EXCEPT for one disquieting symptom, Annan had no reason to suppose that his budding affair with Eris was to develop and terminate differently from other agreeable interludes in his airy career.
That symptom was a new one—an odd disinclination to work because his mind was preoccupied with a girl.
No other tender episodes in this young man’s career had interfered with his creative ability. On the contrary, they had stimulated it.
Always he had taken such incidents gaily; always he remained receptive, not seeking; the onus of initiative equally shared; the normal end a mutual enlightenment, not too tragic, and with the germ of future laughter always latent, even quickening under tears.
There never had been any passion in these affairs—not on his part anyway—unless a passion for the analysis of reactions counted, and a passionate desire to comprehend beauty, physical and intellectual; its multiple motives, responsibilities, and penalties.
Partly experimental, partly sympathetically responsive, always tenderly curious, this young man drifted gratefully through the inevitable episodes to which all young men are heir.
And something in him always transmuted into ultimate friendship the sentimental chaos, where comedy and tragedy clashed at the crisis.
The result was professional knowledge. Which, however, he had employed rather ruthlessly in his work. For he resolutely cut out all that had been agreeable to the generations which had thriven on the various phases of virtue and its rewards. Beauty he replaced with ugliness; dreary squalor was the setting for crippled body and deformed mind. The heavy twilight of Scandinavian insanity touched his pages where sombre shapes born out of Jewish Russia moved like anachronisms through the unpolluted sunshine of the New World.
His were essays on the enormous meanness of mankind—mean conditions, mean minds, mean aspirations, and a little mean horizon to encompass all.
Out of his theme, patiently, deftly, ingeniously he extracted every atom of that beauty, sanity, inspired imagination which makes the imperfect more perfect, creates better than the materials permit, forces real life actually to assume and be what the passionate desire for sanity and beauty demands.