Chapter C: Payne (5)

"Well, the truth is," he said at last, "that I'm a perfect baby. I never can resist looking into a hole in the ground, and I happened to look into the pit where we dig gravel. I can't tell you how long I spent there."

"What were you doing?" I said.

"Looking for fossils," he said; "I had a great gift for finding them when I was a child. I didn't find any fossils to-day, but I found these stones, and I think they contain crystals. I am going to break them and see."

I took one in my hand. "I think they are only fossil sponges," I said; "there will only be a rusty sort of core inside."

"You know that!" he said, brightening up; "you know about stones too? But these are not sponges--they would rattle if they were--no, they contain crystals--I am sure of it. Come and see!"

We went into the stable-yard. Father Payne fetched a hammer, and then selected a convenient place in the cobbled yard to break the stones. He put one of them in position, and aimed a blow at it, but it glanced off, and the stone flew off with the impact to some distance. "Lie still, can't you?" said Father Payne, apostrophising the stone, and adding, "This is for my pleasure, not for yours." I recovered the stone, and brought it back, and Father Payne broke it with a well-directed blow. He gathered up the pieces eagerly. "Yes," he said, "it's all right--they are blue crystals: better than I had hoped."

He handed a fragment to me to look at. The inside of the stone was hollow. It had a coagulated appearance, and was thickly coated with minute bluish crystals, very beautiful.

"I don't know that I ever saw a stone I liked as well as this," said Father Payne, musing over another piece. "Think what millions of years this has been like that,--before Abraham was! It has never seen the light of day before--it's a splash of some molten stone, which fell plop into a cool sea-current, I suppose. I wish I knew all about it. The question, is, why is it so beautiful? It couldn't help it, I suppose! But for whose delight?" Then he said, "I suppose this was a vacuum in here till it was broken? That is why it is so clear and fresh. Good Heavens, what would I not give to know why this thing cooled into these lovely little shapes. It's no use talking about the laws of matter--why are the laws of matter what they are, and not different? And odder still, why do I like the look of it?"

"Perhaps that is a law of matter too," I said.

"Oh, shut up!" said Father Payne to me. "But I understand--and of course the temptation is to believe that this was all done on your account and mine. That is as odd a thing as the stone itself, if you come to think of it, that we should be made so that we refer everything to ourselves, and to believe that God prepared this pretty show for us."

"I suppose we come in somewhere?" I said.

"Yes, we are allowed to see it," said Father Payne. "But it wasn't arranged for the benefit of a silly old man like me. That is the worst of our religious theories--that we believe that God is for ever making personal appeals to us. It is that sort of self-importance which spoils everything."

"But I can hardly believe that we have this sense of self-importance only to get rid of it," I said. "It all seems to me a dreadful muddle--to shut up these lovely little things inside millions of stones, and then to give us the wish to break a couple, only that we may reflect that they were not meant for us to see at all."

Father Payne gave a groan. "Yes, it is a muddle!" he said. "But one thing I feel clear about--that a beautiful thing like this means a sense of joy somewhere: some happiness went to the making of things which in a sense are quite useless, but are unutterably lovely all the same. Beauty implies consciousness--but come, we are neglecting our business. Give me the other stone at once!"

I gave it him, and he cracked it. "Very disappointing!" he said. "I made sure there was a beautiful stone, but it is all solid--only a flaky sort of jelly--it's no use at all!"

He threw it aside, but carefully gathered up the fragments of the crystalline stone. "Don't tell of me!" he said, looking at me whimsically. "This is the sort of nonsense which our sensible friends won't understand. But now that I know that you care about stones, we will have a rare hunt together one of these days. But mind--no stuff about geology! It's beauty that we are in search of, you and I."

XXIX

EARLY LIFE

One day, to my surprise and delight, Father Payne indulged in some personal reminiscences about his early life. He did not as a rule do this. He used to say that it was the surest sign of decadence to think much about the past. "Sometimes when I wake early," he said, "I find myself going back to my childhood, and living through scene after scene. It's not wholesome--I always know I am a little out of sorts when I do that--it is only one degree better than making plans about the future!"

