Chapter C: Payne (8)

"Ah, that's a large question," said Father Payne, "the duty of loving--it's a contradiction in terms! To love people seems the one thing in the world you cannot do because you ought to do it; and yet to love your neighbour as yourself can't _only_ mean to behave _as if_ you loved him. And then, what does caring about people mean? It seems impossible to say. It isn't that you want anything which they can give you--it isn't that they need anything you can give them; it isn't always even that you want to see them. There are people for whom I care who rather bore me; there are people who care for me who bore me to extinction; and again there are people whose company I like for whom I don't care. It isn't always by any means that I admire the people for whom I care. I see their faults, I don't want to resemble them. Then, too, there have been people for whom I have cared very much, and wanted to please, who have not cared in the least for me. Some of the best-loved people in the world seem to have had very little love to give away! I have a sort of feeling that the people who evoke most affection are the people who have something of the child always in them--something petulant, wilful, self-absorbed, claiming sympathy and attention. It is a certain innocence and freshness that we love, I think; the quality that seems to say, 'Oh, do make me happy'; and I think that caring for people generally means just that you would like to make them happy, or that they have it in their power to make you happy. I think it is a kind of conspiracy to be happy together, if possible. Probably the mistake we make is to think it is one definite thing, when a good many things go to make it up. I have been interested in a very large number of people--in fact, I am generally interested in people; but I haven't cared for all of them, while I have cared for a good many people in whom I have not been at all interested. But it is easier to say what the qualities are that repel affection, than what the qualities are which attract it. I don't think any faults prevent it, if people are sorry for their faults and are sorry to have hurt you. It seems to me impossible to care for spiteful people, or for the people who turn on you in a sudden anger, and don't want to be forgiven, but are glad to have made you fear them. I don't care for people who claim affection as a right, or who bargain for sacrifices. The bargaining element must be wholly absent from affection. The feeling 'it is your turn to be nice' is fatal to it. No, I think that it is a feeling that you can live at peace with the particular person that is the basis of friendship. The element of reproach must be wholly absent: I don't mean the element of criticism--that can be impersonal--but the feeling 'you ought not to behave like this to me.'"

Father Payne relapsed into silence. "But," I said, "surely the people who make claims for affection are very often most beloved, even when they are unjust, inconsiderate, ill-tempered?"

"By women," said Father Payne, "but not by men--and there's another difficulty. Men and women mean such utterly different things by affection, that they can't even discuss it together. Women will do anything for you, if you claim their help, and make it clear that you need them; they will love you if you do that. A man, on the other hand, will often do his very best to help you, if you appeal to him, but he won't care for you, as a rule, in consequence. Women like emotional surprises, men do not. A man wants to get done with excitement, and to enter on an easy partnership--women like the excitement more than the ease. And then it is all complicated by the admixture of the masculine and feminine temperaments. As a rule, however, women are interested in moody temperaments, and men are bored by them. Personally, my own pleasure in meeting a real friend, or in hearing from a friend, is the pleasure of feeling 'Yes, you are there, just the same,'--it's the tranquillity that one values. The possibility of finding a man angry or pettish is unpleasant to me. I feel 'so all this nonsense has to be cleared away again!' I don't want to be questioned and scrutinised, with a sense that I am on my trial. I don't mind an ironical letter, which shows that a friend is fully aware of my faults and foibles; but it's an end of all friendship with me if I feel a man is bent on improving me, especially if it is for his own convenience. I'm sure that the fault-finding element is fatal to affection. That may sound weak, but I can't be made to feel that I am responsible to other people. I don't recognise anyone's right to censure me. A man may criticise me if he likes, but he mustn't impose upon me the duty of living up to his ideal. I don't believe that even God does that!"

"I don't understand," I said.

"Well," said Father Payne, "I don't believe that God says, 'This is my law, and you must obey it because I choose," I believe He says, 'This is the law, for Me as well as for you, and you will not be happy till you obey it,'--Yes, I have got it, I believe--the essence of affection is _equality_. I don't mean that you may not recognise superiorities in your friend, and he in you; but they must not come into the question of affection. Love makes equal, and when there is a real sense of equality, love can begin."

"But," I said, "the passion of lovers--isn't that all based on the worship of something infinitely superior to oneself?"

"Yes," said Father Payne, "but that means a sight of something beyond--of the thing which we all love--beauty. I don't say that equality is the thing we love--it's only the condition of loving. The lover can't love, if he feels himself _really_ unworthy of love. He must believe that at worst he _can_ be loved, though he may be astonished at being loved; it is in love that it is possible to meet; it is love that brings beauty within your reach, or down, to your level. It is beauty that you love in your friend, not his right to improve you. He is what you want to be; and the comfort of being loved is the comfort of feeling that there is some touch of the same beauty in yourself. It is so easy to feel dreary, stupid, commonplace--and then someone appears, and you see in his glance and talk that there is, after all, some touch of the same thing in yourself which you love in him, some touch of the beauty which you love in God. But the glory of beauty is that it is concerned with being beautiful and becoming beautiful--not in mocking or despising or finding fault or improving. Love is the finding your friend beautiful in mind and heart, and the joy of being loved is the sense that you are beautiful to him--that you are equal in that! When you once know that, little quarrels and frictions do not matter--what _does_ matter is the recognising of some ugly thing which the man whom you thought was your friend really clings to and worships. Faults do not matter if only the friend is aware of them, and ashamed of them: it is the self-conscious fault, proud of its power to wound, and using affection as the channel along which the envenomed stream may flow, which destroys affection and trust."

