means that the anxiety to succeed is so great that it causes a re- action. The dangerous self-distrust to which we are alluding is a much more negative quality, and generally has joined to it a strong strain of indifference. But when a man does not think he will succeed, and also is doubtful whether it is worth while to succeed, or rather, whether it is not a matter of in- difference whether he wins or loses, failure is almost certain. This stultifying indifference to failure is much more widely spread than people generally imagine. Because failure seems to the average man so horrible, producing, as it must, humilia- tions and miseries, remorseful feelings and regrets of every kind, the average man cannot imagine any human being indifferent to it. Yet as a matter of fact there are men whose hearts become so indurated that they do not mind either failure or its consequences. They would endure any- thing rather than rouse themselves to the painful effort of resisting the march of what they call fate. They will float with the stream or tide, but come what may, they will not row a stroke against either. They conceal this resolve from their friends, and sometimes even from them- selves, but nevertheless it exists. Another frequent cause of failure is the inability to be helped which certain people lisplay. We have all encountered persons whom it is almost impossible to help over an obstacle or up a steep place. Do what you will, it seems impossible to lift or get them over or through. They always either fail to hold on, or give the wrong hand, or move the wrong foot, or jump short when they ought to jump long, or over-jump when a short jump is all that is asked of them. In the same way there are people who seem utterly incapable of making use of a helping hand in the greater affairs of life. You cannot help them because they " muff " every attempt. You find them a piece of work quite within their capacity, and there needs only the simplest and easiest little effort to secure an excellent position, Yet this little effort is just what they will not or cannot make. They may be prudent, painstaking, industrious, and yet almost while you turn your head they have slipped off the rock of safety and fallen back into the slough from which you so lately raised them. Of such stuff are the worst form of failures made. Their minds seem utterly unprehensile, and no more capable of grasping and bolding on than is a paralytic. No doubt it is often not in the least the fault of the poor failure, but that does not alter the fact that it is a personal defect, and not mere ill-luck, which produces the failure.
While touching on the question of failures, it must not be forgotten that a great many of the so-called failures, especially in art and literature, are not failures at all, but merely persons who do not possess, or perhaps have not tried to cultivate, the quality of popularity. A failure is not a synonym for a pauper, but a person who has tried to do a particular thing and not succeeded in doing it. But most people try to make a good deal of money, and hence poverty is roughly taken as a sign of failure. If in a particular call- ing the average man makes £800 a year, he who makes only £200 is apt to be dubbed a failure. Yet in troth he may be nothing of the kind. If he did not set out to make money, he may not feel the slightest sense of failure. Again, an artist or a man of letters who fails to please the public taste may not be a failure, for the very sufficient reason that he never attempted to please the public taste. The artist who says, `I will paint what I think beautiful pictures, and not what any one else thinks beautiful,' may be annoyed that the public taste is so different from his own ; but he will not feel that he has failed because the public taste is not satisfied by his work. He will not have expected any but an adverse verdict. It is the same in literature. Words- worth did not feel and was not a failure because the public of his day cared nothing about, and would not read, his poems. To confuse unappreciated people and failures is to make a gross error in the art of human classification. Even bitter and disappointed men are not necessarily failures, for their bitterness and disappointment do not show that they have failed in what they set out to do, but merely that the world has failed to understand them. The true failure is the man who keeps sinking, sinking, who seems to have no buoyancy in him, and who at heart knows that success is for him impossible. No one ever quite thinks of Mr. Micawber as a failure, because Mr. Micawber had always in him the belief that something, and something very good, would be sure to turn up. The true, the hopeless, failure is always a pessimist at heart. He looks on the past with regret and on the future with misgiving. However miserable their outward circumstances, and however hard and unfortunate their worldly lot, we must never call failures those brave souls who, in spite of every mischance, bate no jot of heart and hope, but press right onward, believing that somewhere and somehow they will find a haven of rest, and who hold with Browning that if the earth is full of broken arcs, at any rate in heaven there is the perfect round. How can they be failures who thus teach by example the best of lessons
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