Chapter C: Payne (4)

"Oh, life will take care of that!" said Father Payne, smiling, "The time will come when you will know where to post your battery, and what to fire at. But don't try to make up your mind too early--don't try to fortify yourself against doubts and anxieties. That is the danger of all sensitive people. You can't attain to proved certainties in this life--at least, you can't at present. I don't say that there are not certainties--indeed, I think that it is all certainty, and that we mustn't confuse the unknown with the unknowable. As you go on, if you are fair-minded and sympathetic, you will get intuitions; you will discover gradually exactly what you are worth, and what you can do, and how you can do it best. But don't expect to know that too soon. And don't yield to the awful temptation of saying, 'So many good, fine, reasonable people seem certain of this and that; I had better assume it to be true.' It isn't better, it is only more comfortable. A great many more people suffer from making up their mind too early and too decisively than suffer from open-mindedness and the power to relate new experience to old experience. No one can write you out a prescription for life. You can't anticipate experience; and if you do, you will only find that you have to begin all over again."

XXI

OF BEAUTY

Father Payne had been away on one of his rare journeys. He always maintained that a journey was one of the most enlivening things in the world, if it was not too often indulged in. "It intoxicates me," he said, "to see new places, houses, people."

"Why don't you travel more, then?" said someone.

"For that very reason," said Father Payne; "because it intoxicates me--and I am too old for that sort of self-indulgence!"

"It's a dreadful business," he went on, "that northern industrial country. There's a grandeur about it--the bare valleys, the steep bleak fields, the dead or dying trees, the huge factories. Those great furnaces, with tall iron cylinders and galleries, and spidery contrivances, and black pipes, and engines swinging vast burdens about, and moving wheels, are fearfully interesting and magnificent. They stand for all sorts of powers and forces; they frighten me by their strength and fierceness and submissiveness. But the land is awfully barren of beauty, and I doubt if that can be wholesome. It all fascinates me, it increases my pride, but it makes me unhappy too, because it excludes beauty so completely. Those bleak stone-walled fields of dirty grass, the lines of grey houses, are fine in their way--but one wants colour and clearness. I longed for a glimpse of elms and water-meadows, and soft-wooded pastoral hills. It produces a shrewd, strong, good-tempered race, but very little genius. There is something harsh about Northerners--they haven't enough colour."

"But you are always saying," said Rose, "that we must look after form, and chance colour."

"Yes, but that is because you are _in statu pupillari_," said Father Payne, "If a man begins by searching for colour and ornament and richness, he gets clotted and glutinous. Colour looks after itself--but it isn't clearness that I am afraid of, it is shrewdness--I think that is, on the whole, a low quality, but it is awfully strong! What I am afraid of, in bare laborious country like that, is that people should only think of what is comfortable and sensible. Imagination is what really matters. It is not enough to have solid emotions; one ought not to be too reasonable about emotions. The thing is to care in an unreasonable and rapturous way about beautiful things, and not to know why one cares. That is the point of things which are simply beautiful and nothing else,--that you feel it isn't all capable of explanation."

"But isn't that rather sentimental?" said Rose.

"No, no, it's just the opposite," said Father Payne. "Sentiment is when one understands and exaggerates an emotion; beauty isn't that--it is something mysterious and inexplicable; it makes you bow the head and worship. Take the sort of thing you may see on the coast of Italy--a blue sea, with gray and orange cliffs falling steeply down into deep water; a gap, with a clustering village, coming down, tier by tier, to the sea's edge; fantastic castles on spires of rock, thickets and dingles running down among the clefts and out on the ledges, and perhaps a glimpse of pale, fantastic hills behind. No one could make it or design it; but every line, every blending colour, all combine to give you the sense of something marvellously and joyfully contrived, and made for the richness and sweetness of it. That is the sort of moment when I feel the overwhelming beauty and nearness of God--everything done on a vast scale, which floods mind and heart with utter happiness and wonder. Anything so overpoweringly joyful and delicious and useless as all that _must_ come out of a fulness of joy. The sharp cliffs mean some old cutting and slashing, the blistering and burning of the earth; and yet those old rents have been clothed and mollified by some power that finds it worth while to do it--and it isn't done for you or me, either--there must be treasures of loveliness going on hidden for centuries in tropic forests. It's done for the sake of doing it; and we are granted a glimpse of it, just to show us perhaps that we are right to adore it, and to try in our clumsy way to make beautiful things too. That is why I envy the musician, because he creates beauty more directly then any other mind--and the best kind of poetry is of the same order."

"But isn't there a danger in all this?" said Lestrange. "No, I don't want to say anything priggish," he added, seeing a contraction of Father Payne's brows; "I only want to say what I feel. I recognise the fascination of it as much as anyone can--but isn't it, as you said about travelling, a kind of intoxication? I mean, may it not be right to interpose it, but yet not right to follow it? Isn't it a selfish thing, and doesn't it do the very thing which you often speak against--blind us to other experience, that is?"