"Then it comes to this," I said, "that affection is a mutual recognition of beauty and a sense of equality?"

"It _is_ that, more or less, I believe," said Father Payne. "I don't mean that friends need be aware of that--you need not philosophise about your friendships--but if you ask me, as an analyst, what it all consists in, I believe that those are the essential elements of it--and I believe that it holds good of the dog-and-man friendship as well!"

XLVII

OF RESPECT OF PERSONS

Father Payne had been out to luncheon one day with some neighbours. He had groaned over the prospect the day before, and had complained that such goings-on unsettled him.

"Well, Father," said Rose at dinner, "so you have got through your ordeal! Was it very bad?"

"Bad!" said Father Payne, "why should it be bad? I'm crammed with impressions--I'm a perfect mine of them."

"But you didn't like the prospect of going?" said Rose.

"No," said Father Payne, "I shrank from the strain--you phlegmatic, aristocratic people,--men-of-the-world, blasés, highly-born and highly-placed,--have no conception of the strain these things are on a child of nature. You are used to such things, Rose, no doubt--you do not anticipate a luncheon-party with a mixture of curiosity and gloom. But it is good for me to go to such affairs--it is like a waterbreak in a stream--it aerates and agitates the mind. But _you_ don't realise the amount of observation I bring to bear on such an event--the strange house, the unfamiliar food, the new inscrutable people--everything has to be observed, dealt with, if possible accounted for, and if unaccountable, then inflexibly faced and recollected. A torrent of impressions has poured in upon me--to say nothing of the anxious consideration beforehand of topics of conversation, and modes of investigation! To stay in a new house crushes me with fatigue--and even a little party like this, which seems, I daresay, to some of you, a negligible, even a tedious thing, is to me rich in far-flung experience."

"Mayn't we have the benefit of some of it?" said Rose.

"Yes," said Father Payne, "you may--you must, indeed! I am grateful to you for introducing the subject--it is more graceful than if I had simply divested myself of my impressions unsolicited."

"What was it all about?" said Rose.

"Why," said Father Payne, "the answer to that is simple enough--it was to meet an American! I know that race! Who but an American would have heard of our little experiment here, and not only wanted to know--they all do that--but positively arranged to know? Yes, he was a hard-featured man--a man of wealth, I imagine--from some place, the grotesque and extravagant name of which I could not even accurately retain, in the State of Minnesota."

"Did he want to try a similar experiment?" said Barthrop.

"He did not," said Father Payne. "I gathered that he had no such intention--but he desired to investigate ours. He was full of compliments, of information, even of rhetoric. I have seldom heard a simple case stated more emphatically, or with such continuous emphasis. My mind simply reeled before it. He pursued me as a harpooner might pursue a whale. He had the whole thing out of me in no time. He interrogated me as a corkscrew interrogates a cork. That consumed the whole of luncheon. I made a poor show. My experiment, such as it is, stood none of the tests he applied to it. It appeared to be lacking in all earnestness and zeal. I was painfully conscious of my lack of earnestness. 'Well, sir,' he said at the conclusion of my examination-in-chief, 'I seem to detect that this business of yours is conducted mainly with a view to your own entertainment, and I admit that it causes me considerable disappointment.' The fact is, my boys," said Father Payne, surveying the table, "that we must be more conscious of higher aims here, and we must put them on a more commercial footing!"

"But that was not all?" said Barthrop.

"No, it was not all," said Father Payne; "and, to tell you the truth, I was more alarmed by than interested in the Minnesota merchant. I couldn't state my case--I failed in that--and I very much doubt if I could have convinced him that there was anything in it. Indeed, he said that my conceptions of culture were not as clear-cut as he had hoped."

"He seems to have been fairly frank," said Rose.