However, on this occasion he was very communicative. He had been talking about Ruskin, and he said: "Do you remember in _Praeterita_ how Ruskin, writing about his sheltered and complacent childhood, describes how entirely he lived in the pleasure of _sight_? He noticed everything, the shapes and colours of things, the almond blossom, the ants that made nests in the garden walk, the things they saw in their travels. He was entirely absorbed in sense-impressions. Well, that threw a light on my own life, because it was exactly what happened to me as a child. I lived wholly in observation. I had no mind and very little heart. I suppose that I had so much to do looking at everything, getting the shapes and the textures and the qualities of everything by heart, that I had no time to think about ideas and emotions. I had a very lonely childhood, you know, brought up in the country by my mother, who was rather an invalid, my father being dead. I had no companions to speak of, and I didn't care about anyone or need anyone--it was all simply a collecting of impressions. The result is that I can visualise anything and everything--speak of a larch-bud or a fir-cone, and there it is before me--the little rosy fragrant tuft, or the glossy rectangular squares of the cone. Then I went to Marlborough, and I was dreadfully unhappy, I hated everything and everybody--the ugliness and slovenliness of it all, the noise, the fuss, the stink. I did not feel I had anything in common with those little brutes, as I thought them. I lived the life of a blind creature in a fright, groping aimlessly about. I joined in nothing--but I was always strong, and so I was left alone. No one dared to interfere with me; and I have sometimes wished I hadn't been so strong, that I had had the experience of being weak. I dare say that nasty things might have happened--but I should have known more what the world was like, I should have depended more upon other people, I should have made friends. As it was, I left school entirely innocent, very solitary, very modest, thinking myself a complete duffer, and everyone else a beast. It got a little better at the end of my time, and I had a companion or two--but I never dreamed of telling anyone what I was really thinking about."

He broke off suddenly. "This is awful twaddle!" he said. "Why should you care to hear about all this? I was thinking aloud."

"Do go on thinking aloud a little," I said; "it is most interesting!"

"Ah," he said, "with the flatterers were busy mockers! You enjoy staring and looking upon me."

"No, no," I said, rather nettled. "Father Payne, don't you understand? I want to hear more about you. I want to know how you came to be what you are: it interests me more than I can say. You asked me about myself when I came here, and I told you. Why shouldn't I ask you, for a change?"

He smiled, obviously pleased at this. "Why, then," he said, "I'll go on. I'm not above liking to tell my tale, like the Ancient Mariner. You can beat your breast when you are tired of it." He was intent for a moment, and then went on. "Well, I went up to Oxford--to Corpus. A funny little place, I now think--rather intellectual. I could hardly believe my senses when I found how different it was from school, and how independent. Heavens, how happy I was! I made some friends--I found I could make friends after all--I could say what I liked, I could argue, I could even amuse them. I really couldn't make you realise how I adored some of those men. I used to go to sleep after a long evening of chatter, simply hating the darkness which separated me from life and company. There were two in particular, very ordinary young men, I expect. But they were fond of me, and liked being with me, and I thought them the most wonderful and enchanting persons, with a wide knowledge of the great mysterious world. The world! It wasn't, I saw, a nasty, jostling place, as I had thought at school, but a great beautiful affair, full of love and delight, of interest and ideas. I read, I talked, I flew about--it was simply a new birth! I felt like a prisoner suddenly released. Of course, the mischief was that I neglected my work. There wasn't time for that: and I fell in love, too, or thought I did, with the sister of one of those friends, with whom I went to stay. I wonder if anyone was ever in love like that! I daresay it's common enough. But I won't go into that; these raptures are for private consumption. I was roughly jerked up. I took a bad degree. My mother died--I had very little in common with her: she was an invalid without any hold on life, and I took no trouble to be kind to her--I was perfectly selfish and wilful. Then I had to earn my living. I would have given anything to stay at Oxford: and you know, even now, when I think of Oxford, a sort of electric shock goes through me, I love it so much. I daren't even set foot there, I'm so afraid of finding it altered. But when I think of those dark courts and bowery gardens, and the men moving about, and the fronts of blistered stone, and the little quaint streets, and the meadows and elms, and the country all about, I have a physical yearning that is almost a pain--a sort of home-sickness--"

He broke off, and was silent for a moment, and I saw that his eyes were full of tears.

"Then it was London, that accursed place! I had a tiny income: I got a job at a coaching establishment, I worked like the devil. That was a cruel time. I couldn't dream of marriage--that all vanished, and she married pretty soon, I couldn't get a holiday--I was too poor. I tried writing, but I made a hash of that. I simply went down into hell. One of my great friends died, and the other--well, it was awkward to meet, when I had had to break it off with his sister. I simply can't describe to you how utterly horrible it all was. I used to teach all the terms, and in the vacations I simply mooned about. I hadn't a club, and I used to read at the Museum--read just to keep my senses. Then, I suppose I got used to it. Of course, if I had had any adventurousness in me, I should have gone off and become a day-labourer or anything--but I am not that sort of person.

