“We have not met for so long,” I said, “I wonder whether you have forgotten anything of what we had done?”
They all assured me that it was clear in their minds. Henry said: “It has had time to sink in.”
“I am glad,” I went on, “that we happened to stop at the end of a part; that now we begin anew at a new thing. But I am a little afraid to go on. For now we are going to speak of morals, of goodness.”
“Because I am so afraid we are going to moralize, to become petty.”
“Don’t be afraid of that,” said Marian; “I have had too much experience to be likely to do it.”
“Well, then,” I said, “first of all we must find out what we consider good, what we mean by the good—that misused word—and to distinguish between the true and the artificial good. Have you any ideas about it?”
None of them had any definite idea of what they meant by the good, or of the distinction between the goody-goodiness which repelled them, and the goodness which they loved. They thought immediately of “good” people who are unlovable or stupid. Virginia and Marian exchanged remarks about a girl they had met that morning at Sunday-school; and all through the meeting, until I found effective means to stop them, they referred to her as an example.
“Now,” I said, “I will tell you of the true good, and by the light of it you will clearly distinguish the artificial. You remember the first law of art.”
Henry had the paper with him. It was: “Art is a symbol of completeness in a definite shape.”
“So the good, too, is a symbol of completeness in a definite shape,” I said. “Goodness is always of relation. It means the right relation, sympathy and unity of those who know each other. And the good man is the man who makes a complete world, a symbol of the perfect awakened universe, out of those few people whom he knows—that is, of whose existence he is aware—and of all that he knows in the universe, which is a small part of the whole. He makes it complete and perfect, by making all his relations with life complete, and understanding and beautiful. You realize that a Robinson Crusoe, alone on his desert island, if he never expected to see human beings again, could not be either good or bad.”
“Yes, he could,” said Virginia, “in the way he treated the animals.”