"He was frank, but not uncivil," said Father Payne. "He did not deride my absence of definiteness, he only deplored it. But I really got more out of the subsequent talk. We adjourned to a sort of portico, a pretty place looking on to a formal garden: it was really very charmingly done--a clever fake of an, old garden, but with nothing really beautiful about it. It looked as if no one had ever lived in it, though the illusion of age was skilfully contrived--old paving-stones, old bricks, old lead vases, but all looking as if they were shy, and had only been just introduced to each other. There was no harmony of use about it. But the talk--that was the amazing thing! Such pleasant intelligent people, nice smiling women, courteous grizzled men. By Jove, there wasn't a single writer or artist or musician that they didn't seem to know intimately! It was a literary party, I gathered: but even so there was a haze of politics and society about it--vistas of politicians and personages of every kind, all known intimately, all of them quoted, everything heard and whispered in the background of events--we had no foregrounds, I can tell you, nothing second-hand, no concealments or reticences. Everyone in the world worth knowing seemed to have confided their secrets to that group. It was a privilege, I can tell you! We simply swam in influences and authenticities. I seemed to be in the innermost shrine of the world's forces--where they get the steam up, you know!"

"But who are these people, after all?" said Rose.

"My dear Rose!" said Father Payne. "You mustn't destroy my illusions in that majestic manner! What would I not have given to be able to ask myself that question! To me they were simply the innermost circle, to whom the writers and artists of the day told their dreams, and from whom they sought encouragement and sympathy. That was enough for me. I stored my memory with anecdotes and noble names, like the man in _Pride and Prejudice_."

"But what did it all come to?" said Rose.

"Well," said Father Payne, "to tell you the truth, it didn't amount to very much! At the time I was dazzled and stupefied--but subsequent reflection has convinced me that the cooking was better than the food, so to speak."

"You mean that it was mostly humbug?" said Rose.

"Well, I wouldn't go quite as far as that," said Father Payne, "but it was not very nutritive--no, the nutriment was lacking! Come, I'll tell you frankly what I did think, as I came away. I thought these pretty people very adventurous, very quick, very friendly. But I don't truly think they were interested in the real thing at all--only interested in the words of the wise, and in the unconsidered trifles of the Major Prophets, so to speak. I didn't think it exactly pretentious--but they obviously only cared for people of established reputation. They didn't admire the ideas behind, only the reputations of the people who said the things. They had undoubtedly seen and heard the great people--I confess it amazed me to think how easily the men of mark can be exploited--but I did not discern that they cared about the things represented,--only about the representatives. The American was different. He, I think, cared about the ideas, though he cared about them in the wrong way. I mean that he claimed to find everything distinct, whereas the big things are naturally indistinct. They loom up in a shadowy way, and the American was examining them through field-glasses. But my other friends seemed to me to be only interested in the people who had the entrée, so to speak--the priests of the shrine. They had noticed everything that doesn't matter about the high and holy ones--how they looked, spoke, dressed, behaved. It was awfully clever, some of it; one of the women imitated Legard the essayist down to the ground--the way he pontificates, you know--but nothing else. They were simply interested in the great men, and not interested in what make the great men different from other people, but simply in their resemblance to other people. Even great people have to eat, you know! Legard himself eats, though it's a leisurely process; and this woman imitated the way he forked up a bit, held it till the bit dropped off, and put the empty fork into his mouth. It was excruciatingly funny--I'll admit that. But they missed the point, after all. They didn't care about Legard's books a bit--they cared much more about that funny cameo ring he wears on his tie!"

"It all seems to me horribly vulgar," said Kaye.

"No, it was no more vulgar than a dance of gnats," said Father Payne. "They were all alive, those people. They were just gnats, now I come to think of it! They had stung all the great men of the day--even drawn a little blood--and they were intoxicated by it. Mind, I don't say that it is worth doing, that kind of thing! But they were having their fun--and the only mistake they made was in thinking they cared about these people for the right reasons. No, the only really rueful part of the business was the revelation to me of what the great people can put up with, in the way of being fêted, and the extent to which they seem able to give themselves away to these pretty women. It must be enervating, I think, and even exhausting, to be so pawed and caressed; but it's natural enough, and if it amuses them, I'm not going to find fault. My only fear is that Legard and the rest think they are really _living_ with these people. They are not doing that; they are only being roped in for the fun of the performance. These charming ladies just ensnare the big people, make them chatter, and then get together, as they did to-day, and compare the locks of hair they have snipped from their Samsons. But it isn't a bit malicious--it's simply childish; and, by Jove, I enjoyed myself tremendously. Now, don't pull a long face, Kaye! Of course it was very cheap--and I don't say that anyone ought to enjoy that sort of thing enough to pursue it. But if it comes in my way, why, it is like a dish of sweetmeats! I don't approve of it, but it was like a story out of Boccaccio, full of life and zest, even though the pestilence was at work down in the city. We must not think ill of life too easily! I don't say that these people are living what is called the highest life. But, after all, I only saw them amusing themselves. There were some children about, nice children, sensibly dressed, well-behaved, full of go, and yet properly drilled. These women are good wives and good mothers; and I expect they have both spirit and tenderness, when either is wanted. I'm not going to bemoan their light-mindedness; at all events, I thought it was very pleasant, and they were very good to me. They saw I wasn't a first-hander or a thoroughbred, and they made it easy for me. No, it was a happy time for me--and, by George, how they fed us! I expect the women looked after all that. I daresay that, as far as economics go, it was all wrong, and that these people are only a sort of scum on the surface of society. But it is a pretty scum, shot with bright colours. Anyhow, it is no good beginning by trying to alter _them_! If you could alter everything else, they would fall into line, because they are good-humoured and sensible. And as long as people are kindly and full of life, I shall not complain; I would rather have that than a dreary high-mindedness."

