untry, go up in a balloon,
where an element of risk is inseparable from the experiment; but ordinary
work isn't risky in itself. Why," he added, "I was reading a book the other
day, the life of Fitzherbert, you know, who was a man of prodigious
laboriousness, who died early, worn out. He had an impossible standard of
perfection. If he had to write an article, he read all the literature on
the subject over and over; he wrote and re-wrote his stuff. There was a
case quoted in the book, as if it were to Fitzherbert's credit, when he had
to send in an article by a certain date--just a _Quarterly_ article.
It had to go in on the Friday. He had finished it on the Monday before,
when his mind misgave him. He destroyed the article, began again, sate up
all Monday night and all Wednesday night, and wrote the whole thing afresh.
He was laid up for a month after it. That is simply the act of an
unbalanced mind."

"I can't help feeling that there is something fine about it," said Vincent.

"There is always something fine about unreasonable things," said Father
Payne, "or in a man making a sacrifice for an idea. But there is an entire
lack of proportion about this performance; and if Fitzherbert thought his
work so valuable as that, then he ought to have reflected that he was
simply limiting his future output by this reckless expenditure of force.
But the whole case was a sad one--Fitzherbert worked in a ghastly way as a
boy and as a young man. He had a very broad outlook, he was interested in
everything; and when he was at Oxford, he told a friend that he was
discovering a hundred subjects on which he hoped to have a say. Well, then,
the middle part of his life was spent in preparing himself, under the same
sort of pressure, to entitle himself to have his say: and then came his
first bad break-down--and the end of his life, which was a wretched period,
was spent in finding elaborate reasons why he should not commit himself to
any opinion whatever. If he was asked his opinion, he always said he had
not studied the subject adequately. That seems to me the life of a man
suffering from a sort of nightmare. Things are not so deep as all that--at
least, if no one is to give an opinion on any point until he has mastered
the whole sum of human opinion on the point, then we shall never make any
progress at all. I remember Fitzherbert's strong condemnation of Ruskin,
for giving his opinion cursorily on all subjects of importance. Yet Ruskin