“Well, it ought to be gratitude and admiration,” said Father Payne.  “Why mix yourself up with it at all?”

“Because I can’t help it,” I said; “I think of the way in which I muddle on with my writing, and I feel how hopeless I am.”

“That’s all wrong, my boy,” said Father Payne; “you ought to say to yourself—­’So that is his way of putting things and, by Jove, it’s superb.  Now I’ve got to find my way of putting things!’ You had better go and work in the fields like an honest man, if you don’t feel you have got anything to say worth saying.  You have your own point of view, you know:  try and get it down on paper.  It isn’t exactly the same as, let us say, Shakespeare’s point of view:  but if you feel that he has seen everything worth seeing, and said everything worth saying, then, of course, it is no good going on.  But that is pure grovelling; no lively person ever does feel that—­he says, ‘Hang it, he has left some things out!’ After all, everyone has a right to his point of view, and if it can be expressed, why, it is worth expressing.  We want all the sidelights we can get.”

“That’s one comfort!” I said.

“Yes,” said Father Payne, “but you know perfectly well that you knew it before I told you.  Why be so undignified?  You need not want to astonish or amuse the whole civilised world.  You probably won’t do that; but you can fit a bit of the mosaic in, if you have it in you.  Now look you here!  I know exactly what I am worth.  I can’t write—­though I think I can when I’m at it—­but I can perceive, and see when a thing is amiss, and lay my finger on a fault; I can be of some use to a fellow like yourself—­and I can manage an estate in my own way, and I can keep my tenants’ spirits up.  I have got a perfectly definite use in the world, and I’m going to play my part for all that I’m worth.  I’m not going to pretend that I am a worm or an outcast—­I don’t feel one; and I am as sure as I can be of anything, that God does not wish me to feel one.  He needs me; He can’t get on without me just here; and when He can, He will say the word.  I don’t think I am of any far-reaching significance:  but neither am I going to say that I am nothing but vile earth and a miserable sinner.  I’m lazy, I’m cross, I’m unkind, I’m greedy:  but I know when I am wasting time and temper, and I don’t do it all the time.  It’s no use being abject.  The mistake is to go about comparing yourself with other people and weighing yourself against them.  The right thing to do is to be able to recognise generously and desirously when you see anyone doing something finely which you do badly, and to say, ‘Come, that’s the right way!  I must do better.’  But to be humble is to be grubby, because it makes one proud, in a nasty sort of way, of doing things badly.  ‘What a poor creature I am,’ says the humble man, ’and how nice to know that I am so poor a creature; how noble and unworldly I am.’  The mistake is to want to do a thing better than Smith or Jones:  the right way is to want to do it better than yourself.”