Father Payne rose. "Oh, do go on, Father!" said someone.

"No, my boy," said Father Payne, "I'm boiling over with impressions--rooms, carpets, china, flowers, ladies' dresses! But that must all settle down a bit. In a few days I'll interrogate my memory, like Wordsworth, and see if there is anything of permanent worth there!"

XLVIII

OF AMBIGUITY

Father Payne had been listening to some work of mine: and he said at the end, "That is graceful enough, and rather attractive--but it has a great fault: it is sometimes ambiguous. Several of your sentences can have more than one meaning. I remember once at Oxford," he said, smiling, "that Collins, one of our lecturers, had been going through a translation-paper with me, and had told me three quite distinct ways of rendering a sentence, each backed by a great scholar. I asked him, I remember, whether that meant that the original writer--it was Livy, I think--had been in any doubt as to what his words were meant to convey. He laughed, and said, 'No, I don't imagine that Livy intended to make his meaning obscure. I expect, if we took the passage to him with the three renderings, he would deride at least two of them, and possibly all three, and would point out that we simply did not know the usage of some word or phrase which would have been absolutely clear to a contemporary reader,' But Collins went on to say that there might also be a real ambiguity about the passage: and then he quoted the supposed remark of the bishop who declined to wear gaiters, and said, 'I shall wear no clothes to distinguish myself from my fellow-Christians.' This was printed in his biography, 'I shall wear no clothes, to distinguish myself from my fellow-Christians.' 'That sentence may be fairly called ambiguous,' Collins said, 'when its sense so much depends upon punctuation.'

"Now," Father Payne went on, "you must remember, in writing, that you write for the eye, you don't write for the ear. A book isn't primarily meant to be read aloud: and you mustn't resort to tricks of emphasis, such as italics and so forth, which can only be rendered by voice-inflections. It is your first duty to be absolutely clear and limpid. You mustn't write long involved sentences which necessitate the mind holding in solution a lot of qualifying clauses. You must break up your sentences, and even repeat yourself rather than be confused. There is no beauty of style like perfect clearness, and in all writing mystification is a fault. You ought never to make your reader turn back to the page before to see what you are driving at."

"But surely," I said, "there are great writers like Carlyle and George Meredith, for instance, who have been difficult to understand."

"Yes," said Father Payne, "but that's a fault, though it may be a magnificent fault. It may mean such a pressure of ideas and images that the thing can hardly be written at length--and it may give you a sense of exuberant greatness. You may have to forgive a great writer his exuberance--you may even have to forgive him the trouble it costs to penetrate his exact thoughts, for the sake of steeping yourself in the rush and splendour of the style. But obscurity isn't a thing to aim at for anyone who is trying to write; it may be, in the case of a great writer, a sort of vociferousness which intoxicates you: and the man may convey a kind of inspiration by his very obscurities. But it must be an impulse which simply overpowers him--it mustn't be an effect deliberately planned. You may perhaps feel the bigness of the thought all the more in the presence of a writer who, for all his power, can't confine the stream, and comes down in a cataract of words. But if you begin trying for an effect, it is like splashing about in a pool to make people believe it is a rushing river. The movement mustn't be your own contortions, but the speed of the stream. If you want to see the bad side of obscurity, look at Browning. The idea is often a very simple one when you get at it; it's only obscure because it is conveyed by hints and jerks and nudges. In _Pickwick_, for instance, one does not read Jingle's remarks for the underlying thought--only for the pleasure of seeing how he leaps from stepping-stone to stepping-stone. You mustn't confuse the pleasure of unravelling thought with the pleasure of thought. If you can make yourself so attractive to your readers that they love your explosions and collisions, and say with a half-compassionate delight--'how characteristic--but it _is_ worth while unravelling!' you have achieved a certain success. But the chance is that future ages won't trouble you much. Disentangling obscurities isn't bad fun for contemporaries, who know by instinct the nuances of words; but it becomes simply a bore a century later, when people are not interested in old nuances, but simply want to know what you thought. Only scholars love obscurity--but then they are detectives, and not readers."

"But isn't it possible to be too obvious?" I said--"to get a namby-pamby way of writing--what a reviewer calls painfully kind?"