"Yes, there is something in that," said Father Payne. "Of course that is always the difficulty about the artist, that he appears to live selfishly in joy--but it applies to most things. The best you can do for the world is often to turn your back upon it. Philanthropy is a beautiful thing in its way, but it must be done by people who like it--it is useless if it is done in a grim and self-penalising way. If a man is really big enough to follow art, he had better follow it. I do not believe very much in the doctrine that service to be useful must be painful. No one doubts that Wordsworth gave more joy to humanity by living his own life than if he had been a country doctor. Of course the sad part of it is when a man follows art and does _not_ succeed in giving pleasure. But you must risk that--and a real devotion to a thing gives the best chance of happiness to a man, and is perhaps, too, his best chance of giving something to others. There is no reason to think that Shakespeare was a philanthropist."

"But does that apply to things like horse-racing or golf?" said Rose.

"No, you must not pursue comfort," said Father Payne; "but I don't believe in the theory that we have all got to set out to help other people. That implies that a man is aware of valuable things which he has to give away. Make friends if you can, love people if you can, but don't do it with a sense of duty. Do what is natural and beautiful and attractive to do. Make the little circle which surrounds you happy by sympathy and interest. Don't deal in advice. The only advice people take is that with which they agree. And have your own work. I think we are--many of us--afraid of enjoying work; but in any case, if we can show other people how to perceive and enjoy beauty, we have done a very great thing. The sense of beauty is growing in the world. Many people are desiring it, and religion doesn't cater for it, nor does duty cater for it. But it is the only way to make progress--and religion has got to find out how to include beauty in its programme, or it will be left stranded. Nothing but beauty ever lifted people higher--the unsensuous, inexplicable charm, which makes them ashamed of dull, ugly, greedy, quarrelsome ways. It is only by virtue of beauty that the world climbs higher--and if the world does climb higher by something which isn't obviously beautiful, it is only that we do not recognise it as beautiful. Sin and evil are signals from the unknown, of course; but they are danger signals, and we follow them with terror--but beauty is a signal too, and it is the signal made by peace and happiness and joy."

XXII

OF WAR

The talk one evening turned on War; Lestrange said that he believed it was good for a nation to have a war: "It unites them with the sense of a common purpose, it evokes self-sacrifice, it makes them turn to God."

"Yes, yes," said Father Payne, rather impatiently. "But you can't personify a nation like that; that personification of societies and classes and sections of the human race does no end of harm. It is all a matter of statistics, not of generalisation. Take your three statements. 'It is good for a nation to have a war.' You mean, I suppose, that, in spite of the loss of the best stock and the disabling of strong young men, and the disintegration of families, and the hideous waste of time and money--subtracting all that--there is a balance of good to the survivors?"

"Yes, I think so," said Lestrange.

"But are you sure about this?" said Father Payne. "How do you know? Would you feel the same if you yourself were turned out a helpless invalid for life with your occupation gone? Are you sure that you are not only expressing the feeling of relief in the community at having a danger over? Is it more than the sense of gratitude of a man who has not suffered unbearably, to the people who _have_ died and suffered? The only evidence worth having is that of the real sufferers. Take the case of the people who have died. You can't get evidence from them. It is an assumption that they are content to have died. Is not the glory which surrounds them--and how short a time that lasts!--a human attempt to make consciences comfortable, and to relieve human doubts? The worst of that theory is that it makes so light of the worth of life; and, after all, a soldier's business is to kill and not to be killed; while, generally speaking, the worst turn that a strong, healthy, and honest man can do to his country is to die prematurely. Of course war has a great and instinctive prestige about it; are we not misled by that into accepting it as an inevitable business?"

"No, I believe there is a real gain," said Lestrange, "in the national sense of unity, in the feeling of having been equal to an emergency."

"But are you speaking of a nation which conquers or a nation which is defeated?" said Father Payne.

"Both," said Lestrange; "it unites a nation in any case."

"But if a nation is defeated," said Father Payne, "are they the better for the common depression of _not_ having been equal to the emergency?"

"It may make them set their teeth," said Lestrange, "and prepare themselves better."

"Then it does not matter," said Father Payne, "whether they are united by the complacency of conquest or by the desire for revenge?"

"I would not quite say that," said Lestrange. "But at all events a desire for revenge might teach them discipline."

"I can't believe that," said Father Payne; "it seems to me to make all the difference what the purpose has been. I do not believe that a nation gains by being united for a predatory and aggressive purpose. I think the victory of the Germans in the Franco-Prussian war has been wholly bad for them. It has made them believe in aggressiveness. A nation naturally philosophical and moral, and also both energetic and stupid, acquires the sense of a divine mission like that. I don't believe that a belief in your own methods of virtue is a wholesome belief. That seems to me likely to perpetuate war--and I suppose that we should all believe that war was an evil, if we could produce the good results of it without war."

