"You thought all that?" said he. "Well, that's more hopeful! Have you ever done any essay work?"
"Yes," I said, "and that was the worst of all—no one ever showed me how to do it in my own way, but always in some one else's way."
He sate a little in silence. Then he said: "But mind you, that's not all! I don't think writing is the end of life. The real point is to feel the things, to understand the business, to have ideas about life. I don't want people to learn how to write interestingly about things in which they are not interested—but to be interested first, and then to write if they can. I like to turn out a good writer, who can say what he feels and believes. But I'm just as pleased when a man tells me that writing is rubbish, and that he is going away to do something real. The real—that's what I care about! I don't want men to come and pick up grains of truth and reality, and work them into their stuff. I have turned out a few men like that, and those are my worst failures. You have got to care about ideas, if you come here, and to get the ideas into shape. You have got to learn what is beautiful and what is not, because the only business of a real writer is with beauty—not a sickly exotic sort of beauty, but the beauty of health and strength and generous feeling. I can't have any humbugs here, though I have sent out some humbugs. It's a hard life this, and a tiring life; though if you are the right sort of fellow, you will get plenty of fun out of it. But we don't waste time here; and if a man wastes time, out he goes."
"I believe I can work as hard as anyone," I said, "though I have shown no signs of it—and anyhow, I should like to try. And I do really want to learn how to distinguish between things, how to know what matters. No one has ever shown me how to do that!"
"That's all right!" he said, "But are you sure you don't want simply to make a bit of a name—to be known as a clever man? It's very convenient, you know, in England, to have a label. Because I want you clearly to understand that this place of mine has nothing whatever to do with that. I take no stock in what is called success. This is a sort of monastery, you know; and the worst of some monasteries is that they cultivate dreams. That's a beautiful thing in its way, but it isn't what I aim at. I don't want men to drug themselves with dreams. The great dreamers don't do that. Shelley, for instance—his dreams were all made out of real feeling, real beauty. He wanted to put things right in his own way. He was enraged with life because he was fine, while Byron was enraged with life because he was vulgar. Vulgarity—that's the one fatal complaint; it goes down deep to the bottom of the mind. And I may as well say plainly that that is what I fight against here."
"I don't honestly think I am vulgar," I said.
"Not on the surface, perhaps," he said, "but present-day education is a snare. We are a vulgar nation, you know. That is what is really the matter with us—our ambitions are vulgar, our pride is vulgar. We want to fit into the world and get the most we can out of it; we don't, most of us, just want to give it our best. That's what I mean by vulgarity, wanting to take and not wanting to give."
He was silent for a minute, and then he said: "Do you believe in God?"
"I hardly know," I said. "Not very much, I am afraid, in the kind of God that I have heard preached about."
"What do you mean?" he said.