Chapter C: Payne (6)

"You are all right, my boy," said Father Payne; "you have got the sense of beauty right enough, though you probably call it by some uncomfortable name. I won't make you blush by praising you, but I give you a good mark for the whole affair. If you had excused yourself, or asked to be let off, or told a lie, it would have been ugly. What you did was in the best taste: and that is what I mean. The ugly thing is to clutch and hold on. You did more for yourself by being polite and honest than even George Meredith could have done for you. What I mean by the sense of beauty, as applied to morality, is that a man must be a gentleman first, and a moralist afterwards, if he can. It is grabbing at your own sense of righteousness, if you use it to hurt other people. Your own complacency of conscience is not as important as the duty of not making other people uncomfortable. Of course there are occasions when it is right to stand up to a moral bully, and then you may go for him for all you are worth: but these cases are rare; and what you must not do is to get into the way of a sort of moral skirmishing. In ordinary life, people draw their lines in slightly different places according to preference: you must allow for temperament. You mustn't interfere with other people's codes, unless you are prepared to be interfered with. It is impossible to be severely logical. Take a thing like the use of money: it is good to be generous, but you mustn't give away what you can't afford, because then your friends have to pay your bills. What everyone needs is something to tell him when he must begin practising a virtue, and when to stop practising it. You may say that common sense does that. Well, I don't think it does! I know sensible people who do very brutal things: there must be something finer than common sense: it must be a mixture of sense and sympathy and imagination, and delicacy and humour and tact--and I can't find a better way of expressing it than to call it a sense of beauty, a faculty of judging, in a fine, sweet-tempered, gentle, quiet way, with a sort of instinctive prescience as to where the ripples of what you do and say will spread to, and what sort of effect they will produce. That's the right sort of virtue--attractive virtue--which makes other people wish to behave likewise. I don't say that a man who lives like that can avoid suffering: he suffers a good deal, because he sees ugly things going on all about him; but he doesn't cause suffering--unless he intends to--and even so he doesn't like doing it. He is never spiteful or jealous. He often makes mistakes, but he recognises them. He doesn't erect barriers between himself and other people. He isn't always exactly popular, because many people hate superiority whenever they see it: but he is trusted and loved and even taken advantage of, because he doesn't go in for reprisals."

"But if you haven't got this sense of beauty," said Vincent, "how are you to get it?"

"By admiring it," said Father Payne. "I don't say that the people who have got it are conscious of it--in fact they are generally quite unconscious of it. Do you remember what Shelley--who was, I think, one of the people who had the sense of beauty as strongly as anyone who ever lived--what he said to Hogg, when Hogg told him how he had shut up an impertinent young ruffian? 'I wish I could be as exclusive as you are,' said Shelley with a sigh, feeling, no doubt, a sense of real failure--'but I cannot!' Shelley's weakness was a much finer thing than Hogg's strength. I don't say that Shelley was perfect: his imagination ran away with him to an extent that may be called untruthful; he idealised people, and then threw them over when he discovered them to be futile; but that is the right kind of mistake to make: the wrong kind of mistake is to see people too clearly, and to take for granted that they are not as delightful as they seem."

"You mean that if one must choose," said Vincent, "it is better to be a fool than a knave."

"Why, of course," said Father Payne; "but don't call it 'a fool'--call it 'a child': that's the kind of beauty I mean, the unsuspicious, guileless, trustful, affectionate temper--that to begin with: and you must learn, as you go on, a quality which the child has not always got--a sense of humour. That is what experience ought to give you--a power, that is, of seeing what is really there, and of being more amused than shocked by it. That helps you to distinguish real knavishness from childish faults. A great many of the absurd, perverse, unkind, unpleasant things which people do are not knavish at all--they are silly, selfish little diplomacies, guileless obedience to conventions, unreasonable deference to imaginary authority. People don't mean any harm by such tricks--they are the subterfuges of weakness: but when you come upon real cynical deliberate knavishness--that is different. There's nothing amusing about that. But you must be indulgent to weakness, and only severe with strength."

"I'm getting a little confused," said Vincent.

"Not as much as I am," said Father Payne; "I don't know where I have got to, I am sure. I seem to have changed hares! But one thing does emerge, and that is, that a sort of inspired good taste is the only thing which can regulate morals. The root of all morals is ultimately beauty. Why are we not all as greedy and dirty as the old cave-men? For the simple reason that something, for which he was not responsible, began to work in the caveman's mind. He said to himself, 'This is not the way to behave: it would be nicer not to have killed Mary when I was angry.' And then, when that impulse is once started, human beings go too fast, and want to carry out their new discoveries of rules and principles too far: and you must have a regulating force: and if you can find a better force than the instinct for what is beautiful, tell me, and I'll undertake to talk for at least as long about it. I must stop! My sense of beauty warns me that I am becoming a bore."