We all agreed to this.

"I will grant," said Father Payne, "that if a nation which sincerely believes in peace and wishes to cultivate goodwill, is wantonly and aggressively attacked, and repels that attack, it may gain much from war if it sticks to its theory, does not attempt reprisals, and leaves the conquered bully in a position to see its mistake and regain its self-respect. But it is a very dangerous kind of success for all that. I do not believe that complacency ever does anything but harm. The purpose must be a good one in the first place, the cause must be a great one, and it must be honestly pursued to the end, if it is to help a nation. But it lets all sorts of old and evil passions loose, and it makes slaughter glorious. No, I believe that at best it is a relapse into barbarism. Hardly any nation is strong enough and great enough to profit either by conquest or by defeat."

"But what about the splendid self-sacrifice it all evokes?" said Lestrange. "People give up their comfort, their careers, they go to face the last risk--is that nothing?"

"No," said Father Payne; "it is a very magnificent and splendid thing,--I don't deny that. But even so, that can't be preserved artificially. I mean that no one would think that, if there were no chance of a real war, it would be a good thing to evoke such self-sacrifice by having manoeuvres in which the best youth of the country were pitted against each other, to kill each other if possible. There must be a _real_ cause behind it. No one would say it was a noble thing for the youth of a country to fling themselves down over a cliff or to infect themselves with leprosy to show that they could despise suffering and death. If it were possible to settle the differences between nations without war, war would be a wholly evil thing. The only thing that one can say is that while there exists a strong nation which believes enough in war to make war aggressively, other nations are bound to resist it. But the nation which believes in war is _ipso facto_ an uncivilised nation."

"But does not a war," said Lestrange, "clear the air, and take people away from petty aims and trivial squabbles into a sterner and larger atmosphere?"

"Yes, I think it does," said Father Payne; "but a great pestilence might do that. We might be thankful for all the good we could get out of a pestilence, and be grateful for it; but we should never dream of artificially renewing it for that reason. I look upon war as a sort of pestilence, a contagion which spreads under certain conditions. But we disguise the evil of it from ourselves, if we allow ourselves to believe in its being intrinsically glorious. I can't believe that highway robbery has only to be organised on a sufficiently large scale to make it glorious. A man who resists highway robbery, and runs the risk of death, because he wants to put a stop to it, seems to me a noble person--quite different from the man who sees a row going on and joins in it because he does not want to be out of a good thing! Do you remember the story of the Irishman who saw a fight proceeding, and rushed into the fray wielding his shillelagh, and praying that it might fall on the right heads? We have all of us uncivilised instincts, but it does not make them civilised to join with a million other people in indulging them. I think that a man who refuses to join from conviction, at the risk of being hooted as a coward, is probably doing a braver thing still."

"But I have often, heard you say that life must be a battle," said Lestrange.

"Yes," said Father Payne, "but I know what I want to fight. I want the human race to join in fighting crime and disease, evil conditions of nurture, dishonesty and sensuality. I don't want to pit the finest stock of each country against each other. That is simple suicide, for two nations to kill off the men who could fight evil best. I want the nations to combine collectively for a good purpose, not to combine separately for a bad one."

"I see that," said Lestrange; "but I regard war as an inevitable element in society as at present constituted. I don't think the world can be persuaded out of it. If it ever ceases, it will die a natural death because it will suddenly be regarded as absurd. Meantime, I think it is our duty to regard the benefits of it; and, as I said, it turns a nation to God--it takes them out of petty squabbles, and makes them recognise a power beyond and behind the world."

"Yes, that is so," said Father Payne, "if you regard war as caused by God. But I rather believe that it is one of the things that God is fighting against! And I don't agree that it produces a noble temper all through. It does in many of the combatants; but there is nothing so characteristic at the outbreak of war as the amount of bullying that is done. Peaceful people are hooted at and shouted down; thousands of general convictions are over-ridden; the violent have it their own way; it seems to me to organise the unruly and obstreperous, and to force all gentler and more civilised natures into an unconvinced silence. Many of the people who do most for the happiness of the world can't face unpopularity. They are apt to think that there must be something wrong with themselves, something spiritless and abnormal, if they find themselves loathing the cruelties of which others seem to approve. I do not believe that war organises wholesome and sane opinion; I believe that it silences it. It is a time when base, heartless, cruel people can become heroes. It is true that it also gives serene, courageous, and calm people a great opportunity. But on the whole it is a bad time for sober, orderly, and peaceable people. I believe that it evokes a good many fine qualities--simplicity, uncomplaining patience, unselfishness, but it reveals them rather than creates them. It shows the worth of a nation, but it should want a great deal of evidence before I believe that it does more than prove to people that they are braver than they know. I can't believe vaguely in death and sorrow and disablement and waste being good things. It is merely a question of what you are paying so ghastly a price for. In the Napoleonic wars the price was paid for the liberties of Europe, to show a great nation that it must abandon the ideal of domination. That is a great cause; but it is great because men are evil, and not because they are good. War seems to me the temporary triumph of the old bad past over the finer and more beautiful future. Do not let us be taken in by the romance of it. That is the childish view, that loves the sight and sound of the marching column and the stirring music. People find it hard to believe that anything so strong and gallant and cheerful _can_ have a sinister side. And no doubt for a young, strong, and bold man the excitement of it is an intense pleasure. But what we have to ask is whether we are right in taking so heavy a toll from the world for all that: I do not think it right, though it may be inevitable. But then I belong to the future, and I think I should be more at home in the world a thousand years hence than I am to-day."

