. 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?"

"No," I said, "to be honest, I don't."

"You must take to it again," he said. "You can't get on without prayer. And
if you come here," he said, "you may expect to hear about God. I talk a
good deal about God. I don't believe in