XXXVI

OF BIOGRAPHY

Father Payne broke out suddenly after dinner to two or three of us about a book he had been reading.

"It's called a _Life_," he said, "at the top of every page almost. I don't wonder the author felt it necessary to remind you--or perhaps he was reminding himself? I can see him," said Father Payne, "saying to himself with a rueful expression, 'This is a Life, undoubtedly!' Why, the waxworks of Madame Tussaud are models of vivacity and agility compared to it. I never set eyes on such a book!"

"Why on earth did you go on reading it?" said I.

"Well may you ask!" said Father Payne. "It's one of my weaknesses; if I begin a book, I can put it down if it is moderately good; but if it is either very good or very bad, I can't get out of it--I feel like a wasp in a honey-pot. I make faint sticky motions of flight--but on I go."

"Whose life was it?" I said, laughing.

"I hardly know," said Father Payne. "It leaves on my mind the impression of his having been a decent old party enough. I think he must have been a general merchant--he seems to have had pretty nearly everything on hand. He wrote books, I gather"; and Father Payne groaned.

"What were they about?" I said.

"I don't know, I'm sure," said Father Payne. "History and stuff--literary essays, and people's influence, perhaps. He went in for accounting for things, I fancy, and explaining things away. There were extracts which alienated my attention faster than any extracts I ever read. I could not keep my mind on them. God preserve me from ever falling in with any of his books; I should spend days in reading them! He travelled too--he was always travelling. Why couldn't he leave Europe alone? He has left his trail all over Europe, like a snail. He has defiled all the finest scenery on the Continent. But, by Jove, he met his match in his biographer; he has been accounted for all right. And yet I feel that it was rather hard on him. If _he_ could have held his tongue about things in general, and if his biographer could have held his tongue about _him_, it would have been all right. He did no harm, so far as I can make out--he was honest and upright; he would have done very well as a trustee."

Father Payne stopped, and looked round with a melancholy air. "I have gathered," he said, "after several hours' reading, three interesting facts about him. The first is that he wore rather loud checks--I liked that--I detected a touch of vanity in that. The second is that he was fond of quoting poetry, and the moment he did so, his voice became wholly inaudible from emotion--that's a good touch. And the third is that, if he had a guest staying with him, he used to talk continuously in the smoking-room, light his candle, go on talking, walk away talking--by Jove, I can hear him doing it--all up the stairs, along the passage to his bedroom--talk, talk, talk--in they went--then he used to begin to undress--no escape--I can hear his voice muffled as he pulled off his shirt--off went his socks--talking still--then he would actually get into bed--more explanations, more quotations, I wonder how the guest got away; that isn't related--in the intervals of an inaudible quotation, perhaps? What do you think?"

We exploded in laughter, in which Father Payne joined. Then he said: "But look here, you know, it's not really a joke--it's horribly serious! A man ought really to be prosecuted for writing such a book. That is the worst of English people, that they have no idea who deserves a biography and who does not. It isn't enough to be a rich man, or a public man, or a man of virtue. No one ought to be written about, simply because he has _done_ things. He must be content with that. No one should have a biography unless he was either beautiful or picturesque or absurd, just as no one should have a portrait painted unless he is one of the three. Now this poor fellow--I daresay there were people who loved him--think what their feelings must be at seeing him stuffed and set up like this! A biography must be a work of art--it ought not to be a post-dated testimonial! Most of us are only fit, when we have finished our work, to go straight into the waste-paper basket. The people who deserve biographies are the vivid, rich, animated natures who lived life with zest and interest. There are a good many such men, who can say vigorous, shrewd, lively, fresh things in talk, but who cannot express themselves in writing. The curse of most biographies is the letters; not many people can write good letters, and yet it becomes a sacred duty to pad a Life out with dull and stodgy documents; it is all so utterly inartistic and decorous and stupid. A biography ought to be well seasoned with faults and foibles. That is the one encouraging thing about life, that a man can have plenty of failings and still make a fine business out of it all. Yet it is regarded as almost treacherous to hint at imperfections. Now if I had had our friend the general merchant to biographise, I would have taken careful notes of his talk while undressing--there's something picturesque about that! I would have told how he spent his day, how he looked and moved, ate and drank. A real portrait of an uninteresting man might be quite a treasure."

"Yes, but you know it wouldn't do," said Barthrop; "his friends would be out at you like a swarm of wasps."

