“Suppose,” I asked, “that you had failed in a very important examination, Henry, would you feel bad?”
“Yes,” he said, “if it were a very, _very_ important one.”
“Then, if you went to Riverside Drive and forgot yourself in that immense feeling, when you returned home you would not only be over your sore, bitter disappointment, but you would be full of energy to begin work again.”
“So, you see, it is a creative, sympathetic, living aloofness, not cold and far off.”
Ruth said she had noticed that the artistic life was a selfish ideal.
“Yes,” I said, “selfish in the best sense.”
“It is self-development, you mean,” said Alfred.
“Yes,” I answered, “and that selfishness includes the whole world.”
“Why use the word ‘selfishness,’ then,” asked Marian, “that has been used in another sense?”
We spent the rest of the time telling Leo our idea of God and progress. Henry, Ruth, Florence and Marian did it; Florence told him of complete human sympathy, Marian of progress toward it as the good, Henry explained the poem, “Abou ben Adhem,” and Ruth—when Leo objected that knowing men was not knowing God—quoted a passage from the Bible to show it was.
“I always think of God as a supreme power,” said Leo.
I told him something of our idea. What I cared for was to hear the others talk. All, except Henry, seemed satisfied with a merely human conception of self—that is, Florence set the key, and all but Henry kept the tune. He spoke of the “something outside.”
I remarked that, as I had foreseen, we no longer used the word God.
Henry said: “I use it when I speak to other people; but not here, because we know what we mean, without saying it.”
Marian said: “We have made a vocabulary of our own. Ought we to?”
“Yes,” I said. “Perhaps we can impose it on others?”
“I don’t think that would be fair or right,” she answered.
“Why not? That is just what every great thinker has done. He has imposed a new vocabulary upon the world. Unless our words are good and great and true, they will not last.”
I read Virginia’s paper of two weeks ago:
“Anything to be really beautiful must be complete. The reason for this is that it gives us that idea of completeness which the universe possesses. A picture in which every detail is painted may be pretty, but it is not beautiful. When you look at a person you look at his face and the expression of it. In anything on which you set your eyes, you see only the part that interests you. Therefore a good picture or a book should only have that part brought forth, and the rest and unimportant parts should be kept in the background. In fact, they should only be there to make the important thing more interesting; to make it stand out.”