"But I go back to my point," said Lestrange: "does not a great war like that send people to their knees in faith?"

"Depend upon it," said Father Payne, "that anything which makes people acquiesce in preventable evil, and see the beautiful effects of death and pain and waste, is the direct influence of the devil. It is the last and most guileful subtlety that he practises, to make us solemnly mournful and patient in the presence of calamities for which we have ourselves to thank. The only prayer worth praying in the time of war is not, 'Help us to bear this,' but 'Help us to cure this'; and to behave with meek reverence is to behave like the old servant in _The Master of Ballantrae_, who bore himself like an afflicted saint under an illness, the root of which was drunkenness. The worst religion is that which keeps its sense of repentance alive by its own misdeeds!"

He was silent for a moment, and then he said: "No, we mustn't make terms with war, any more than we must do with cholera. It's a great, heartbreaking evil, and it puts everything back a stage. Of course it brings out fine qualities--I know that--and so does a plague of cholera. It's the evil in both that brings out the fine things to oppose it. But we ought to have more faith, and believe that the fine qualities are there--war doesn't create them, it only shows you that they are present--and we believe in war because it reassures us about the presence of the great qualities. It shows them, and then blows them out, like the flame of a candle. But we want to keep them; we don't want just to be shown them, with a risk of extinguishing them. Example can do something, but not half as much as inheritance; and we sweep away the inheritance for the sake of the romantic delight of seeing the great virtues flare up. No," he said, "war is one of the evil things that is trying to hurt mankind, and disguising itself in shining armour; but it means men ill; it is for ever trying to bring their dreams to an end."

XXIII

OF CADS AND PHARISEES

"There are only two sorts of people with whom it is impossible to live," said Father Payne one day, in a loud, mournful tone.

"Elderly women and young women, I suppose he means," said Rose softly.

"No," said Father Payne, "I protest! I adore sensible women, simple women, clever women, all non-predatory women--it is they who will not live with me. I forget they are not men, and they do not like that. And then they are so much more unselfish than men, that they have generally axes to grind, and I don't like that."

"Whom do you mean, then?" said I.

"Cads and Pharisees," said Father Payne, "and they are not two sorts really, but one. They are the people without imagination. It is that which destroys social life, the lack of imagination. The Pharisee is the cad with a tincture of Puritanism."

"What is the cad, then?" said I.

"Well," said Father Payne, "he is very easy to detect, and not very easy to define. He is the man who has got a perfectly definite idea of what he wants, and he suffers from isolation. He can't put himself into anyone's place, or get inside other people's minds. He is stupid, and he is unperceptive. He does not detect the little looks, gestures, tones of voice, which show when people are uncomfortable or disgusted. He is not uncomfortable or easily disgusted himself, and he does not much mind other people being so. He says what he thinks, and you have got to lump it. Sometimes he is good-natured enough, and even brave. There is an admirable sketch of a good-natured cad in one of Mrs. Walford's novels, who is the acme of kind indelicacy. The cad is dreadful to live with, because he is always making one ashamed, and ashamed of being ashamed, because many of the things he does do not really matter very much. Then, when he is out of sight and hearing, you cannot trust him. He makes mischief; he throws mud. If he is vexed with you, he injures you with other people. We are all criticised behind our backs, of course, and we have all faults which amuse and interest our friends; and it is not caddish to criticise friends if one is only interested in them. But the cad is not interested, except in clearing other people out of his way. He is treacherous and spiteful. He drops in upon you uninvited, and then he tells people he could not get enough to eat. He repeats things you have said about your friends to the people of whom you have spoken, leaving out all the justifications, and says that he thinks they ought to know how you abuse them. He borrows money of you, and if you ask him for repayment, he says he is not accustomed to be dunned. He never can bring himself to apologise for anything, and if you lose your temper with him, he says you are getting testy in your old age. His one idea is to be formidable, and he says that he does not let people take liberties with him. He takes a mean and solitary view of the world, and other people are merely channels for his own wishes, or obstacles to them. The only way is to keep him at arm's length, because he is not disarmed by any generosity or trustfulness; the discovery of caddishness in a man is the only excuse for breaking off a companionship. The worst of it is that cads are sometimes very clever, and don't let the caddishness appear till you are hooked. The mischief really is that the cad has no morals, no sense of social duty."

