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 our _confrères_, 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
new idea. 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 all minor 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 the Doctor, 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 not wholly 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 analysis
that 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.