“But does not your principle about the right to risk one’s life hold good here too?” said Barthrop.

“No, I think not,” said Father Payne.  “A man may choose to try a dangerous thing, climb a mountain, explore a perilous country, go up in a balloon, where an element of risk is inseparable from the experiment; but ordinary work isn’t risky in itself.  Why,” he added, “I was reading a book the other day, the life of Fitzherbert, you know, who was a man of prodigious laboriousness, who died early, worn out.  He had an impossible standard of perfection.  If he had to write an article, he read all the literature on the subject over and over; he wrote and re-wrote his stuff.  There was a case quoted in the book, as if it were to Fitzherbert’s credit, when he had to send in an article by a certain date—­just a Quarterly article.  It had to go in on the Friday.  He had finished it on the Monday before, when his mind misgave him.  He destroyed the article, began again, sate up all Monday night and all Wednesday night, and wrote the whole thing afresh.  He was laid up for a month after it.  That is simply the act of an unbalanced mind.”

“I can’t help feeling that there is something fine about it,” said Vincent.

“There is always something fine about unreasonable things,” said Father Payne, “or in a man making a sacrifice for an idea.  But there is an entire lack of proportion about this performance; and if Fitzherbert thought his work so valuable as that, then he ought to have reflected that he was simply limiting his future output by this reckless expenditure of force.  But the whole case was a sad one—­Fitzherbert worked in a ghastly way as a boy and as a young man.  He had a very broad outlook, he was interested in everything; and when he was at Oxford, he told a friend that he was discovering a hundred subjects on which he hoped to have a say.  Well, then, the middle part of his life was spent in preparing himself, under the same sort of pressure, to entitle himself to have his say:  and then came his first bad break-down—­and the end of his life, which was a wretched period, was spent in finding elaborate reasons why he should not commit himself to any opinion whatever.  If he was asked his opinion, he always said he had not studied the subject adequately.  That seems to me the life of a man suffering from a sort of nightmare.  Things are not so deep as all that—­at least, if no one is to give an opinion on any point until he has mastered the whole sum of human opinion on the point, then we shall never make any progress at all.  I remember Fitzherbert’s strong condemnation of Ruskin, for giving his opinion cursorily on all subjects of importance.  Yet Ruskin did a greater work than Fitzherbert, because he at least made people think, while Fitzherbert only prevented them from daring to think.  I don’t mean that people ought to feel competent to express an opinion on everything—­yet even that habit cures itself, because, if you do it,