"Oh, I know that," said Father Payne. "It is all this infernal sentimentality which spoils everything; as long as we think of the dead as elderly angels hovering over us while we pray, there is nothing to be done. If we really believe that we migrate out of life into an atmosphere of mild piety, and lose all our individuality at once, then, of course, the less said the better. As long as we hold that, then death must remain as the worst of catastrophes for everyone concerned. The result of it all is that a bad biography is the worst of books, because it quenches our interest in life, and makes life insupportably dull. The first point is that the biographer is infinitely more important than his subject. Look what an enchanting book Carlyle made out of the Life of Sterling. Sterling was a man of real charm who could only talk. He couldn't write a line. His writings are pitiful. Carlyle put them all aside with a delicious irony; and yet he managed to depict a swift, restless, delicate, radiant creature, whom one loves and admires. It is one of the loveliest books ever written. But, on the other hand, there are hundreds of fine creatures who have been hopelessly buried for ever and ever under their biographies--the sepulchre made sure, the stone sealed, and the watch set."

"But there are some good biographies?" said Barthrop.

"About a dozen," said Father Payne. "I won't give a list of them, or I should become like our friend the merchant. I feel it coming on, by Jove--I feel like accounting for things and talking you all up to my bedroom."

"But what can be done about it all?" I said.

"Nothing whatever, my boy," said Father Payne; "as long as people are not really interested in life, but in money and committees, there is nothing to be done. And as long as they hold things sacred, which means a strong dislike of the plain truth, it's hopeless. If a man is prepared to write a really veracious biography, he must also be prepared to fly for his life and to change his name. Public opinion is for sentiment and against truth; and you must change public opinion. But, oh dear me, when I think of the fascination of real personality, and the waste of good material, and the careful way in which the pious biographer strains out all the meat and leaves nothing but a thin and watery decoction, I could weep over the futility of mankind. The dread of being interesting or natural, the adoration of pomposity and full dress, the sickening love of romance, the hatred of reality--oh, it's a deplorable world!"

XXXVII

OF POSSESSIONS

"I wonder," said Father Payne one day at dinner, "whether any nation's proverbs are such a disgrace to them as our national proverbs are to us. Ours are horribly Anglo-Saxon and characteristic. They seem to me to have been all invented by a shrewd, selfish, complacent, suspicious old farmer, in a very small way of business, determined that he will not be over-reached, and equally determined, too, that he will take full advantage of the weakness of others. 'Charity begins at home,' 'Possession is nine points of the law,' 'Don't count your chickens before they are hatched,' 'When poverty comes in at the door, love flies out of the window.' They are all equally disgraceful. They deride all emotion, they despise imagination, they are unutterably low and hard, and what is called sensible; they are frankly unchristian as well as ungentlemanly. No wonder we are called a nation of shopkeepers."

"But aren't we a great deal better than our proverbs?" said Barthrop: "do they really express anything more than a contempt for weakness and sentiment?"

"Yes," said Father Payne, "but I don't like them any better for that. Why should we be ashamed of all our better feelings? I admit that we have a sense of justice; but that only means that we care for material possessions so much that we are afraid not to admit that others have the right to do the same. The real obstacle to socialism in England is the sense of sanctity about a man's savings. The moment that a man has saved a few pounds, he agrees to any legislation that allows him to hold on to them."

"But aren't we, behind all that," said Barthrop, "an intensely sentimental nation?"

"Yes," said Father Payne, "but that's a fault really--we don't believe in real justice, only in picturesque justice. We are hopeless individualists. We melt into tears over a child that is lost, or a dog that howls; and we let all sorts of evil systems and arrangements grow and flourish. We can't think algebraically, only arithmetically. We can be kind to a single case of hardship; we can't take in a widespread system of oppression. We are improving somewhat; but it is always the particular case that affects us, and not the general principle."

"But to go back to our sense of possession," I said, "is that really much more than a matter of climate? Does it mean more than this, that we, in a temperate climate inclining to cold, need more elaborate houses and more heat-producing food than nations who live in warmer climates? Are not the nations who live in warmer climates less attached to material things simply because they are less important?"

"There is something in that, no doubt," said Father Payne. "Of course, where nature is more hostile to life, men will have to work longer hours to support life than where 'the spicy breezes blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle.' But it isn't that of which I complain--it is the awful sense of respectability attaching to possessions, the hideous way in which we fill our houses with things which we do not want or use, just because they are a symbol of respectability. We like hoarding, and we like luxuries, not because we enjoy them, but because we like other people to know that we can pay for them. I do not imagine that there is any nation in the world whose hospitality differs so much from the mode in which people actually live as ours does. In a sensible society, if we wanted to see our friends, we should ask them to bring their cold mutton round, and have a picnic. What we do actually do is to have a meal which we can't afford, and which our guests know is not in the least like our ordinary meals; and then we expect to be asked back to a similarly ostentatious banquet."

"But isn't there something," said Barthrop, "in Dr. Johnson's dictum, that a meal was good enough to eat, but not good enough to ask a man to? Isn't it a good impulse to put your best before a guest?"