"What about Pharisees?" said I.

"Well, the Pharisee has too many morals," said Father Payne. "He is the person whose own tastes are a sort of standard. If you disagree with him, he thinks you must be wicked. If your tastes differ from his, they are of the nature of sin. You live under his displeasure. If he dresses for dinner, it is sloppy and middle-class not to do so. If he doesn't dress for dinner, the people who do are either wasting time or aping the manners of the great. He is always very strong about wasting time. If he likes gardening, he says it is the best sort of exercise; if he does not, he says that it is bilious work muddling about in a corner. Everything that he does is done on principle, but he uses his principles to bludgeon other people. If you make him the subject of a harmless jest, he says that he cannot bear personalities. You can please him only by deferring to him, and the only way to manage him is by gross flattery. A Pharisee can be a gentleman, and he isn't purely noxious like the cad; he is only unpleasant and discouraging. He is quite impervious to argument, and only says that he thought the principle he is contending for was generally accepted. The Pharisee wants in a heavy way to improve the world, and thinks meanly of it, while the cad thinks meanly of it, and wants to exploit it. The Pharisee is a tyrant, and hates freedom; but you can often make a friend of him by asking him a favour, if you are also prepared to be subsequently reminded of the trouble he took to serve you.

"I think that the Pharisee perhaps does most harm in the end, because he hates all experiments. He does harm to the young, because he makes them dislike virtue and mistrust beauty. The cad does not corrupt--in fact, I think he rather improves people, because he is so ugly a case of what no one wishes to be--and it is better to hate people than to be frightened of them. If we got a cad and a Pharisee in here, for instance, it would be easier to get rid of the cad than the Pharisee."

"I begin to breathe more freely," said Vincent. "I had begun to review my conscience."

Father Payne laughed. "It's all blank cartridge," he said.

XXIV

OF CONTINUANCE

I was walking with Father Payne in the garden one day of spring. I think I liked him better when I was alone with him than I did when we were all together. His mind expanded more tenderly and simply--less epigrammatically. He spoke of this once to me, saying: "I am at my best when alone; even one companion deflects me. I find myself wishing to please him, pinching off roughnesses, perfuming truth, diplomatising. This ought not to be, of course; and if one was not thorny, self-assertive, stupid, it would not be so; and every companion added makes me worse, because the strain of accommodation grows--I become vulgar and rough and boisterous in a large circle. I often feel: 'How these young men must be hating this gibbering and giggling ape, which after all is not really me!'" I tried to reassure him, but he shook his head, though with a smiling air. "Barthrop is not like that," he said, "the wise Barthrop! He is never suspicious or hasty--he does not think it necessary to affirm; yet you are never in any doubt what he thinks! He moves along like water, never anxious if he is held up or divided, creeping on as the land lies--that is the right way."

Presently he stopped, and looked long at some daffodil blades which were thrusting up in a sheltered place. "Look at the gray bloom on those blades," he said; "isn't that perfect? Fancy thinking of that--each of them so obviously the same thought taking shape, yet each of them different. Do not you see in them something calm, continuous, active--happy, in fact--at work; often tripped up and imprisoned, and thwarted--but moving on?" He was silent a little, and then he said: "This force of _life_--what a fascinating mystery it is--never dying, never ceasing, always coming back to shape itself into matter. I wonder sometimes it is not content to exist alone; but no, it is always back again, arranging matter, manipulating it into beautiful shapes and creatures, never discouraged; even when the plant falls ill and begins to pine away, the happy life is within it--languid perhaps, but just waiting for the release, till the cage in which it has imprisoned itself is opened, and then--so I believe--back again in an instant somewhere else.

"I am inclined to believe," he went on, "that that is what we are all about; it seems to me the only explanation for the fact that we care so much about the past and the future. If we are creatures of a day, why should we be interested? The only reason we care about the past is because we ourselves were there in it; and we care about the future because we shall be there in it again."

"You mean a sort of re-incarnation," I said.

"That's an ugly word for a beautiful thing," he said. "But this love of life, this impulse to live, to protect ourselves, to keep ourselves alive, must surely mean that we have always lived and shall always live. Some people think that dreadful. They think it is taking liberties with them. If they are rich and comfortable and dignified, they cannot bear to think that they may have to begin again, perhaps as a baby in a slum--or they grow tired, and think they want rest; but we can't rest--we must live again, we must be back at work; and of course the real hope in it all is that, when we do anything to make the world happier, it is our own future that we are working for. Who could care about the future of the world, if he was to be banished from it for ever? I was reading a book the other day, in which a wise and a good man said that he felt about the future progress of the world as Moses did about the promised land, 'not as of something we want to have for ourselves, but as of something which we want to exist, whether we exist or no,' I can't take so impersonal a view! If one really believed that one was going to be extinguished in death, one would care no more about the world's future than one cares where the passengers in a train are going to, when we get out at a station. Who, on arriving at home, can lose himself in wondering where his fellow-travellers have got to? We have better things to do than that! That is the sham altruism. It is as if a boy at school, instead of learning his own lesson, spent his time in imploring the other boys to learn theirs. That is what we are whipped for--for not learning our own lesson."

