“I believe I can work as hard as anyone,” I said, “though I have shown no signs of it—­and anyhow, I should like to try.  And I do really want to learn how to distinguish between things, how to know what matters.  No one has ever shown me how to do that!”

“That’s all right!” he said, “But are you sure you don’t want simply to make a bit of a name—­to be known as a clever man?  It’s very convenient, you know, in England, to have a label.  Because I want you clearly to understand that this place of mine has nothing whatever to do with that.  I take no stock in what is called success.  This is a sort of monastery, you know; and the worst of some monasteries is that they cultivate dreams.  That’s a beautiful thing in its way, but it isn’t what I aim at.  I don’t want men to drug themselves with dreams.  The great dreamers don’t do that.  Shelley, for instance—­his dreams were all made out of real feeling, real beauty.  He wanted to put things right in his own way.  He was enraged with life because he was fine, while Byron was enraged with life because he was vulgar.  Vulgarity—­that’s the one fatal complaint; it goes down deep to the bottom of the mind.  And I may as well say plainly that that is what I fight against here.”

“I don’t honestly think I am vulgar,” I said.

“Not on the surface, perhaps,” he said, “but present-day education is a snare.  We are a vulgar nation, you know.  That is what is really the matter with us—­our ambitions are vulgar, our pride is vulgar.  We want to fit into the world and get the most we can out of it; we don’t, most of us, just want to give it our best.  That’s what I mean by vulgarity, wanting to take and not wanting to give.”

He was silent for a minute, and then he said:  “Do you believe in God?”

“I hardly know,” I said.  “Not very much, I am afraid, in the kind of God that I have heard preached about.”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Well,” I said, “it’s rather a large question—­but I used to think, both at school and at Oxford, that many of the men who were rather disapproved of, that did quite bad things, and tried experiments, and knocked up against nastiness of various kinds, but who were brave in their way and kind, and not mean or spiteful or fault-finding, were more the sort of people that the force—­or whatever it is, behind the world—­was trying to produce than many of the virtuous people.  What was called virtue and piety had something stifling and choking about it, I used to think.  I had a tutor at school who was a parson, and he was a good sort of man, too, in a way.  But I used to feel suddenly dreary with him, as if there were a whole lot of real things and interesting things which he was afraid of.  I couldn’t say what I thought to him—­only what I felt he wanted me to think.  That’s a bad answer,” I went on, “but I haven’t really considered it.”

“No, it isn’t a bad answer,” he said, “It’s all right!  The moment you feel stifled with anyone, whatever the subject is—­art, books, religion, life—­there is something wrong.  Do you say any prayers?”