CHAPTER XXVI
Our passion for comprehending invaded even our friendships. A friend was no longer simply a friend, but a riddle to be read, a proposition to be understood and expounded. Everybody talked of everybody else, and we analyzed and dissected one another with great calmness. The temperaments of ourconfrères, their growth and change in ideas,—all these matters we tossed back and forth over many a cup of afternoon tea.
The Lad did not shine in this work of analysis. We all decided that he was no judge of character: he had so little insight into people’s faults. The opinions that he formed were most astounding. To him the Man of the World was a promising child, and he regarded me as a person of firmest conviction, not seeing how I was swayed this way and that by any newidea. In those days everything that I heard impressed me greatly.
When we were all together, we talked of our remoter acquaintances. The Man of the World afforded us much amusement, and the Butterfly Hunter interested us greatly. But when the little coterie was not complete, the absent members often became the subject of conversation.
Our best epigrams, I noticed, were made about the Altruist. It was easy to be clever at his expense.
“What I admire most about him,” said the Doctor, “is his brilliant lack of logic. He is never so convincing as when he contradicts himself.”
“Paul has that exclusive belief in his immediate notion which is so effective in this world,” said Janet. “The difference between him and me is this: I can never believe in anything that I am doing, and he can never believe in anything that he is not doing.”
I defended the Altruist. His burning zeal for good, I maintained, consumed allminor faults. One could forgive him much for the greatness of his endeavour.
Yet I could not help admitting that the Altruist’s passionate devotion to his idea kept him remote, apart from the world he was trying to uplift.
“He is rather an ingenious theory of living than a part of life itself,” said Janet one day. “I sometimes think that he is like a beautiful religion that never saved a soul.”
“Yes,” answered the Doctor, impiously, “he ought to commit some sin that would humble him thoroughly. Then he would understand better the common experience of mankind.”
“I haven’t a doubt that he would do it,” laughed Janet, “if he thought it necessary to bring him ‘in touch with the masses.’”
It was on this occasion that the Doctor made her famous inquiry as to whether, in becoming too literally an Altruist, one ceased to be an individual.
When the Altruist was with us, we talked often of the Lad. We rarely discussed theDoctor, because in doing so the Altruist and I quarrelled.
“There is something lacking in the Lad,” the Altruist said. “He has the old Greek joyousness in mere living, but one misses the touch of the spiritual, the mystical. It is a nature that is limited to delight in sensuous and intellectual life. It has no hold on the Infinite.”
“That is what the Altruist says about everybody who doesn’t agree with him,” the Doctor remarked afterward. “I wish that he did not confuse lack of appreciation of himself with lack of appreciation of the good.”
I feared that the Altruist might withhold his approval from the Lad. The two men stood very far apart in aim and in ways of thinking. It was true that the Lad did not entirely understand the Altruist and his gallant efforts to come to the rescue of the fainting powers of Heaven; and the Doctor’s suggestion that the Altruist regarded criticism of himself as a mark of mental limitation in the critic, was notwholly unjust. Yet knowing that the younger man was not numbered among his disciples, the Altruist treated him with great cordiality.
I did not scruple to criticise the Lad myself. It seemed to me that he had parted too easily with his old faith, and that he was not sufficiently interested in my Cause.
“He stands for nothing,” I said one day to Janet and the Doctor.
“O yes he does,” laughed Janet. “He stands for the forgotten art of living unconsciously. He has rediscovered a lost point of view.”
Janet usually refused to talk of the Lad, but to-day she took up the cudgels in his defence.
“I like that radiant scepticism. There is nothing negative about it. I sometimes think that the Lad has more than his share of the primal creative impulse that is at the heart of all things. His energy always urges him forward. The rest of us are working backward, by an analysisthat is death, as if the meaning of life lay behind us and not before.”
“Janet,” said the Doctor, “did you think of that just now, or did you make it up before?”
“I thought of it a long time ago,” answered Janet, raising her chin saucily, but flushing, “and I wrote it down in my note-book.”
Janet herself was one of our most interesting subjects at these afternoon séances. I was constantly tempted into a bit of analysis at her expense: she was so complex, so puzzling.
I have regretted since our free discussions of one another. We considered them impersonal, artistic, critical. One’s friends, I have come to think, should serve other ends than those of amateur psychology.