Have you ever known an individual who appeared to you the better for having achieved popular acclaim, recognition in the great world of majority opinion,--success? I have not. I have never known any one whom it had not--or so I truly felt--at least a little harmed. Something of fineness and brave integrity was gone from the best of them. One could not any longer quite safely say to any one of them: ‘Just there what you’ve done is poor, unworthy of you,’ and have him fight the accusation out on its merits. Suppose the man a writer. Expressed or not, there arose unmistakably to his mind the thought: ‘A hundred thousand readers have not found it so. That very passage has been praised in a score of reviews.’ It is not a question of whether he or his accuser is right; it is the matter of the harm that has been done to the man’s open-mindedness. Of value only as himself, he has become a sort of institution. And institutions are at once absurd and distressing, whether they are the Harvard Commencement, _The New Republic_, Doney’s restaurant in Florence, or successful individuals. Among all the men I have known, the ones whom I have most deeply esteemed were men to whom no imaginable stretching of the popular conception would concede success. But I think that what they have, diversely, achieved is precisely what success ought to mean, since it has benefited, not harmed, their character. But the final saddest note of this homily remains to be sounded. The worst thing--and also the strangest--is not the evil effect of success on the individual who succeeds; for vanity and self-satisfaction are universal human traits easy to arouse, and, if deplored, should be readily pardoned. Moreover, an individual who has achieved success, as success is counted to-day, is likely to be of too poor quality to waste many tears over. No, the worst thing of all is the effect the success of an individual has on other individuals, even intelligent. Hardly ever can they see him as they saw him before; they cannot now meet him quite on an equality; they are a little humble, slightly awed (though they may disguise the emotion beneath pertness or cynicism). For he has been sanctioned, he has been anointed, he has been canonized. And, dear heaven! when one thinks of how and by whom, one is oppressed by a sense of desolation beyond even the ministerings of the Ironic Spirit. BLACK-AND-WHITE