Chesterton has just described Midas as “a failure of an unusually painful kind.” Here, however, though he hides the accusation in a parenthetical, he implies not only that most other prominent persons would hide their ass-ears, but that they do. They are, like Midas, trying to conceal their foolishness from the world, and Midas’s failure is extrapolated to encompass “most other prominent and wealthy persons.”

This is not the first time Chesterton has employed first-person narration in this essay, but this parenthetical marks the beginning of his longest stretch in that mode. The aside establishes a new, more conversational tone for the piece, and shows that Chesterton is willing to call his own assertions into question. By noting that his memory on this point of the Midas story could be faulty, Chesterton humanizes himself, implying that he is open to correction, making his arguments more approachable to skeptical readers. That he is, in fact, correct about the barber upholds his general authority as an informed speaker.

The sibilant hissing of this alliteration mimics the sound of the whisper being described. Consistent use of sound-based techniques like this contribute to Chesterton’s colloquial tone; it’s easy to imagine this piece being read aloud. The tonal variety of his diction, combined with the rhythms of his parallel constructions, creates an immersive sonic experience for readers, contributing to his use of pathos by engaging their interests and sympathies on a subconscious level as well as an intellectual one.

In this paragraph, the scope of the essay expands from a narrow critique of “success” books and encompasses those who venerate the successful—embodied in the writer of the article Chesterton cites—as well as the successful themselves, as embodied by Rothschild and Vanderbilt. This particular line constitutes a direct attack on the trustworthiness of Rothschild and Vanderbilt, who Chesterton assumes to be hiding, in the manner of Midas, some personal secrets or shames. It also marks a firm transition in the point of Chesterton’s argument. Where at first he decried books about “success” as illogical and useless, he now transitions into a stance of finding the pursuit of success—including people who are wildly successful—innately immoral.

This appeal includes a very subtle use of ethos. By adding a “we” to the statements he makes about human nature, Chesterton is including himself in the group he describes and placing himself as a spokesman for the entirety of humanity. His self-inclusion softens the blow of what could read as a harsh indictment of impractical behavior.

It is unclear if Chesterton is referring to an actual article or if he has fabricated the excerpts he will include below, either as pastiches of articles he has read or as entirely fictional. The answer may have been more obvious to his contemporaries, but modern readers are left uncertain.

Chesterton frequently uses extremes to convey the scale of his disdain for his subject. To contrast with the hyperbolic vehemence of his fictional excerpts, he uses understatement to describe a “decent little book” that conveys factual information pertinent to the situation he describes. Following so much empty blustering, the statement is appealing in its simplicity and clarity.

By paraphrasing the style of the books he derides, Chesterton hopes to demonstrate that he has, in fact, read them. It would be easy for him to mock these works without any firsthand knowledge of them, but his familiarity with their style and contents gives him authority as an informed speaker and weights his arguments with ethos, the appeal to that authority.

In this paragraph, Chesterton has devised a fictional conversation with his readers, who he speaks to directly as “you.” He is appealing to a shared human experience, that of wanting to acquire a skill, that readers are likely familiar with. This is an argument that uses pathos to engage readers in an emotional response as they place themselves in the fictional narrative Chesterton is creating.

Chesterton returns to this theme in “The Worship of the Wealthy,” another of his essays collected in [All Things Considered] (https://www.owleyes.org/text/all-things-considered/read/the-worship-of-the-wealthy). In that essay, Chesterton criticizes the tendency among the poor to treat the wealthy as if they were especially noble and sacred. True to Christian ethics, Chesterton often pointed out the false conflation of material riches with spiritual attainment.

In the Greek myth of Midas, the foolish Minoan King Midas is granted a wish by the god Bacchus, and he asks that everything he touch turn to gold. Initially he is overjoyed, but the lasting effects of his new power become apparent when he attempts to enjoy a meal, and he begs Bacchus to free him from his curse. (A later interpolation, perhaps creditable to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1851 retelling in A Wonder Book for Girls & Boys, has Midas’s daughter fall prey to his “golden touch,” with his remorse at her temporary solidification motivating his redemption.) Hating the trappings of wealth, Midas flees to the countryside. There, he overhears a musical contest between Pan, a woodland deity, and Apollo, the Olympian god of light and music. Midas, alone of all, favors Pan’s reed pipes to Apollo’s lyre, and in retaliation Apollo replaces his human ears with those of an ass.

