ally been very happy--there is too often a patent conspiracy to
keep the great irritable babyish giant amused--and that's a bad atmosphere
for anyone to live in--an unreal, a royal sort of atmosphere, of
deferential scheming."

I said something about Walter Scott. "Ah yes," said Father Payne, "but
Scott's work was amazing--it just seemed to overflow from a gigantic
reservoir of vitality. He could do his day's work in the early hours, and
then tramp about all day, chattering, farming, planting,
entertaining--endlessly good-humoured. Of course he wore himself out at
last by perfectly ghastly work--most of it very poor stuff. Browning and
Thackeray were men of the same sort, sociable, genial, exuberant. They
overflowed too--they didn't batter things out.

"But, as a rule, most men who want to do good work, must be content to
potter about, and seem lazy and even self-indulgent. And one of the reasons
why many men who start as promising writers come to nothing is because they
can't be inert, acquiescent, easy-going. I have often thought that a good
novel might be written about the wife of a great writer, who marries him,
dazzled by his brilliance and then finds him to be a petty, suspicious,
wayward sort of child, with all his force lying in one supreme faculty of
vision and expression. It must be a fiery trial to see deep, wise,
beautiful things produced by a man who can't _live_ his thoughts--can
only write them."

"But what should a man _do_?" I said.

"Well," said Father Payne, "I think, as a practical matter, it would be a
good thing to cultivate a hobby of a manual kind--and also, above all, the
power of genial loafing. Of course, the real pity is that we are not all
taught to do some house-work as a matter of course--we depend too much on
servants, and house-work is the natural and amusing outlet of our physical
energies; as it is, we specialise too much, and half of our maladies and
discomforts and miseries are due to that--that we work a part of ourselves
too hard, and the other parts not hard enough. The thing to aim at is
equanimity, and the existence of unsatisfied instincts in us is what
poisons life for many people."

He was silent for a little, and then he said, "And then, too, there is the
great danger of all writers--the feeling that he has the power of giving
people what they want, when he ought to remember that he has only the good
fortune of expressing what people feel. Art oughtn't to be a thing
spr