"That went on till I was about thirty-three--and then quite suddenly, and without any warning, I had my experience. I suppose that something was going on inside me all the time, something being burnt out of me in those fires. It was a mixture of selfishness and stupidity and perverseness that was the matter with me. I didn't see that I could do anything. I was simply furious with the world for being such a hole, and with God for sticking me in the middle of it. The occasion of the change was simply too ridiculous. It was nothing else but coming back to my rooms and finding a big bowl of daffodils there. They had been left, my landlady told me, by a young gentleman. It sounds foolish enough--but it suddenly occurred to me to think that someone was interested in me, pitied me, cared for me. A sort of mist cleared away from my eyes, and I saw in a flash, what was the mischief--that I had walled myself in by my misery and bad temper, and by my expectation that something must be done for me. The next day I had to take a lot of pupils, one after another, for composition. One of them had a daffodil in his hand, which he put down carelessly on the table. I stared at it and at him, and he blushed. He wasn't an interesting young man to look at or to talk to--but it was just a bit of simple humanity. It all came out. I had been good to him--I looked as if I were having a bad time. It was just a little human, signal, and a beautiful one. It was there, then, all the time, I saw--human affection--if I cared to put out my hand for it. I can't describe to you how it all developed, but my heart had melted somehow--thawed like a lump of ice. I saw that there was no specific ill-will to me in the world. I saw that everything was there, if I only chose to take it. That was my second awakening--a glimmer of light through a chink--and suddenly, it was day! I had been growling over bones and straw in a filthy kennel, and I was not really tied up at all. Life was running past me, a crystal river. I was dying of thirst: and all because it was not given me in a clean glass on a silver tray, I would not drink it--and God smiling at me all the time."

Father Payne walked on in silence.

"The truth is, my boy," he said a minute later, "that I'm a converted man, and it isn't everyone who can say that--nor do I wish everyone to be converted, because it's a ghastly business preparing for the operation. It isn't everyone who needs it--only those self-willed, devilish, stand-off, proud people, who have to be braised in a mortar and pulverised to atoms. Then, when you are all to bits, you can be built up. Do you remember that stone we broke the other day? Well, I was a melted blob of stone, and then I was crystallised--now I'm full of eyes within! And the best of it is that they are little living eyes, and not sparkling flints--they see, they don't reflect! At least I think so; and I don't think trouble is brewing for me again--though that is always the danger!"

I was very deeply moved by this, and said something about being grateful.

"Oh, not that," said Father Payne; "you don't know what fun it has been to me to tell you. That's the sort of thing that I want to get into one of my novels, but I can't manage it. But the moral is, if I may say so: Be afraid of self-pity and dignity and self-respect--don't be afraid of happiness and simplicity and kindness. Give yourself away with both hands. It's easy for me to talk, because I have been loaded with presents ever since: the clouds drop fatness--a rich but expressive image that!"

XXX

OF BLOODSUCKERS

"I'm feeling low to-night," said Father Payne in answer to a question about his prolonged silence. "I'm not myself: virtue has gone out of me--I'm in the clutches of a bloodsucker."

"Old debts with compound interest?" said Rose cheerfully.

"Yes," said Father Payne with a frown; "old emotional I.O.U.'s. I didn't know what I was putting my name to."

"A man or a woman?" said Rose.

"Thank God, it's a man!" said Father Payne. "Female bloodsuckers are worse still. A man, at all events, only wants the blood; a woman wants the pleasure of seeing you wince as well!"

"It sounds very tragic," said Kaye.

"No, it's not tragic," said Father Payne; "there would be something dignified about that! It's only unutterably low and degrading. Come, I'll tell you about it. It will do me good to get it off my chest.

"It is one of my old pupils," Father Payne went on. "He once got into trouble about money, and I paid his debts--he can't forgive me that!"

"Does he want you to pay some more?" said Rose.

"Yes, he does," said Father Payne, "but he wants to be high-minded too. He wants me to press him to take the money, to prevail upon him to accept it as a favour. He implies that if I hadn't begun by paying his debts originally, he would not have ever acquired what he calls 'the unhappy habit of dependence.' Of course he doesn't think that really: he wants the money, but he also wants to feel dignified. 'If I thought it would make you happier if I accepted it,' he says, 'of course I should view the matter differently. It would give me a reason for accepting what I must confess would be a humiliation,' Isn't that infernal? Then he says that I may perhaps think that his troubles have coarsened him, but that he unhappily retains all his old sensitiveness. Then he goes on to say that it was I who encouraged him to preserve a high standard of delicacy in these matters."

