“Yes,” said Father Payne, “in a sense that is true, that these little literary hucksters and pedlars don’t do any very great harm—­I don’t mean that they cause much mischief:  but they are the symptom of a grave disease.  It is this d——­d bookishness which is so unreal.  I would like to say a word about it to you, if you have time, instead of doing our work to-day—­for if you will allow me to say so, my boy, you have got a touch of it about you—­only a touch—­and I think if I can show you what I mean, you can throw it off—­I have heard you say rather solemn things about books!  But I want you to get through that.  It reminds me of the talk of ritualists.  I have a poor friend who is a very harmless sort of parson—­but I have heard him talk of a bit of ceremonial with tears in his eyes.  ’It was exquisite, exquisite,’ he will say,—­’the celebrant wore a cope—­a bit, I believe of genuine pre-Reformation work—­of course remounted—­and the Gospeller and Epistoller had copes so perfectly copied that it would have been hard to say which was the real one.  And then Father Wynne holds himself so nobly—­such a mixture of humility and pride—­a priest ought to exhibit both, I think, at that moment?—­and his gestures are so inevitable—­so inevitable—­that’s the only word:  there’s no sense of rehearsal about it:  it is just the supreme act of worship expressing itself in utter abandonment’—­He will go on like that for an hour if he can find a great enough goose to listen to him.  Now, I don’t mean to say that the man hasn’t a sense of beauty—­he has the real ritual instinct, a perfectly legitimate branch of art.  But he doesn’t know it’s art—­he thinks it is religion.  He thinks that God is preoccupied with such things; ’a full choral High Mass, at nine o’clock, that’s a thing to live and die for,’ I have heard him say.  Of course it’s a sort of idealism, but you must know what you are about, and what you are idealising:  and you mustn’t think that your kind is better than any other kind of idealising.”

He made a pause, and then held out his hand for the book.

“Now here is the same sort of intemperate rapture,” he said.  “Look at this introduction!  ’It is his very self that his poems give, and the sharpest jealousy of his name and fame is enkindled by them.  Not to find him there, his passion, endurance, faith, rapture, despair, is merely a confession of want in ourselves.’  That’s not sane, you know—­it’s the intoxication of the Corybant!  It isn’t the man himself we want to fix our eyes upon.  He felt these things, no doubt:  but we mustn’t worship his raptures—­we must worship what he worshipped.  This sort of besotted agitation is little better than a dancing dervish.  The poems are little sparks, struck out from a scrap of humanity by some prodigious and glorious force:  but we must worship the force, not the spark:  the spark is only an evidence, a system, a symbol if you like, of the force.  And then see how utterly the man has lost all sense of proportion—­he