er Payne, "I can conceive that if he had recovered his
health, and escaped from his engagement with Fanny Brawne, he might have
been a much finer fellow afterwards. There were two weak points in Keats,
you know--his over-sensuousness and a touch of commonness--I won't call it
vulgarity," he added, "but his jokes are not of the best quality! I do not
feel sure that his suffering might not have cleared away the poisonous
stuff."

"Perhaps," said Kaye; "but doesn't that make it more wasteful still? The
world needs beauty--and for a man to die so young with his best music in
him seems to me a clumsy affair."

"I don't know," said Father Payne; "it seems to me harder to define the
word _waste_ than almost any word I know. Of course there are cases
when it is obviously applicable--if a big steamer carrying a cargo of wheat
goes down in a storm, that is a lot of human trouble thrown away--and a war
is wasteful, because nations lose their best and healthiest parental stock.
But it isn't a word to play with. In a middle-class household it is applied
mainly to such things as there being enough left of a nice dish for the
servants to enjoy; and, generally speaking, I think it might be applied to
all cases in which the toil spent over the making of a thing is out of all
proportion to the enjoyment derived from it. But the difficulty underlying
it is that it assumes a knowledge of what a man's duty is in this
world--and I am not by any means sure that we know. Look at the phrase 'a
waste of time.' How do we know exactly how much time a man ought to allot
to sleep, to work, to leisure? I had an old puritanical friend who was very
fond of telling people that they wasted time. He himself spent nearly two
hours of every day in dressing and undressing. That is to say that when he
died at the age of seventy-six, he had spent about six entire years in
making and unmaking his toilet! Let us assume that everyone is bound to
give a certain amount of time to doing the necessary work of the
world--enough to support, feed, clothe, and house himself, with a margin to
spare for the people who can't support themselves and can't work. Then
there are a lot of outlying things which must be done--the work of
statesmen, lawyers, doctors, writers--all the people who organise, keep
order, cure, or amuse people. Then there are all the people who make
luxuries and comforts--things not exactly necessary, but still reasonable
indulgences. Now let us suppose t