"He must be a precious rascal," said Vincent.

"No, he isn't," said Father Payne, "that's the worst of it--but he is a frantic poseur. He has got so used to talking and thinking about his feelings, that he doesn't know what he really does feel. That's the part of it which bothers me: because if he was a mere hypocrite, I would say so plainly. One must not be taken in by apparent hypocrisy. It often represents what a man did once really think, but which has become a mere memory. One must not be hard on people's reminiscences. Don't you know how the mildest people are often disposed to make out that they were reckless and daring scapegraces at school? That isn't a lie; it is imagination working on very slender materials."

We laughed at this, and then Barthrop said, "Let me write to him, Father. I won't be offensive."

"I know you wouldn't," said Father Payne; "but no one can help me. It's not my fault, but my misfortune. It all comes of acting for the best. I ought to have paid his debts, and made myself thoroughly unpleasant about it. What I did was to be indulgent and sympathetic. It's all that accursed sentimentality that does it. I have been trying to write a letter to him all the morning, showing him up to himself without being brutal. But he will only write back and say that I have made him miserable, and that I have wholly misunderstood him: and then I shall explain and apologise; and then he will take the money to show that he forgives me. I see a horrible vista of correspondence ahead. After four or five letters, I shall not have the remotest idea what it is all about, and he will be full of reproaches. He will say that it isn't the first time that he has found how the increase of wealth makes people ungenerous. Oh, don't I know every step of the way! He is going to have the money, and he is going to put me in the wrong: that is his plan, and it is going to come off. I shall be in the wrong: I feel in the wrong already!"

"Then in that case there is certainly no necessity for losing the money too!" said Rose.

"It's all very well for you to talk in that impersonal way, Rose," said Father Payne. "Of course I know very well that you would handle the situation kindly and decisively; but you don't know what it is to suffer from politeness like a disease. I have done nothing wrong except that I have been polite when I might have been dry. I see right through the man, but he is absolutely impervious; and it is my accursed politeness that makes it impossible for me to say bluntly what I know he will dislike and what he genuinely will not understand. I know what you are thinking, every one of you--that I say lots of things that you dislike--but then you _do_ understand! I could no more tell this wretch the truth than I could trample on a blind old man."

"What will you really do?" said Barthrop.

"I shall send him the money," said Father Payne firmly, "and I shall compliment him on his delicacy; and then, thank God, I shall forget, until it all begins again. I am a wretched old opportunist, of course; a sort of Ally Sloper--not fit company for strong and concise young men!"

XXXI

OF INSTINCTS

I do not remember what led to this remark of Father Payne's:--"It's a painful fact, from the ethical point of view, that qualities are more admired, and more beautiful indeed, the more instinctive they are. We don't admire the faculty of taking pains very much. The industrious boy at school is rather disliked than otherwise, while the brilliant boy who can construe his lesson without learning it is envied. Take a virtue like courage: the love of danger, the contempt of fear, the power of dashing headlong into a thing without calculating the consequences is the kind of courage we admire. The person who is timid and anxious, and yet just manages desperately to screw himself up to the sticking-point, does not get nearly as much credit as the bold devil-may-care person. It is so with most performances; we admire ease and rapidity much more than perseverance and tenacity, what obviously costs little effort rather than what costs a great deal.

"We all rather tend to be bored by a display of regularity and discipline. Do you remember that letter of Keats, where he confesses his intense irritation at the way in which his walking companion, Brown, I think, always in the evening got out his writing-materials in the same order--first the paper, then the ink, then the pen. 'I say to him,' says Keats, 'why not the pen sometimes first?' We don't like precision; look at the word 'Methodist,' which originally was a nick-name for people of strictly disciplined life. We like something a little more gay and inconsequent.

"Yet the power of forcing oneself by an act of will to do something unpleasant is one of the finest qualities in the world. There is a story of a man who became a Bishop. He was a delicate and sensitive fellow, much affected by a crowd, and particularly by the sight of people passing in front of him. He began his work by holding an enormous confirmation, and five times in the course of it he actually had to retire to the vestry, where he was physically sick. That's a heroic performance; but we admire still more a bland and cheerful Bishop who is not sick, but enjoys a ceremony."

