has spent hours and days in identifying with uncommon patience the exact date of these tepid scraps, and he says he is content to have laid a single stone in the “unamended, unabridged, authentic temple” of his idol’s fame.  That seems to me simply degrading:  and then the portentous ass, whose review I read, says that if the editor had done nothing else, he is sure of an honoured place for ever in the hierarchy of impeccable critics!  And what is all this jabber about—­a few rhymes which a man made when he was feeling a little off colour, and which he did not think it worth while to publish!

“You mustn’t get into this kind of a mess, my boy.  The artist mustn’t indulge in emotion for the sake of the emotion.  ‘The weakness of life,’ says this pompous ass, ‘is that it deviates from art!’ You might just as well say that the weakness of food was that it deviated from a well-cooked leg of mutton!  Art is just an attempt to disentangle something, to get at one of the big constituents of life.  It helps you to see clearly, not to confuse one thing with another, not to be vaguely impressed—­the hideous danger of bookishness is that it is one of the blind alleys into which people get.  These two fellows, the editor and his critic, have got stuck there:  they can’t see out:  they think their little valley is the end of the world.  I expect they are both of them very happy men, as happy as a man who goes to bed comfortably drunk.  But, good God, the awakening!” Father Payne relapsed into a long silence, with knitted brows.  I tried to start him afresh.

“But you often tell us to be serious, to be deadly earnest, about our work?” I said.

“Oh yes,” said Father Payne, “that’s another matter.  We have to work hard, and put the best of ourselves into what we do.  I don’t want you to be an amiable dilettante.  But I also want you to see past even the best art.  You mustn’t think that the stained-glass window is the body of heaven in its clearness.  The sort of worshippers I object to are the men who shut themselves up in a church, and what with the colour and the music and the incense-smoke, think they are in heaven already.  It’s an intoxication, all that.  I don’t get you men to come here to make you drunk, but to get you to loathe drunkenness.  God—­that’s the end of it all!  God, who reveals Himself in beauty and kindness, and trustfulness, and charm and interest, and in a hundred pure and fine forces—­yet each of them are but avenues which lead up to Him, the streets of the city, full of living water.  But it is movement I am in search of—­and I would rather be drowned in the depth of the sea than mislead anyone, or help him to sit still.  I have made an awful row about it all,” said Father Payne, relapsing into a milder mood—­“But you will forgive me, I know.  I can’t bear to see these worthy men blocking the way with their unassailable, unabridged, authentic editions.  They are like barbed-wire entanglements:  and the worst of it is that, in spite of all their holy