"Oh, no doubt," said Father Payne, "but there's a want of simplicity about it if you only want to entertain people in order that they may see you do it, and not because you want to see them. It's vulgar, somehow--that's what I suspect our nation of being. Our inability to speak frankly of money is another sign. We do money too much honour by being so reticent about it. The fact is that it is the one sacred subject among us. People are reticent about religion and books and art, because they are not sure that other people are interested in them. But they are reticent about money as a matter of duty, because they are sure that everyone is deeply interested. People talk about money with nods and winks and hints--those are all the signs of a sacred mystery!"

"Well, I wonder," said Barthrop, "whether we are as base as you seem to think!"

"I will tell you when I will change my mind," said Father Payne; "all the talk of noble aims and strong purposes will not deceive me. What would convert me would be if I saw generous giving a custom so common that it hardly excited remark. You see a few generous _wills_--but even then a will which leaves money to public purposes is generally commented upon; and it almost always means, too, if you look into it, that a man has had no near relations, and that he has stuck to his money and the power it gives him during his life. If I could see a few cases of men impoverishing themselves and their families in their lifetime for public objects; if I saw evidence of men who have heaped up wealth content to let their children start again in the race, and determined to support the State rather than the family; if I could hear of a rich man's children beseeching their father to endow the State rather than themselves, and being ready to work for a livelihood rather than to receive an inherited fortune; if I could hear of a few rich men living simply and handing out their money for general purposes,--then I would believe! But none of these things is anything but a rare exception; a man who gives away his fortune, as Ruskin did, in great handfuls, is generally thought to be slightly crazy; and, speaking frankly, the worth of a man seems to depend not upon what he has given to the world, but upon what he has gained from the world. You may say it is a rough test;--so it is! But when we begin to feel that a man is foolish in hoarding and wise in lavishing, instead of being foolish in lavishing and wise in hoarding, then, and not till then, shall I believe that we are a truly great nation. At present the man whom we honour most is the man who has been generous to public necessities, and has yet retained a large fortune for himself. That is the combination which we are not ashamed to admire."

XXXVIII

OF LONELINESS

We were walking together, Father Payne and I. It was in the early summer--a still, hot day. The place, as I remember it, was very beautiful. We crossed the stream by a little foot-bridge, and took a bypath across the meadows; up the slope you came to a beautiful bit of old forest country, the trees of all ages, some of them very ancient; there were open glades running into the heart of the woodland, with thorn thickets and stretches of bracken. Hidden away in the depth of the woods, and approached only by green rides, were the ruins of what must have been a big old Jacobean mansion; but nothing remained of it except some grassy terraces, a bit of a fine façade of stone with empty windows, half-hidden in ivy, and some tall stone chimney-stacks. The forest lay silent and still; and, along one of the branching rides, you could discern far away a glimpse of blue hills. The scene was so entirely beautiful that we had gradually ceased to talk, and had given ourselves up to the sweet and quiet influence of the place.

We stood for awhile upon one of the terraces, looking at the old house, and Father Payne said, "I'm not sure that I approve of the taste for ruins; there is something to be said for a deserted castle, because it is a reminder that we do not need to safeguard ourselves so much against each others' ill-will; but a roofless church or a crumbling house--there's something sad about them. It seems to me a little like leaving a man unburied in order that we may come and sentimentalise over his bones. It means, this house, the decay of an old centre of life--there's nothing evil or cruel about it, as there is about a castle; and I am not sure that it ought not to be either repaired or removed--

"'And doorways where a bridegroom trode
Stand open to the peering air.'"

"I don't know," I said; "I'm sure that this is somehow beautiful. Can't one feel that nature is half-tender, half-indifferent to our broken designs?"

"Perhaps," said Father Payne, "but I don't like being reminded of death and waste--I don't want to think that they can end by being charming--the vanity of human wishes is more sad than picturesque. I think Dr. Johnson was right when he said, 'After all, it is a sad thing that a man should lie down and die.'"

A little while afterwards he said, "How strange it is that the loneliness of this place should be so delightful! I like my fellow-beings on the whole--I don't want to avoid them or to abolish them--but yet it is one of the greatest luxuries in the world to find a place where one is pretty sure of not meeting one of them."

"Yes," I said, "it is very odd! I have been feeling to-day that I should like time to stand still this summer afternoon, and to spend whole days in rambling about here. I won't say," I said with a smile, "that I should prefer to be quite alone; but I shouldn't mind even that in a place like this. I never feel like that in a big town--there is always a sense of hostile currents there. To be alone in a town is always rather melancholy; but here it is just the reverse."

"Indeed, yes," said Father Payne, "and it is one of the great mysteries of all to me what we really want with company. It does not actually take away from us our sense of loneliness at all. You can't look into my mind, nor can I look into yours; whatever we do or say to break down the veil between us, we can't do it. And I have often been happier when alone than I have ever been in any company."

