“What has lured these people into their attitudes of isolated and weary superiority?” he asked himself, “and if the attitudes are genuine, why do these people make a garrulous religion of attacking each other? If they actually believed that their convictions were mountain ranges, with some snow of immortality soft beneath their feet, they would dwell with a more pensive calmness upon these substantial protests, instead of assiduously pelting each other with flecks of mud in the valleys.” With the melancholy idealism of his youth Carl had made an emotional sketch in which artists and writers were a band of profoundly misunderstood martyrs, clinging to each other as they accepted the indifference and ridicule of a practical world, and he was amazed to find that almost all of them were far too easy to understand, and thronged with shudders of words at the idea of clinging to one another. Like an array of famished and animated housewives, they traded gaiety and friendly argument while in each other’s presence, while in secret they carved each other with gossiping exaggerations, three-penny sneers, and every hair’s-breadth edge of derision. Even among their different “schools” and cliques he found little fusion--the members of each group were plotting to unseat their leader because they had commenced to fear that he was merely using them as a step-ladder. This trivial drama, with malice performing menial duties in the service of the old, egoistic dream of immortal expression and emotional tallness, was a new reality to Carl and he surveyed it with an alert contempt. “Why all of this clownish, papier-mache melodrama, with words playing the part of overworked murderers?” he asked himself. “Is it possible that faint voices whisper within these people that they are not as important and all-seeing as they would like to be? Most ludicrous tragedy! The noise, alas, must ever continue, since their doubts and fears require a constant pounding. Poor, astounding people! ... The critic, stroking his suave patter above a tea-table: ‘Oh, yes, Mr. X. is a very sound man, very sound.’ ‘Mr. C. is indeed a great poet, for there’s a certain simplicity and sincerity in everything he does.’ ‘Mr. E. is amazingly clever and erudite--a most important man.’ ‘Mr. B.? I’m afraid that he’s only a minor Baudelaire, you know, the old morbid straining after originality’--this critic is merely allowing his thoughts and emotions to perform their private functions upon the publicity of a fanciful pedestal, to retch, relieve themselves of fluids and rubbishes, and scratch their smarts. It is, in truth, a weird, prolonged indecency.” He meditated upon his own relation to this explanation of the belligerent waste of energy around him.