"Well, of course, the thought must be tough," said Father Payne, "but it's your duty to make a tough thought digestible, not to make an easy thought tough. No, my boy, you may depend upon it that, if you want people to attend to you, you must be intelligible. Don't, for God's sake, think that Carlyle or Meredith or Browning _meant_ to be unintelligible, or even thought they were being unintelligible. They were only thinking too concisely or too rapidly for the reader. But don't you try to produce that sort of illusion. Try to say things like Newman or Ruskin--big, beautiful, profound, delicate things, with an almost childlike naïveté. That is the most exquisite kind of charm, when you find that half-a-dozen of the simplest words in the language have expressed a thought which holds you spell-bound with its truth and loveliness. That is what lasts. People want to be fed, not to be drugged: That, I believe, is the real difference between romance and realism, and I am one of those who gratefully believe that romance has had its day. We want the romance that comes from realism, not the romance which comes by neglecting it. But that's another subject."

XLIX

OF BELIEF

"I don't think there is a single word in the English language," said Father Payne, "which is responsible for such unhappiness as the word 'believe.' It is used with a dozen shades of intensity by people; and yet it is the one word which is always being used in theological argument, and which, like the ungodly, 'is a sword of thine.'"

"I always mean the same thing by it, I believe!" I said.

"Excuse me," said Father Payne, "but if you will take observations of your talk, you will find you do not. At any rate, _I_ do not, and I am more careful about the words I use than many people. If I have a heated argument with a man, and think he takes up a perverse or eccentric opinion, I am quite capable of saying of him, 'I believe he must be crazy.' Now such a sentence to a foreigner would carry the evidence of a deep and clear conviction; but, as I say it, it doesn't really express the faintest suspicion of my opponent's sanity--it means little more than that I don't agree with him; and yet when I say, 'If there is one thing that I do believe, it is in the actual existence of evil,' it means a slowly accumulated and almost unalterable opinion. In the Creed, one uses the word 'believe' as the nearest that conviction can come to knowledge, short of indisputable evidence; and some people go further still, and use it as if it meant an almost higher sort of knowledge. The real meaning is just what Tennyson said,

"'Believing where we cannot prove,'

where it signifies a conviction which we cannot actually test, but on which we are content to act."

"But," I said, "if I say to a friend--'You are a real sceptic--you seem to me to believe nothing,' I mean to imply something almost cynical."

"Yes," said Father Payne, "you mean that he has no enthusiasm or ideals, and holds nothing sacred, because those are just the convictions which cannot be proved."

"Some people," I said, "seem to me simply to mean by the word 'believe' that they hold an opinion in such a way that they would be upset if it turned out to be untrue."

"Yes," said Father Payne, "it is the intrusion of the nasty personal element which spoils the word. Belief ought to be a very impersonal thing. It ought simply to mean a convergence of your own experience on a certain result; but most people are quite as much annoyed at your disbelieving a thing which they _believe_, as at your disbelieving a thing which they _know_. You ought never to be annoyed at people not accepting your conclusions, and still less when your conclusion is partly intuition, and does not depend upon evidence. This is the sort of scale I have in my mind--'practically certain, probable, possible, unproved, unprovable.' Now, I am so far sceptical that, apart from practical certainties, which are just the convergence of all normal experience, the fact that any one person or any number of persons believed a thing would not affect my own faith in it, unless I felt sure that the people who believed it were fully as sceptical as and more clear-headed than myself, and had really gone into the evidence. But even so, as I said, the things most worth believing are the things that can't be proved by any evidence."

"What sort of things do you mean?" I said.

"Well, a thing like the existence of God," said Father Payne; "that at best is only a generalisation from an immense range of facts, and a special interpretation of them. But the amazing thing in the world is the vast number of people who are content to believe important things on hearsay, because, on the whole, they love or trust the people who teach them. The word 'believing,' when I use it, doesn't mean that a good man says it, and that I can't disprove it, but a sort of vital assent, so that I can act upon the belief almost as if I knew it. It means for me some sort of personal experience, I could not love or hate a man on hearsay, just because people whom I loved or trusted said that they either loved or hated him. I might be so far biassed that I should meet him expecting to find him either lovable or hateful, but I could not adopt a personal emotion on hearsay--that must be the result of a personal experience; and yet the adoption of a personal emotion on hearsay is just what most people seem to me to be able to do. I might believe that a man had done good or bad things on hearsay: but I could have no feeling about him unless I had seen him. I could not either love or hate a historical personage: the most I could do would be to like or dislike all stories told about him so much that I could wish to have met him or not to have met him."

"Isn't it a question of imagination?" I said.

"Yes," said Father Payne, "and most ordinary religious belief is simply an imaginative personification: but that is a childish affair, not a reasonable affair: and that is why most religious teachers praise what they call a childlike faith, but what is really a childish faith. I don't honestly think that our religious beliefs ought to be a dog-like kind of fidelity, unresentful, unquestioning, undignified confidence. The love of Bill Sikes' terrier for Bill Sikes doesn't make Bill Sikes an admirable or lovable man: it only proves his terrier a credulous terrier. The only reason why we admire such a faith is because it is pleasant and convenient to be blindly trusted, and to feel that we can behave as badly as we like without alienating that sort of trust. I have sometimes thought that the deepest anguish of God must lie in His being loved and trusted by people to whom He has been unable so far to show Himself a loving and careful Father. I don't believe God can wish us to love Him in an unreasonable way--I mean by simply overlooking the bad side of things. A man, let us say, with some hideous inherited disease or vice ought not to love God, unless he can be sure that God has not made him the helpless victim of disease or vice."

