He stared with his strange, smiling stare at James.
"I shouldn't say so," replied James. "But if a man never knows his
own mind, he certainly can't be much of a man."
"I don't see it," replied Albert. "What's the matter is that he
feels guilty for not knowing his own mind. That's the unnecessary
part. The guilty feeling--"
Albert seemed insistent on this point, which had no particular
interest for James.
"Where we've got to make a change," said Albert, "is in the feeling
that other people have a right to tell us what we ought to feel and
do. Nobody knows what another man ought to feel. Every man has his
own special feelings, and his own right to them. That's where it is
with education. You ought not to want all your children to feel
alike. Their natures are all different, and so they should all feel
different, about practically everything."
"There would be no end to the confusion," said James.
"There needn't be any confusion to speak of. You agree to a number
of rules and conventions and laws, for social purposes. But in
private you feel just as you do feel, without occasion for trying to
feel something else."
"I don't know," said James. "There are certain feelings common to
humanity, such as love, and honour, and truth."
"Would you call them feelings?" said Albert. "I should say what is
common is the idea. The idea is common to humanity, once you've put
it into words. But the feeling varies with every man. The same idea
represents a different kind of feeling in every different
individual. It seems to me that's what we've got to recognize if
we're going to do anything with education. We don't want to produce
mass feelings. Don't you agree?"
Poor James was too bewildered to know whether to agree or not to
agree.
"Shall we have a light, Alvina?" he said to his daughter.
Alvina lit the incandescent gas-jet that hung in the middle of the
room. The hard white light showed her somewhat haggard-looking as
she reached up to it. But Albert watched her, smiling abstractedly.
It seemed as if his words came off him without affecting him at all.
He did not think about what he was feeling, and he did not feel what
he was thinking about. And therefore she hardly heard what he said.
Yet she believed he was clever.
It was evident Albert was quite blissfully happy, in his own way,
sitting there at the end of the sofa not far from the fire, and
talking animatedly. The uncomfortable thing was that though he
talked in the direction of his interlocutor, he did not speak _to_
him: merely said his words towards him. James, however, was such an
<<BackPagesTo menuForward>>