I said something about Walter Scott.  “Ah yes,” said Father Payne, “but Scott’s work was amazing—­it just seemed to overflow from a gigantic reservoir of vitality.  He could do his day’s work in the early hours, and then tramp about all day, chattering, farming, planting, entertaining—­endlessly good-humoured.  Of course he wore himself out at last by perfectly ghastly work—­most of it very poor stuff.  Browning and Thackeray were men of the same sort, sociable, genial, exuberant.  They overflowed too—­they didn’t batter things out.

“But, as a rule, most men who want to do good work, must be content to potter about, and seem lazy and even self-indulgent.  And one of the reasons why many men who start as promising writers come to nothing is because they can’t be inert, acquiescent, easy-going.  I have often thought that a good novel might be written about the wife of a great writer, who marries him, dazzled by his brilliance and then finds him to be a petty, suspicious, wayward sort of child, with all his force lying in one supreme faculty of vision and expression.  It must be a fiery trial to see deep, wise, beautiful things produced by a man who can’t live his thoughts—­can only write them.”

“But what should a man do?” I said.

“Well,” said Father Payne, “I think, as a practical matter, it would be a good thing to cultivate a hobby of a manual kind—­and also, above all, the power of genial loafing.  Of course, the real pity is that we are not all taught to do some house-work as a matter of course—­we depend too much on servants, and house-work is the natural and amusing outlet of our physical energies; as it is, we specialise too much, and half of our maladies and discomforts and miseries are due to that—­that we work a part of ourselves too hard, and the other parts not hard enough.  The thing to aim at is equanimity, and the existence of unsatisfied instincts in us is what poisons life for many people.”

He was silent for a little, and then he said, “And then, too, there is the great danger of all writers—­the feeling that he has the power of giving people what they want, when he ought to remember that he has only the good fortune of expressing what people feel.  Art oughtn’t to be a thing sprinkled on life, as you shake sugar out on to a pudding—­it is just a power of disentangling things; we suffer most of us from finding life too complicated—­we don’t understand it—­it’s a mass of confused impressions.  Well, the artist puts it all in order, isolates the important things, makes the values distinct—­he helps people to feel clearly—­that’s his only use.  And then, if he succeeds, there come silly flatteries and adorations—­until he gets to feel as if he were handing down pots of jam and bottles of wine from a high shelf out of reach—­until he grows to believe that he put them there, when he only found them there.  It’s a dreadful thing for an artist never to succeed at all, because then