he world at large; and that if it meant love of
the world at large, it meant love of a great many utterly unworthy and
beastly people. You deprived me of humanitarianism, of positivism, of
mysticism; and then you did not even let me rest peaceably in pessimism,
telling me that to say that all was for the worst was as unjust as to
say that all was for the best. With a few of your curt sentences you
showed me that all these religions of mine were mere idolatries, and
that to rest in them for the sake of peace was to be utterly base. You
left me nothing but a vague religion of duty, of good; but you gave me
no means of seeing where my duty lay, of distinguishing good from evil.
You are a very useful rooter up of error, Baldwin; but you leave one's
soul as dry and barren and useless as sea shingle. You have taken away
all the falsehoods from my life, but you have not replaced them by
truths."

Baldwin listened quietly.

"Would you like to have the falsehoods back, Cyril?" he asked. "Would
you now like to be the holy knight, adoring and defending the pewter
basin or blue china teapot of humanitarianism, or positivism, or
mysticism, or aestheticism? And what becomes of the only religion which I
told you was the true one--the religion of good, of right? Do you think
it worthless now?"

"I think it is the religion of the Unknown God. Where shall I find Him?"

"In yourself, if you will look, Cyril."

Cyril was silent for a moment. "What is right?" he said. "In the
abstract--(oh, and it is so easy to find out in the abstract, compared
to the concrete!)--in the abstract, right is to improve things in the
world, to make it better for man and beast; never to steal justice, and
always to give mercy; to do all we can which can increase happiness,
and refrain from doing all which can diminish it. That is the only
definition I can see. But how vague!--and who is to tell me what I am to
do? And when I see a faint glimmer of certainty, when I perceive what
seems to me the right which I must do, who again interferes? My friend
Baldwin, who, after preaching to me that the only true religion is the
religion of diminishing evil and increasing good for the sake of so
doing, coolly writes to me, in half-a-dozen letters, that the sole duty
of the artist is to produce good art, and that good art is art which has
no aim beyond its own perfection. Why, it is a return to my old aesthetic
fetish worship, when I thought abstract ideas of beauty w