"But if all this is so," I said, "why don't we _know_ that we shall live again? Why is the one thing which is important for us to know hidden from us?"

"I think we do know it," said Father Payne, "deep down in ourselves. It is why it is worth while to go on living. If we believed our reason, which tells us that we come to an end and sink into silence, we could not care to live, to suffer, to form passionate ties which must all be severed, only to sink into nothingness ourselves. If we will listen to our instincts, they assure us that it _is_ all worth doing, because it all has a significance for us in the life that comes next."

"But if we are to go on living," I said, "are we to forget all the love and interest and delight of life? There seems no continuance of identity without memory."

"Oh," said Father Payne, "that is another delusion of reason. Our qualities remain--our power of being interested, of loving, of caring, of suffering. We practise them a little in one life, we practise them again in the next--that is why we improve. I forget who it was who said it, but it is quite true, that there are numberless people now alive, who, because of their orderliness, their patience, their kindness, their sweetness, would have been adored as saints if they had lived in mediaeval times. And that is the best reason we have for suppressing as far as we can our evil dispositions, and for living bravely and freely in happy energy, that we shall make a little better start next time. It is not the particular people we love who matter--it is the power of loving other people--and if we meet the same people as those we loved again, we shall love them again; and if we do not, why, there will be others to love. One of the worst limitations I feel is the fact that there are so many thousand people on earth whom I could love, if I could but meet them--and I am not going to believe that this wretched span of days is my only chance of meeting them. We need not be in a hurry--and yet we have no time to waste!"

He stopped for a moment, and then added: "When I lived in London, and was very poor, and had either too much or not enough to do, and was altogether very unhappy, I used to wander about the streets and wonder how I could be so much alone when there were so many possible friends. Just above Ludgate Railway Viaduct, as you go to St. Paul's, there is a church on your left, a Wren church, very plain, of white and blackened stone, and an odd lead spire at the top. It has hardly any ornament, but just over the central doorway, under a sort of pediment, there is a little childish angel's head, a beautiful little baby face, with such an expression of stifled bewilderment. It seems to say, 'Why should I hang here, covered with soot, with this mob of people jostling along below, in all this noise and dirt?' The child looks as if it was just about to burst into tears. I used to feel like that. I used to feel that I was meant to be happy, and even to make people happy, and that I had been caught and pinned down in a sort of pillory. It's a grievous mistake to feel like that. Self-pity is the worst of all luxuries! But I think I owe all my happiness to that bad time. Coming here was like a resurrection; and I never grudged the time when I was face to face with a nasty, poky, useless life. And if that can happen inside a single existence, I am not going to despair about the possibility of its happening in many existences. I dreamed the other night that I saw a party of little angels singing a song together, all absorbed in making music, and I recognised the little child of Ludgate Hill in the middle of them singing loud and clear. He gave me a little smile and something like a wink, and I knew that he had got his promotion. We ought all of us, and always, to be expecting that. But we have got to earn it, of course. It does not come if we wait with folded hands."

XXV

OF PHILANTHROPY

Father Payne told us an odd story to-day of a big house on the outskirts of London, with a great garden and some fields belonging to it, that was shut up for years and seemed neglected. It was inhabited by an old retired Colonel and his daughter: the daughter had become an invalid, and her mind was believed to be affected. No one ever came to the house or called there. A wall ran, round it, and the trees grew thick and tangled within; the big gates were locked. Occasionally the Colonel came out of a side-door, a tall handsome man, and took a brisk walk; sometimes he would be seen handing his daughter, much wrapped up, into a carriage, and they drove together. But the place had a sinister air, and was altogether regarded with a gloomy curiosity.

When the Colonel died, it was discovered that the place was beautifully kept within, and the house delightfully furnished. It came out that, after a period of mental depression, the daughter had recovered her spirits, though her health was still delicate. The two were devoted to each other, and they decided that, instead of living an ordinary sociable life, they would just enjoy each other's society in peace. It had been the happiest life, simple, tenderly affectionate, the two living in and for each other, and one, moreover, of open-handed, secret benevolence. Apart from the expenses of the household, the Colonel's wealth had been used to support every kind of good work. Only one old friend of the Colonel's was in the secret, and he spoke of it as one of the most beautiful homes he had ever seen.

Someone of us criticised the story, and asked whether it was not a case of refined selfishness. He added rather incisively that the expenditure of money on charitable objects seemed to him to show that the Colonel's conscience was ill at ease.

