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