"Isn't it a sense of security?" I said; "I suppose that it is an instinct derived from old savage days which makes us dread other human beings. The further back you go, the more hatred and mistrust you find; and I suppose that the presence of a friend, or rather of someone with whom one has a kind of understanding, gives a feeling of comparative safety against attack."

"That's it, no doubt," said Father Payne; "but if I had to choose between spending the rest of my life in solitude, or in spending it without a chance of solitude, I should be in a great difficulty. I am afraid that I regard company rather as a wholesome medicine against the evils of solitude than I regard solitude as a relief from company. After all, what is it that we want with each other?--what do we expect to get from each other? I remember," he said, smiling, "a witty old lady saying to me once that eternity was a nightmare to her.--'For instance,' she said, 'I enjoy sitting here and talking to you very much; but if I thought it was going on to all eternity, I shouldn't like it at all.' Do we really want the company of any one for ever and ever? And if so, why? Do we want to agree or to disagree? Is the point of it that we want similarity or difference? Do we want to hear about other people's experiences, or do we simply want to tell our own? Is the desire, I mean, for congenial company anything more than the pleasure of seeing our own thoughts and ideas reflected in the minds of others; or is it a real desire to alter our own thoughts and ideas by comparing them with the experiences of others? Why do we like books, for instance? Isn't it more because we recognise our own feelings than because we make acquaintance with unfamiliar feelings? It comes to this? Can we really ever gain an idea, or can we only recognise our own ideas?"

"It is very difficult," I said; "if I answered hastily, I should say that I liked being with you because you give me many new ideas; but if I think about it, it seems to me that it is only because you make me recognise my own thoughts."

"Yes," said Father Payne, "I think that is so. If I see another man behaving well where I should behave ill, I recognise that I have all the elements in my own mind for doing the same, but that I have given undue weight to some of them and not enough weight to others. I don't think, on the whole, that anyone can give one a new idea; he can only help one to a sense of proportion. But I want to get deeper than that. You and I are friends--at least I think so; but what exactly do we give each other? How do you affect my solitude, or I yours? I'm blessed if I know. It looks to me, indeed, as if you and I might be parts of one great force, one great spirit, and that we recognise our unity, through some material condition which keeps us apart. I am not sure that it isn't only the body that divides us, and that we are a part of the same thing behind it all."

"But why, if that is so," said I, "do we feel a sense of unity with some people, and not at all with others? There are people, I mean, with whom I feel that I have simply nothing in common, and that our spirits could not possibly mix or blend. With you, to speak frankly, it is different. I feel as though I had known you far longer than a few months, and should never be in any real doubt about you. I recognise myself in you and yourself in me. But there are many people in whom I don't recognise myself at all."

Father Payne put his arm through mine, "Well, old man," he said, "we must be content to have found each other, but we mustn't give up trying to find other people too. I think that is what civilisation means--a mutual recognition--we're only just at the start of it, you know. I'm in no doubt as to what you give me--it's a sense of trust. When I think about you, I feel, 'Come, there is someone at all events who will try to understand me and to forgive me and to share his best with me'--but even so, my boy, I shall enjoy being alone sometimes. I shall want to get away from everyone, even from you! There are thoughts I cannot share with you, because I want you to think better of me than I do of myself. I suppose that is vanity--but still old Wordsworth was right when he wrote:

"'And many love me; but by none
Am I enough beloved.'"

XXXIX

OF THE WRITER'S LIFE

I was walking once with Father Payne in the fields, and he was talking about the difficulties of the writer's life. He said that the great problem for all industrious writers was how to work in such a way as not to be a nuisance to the people they lived with. "Of course men vary very much in their habits," he said; "but if you look at the lives of authors, they often seem tiresome people to get on with. The difficulty is mostly this," he went on, "that a writer can't write to any purpose for more than about three hours a day--if he works really hard, even that is quite enough to tire him out. Think what the brain is doing--it is concentrated on some idea, some scene, some situation. Take a novelist: he has to have a picture in his mind all the time--a clear visualisation of a place--a room, a garden, a wood; then he must know how his people move and look and speak, and he has to fly backwards and forwards from one to another; then he has the talk to create, and he has to be always rejecting thoughts and impressions and words, good enough in themselves, but not characteristic. It is a fearful strain on imagination and emotion, on phrase-making and word-finding. The real wonder is not that a few people can do it better than others, but that anyone can do it at all. The difference between the worst novelist and the best is much less than the difference between the worst novelist and the person who can't write at all.