A list of three parallel elements in succession is called a “tricolon,” and is a common rhetorical device. The tricolon serves both a rhythmic purpose, using repetition to build and reinforce the piece’s tone, and also an argumentative one, offering a memorable break from the more linear examples of parallelism and juxtaposition that tend to include only two comparative elements. Famous examples include [Antony’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen” from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar] (http://www.owleyes.org/text/julius-caesar/read/act-iii-scene-ii#root-71641-36), and [“we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground,” from Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.”] (http://www.owleyes.org/text/gettysburg-address/read/text-of-lincolns-speech) The tricolon Chesterton employs here combines with hyperbole to create an escalating sense of the of absurdity of the supposed wisdom of the books he mocks.

To support his argument that “what is called Success” is functionally meaningless, Chesterton invents a definition for “Success” that is logically sound but potentially at odds with more common understandings of the word. To Chesterton, success is necessarily local, determined by the boundaries of the specific domain of action. For example, a donkey is just as successful as a millionaire, given that the former is involved in being a donkey and the latter in being a millionaire. Thus, there is no generalized definition of success; no success as such.

While it is not a strict example, this sentence loosely follows a pattern called chiasmus, in which the second portion of a parallel construction is grammatically inverted. Because Chesterton uses parallel construction so frequently, these instances of formal inversion stand out. Here, the inversion hides a flaw in Chesterton’s coming argument: if a donkey “succeeds” simply by being a donkey (in the lines following), then these men who have written books have succeeded simply by writing them.

Chesterton is invoking a perceived disparity in the quality of personhood between a German Jew and an “Anglo-Saxon,” or white Northern European. When All Things Considered was published in 1909, systemic anti-Semitism in Europe had been declining for some time, but Chesterton’s remark is indicative of the social standing and cultural perception of Jews in some circles, and potentially of the anti-Semitism of which Chesterton would later be personally accused.

“Peer” refers to a member of the peerage, the system of hereditary noble titles in Britain. The peerage includes ranks such as Duke and Earl. It is highly unlikely that one of these honors would be bestowed upon a “tenth-rate journalist.”

Chesterton continues to view the entrepreneurial landscape through a lens of religious language and metaphors. Comparing the previous generation of “Industrious Apprentice” with that of today, Chesterton discusses the differing “gospel[s] preached” to the two. For the prior generation, it was “Good work will not make him a rich man, but good work may make him a good workman.” For the new generation, the gospel of “Success” motivates the workman to rise “not by his virtues, but avowedly by his vices.” For Chesterton, such language is important not for its religious connotations, but as a shorthand through which to discuss values and ethics.

Here Chesterton alludes to the seven deadly sins, a list of behaviors considered immoral according to Christian orthodoxy. The sins do not originate in the Bible; rather, they were introduced into Christian theology by Egyptian mystics in the 3rd-century CE. In his criticism of “Success” culture, Chesterton accuses those who pursue “Success” of the sins of avarice—that is, material greed—and pride—that is, selfishness. The other five sins are lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. In this section of the essay, Chesterton’s tactic has shifted; rather than attacking the idea of “Success” at the level of logic, he is attacking it at the level of morality.

Chesterton points out the inherent error of those “Success” writers who cite the life of King Midas as a “progress amidst riches.” The error is one of omission. Chesterton’s assessment is correct: to view King Midas’s story as a model of entrepreneurial triumph is to neglect the end of the myth as well as its ultimate lesson about the catastrophes that follow the unabashed pursuit of worldly goods. Chesterton simply returns Midas’s “‘Golden Touch’” to its proper mythical context of failure and dissolution.

Chesterton crafts an original phrase here—an “ecstasy of priestcraft.” “Ecstasy” refers to a state of immense joy, literally an out-of-body experience. “Priestcraft” refers to the functions performed by clergy. Chesterton suggests that the “Success” mongers relate to their millionaire idols with the same crazed joy with which priests relate to their God and the attendant mysteries of divinity.