"But may the victim not have a faith in God through and in spite of a disease or a vice?" I said.

"Yes, if he really faces the fact of the evil," said Father Payne; "but he must not believe in a muddled sort of way, with a sort of abject timidity, that God may have brought about his weakness or his degradation. He ought to be quite clear that God wishes him to be free and happy and strong, and grieves, like Himself, over the miserable limitation. He must have no sort of doubt that God wishes him to be healthy or clean-minded. Then he can pray, he can strive for patience, he can fight his fault: he can't do it, if he really thinks that God allowed him to be born with this horror in his blood. If God could have avoided evil--I don't mean the sharp sorrows and trials which have a noble thing behind them, but the ailments of body or soul that simply debase and degrade--if He could have done without evil, but let it creep in, then it seems to me a hopeless business, trying to believe in God's power or His goodness. I believe in the reality of evil, and I believe too in God with all my heart and soul. But I stand with God against evil: I don't stand facing God, and not knowing on which side He is fighting. Everything may not be evil which I think evil: but there are some sorts of evil--cruelty, selfish lust, spite, hatred, which I believe that God detests as much as and far more than I detest them. That is what I mean by a belief, a conviction which I cannot prove, but on which I can and do act."

"But am I justified in not sharing that belief?" I said.

"Yes," said Father Payne; "if you, in the light of your experience, think otherwise, you need not believe it--you cannot believe it! But it is the only interpretation of the facts which sets me free to love God, which I do not only with heart and soul, but with mind and strength. If I could believe that God had ever tampered with what I feel to be evil, ever permitted it to exist, ever condoned it, I could fear Him--I should fear Him with a ghastly fear--but I could not believe in Him, or love Him as I do."

L

OF HONOUR

"No, I couldn't do that," said Lestrange to Barthrop, in one of those unhappy little silences which so often seemed to lie in wait for Lestrange's most platitudinal utterances. "It wouldn't be consistent with a sense of honour."

Father Payne gave a chuckle, and Lestrange looked pained, "Oughtn't one to have a code of honour?" he said.

"Why, certainly!" said Father Payne, "but you mustn't impose your code on other people. You mustn't take for granted that your idea of honour means the same thing to everyone. Suppose you lost money at cards, and called it a debt of honour, and thought it dishonourable not to pay it; while at the same time you didn't think it dishonourable not to pay a poor tradesman whose goods you had ordered and consumed, am I bound to accept your code of honour?"

"But there _is_ a difference there," said Rose, "because the man to whom you owe a gambling debt can't recover it by law, while a tradesman can. All that a debt of honour means is that you feel bound to pay it, though you are not legally compelled to do so."

"Yes," said Father Payne, "that is so, in a sense, I admit. But still, one mustn't shelter oneself behind big words unless one is certain that they mean exactly the same to one's opponent. When I was at school there was a master who used to be fond, as he said, of putting the boys on their honour: but he never asked if we accepted the obligation. If I say, 'I give you my honour not to do a thing,' then I can be called dishonourable if I don't do it; but you can't put me on my honour unless I consent."

"But surely honour means something quite definite?" said Lestrange.

"Tell me what it is, then," said Father Payne. "Rose, you seem to have ideas on the subject. What do you mean by honour?"

"Isn't it one of the ultimate things," said Rose, "which can't be defined, but which everyone recognises--like blue and green, let me say, or sweet and bitter?"

"No," said Father Payne; "at least I don't think so. It seems to me rather an artificial thing, because it varies at different dates. It used, not so long ago, to be considered an affair of honour to fight a duel with a man if he threw a glass of wine in your face. And what do you make of the old proverb, 'All is fair in love and war'? That seems to mean that honour is not a universal obligation. Then there's the phrase, 'Honour among thieves,' which isn't a very exalted one; or the curious thing, schoolboy honour, which dictates that a boy may know that another boy is being disgracefully and cruelly bullied, and yet is prevented by his sense of honour from telling a master about it. I admit that honour is a fine idea; but it seems to me to cover a lot of things in human nature which are very bad indeed. It may mean only a sort of prudential arrangement which binds a set of people together for a bad purpose, because they do not choose to be interfered with, and yet call the thing honour for the sake of the associations."

"Yes, I don't think it is necessarily a moral thing," said Rose, "but that doesn't seem to me to matter. It is simply an obligation, pledged or implied, that you will act in a certain way. It may conflict with a moral obligation, and then you have to decide which is the greater obligation."