"Well, then, there is such a thing as inspiration; most creative writers get a book in their minds, and can think of nothing else, day and night, while it is on. The difficulty is to know what a writer is to do in the intervals between his books, and in the hours in which he is not writing. He has got to take it easy somehow, and the question is what is he to do. He can't, as a rule, do much in the way of hard exercise. Violent exercise in the open air is pleasant enough, but it leaves the brain torpid and stagnant. A man who really makes a business of writing has got to live through ten or twelve hours of a day when he isn't writing. He can't afford to read very much--at least he can't afford to read authors whom he admires, because they affect his style. There is something horribly contagious about style, because it is often much easier to do a thing in someone else's way than to do it in one's own. Pater was asked once if he had read Stevenson or Kipling, I forget which--'Oh no, I daren't!' he said, 'I have peeped into him occasionally, but I can't afford to read him. I have learnt exactly how I can approach and develop a subject, and if I looked to see how he does it, I should soon lose my power. The man with a style is debarred from reading fine books unless they are on lines entirely apart from his own.' That is perfectly true, I expect. There is nothing so dreadful as reading a writer whom one likes, and seeing that he has got deflected from his manner by reading some other craftsman. The effect is a very subtle one. If you really want to see that sort of sympathy at work, you should look at Ruskin's letters--his letters are deeply affected by the correspondent to whom he is writing. If he wrote to Carlyle or to Browning, he wrote like Carlyle and Browning, because, as he wrote, they were strongly in his mind.

"With a painter or a musician it is different--a lot of hand-work comes in which relieves the brain, so that they can work longer hours. But a writer, as a rule, while he is writing, can't even afford to talk very much to interesting people, because talking is hard work too.

"Well, then, a writer, as an artistic person, is rather easily bored. He likes vivid sensations and emphatic preferences--and it is not really good for him to be bored; a man may read the paper, write a few letters, stroll, garden, chatter--but if he takes his writing seriously, he must somehow be fresh for it. It isn't easy to combine writing with any other occupation, and it leaves many hours unoccupied.

"Carlyle is a terrible instance, because he was wretched and depressed when he was not writing; he was melancholy, peevish, physically unwell; and when he was writing, he was wholly absorbed very impatient of his labour, and most intolerable. Indeed, it does not look as if the home lives of writers have generally been very happy--there is too often a patent conspiracy to keep the great irritable babyish giant amused--and that's a bad atmosphere for anyone to live in--an unreal, a royal sort of atmosphere, of deferential scheming."

I said something about Walter Scott. "Ah yes," said Father Payne, "but Scott's work was amazing--it just seemed to overflow from a gigantic reservoir of vitality. He could do his day's work in the early hours, and then tramp about all day, chattering, farming, planting, entertaining--endlessly good-humoured. Of course he wore himself out at last by perfectly ghastly work--most of it very poor stuff. Browning and Thackeray were men of the same sort, sociable, genial, exuberant. They overflowed too--they didn't batter things out.

"But, as a rule, most men who want to do good work, must be content to potter about, and seem lazy and even self-indulgent. And one of the reasons why many men who start as promising writers come to nothing is because they can't be inert, acquiescent, easy-going. I have often thought that a good novel might be written about the wife of a great writer, who marries him, dazzled by his brilliance and then finds him to be a petty, suspicious, wayward sort of child, with all his force lying in one supreme faculty of vision and expression. It must be a fiery trial to see deep, wise, beautiful things produced by a man who can't _live_ his thoughts--can only write them."

"But what should a man _do_?" I said.

"Well," said Father Payne, "I think, as a practical matter, it would be a good thing to cultivate a hobby of a manual kind--and also, above all, the power of genial loafing. Of course, the real pity is that we are not all taught to do some house-work as a matter of course--we depend too much on servants, and house-work is the natural and amusing outlet of our physical energies; as it is, we specialise too much, and half of our maladies and discomforts and miseries are due to that--that we work a part of ourselves too hard, and the other parts not hard enough. The thing to aim at is equanimity, and the existence of unsatisfied instincts in us is what poisons life for many people."

He was silent for a little, and then he said, "And then, too, there is the great danger of all writers--the feeling that he has the power of giving people what they want, when he ought to remember that he has only the good fortune of expressing what people feel. Art oughtn't to be a thing sprinkled on life, as you shake sugar out on to a pudding--it is just a power of disentangling things; we suffer most of us from finding life too complicated--we don't understand it--it's a mass of confused impressions. Well, the artist puts it all in order, isolates the important things, makes the values distinct--he helps people to feel clearly--that's his only use. And then, if he succeeds, there come silly flatteries and adorations--until he gets to feel as if he were handing down pots of jam and bottles of wine from a high shelf out of reach--until he grows to believe that he put them there, when he only found them there. It's a dreadful thing for an artist never to succeed at all, because then his life appears the most useless business conceivable; but it is almost a worse thing to get to depend upon success--and it is undeniably pleasant to be a personage, to cause a little stir when you enter a room, to find that people know all about you and like meeting you, and saying they have met you. I never had any of that: and I have sometimes found myself with successful writers who made me thank God I couldn't write--such complacency, such lolling among praise, such vexation at not being deferred to! The best fate for a man is to be fairly successful, and to be at the same time pretty severely criticised. That keeps him modest, while it gives him a degree of confidence that he is doing something useful. The danger is of drifting right out of life into unreal civilities and compliments, which you don't wholly like and yet can't do without. The fact is that writing doesn't generally end in very much happiness, except perhaps the happiness of work. That's the solid part of it really, and no one can deprive you of that, whatever happens."

