THE DIAL
SEPTEMBER 1922
People who pass by their true life and their true happiness, or whom happiness passes by. People of very delicate adjustments, haughty in their isolation, and yet suffering because no one is quite open to another. People of the defensive, of perfect form, of good bearing. Amiable melancholics, hardly adapted to living, a bit spoiled and querulous, and sensitive to any banality. The disillusioned, who go on nevertheless in their quest for love. Quiet ironists and beauty-hungering egoists. Then again, those who are simply young; some unhampered, others sombre, but all entranced with living and loving, which is to them the gravitational centre and the quintessential meaning of existence; everything else, and especially such "serious things" as vocations and work . . . this is a mere incidental tracery. (Only one of these young people is different: Felix in The Lonely Way, who orients himself calmly and steadily in the big issues of life and seems to stride by all small adventures towards a life of action and utility.) People who stand aside from the confused struggles of the age, with a strong Viennese element to their cultivation, somewhat over-refined and yet not without a certain rigour in their self-sickness; aesthetes of the spirit, for the most part removed from all practical manual labour: writers, painters, doctors, fine sceptics with soft, white, delicately cautious hands, hands which are in another plane of existence from that of violent grips and blows. Women who understand nothing but love, with slight inklings of the maternal, and around whom even in old age