"Yes, that is perfectly true," said Father Payne, "and as long as you admit that honour isn't in itself bound to be a good thing, that is all I want. Lestrange seemed to use it as if you had only got to say that a motive was honourable, to have it recognised by everyone as right. Take the case of what are called 'national obligations.' A certain party in the State, having secured a majority of votes, enters into some arrangement--a treaty, let us say--without consulting the nation. Is that held to be for ever binding on a nation till it is formally repealed? Is it dishonourable for a citizen belonging, let us say, to the minority which is not represented by the particular Government which makes the treaty, to repudiate it?"

"Yes, I think it may be fairly called dishonourable," said Rose; "there is an obligation on a citizen to back up his Government."

"Then I should feel that honour is a very complicated thing," said Father Payne. "If a citizen thinks a treaty dishonourable, and if it is also dishonourable for him to repudiate it, it seems to me he is dishonourable whatever he does. He is obliged to consent for the sake of honour to a dishonourable thing being done. It seems to me perilously like a director of a firm having to condone fraudulent practices, because it is dishonourable to give his fellow-directors away. It is this conflict between individual honour and public honour which puzzles me, and which makes me feel that honour isn't a simple thing at all. A high conception of private honour seems to me a very fine thing indeed. I mean by it a profound hatred of anything false or cowardly or perfidious, and a loathing of anything insincere or treacherous. That sort of proud and stainless chivalry seems to me to be about the brightest thing we can discern, and the furthest beauty we can recognise. But honour seems also, according to you, to be a principle to which you can be committed by a majority of votes, whether you approve of it or not; and then it seems to me a merely detestable thing, if you can be bound by honour to acquiesce in something which you honestly believe to be base. It seems to me a case of what Tennyson describes:

"'His honour rooted in dishonour stood,
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.'"

"But surely social obligations must often conflict with private beliefs," said Rose. "A nation or a society has got to act collectively, and a minority must be over-ridden."

"I quite agree," said Father Payne, "but why mix up honour with it at all? I don't object to a man who conscientiously dissents to some national move being told that he must lump it. But if he is called dishonourable for dissenting, then honour does not seem to me to be a real word at all, but only a term of abuse for a man who objects to some concerted plan. You can't make a dishonest thing honest because a majority choose to do it--at least I do not believe that morality is purely a matter of majorities, or that the dishonour of one century can become the honour of the next. I am inclined to believe just the opposite. I believe that the man who has so sensitive a conscience about what is honourable or not, that he is called a Quixotic fool by his contemporaries, is far more likely to be right than the coarser majority who only see that a certain course is expedient. I should believe that he saw some truth of morality clearly which the rougher sort of minds did not see. The saint--call him what you like--is only the man who stands higher up, and sees the sunrise before the people who stand lower down."

"But everyone has a right to his own sense of honour," said Rose.

"Certainly," said Father Payne, "but you must be certain that a man's sense of honour is lower than your own before you call him dishonourable for differing from you. If a man is less scrupulous than myself, I may think him dishonourable, if I also think that he knows better. But what I do not think that any of us has a right to do is to call a man dishonourable if he has more scruples than oneself. He may be over-scrupulous, but the chances are that any man who sacrifices his convenience to a scruple has a higher sense of honour than the man who throws over a scruple for the sake of his convenience. That is why I think honour is a dangerous word to play with, because it is so often used to frighten people who don't fall in with what is for the convenience of a gang."

"But surely," said Rose, "morality is after all only a word for what society agrees to consider moral."

"Yes, in a sense that is so," said Father Payne; "it is only a word to express a phenomenon. But I believe that morality is a real thing, for all that; and that our conceptions of it get clearer, as the world goes on. It is something outside of us--a law of nature if you like--which we are learning; not merely a thing which we invent for our convenience. But that is too big a business to go into now."

LI

OF WORK

I cannot remember now what public man it was who had died of a breakdown from overwork, but I heard Father Payne say, after dinner, referring to the event, "I wish it to be clearly understood that I think a man who dies of deliberate or reckless overwork is a victim of self-indulgence. It is nothing more or less than giving way to a passion. I am as sure as I can be of anything," he went on, "that a thousand years hence that will be recognised by human beings, and that they will feel it to be as shameful for a man to die of spontaneous overwork as for him to die of drink or gluttony or any other vice. I don't of course mean," he added, "the cases of men who have had some definite and critical job to carry through, and have decided that the risk is worth running. A man has always the right to risk his life for a definite aim--but I mean the men--you can see it in biographies, and the worst of it is that they are often the biographies of clergymen--who, in spite of physical warnings, and entreaties from their friends, and definite statements by their doctors that they are shortening their lives by labour, still cannot stop, or, if they stop, begin again too soon. No man has any right to think his work so important as that--to take unimportant things too seriously is the worst sort of frivolity."

"But isn't it the finer kind of people," said Kaye, "who make the mistake?"

"Yes, of course," said Father Payne, "but so, too, if you look into it, you will too often find that it is the finer kinds of imaginative people who take to drink and drugs. I remember," he added, "once going to see a poor friend of mine in an asylum, and the old doctor at the head of it said, 'It isn't the stupid people who come here, Mr. Payne; it is the clever people!'"