XL

OF WASTE

We were discussing Keats and his premature death. Someone had said that, beside being one of the best, he was also one of the most promising of poets; and Father Payne had remarked that reading Keats's letters made him feel more directly in the presence of a man of genius than any other book he knew. Kaye had added that the death of Keats seemed to him the most ghastly kind of waste, at which Father Payne had smiled, and said that that presupposed that he was knocked out by some malign or indifferent force. "It is possible--isn't it?" he added, "that he was needed elsewhere and summoned away." "Then why was he so elaborately tortured first?" said Kaye. "Well," said Father Payne, "I can conceive that if he had recovered his health, and escaped from his engagement with Fanny Brawne, he might have been a much finer fellow afterwards. There were two weak points in Keats, you know--his over-sensuousness and a touch of commonness--I won't call it vulgarity," he added, "but his jokes are not of the best quality! I do not feel sure that his suffering might not have cleared away the poisonous stuff."

"Perhaps," said Kaye; "but doesn't that make it more wasteful still? The world needs beauty--and for a man to die so young with his best music in him seems to me a clumsy affair."

"I don't know," said Father Payne; "it seems to me harder to define the word _waste_ than almost any word I know. Of course there are cases when it is obviously applicable--if a big steamer carrying a cargo of wheat goes down in a storm, that is a lot of human trouble thrown away--and a war is wasteful, because nations lose their best and healthiest parental stock. But it isn't a word to play with. In a middle-class household it is applied mainly to such things as there being enough left of a nice dish for the servants to enjoy; and, generally speaking, I think it might be applied to all cases in which the toil spent over the making of a thing is out of all proportion to the enjoyment derived from it. But the difficulty underlying it is that it assumes a knowledge of what a man's duty is in this world--and I am not by any means sure that we know. Look at the phrase 'a waste of time.' How do we know exactly how much time a man ought to allot to sleep, to work, to leisure? I had an old puritanical friend who was very fond of telling people that they wasted time. He himself spent nearly two hours of every day in dressing and undressing. That is to say that when he died at the age of seventy-six, he had spent about six entire years in making and unmaking his toilet! Let us assume that everyone is bound to give a certain amount of time to doing the necessary work of the world--enough to support, feed, clothe, and house himself, with a margin to spare for the people who can't support themselves and can't work. Then there are a lot of outlying things which must be done--the work of statesmen, lawyers, doctors, writers--all the people who organise, keep order, cure, or amuse people. Then there are all the people who make luxuries and comforts--things not exactly necessary, but still reasonable indulgences. Now let us suppose that anyone is genuinely and sensibly occupied in any one of these ways, and does his or her fair share of the world's work: who is to say how such workers are to spend their margin of time? There are obviously certain people who are mere drones in the hive--rich, idle, extravagant people: we will admit that they are wasters. But I don't admit for a moment that all the time spent in enjoying oneself is wasted, and I think that people have a right to choose what they do enjoy. I am inclined to believe that we are here to live, and that work is only a part of our material limitations. A great deal of the usefulness of work is not its intrinsic value, but its value to ourselves. It isn't only what we perform that matters; it is the fact that work forces us into relations with other people, which I take to be the experience we all need. In the old dreary books of my childhood, the elders were always hounding the young people into doing something useful--useful reading, useful sewing, and so forth. But I am inclined to believe that sociability and talk are more useful than reading, and that solitary musing and dreaming and looking about are useful too. All activity is useful, all interchange, all perception. What isn't useful is anything which hides life from you, any habit that drugs you into inactivity and idleness, anything which makes you believe that life is romantic and sentimental and fatuous. I wouldn't even go so far as to say that _all_ the time spent in squabbling and quarrelling is useless, because it brings you up against people who think differently from yourself. That becomes wasteful the moment it leaves you with the impotent desire to hurt your adversary. No, I am inclined to think that the only thing which is wasteful is anything which suspends interest and animation and the love of life; and I don't blame idle and extravagant people who live with zest and liveliness for doing that. I only blame them for not seeing that their extravagance is keeping people at the other end of the scale in drudgery and dulness. Of course the difficulty of it is, that if we offered the lowest stratum of workers a great increase of leisure, they would largely misuse it; and that is why I believe that in the future a large part of the education of workers will be devoted to teaching them how to employ their leisure agreeably and not noxiously. And I believe that there are thousands of cases in the world which are infinitely worse than the case of Keats--who, after all, had more joy of the finest quality in his short life than most of us achieve. I mean the cases of men and women with fine and sensitive instincts, who by being born under base and down-trodden conditions are never able to get a taste of clean, wholesome, and beautiful life at all--that's a much darker problem."

