before writers who will interest people in
and familiarise them with ideas. Some people get absorbed in life in the
wrong way, just bent on acquisition and comfort--some people, again, live
as if they were staying in somebody else's house--but what you want to
induce men and women to do is to realise the sort of thing that life really
is, and to attempt to put it in some kind of proportion. The mischief done
by men like Fitzherbert, who was fond of snapping at people who produced
ideas for inspection, is that ordinary people get to confuse wisdom with
knowledge; and that won't do! And so the man who sets to work like
Fitzherbert loses his alertness and his observation, with the result that
instead of bringing a very fresh and incisive mind to bear on life, he
loses his way in books, and falls a victim to the awful passion for feeling
able to despise other people's opinions."

"But isn't it possible," said Vincent, "for a man to get the best out of
life for himself by a sort of passion for exact knowledge--like the man in
the Grammarian's funeral, I mean?"

"Personally," said Father Payne, "I always think that Browning did a lot of
harm by that poem. He was glorifying a real vice, I think. If the
Grammarian had said to himself, 'There is all this nasty work to be done by
someone; I can do it, and I can save other people having to waste their
time over it, by doing it once and for all,' it would have been different.
But I think he was partly indulging a poor sort of vanity by just
determining to know what no other man knew. The point of work is twofold.
It is partly good for the worker, to tranquillise his life and to reduce it
to a certain order and discipline; but you mustn't do it only for the sake
of your own tranquillity, any more than the artist must work for the sake
of luxuriating in his own emotions. You must have something to give away:
you must have some idea of combination, of helping other people to find
each other and to understand each other. It is vicious to isolate yourself
for your own satisfaction. Fitzherbert and the Grammarian were really
misers. They just accumulated, and enjoyed the pleasure of having their own
minds clear. That doesn't seem to me in itself to be a fine thing at all.
It is simply the oldest of temptations, 'Ye shall be as gods, knowing good
and evil.' That is the danger of the critical mind, that it says, 'I will
know within myself what is good,' The only excuse for the critical min