"But does not your principle about the right to risk one's life hold good here too?" said Barthrop.

"No, I think not," said Father Payne. "A man may choose to try a dangerous thing, climb a mountain, explore a perilous country, go up in a balloon, where an element of risk is inseparable from the experiment; but ordinary work isn't risky in itself. Why," he added, "I was reading a book the other day, the life of Fitzherbert, you know, who was a man of prodigious laboriousness, who died early, worn out. He had an impossible standard of perfection. If he had to write an article, he read all the literature on the subject over and over; he wrote and re-wrote his stuff. There was a case quoted in the book, as if it were to Fitzherbert's credit, when he had to send in an article by a certain date--just a _Quarterly_ article. It had to go in on the Friday. He had finished it on the Monday before, when his mind misgave him. He destroyed the article, began again, sate up all Monday night and all Wednesday night, and wrote the whole thing afresh. He was laid up for a month after it. That is simply the act of an unbalanced mind."

"I can't help feeling that there is something fine about it," said Vincent.

"There is always something fine about unreasonable things," said Father Payne, "or in a man making a sacrifice for an idea. But there is an entire lack of proportion about this performance; and if Fitzherbert thought his work so valuable as that, then he ought to have reflected that he was simply limiting his future output by this reckless expenditure of force. But the whole case was a sad one--Fitzherbert worked in a ghastly way as a boy and as a young man. He had a very broad outlook, he was interested in everything; and when he was at Oxford, he told a friend that he was discovering a hundred subjects on which he hoped to have a say. Well, then, the middle part of his life was spent in preparing himself, under the same sort of pressure, to entitle himself to have his say: and then came his first bad break-down--and the end of his life, which was a wretched period, was spent in finding elaborate reasons why he should not commit himself to any opinion whatever. If he was asked his opinion, he always said he had not studied the subject adequately. That seems to me the life of a man suffering from a sort of nightmare. Things are not so deep as all that--at least, if no one is to give an opinion on any point until he has mastered the whole sum of human opinion on the point, then we shall never make any progress at all. I remember Fitzherbert's strong condemnation of Ruskin, for giving his opinion cursorily on all subjects of importance. Yet Ruskin did a greater work than Fitzherbert, because he at least made people think, while Fitzherbert only prevented them from daring to think. I don't mean that people ought to feel competent to express an opinion on everything--yet even that habit cures itself, because, if you do it, no one pays any attention. But if a man has gone into a subject with decent care, or if he has reflected upon problems of which the data are fairly well known, I think there is every reason why he should give an opinion. It is very easy to be too conscientious. There are plenty of fine hints of opinions in Fitzherbert's letters. You could make a very good book of _Pensées_ out of them--he had a clear, forcible, and original mind; but he did not dare to say what he thought; and you may remember that if he was ever sharply criticised, he felt it deeply, as a sort of imputation of dishonesty. A man must not go down before criticism like that."

"But everyone must do their work in their own way?" said I.

"Yes," said Father Payne, "but Fitzherbert ended by doing nothing--he only snubbed and silenced his own fine mind, by giving way to this unholy passion for examining things. No, I want you fellows to have common-sense about these matters. There is a great deal too much sanctity attached to print. The written word--there's a dark superstition about it! A man has as much right to write as he has to talk. He may say to the world, to his unseen and unknown friends in it, whatever he may say to his intimates. You should write just as you could talk to any gentleman, with the same courtesy and frankness. Of course you must run the risk of your book falling into the hands of ill-bred people--that can't be helped--and of course you must not pretend that your book is the result of deep and copious labour, if it is nothing of the kind. But heart-breaking toil is not the only qualification for speaking. There are plenty of complicated little topics--all the problems which arise from the combination of individuals into societies--which people ought to think about, and which are really everyone's concern. The interplay, I mean, of human relations--the moral, religious, social, intellectual ideas--which have all got to be co-ordinated. A man does not need immense knowledge for that; in fact if he studies the history of such things too deeply, he is often apt to forget that old interpreters of such things had not got all the present data. There is an immense future before writers who will interest people in and familiarise them with ideas. Some people get absorbed in life in the wrong way, just bent on acquisition and comfort--some people, again, live as if they were staying in somebody else's house--but what you want to induce men and women to do is to realise the sort of thing that life really is, and to attempt to put it in some kind of proportion. The mischief done by men like Fitzherbert, who was fond of snapping at people who produced ideas for inspection, is that ordinary people get to confuse wisdom with knowledge; and that won't do! And so the man who sets to work like Fitzherbert loses his alertness and his observation, with the result that instead of bringing a very fresh and incisive mind to bear on life, he loses his way in books, and falls a victim to the awful passion for feeling able to despise other people's opinions."

"But isn't it possible," said Vincent, "for a man to get the best out of life for himself by a sort of passion for exact knowledge--like the man in the Grammarian's funeral, I mean?"