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.