Father Payne was very indignant. He said the world had gone mad on philanthropy and social service. Three-quarters of it was only fussy ambition. He went on to say that a beautiful and simple life was probably the thing most worth living in the world, and that two people could hardly be better employed than in making each other happy. He said that he did not believe in self-denial unless people liked it. Was it really a finer life to chatter at dinner-parties and tea-parties, and occasionally to inspect an orphanage? Perspiration was not the only evidence of godliness. Why, was it to be supposed that one could not live worthily unless one was always poking one's nose into one's neighbour's concerns? He said that you might as well say that it was refined selfishness to have a rose-tree in your garden, unless you cut off every bud the moment it appeared and sent it to a hospital. If the critic really believed what he said, Aveley was no place for him. Let him go to Chicago!

XXVI

OF FEAR

I forget what led up to the subject; perhaps I did not hear; but Father Payne said, "It isn't for nothing that 'the fearful' head the list of all the abominable people--murderers, sorcerers, idolaters; and liars--who are reserved for the lake of fire and brimstone! Fear is the one thing that we are always wrong in yielding to: I don't mean timidity and cowardice, but the sort of heavy, mild, and rather pious sort of foreboding that wakes one up early in the morning, and that takes all the wind out of one's sails; fear of not being liked, of having given offence, of living uselessly, of wasting time and opportunities. Whatever we do, we must not lead an apologetic kind of life. If we on the whole intend to do something which we think may be wrong, it is better to do it--it is wrong to be cautious and prudent. I love experiments."

"Isn't that rather immoral?" said Lestrange.

"No, my dear boy," said Father Payne, "we must make mistakes: better make them! I am not speaking of things obviously wrong, cruel, unkind, ungenerous, spiteful things; but it is right to give oneself away, to yield to impulses, not to take advice too much, and not to calculate consequences too much. I hate the Robinson Crusoe method of balancing pros and cons. Live your own life, do what you are inclined to do, as long as you really do it. That is probably the best way of serving the world. Don't be argued into things, or bullied out of them. You need not parade it--but rebel silently. It is absolutely useless going about knocking people down. That proves nothing except that you are stronger. Don't show up people, or fight people; establish a stronger influence if you can, and make people see that it is happier and pleasanter to live as you live. Make them envy you--don't make them fear you. You must not play with fear, and you must not yield to fear."

XXVII

OF ARISTOCRACY

Father Payne came into the hall one morning after breakfast when I was opening a parcel of books which had arrived for me. It was a fine, sunny day, and the sun lit up the portrait framed in the panelling over the mantelpiece, an old and skilful copy (at least I suppose it was a copy) of Reynolds' fine portrait of James, tenth Earl of Shropshire. Father Payne regarded the picture earnestly. "Isn't he magnificent?" he said. "But he was a very poor creature really, and came to great grief. My great-great-grandfather! His granddaughter married my grandfather. Now look at that--that's the best we can do in the way of breeding! There's a man whose direct ancestors, father to son, had simply the best that money can buy--fine houses to live in, power, the pick of the matrimonial market, the best education, a fine tradition, every inducement to behave like a hero; and what did he do--he gambled away his inheritance, and died of drink and bad courses. We can't get what we want, it would seem, by breeding human beings, though we can do it with cows and pigs. Where and how does the thing go wrong? His father and mother were both of them admirable people--fine in every sense of the word.

"And then people talk, too, as if we had got rid of idolatry! We make a man a peer, we heap wealth upon him, and then we worship him for his magnificence, and are deeply affected if he talks civilly to us. We don't do it quite so much now, perhaps--but in that man's day, think what an aroma of rank and splendour is cast, even in Boswell's _Life of Johnson_, over a dinner-party where a man like that was present! If he paid Johnson the most trumpery of compliments, Johnson bowed low, and down it went on Boswell's cuff! Yet we go on perpetuating it. We don't require that such a man should be active, public-spirited, wise. If he is fond of field-sports, fairly business-like, kindly, courteous, decently virtuous, we think him a great man, and feel mildly elated at meeting him and being spoken to civilly by him. I don't mean that only snobs feel that; but respectable people, who don't pursue fashion, would be more pleased if an Earl they knew turned up and asked for a cup of tea than if the worthiest of their neighbours did so. I don't exaggerate the power of rank--it doesn't make a man necessarily powerful now, but a very little ability, backed up by rank, will go a long way. A great general or a great statesman likes to be made an Earl; and yet a good many people would like an Earl of long descent quite as much. There are a lot of people about who feel as Melbourne did when he said he liked the Garter so much because there was no d----d merit about it. I believe we admire people who inherit magnificence better than we admire people who earn it; and while that feeling is there, what can be done to alter it?"

"I don't think I want to alter it," I said; "it is very picturesque!"

