“But,” I stammered, with a half-guilty feeling, “your being here does not bring these people bread.”
“It does not,” said the Altruist, “but it brings a little beauty into their lives. I share the work of the residents at Barnet House. We have clubs of all kinds. We have musicales and art exhibitions. There is much that is definite in our effort.”
Looking up, I caught sight of some Burne-Jones pictures on the roughly-plastered walls of the study.
“Isn’t it like trying to feed a hungry lion with rose-leaves?” I asked.
The Altruist’s face lighted up.
“It is not what we do that is important,” he said. “We stand for an eternal truth. Barnet House and my study here are only symbols of our faith. They have inestimable value, not in our petty achievement, but as a declaration of the right of our fellow-man to our sympathy and love.”
I listened with interest as my host proceeded to set forth his criticism of society and to unfold his plans for its reform. He talked brilliantly.
The race fell short of its grandest possibilities, he said, in losing its hold on abstract truths. Devotion to an ideal was forgotten in the adjustment of human lives to one another, rather than to something above and beyond them. In attempting to solve minor concrete problems, society had dissipated all energy for lofty thought.
In confiding to me his ideas for reconstruction the Altruist talked of human life as if it were something in which he did not share; as if he stood apart from its real issues, apart, and higher than his fellows, to whom he reached down a helping hand.
His conversation enabled me to understand his face. It was full of a fierce enthusiasm, which life had not yet tamed.