“What can you expect,” he said, the veins at the side of his forehead swelling with strenuousness, “from men who only play at war?  Why, I was told by a man who was dining with Asquith not long ago that he was talking all the time about Georgian poetry, and that apparently he knew more about the subject than anybody at the table.  Fiddling while Rome is burning, I call it.”

“Did you want him to hold a Cabinet Council over the dinner-table?” I asked.  The strenuous person killed me with a look of scorn.

But all the same, so far from being shocked to learn that Mr. Asquith can talk about poetry in these days, the fact, if it be a fact, increases my confidence in his competence for his task.  I should suffer no pain even if I heard that he took a hand of cards after dinner, and I hope he takes care to get a game of golf at the week-end.  I like men who have great responsibilities to carry their burdens easily, and to relax the bow as often as possible.  The bigger the job you have in hand the more necessary it is to cultivate the habit of detachment.  You want to walk away from the subject sometimes, as the artist walks away from his canvas to get a better view of his work.  I never feel sure of an article until I have put it away, forgotten it, and read it again with a fresh mind, disengaged from the subject and seeing it objectively rather than subjectively.  It is the affliction of the journalist that he has to face the light before he has had time to withdraw to a critical distance and to see his work with the detachment of the public.

There is nothing more mistaken than the view that because a thing is serious you must be thinking about it seriously all the time.  If you do that you cease to be the master of your subject:  the subject becomes the master of you.  That is what is the matter with the fanatic.  He is so obsessed by his idea that he cannot relate it to other ideas, and loses all sense of proportion, and often all sense of sanity.  I have seen more unrelieved seriousness in a lunatic asylum than anywhere else.

The key to success is to come to a task with a fresh mind.  That was the meaning of the very immoral advice given by a don to a friend of mine on the day before an examination.  “What would you advise me to read to-night?” asked my friend, anxious to make the most of the few remaining hours.  “If I were you,” said the don, “I shouldn’t read anything.  I should get drunk.”  He did not mean that the business was so unimportant that it did not matter what he did.  He meant that it was so important that he must forget all about it, and come to it afresh from the outside.  And he used the most violent illustration he could find to express his meaning.