the word 'affinity
The word comradeship just now promises to become as fatuous as
the word 'affinity.' There are clubs of a Socialist sort where all
the members, men and women, call each other 'Comrade.' I have no
serious emotions, hostile or otherwise, about this particular habit:
at the worst it is conventionality, and at the best flirtation.
I am convinced here only to point out a rational principle.
If you choose to lump all flowers together, lilies and dahlias
and tulips and chrysanthemums and call them all daisies,
you will find that you have spoiled the very fine word daisy.
If you choose to call every human attachment comradeship,
if you include under that name the respect of a youth for a
venerable prophetess, the interest of a man in a beautiful woman
who baffles him, the pleasure of a philosophical old fogy in a girl
who is impudent and innocent, the end of the meanest quarrel
or the beginning of the most mountainous love; if you are going
to call all these comradeship, you will gain nothing, you will
only lose a word. Daisies are obvious and universal and open;
but they are only one kind of flower. Comradeship is obvious
and universal and open; but it is only one kind of affection;
it has characteristics that would destroy any other kind.
Anyone who has known true comradeship in a club or in a regiment,
knows that it is impersonal. There is a pedantic phrase used
in debating clubs which is strictly true to the masculine emotion;
they call it 'speaking to the question.' Women speak to each other;
men speak to the subject they are speaking about. Many an honest
man has sat in a ring of his five best friends under heaven
and forgotten who was in the room while he explained some system.
This is not peculiar to intellectual men; men are all theoretical,
whether they are talking about God or about golf.
Men are all impersonal; that is to say, republican. No one
remembers after a really good talk who has said the good things.
Every man speaks to a visionary multitude; a mystical cloud,
that is called the club.