"But how do you fit that into your theories of life at all?" said Vincent.

"Oh, it fits my theory of life well enough," said Father Payne. "You see, I believe it to be a real battle, and not a sham fight. I believe in God as the source of all the fine, beautiful, and free instincts, casting them lavishly into the world, against a horribly powerful and relentless but ultimately stupid foe. 'Who put the evil there?' you may say, 'and how did it get there first?' Ah, I don't know that--that is the origin of evil. But I don't believe that God put it there first, just for the interest of the fight. I don't believe that He is responsible for waste--I think it is one of the forces He is fighting. He pushes battalion after battalion to the assault, and down they go. It's cruel work, but it isn't anything like so cruel as to suppose that He arranged it all or even permitted it all. That would indeed sicken and dishearten me. No, I believe that God never wastes anything; but it's a fearful and protracted battle; and I believe that He will win in the end. I read a case in the paper the other day of a little child in a workhouse that had learnt a lot of infamous language, and cursed and swore if it was given milk instead of beer or brandy. Am I to believe that God was in any way responsible for putting a little child in that position?--for allowing things to take shape so, if He could have checked it? No, indeed! I do not believe in a God as helpless or as wicked as that! There is something devilish there, for which He is not responsible, and against which He is fighting as hard as He can."

"But doesn't heredity come in there?" said Vincent. "It isn't the child's fault, and probably no amount of decent conditions would turn that child into anything respectable."

"Yes," said Father Payne; "heredity is just one of the evil devices--but don't you see the stupidity of it? It stops progress, but it also helps it on--it hinders, but it also helps; and nothing in the world seems to me so Divine as the way in which God is using and mastering heredity for good. It multiplies evil, but it also multiplies good; and God has turned that weapon against the contriver of it. The wiser that the world grows, the more they will see how to use heredity for happiness, by preventing the tainted from continuing to taint the races. The slow civilisation of the world is the strongest proof I know that the battle is going the right way. The forces of evil are being slowly transformed into the forces of good. The waste of noble things is but the slow arrival of the new armies of light. There is something real in fighting for a General who has a very urgent and terrible business on hand. There is nothing real about fighting for one who has brought both the armies into the field. It doesn't do to sentimentalise about evil, and to say that it is hidden good! The world is a probation, I don't doubt--but it is testing your strength against something which is really there, and can do you a lot of harm, not against something which is only there for the purpose of testing what might have been made and kept both innocent and strong."

XLI

OF EDUCATION

Father Payne generally declined to talk about education. "Teaching is one of the things, like golf and hunting, which is exciting to do and pleasant to remember, but intolerable to talk about," he said one evening.

"Well," I said, "it is certainly intolerable to listen to people discussing education, or to read about it; but if you know anything about it, I should have thought it was good fun to talk about it."

"Ah," said Father Payne, "you say, 'If you know anything about it.' The worst of it is that everybody knows everything about it. A man who is a success, thinks that his own education is the only one worth having; a man who is a failure thinks that all systems of education are wrong. And as for talking about teaching, you can't talk about it--you can only relate your own experience, and listen with such patience as you can muster to another man relating his. That's not talking!"

"But it is interesting in a general way," said Vincent,--"the kind of thing you are aiming at, what you want to produce, and so on."

"Yes, my dear Vincent," said Father Payne, "but education isn't that--it's an obstinate sort of tradition; it's a quest, like the Philosopher's Stone. Most people think that it is a sort of charm which, if you could discover it, would transmute all baser metals into gold. The justification of the Philosopher's Stone is, I suppose, that different metals are not really different substances, but only different arrangements of the same atoms. But we can't predicate that of human spirits as yet; and to attempt to find one formula of education is like planting the same crop in different soils. It is the ridiculous democratic doctrine of human equality which is the real difficulty. There is no natural equality in human nature, and the question really is whether you are going to try to reduce all human beings to the same level, which is the danger of discipline, or to let people follow their own instincts unchecked, which is the shadow of liberty. I'm all for liberty, of course."

"But why 'of course'?" said Vincent.

"Because I take the aristocratic view," said Father Payne, "which is that you do more for the human race by having a few fine people, than by having an infinite number of second-rate people. What the first-rate man thinks to-day, the second-rate people think to-morrow--that is how we make progress; and I would like to take infinite pains with the best material, if I could find it, and leave discipline for the second-rate. The Jews and the Greeks, both first-class nations, have done more for the world on the whole than the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons, who are the best of the second-rate stocks."

"But how are you going to begin to sort your material?" said Barthrop.