Here Chesterton crafts another tricolon—a three-part parallel construction that posits two false definitions before landing on the proper formulation. Chesterton also makes use of internal rhyme. The phrase “mysticism of money” is a clear use of alliteration. “Cynicism” and “mysticism” rhyme through assonance, as the two words share identical vowel sounds. These musical flourishes contribute to Chesterton’s appeal to pathos; the rich sounds of his language help to drive home his arguments.

Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794–1877) was an American railroad magnate who rose from poverty to unprecedented wealth over the course of his lifetime. Vanderbilt represented an ideal subject for writers of “Success” books in that he was American and he embodied the “rags-to-riches” narrative, making him a ready object of admiration among would-be entrepreneurs.

By directly quoting a passage from one of the works he critiques, Chesterton appeals to both ethos and logos. He makes himself seem more credible by presenting his audience with evidence and he makes his argument seem more rational by critiquing his subject at the level of language. Referring to the quoted paragraphs as “exquisite” is a blatant use of irony; it is clear that Chesterton finds the prose of the “Success” writers unsuccessful, let alone exquisite.

The “Lord Rothschild” referred to here is Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744–1812), a German financier who founded what is perhaps the wealthiest banking dynasty in the world. The Rothschild name has come to be associated with the highest strata of wealth.

This is an allusion to the work of biologist Charles Darwin, who first postulated and popularized the theory of evolution with his seminal 1859 volume On the Origin of Species. One of Darwin’s core ideas was that of “natural selection,” which Chesterton amusingly rephrases as “‘THE WEAKEST GO TO THE WALL.’” In using the phrase, Chesterton is mocking the text of the success books he seeks to systematically dismiss. The suggestion here is that success books can offer nothing more than broad, inane motivational statements about the nature of competition.

This aside makes an allusion to the “Little Englanders,” a loosely defined group of English citizens who, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, opposed English imperialism and expansionism. During the Second Boer War (1899–1902), in which England fought against the Dutch Boers in South Africa, the Little Englanders opposed England’s activities. Chesterton uses the Little Englanders as an example of people who are ostensibly working against their own purposes—a mistake for those seeking “Success,” as the books he mimics would have it.

The phrase “it is perfectly obvious” establishes the ensuing statement as the only logical possibility. As far as Chesterton is concerned, “Success” can only be attributed to hard work or cheating. There is no mystical, Platonic specter of Success to be wooed or pursued. While the phrase “it is perfectly obvious” is intellectually heavy-handed, it helps Chesterton make the case for a limited definition of “Success,” which is important for his overall argument.

After setting forth and supporting his own interpretation of “Success,” Chesterton describes the definition he will be contending with for the remainder of the essay. Though the writers of “Success” literature fail to define “Success” as such, Chesterton assumes that their aims are among the most time-tested and Darwinian: money and status. By criticizing the “bad logic and bad philosophy” of his subject, Chesterton makes an appeal at the level of logos.

This sentence is a paradox, in that it contradicts itself entirely. “These things,” the books, cannot simultaneously be “about nothing” and be “about what is called Success”—if Success can be defined and named, it’s not exactly nothing. The purpose of this paradox is to equate the two, “nothing” and “what is called Success,” in the reader’s mind, necessitating a pause and a reevaluation of expectations for both terms. One logical outcome of this equation is that “Success” amounts to, or is worth, “nothing.”

This is an example of parallelism, or parallel construction, a device that Chesterton employs repeatedly throughout this essay. Parallelism serves to uphold the tone and rhythm of a work by chaining together multiple similarly formulated phrases which contribute to a point or argument. Here, the near-identical constructions of “the romances of chivalry were at least about chivalry” and “the religious tracts are about religion” prime readers for a similar description of the books about “Success.”

By engaging such disparate extremes—the “wildest romances” and the “dullest tracts”—Chesterton is employing hyperbole, or the use of exaggeration for rhetorical emphasis. He returns to this technique throughout, using it to subtly underpin his arguments while still rendering them entertaining to the reader.

Here and throughout this essay, Chesterton employs alliteration to link words and concepts that might otherwise seem to contrast each other entirely. In this instance, “sincerely” and “solemnly” both carry connotations of seriousness and gravity. While “silly” did not have quite the lightheartedly goofy connotation it does today, it is still a much more frivolous word than those proceeding, and the contrast solidly establishes Chesterton’s paradoxical tone.