"Yes, there's the mischief," said Father Payne, "it _is_ more picturesque, hang it all! The old aristocrat who feels like a prince and behaves like one, _is_ more picturesque than the person who has sweated himself into it. Think of the old Duke who was told he _must_ retrench, and that he need not have six still-room maids in his establishment, and said, after a brief period of reflection, 'D----n it, a man must have a biscuit!' We _like_ insolence! That is to say, we like it in its place, because we admire power. It's ten times more impressive than the meekness of the saint. The mischief is that we like anything from a man of power. If he is insolent, we think it grand; if he is stupid, we think it a sort of condescension; if he is mild and polite, we think it marvellous; if he is boorish, we think it is simple-minded. It is power that we admire, or rather success, and both can be inherited. If a man gets a big position in England, he is always said to grow into it; but that is because we care about the position more than we care about the man.

"When I was younger," he went on, "I used to like meeting successful people--it was only rarely that I got the chance--but I gradually discovered that they were not, on the whole, the interesting people. Sometimes they were, of course, when they were big animated men, full of vitality and interest. But many men use themselves up in attaining success, and haven't anything much to give you except their tired side. No, I soon found out that freshness was the interesting thing, wherever it was to be found--and, mind you, it isn't very common. Many people have to arrive at success by resolute self-limitation; and that becomes very uninteresting. Buoyancy, sympathy, quick interests, perceptiveness--that's the supreme charm; and the worst of it is that it mostly belongs to the people who haven't taken too much out of themselves. When we have got a really well-ordered State, no one will have any reason to work too hard, and then we shall all be the happier. These gigantic toilers, it's a sort of morbidity, you know; the real success is to enjoy work, not to drudge yourself dry. One must overflow--not pump!"

"But what is an artist to do," I said, "who is simply haunted by the desire to make something beautiful?"

"He must hold his hand," said Father Payne; "he must learn to waste his time, and he must love wasting it. A habit of creative work is an awful thing."

"Come out for a turn," he went on; "never mind these rotten books; don't get into a habit of reading--it's like endlessly listening to good talk without ever joining in it--it makes a corpulent mind!"

We went and walked in the garden; he stopped before some giant hemlocks. "Just look at those great things," he said, "built up as geometrically as a cathedral, tier above tier, and yet not _quite_ regular. There must be something very hard at work inside that, piling it all up, adding cell to cell, carrying out a plan, and enjoying it all. Yet the beauty of it is that it isn't perfectly regular. You see the underlying scheme, yet the separate shoots are not quite mechanical--they lean away from each other, that joint is a trifle shorter--there wasn't quite room at the start in that stem, and the pressure goes on showing right up to the top, I suppose our lives would look very nearly as geometrical to anyone who _knew_--really knew; but how little geometrical we feel! I don't suppose this hemlock is cursed by the power of thinking it might have done otherwise, or envies the roses. We mustn't spend time in envying, or repenting either--or still less in renouncing life."

"But if I want to renounce it," I said, "why shouldn't I?"

"Yes, there you have me," said Father Payne; "we know so little about ourselves, that we don't always know whether we do better to renounce a thing or to seize it. Make experiments, I say--don't make habits."

"But you are always drilling me into habits," I said.

He gave me a little shake with his hand. "Yes, the habit of being able to do a thing," he said, "not the habit of being unable to do anything else! Hang these metaphysics, if that is what they are! What I want you young men to do is to get a firm hold upon life, and to feel that it is a finer thing than any little presentment of it. I want you to feel and enjoy for yourselves, and to live freely and generously. Bad things happen to all of us, of course; but we mustn't mind that--not to be petty or quarrelsome, or hidebound or prudish or over-particular, that's the point. To leave other people alone, except on the rare occasions when they are not letting other people alone; to be peaceable, and yet not to be afraid; not to be hurt and vexed; to practise forgetting; not to want to pouch things! It's all very well for me to talk," he said; "I made a sufficient hash of it, when I was poor and miserable and overworked; and then I was transplanted out of a slum window-box into a sunny garden, just in time; yet I'm sure that most of my old troubles were in a way of my own making, because I hated being so insignificant; but I fear that was a little poison lurking in me from the Earls of Shropshire. That is the odd thing about ambitions, that they seem so often like regaining a lost position rather than making a new one. The truth is that we are caged; and the only thing to do is to think about the cage as little as we can."

XXVIII

OF CRYSTALS

One day I was strolling down the garden among the winding paths, when I came suddenly upon Father Payne, who was hurrying towards the house. He had in each of his hands a large roughly spherical stone, and looked at me a little shamefacedly.

"You look, Father," I said, "as if you were going to stone Stephen."

He laughed, and looked at the stones. "Yes," he said, "they are what the Greeks called 'hand-fillers,' for use in battle--but I have no nefarious designs."

"What are you going to do with them?" I said

"That's a secret!" he said, and made as if he were going in. Then he said, "Come, you shall hear it--you shall share my secret, and be a partner in my dreams, as the fisherman says in Theocritus." But he did not tell me what he was going to do, and seemed half shy of doing so.

"It's like Dr. Johnson and the orange-peel," I said. "'Nay, Sir, you shall know their fate no further.'"