I cannot remember now what public man it was who had died of a breakdown
from overwork, but I heard Father Payne say, after dinner, referring to the
event, "I wish it to be clearly understood that I think a man who dies of
deliberate or reckless overwork is a victim of self-indulgence. It is
nothing more or less than giving way to a passion. I am as sure as I can be
of anything," he went on, "that a thousand years hence that will be
recognised by human beings, and that they will feel it to be as shameful
for a man to die of spontaneous overwork as for him to die of drink or
gluttony or any other vice. I don't of course mean," he added, "the cases
of men who have had some definite and critical job to carry through, and
have decided that the risk is worth running. A man has always the right to
risk his life for a definite aim--but I mean the men--you can see it in
biographies, and the worst of it is that they are often the biographies of
clergymen--who, in spite of physical warnings, and entreaties from their
friends, and definite statements by their doctors that they are shortening
their lives by labour, still cannot stop, or, if they stop, begin again too
soon. No man has any right to think his work so important as that--to take
unimportant things too seriously is the worst sort of frivolity."
"But isn't it the finer kind of people," said Kaye, "who make the mistake?"
"Yes, of course," said Father Payne, "but so, too, if you look into it, you
will too often find that it is the finer kinds of imaginative people who
take to drink and drugs. I remember," he added, "once going to see a poor
friend of mine in an asylum, and the old doctor at the head of it said, 'It
isn't the stupid people who come here, Mr. Payne; it is the clever
people!'"
"But does not your principle about the right to risk one's life hold good
here too?" said Barthrop.
"No, I think not," said Father Payne. "A man may choose to try a dangerous
thing, climb a mountain, explore a perilous country, 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
did a greater work than Fitzherbert, because he at least made people think,
while Fitzherbert only prevented them from daring to think. I don't mean
that people ought to feel competent to express an opinion on
everything--yet even that habit cures itself, because, if you do it, no one
pays any attention. But if a man has gone into a subject with decent care,
or if he has reflected upon problems of which the data are fairly well
known, I think there is every reason why he should give an opinion. It is
very easy to be too conscientious. There are plenty of fine hints of
opinions in Fitzherbert's letters. You could make a very good book of
_Pensées_ out of them--he had a clear, forcible, and original mind;
but he did not dare to say what he thought; and you may remember that if he
was ever sharply criticised, he felt it deeply, as a sort of imputation of
dishonesty. A man must not go down before criticism like that."
"But everyone must do their work in their own way?" said I.
"Yes," said Father Payne, "but Fitzherbert ended by doing nothing--he only
snubbed and silenced his own fine mind, by giving way to this unholy
passion for examining things. No, I want you fellows to have common-sense
about these matters. There is a great deal too much sanctity attached to
print. The written word--there's a dark superstition about it! A man has as
much right to write as he has to talk. He may say to the world, to his
unseen and unknown friends in it, whatever he may say to his intimates. You
should write just as you could talk to any gentleman, with the same
courtesy and frankness. Of course you must run the risk of your book
falling into the hands of ill-bred people--that can't be helped--and of
course you must not pretend that your book is the result of deep and
copious labour, if it is nothing of the kind. But heart-breaking toil is
not the only qualification for speaking. There are plenty of complicated
little topics--all the problems which arise from the combination of
individuals into societies--which people ought to think about, and which
are really everyone's concern. The interplay, I mean, of human
relations--the moral, religious, social, intellectual ideas--which have all
got to be co-ordinated. A man does not need immense knowledge for that; in
fact if he studies the history of such things too deeply, he is often apt
to forget that old interpreters of such things had not got all the present
data. There is an immense future 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 mind is
to help people not to be taken in by what is bad. It is better to be like
Plato and Ruskin, to make mistakes, to have prejudices, to be unfair, even
to be silly, because at least you encourage people to think that life is
interesting--and that is about as much as any of us can do."