"Surely that is all right, Father Payne?" said Barthrop. "When we see a performance, we are concerned with appreciating the merit of it. A man with a bad headache, however gallant, is not likely to talk as well as a man in perfect health and high spirits; but if we are not considering the performance, but the virtues of the performer, we might admire the man who pumped up talk when he was feeling wretched more than the man from whom it flowed."

"The judicious Barthrop!" said Father Payne. "Yes, you are right--but for all that we do not instinctively admire effort as much as we admire easy brilliance. We are much more inclined to imitate the brilliant man than we are to imitate the man who has painfully developed an accomplishment. The truth is, we are all of us afraid of effort; and instinct is generally so much more in the right than reason, that I end by believing that it is better to live freely in our good qualities, than painfully to conquer our bad qualities; not to take up work that we can't do from a sense of duty, but to take up work that we can do from a sense of pleasure. I believe in finding our real life more than in sticking to one that is not real for the sake of virtue. Trained inclination is the secret. That is why I should never make a soldier. I love being in a rage--no one more--it has all the advantages and none of the disadvantages of getting drunk. But I can't do it on the word of command."

"Isn't that what is called hedonism?" said Lestrange.

"You must not get in the way of calling names!" said Father Payne; "hedonism is a word invented by Puritans to discourage the children of light. It is not a question of doing what you like, but of liking what you do. Of course everyone has got to choose--you can't gratify all your impulses, because they thwart each other; but if you freely gratify your finer impulses, you will have much less temptation to indulge your baser inclinations. It is more important to have the steam up and to use the brake occasionally, than never to have the steam up at all."

XXXII

OF HUMILITY

We had been listening to a paper by Kaye--a beautiful and fanciful piece of work; when he finished, Father Payne said: "That's a charming thing, Kaye--a little sticky in places, but still beautiful."

"It's not so good as I had hoped," said Kaye mildly.

"Oh, don't be humble," said Father Payne; "that's the basest of the virtues, because it vanishes the moment you realise it! Make your bow like a man. It may not be as good as you hoped--nothing ever is--but surely it is better than you expected?"

Kaye blushed, and said, "Well, yes, it is."

"Now let me say generally," said Father Payne, "that in art you ought never to undervalue your own work. You ought all to be able to recognise how far you have done what you intended. The big men, like Tennyson and Morris, were always quite prepared to praise their own work. They did it quite modestly, more as if some piece of good fortune had befallen them than as if they deserved credit. There's no such thing as taking credit to oneself in art. What you try to do is always bound to be miles ahead of what you can do--that is where the humility comes in. But a man who can't admire his own work on occasions, can't admire anyone's work. If you do a really good thing, you ought to feel as if you had been digging for diamonds and had found a big one. Hang it, you _intend_ to make a fine thing! You are not likely to be conceited about it, because you can't make a beautiful thing every day; and the humiliation comes in when, after turning out a good thing, you find yourself turning out a row of bad ones. The only artists who are conceited are those who can't distinguish between what is good and what is inferior in their own work. You must not expect much praise, and least of all from other artists, because no artist is ever very deeply interested in another artist's work, except in the work of the two or three who can do easily what he is trying to do. But it is a deep pleasure, which may be frankly enjoyed, to turn out a fine bit of work; though you must not waste much time over enjoying it, because you have got to go on to the next."

"I always think it must be very awful," said Vincent, "when it dawns upon a man that his mind is getting stiff and his faculty uncertain, and that he is not doing good work any more. What ought people to do about stopping?"

"It's very hard to say," said Father Payne. "The happiest thing of all is, I expect, to die before that comes; and the next best thing is to know when to stop and to want to stop. But many people get a habit of work, and fall into dreariness without it."

"Isn't it better to go on with the delusion that you are just as good as ever--like Wordsworth and Browning?" said Rose.

"No, I don't think that is better," said Father Payne, "because it means a sort of blindness. It is very curious in the case of Browning, because he learned exactly how to do things. He had his method, he fixed upon an abnormal personality or a curious incident, and he turned it inside out with perfect fidelity. But after a certain time in his life, the thing became suddenly heavy and uninteresting. Something evaporated--I do not know what! The trick is done just as deftly, but one is bored; one simply doesn't care to see the inside of a new person, however well dissected. There's no life, no beauty about the later things. Wordsworth is somehow different--he is always rather noble and prophetic. The later poems are not beautiful, but they issue from a beautiful idea--a passion of some kind. But the later Browning poems are not passionate--they remind one of a surgeon tucking up his sleeves for a set of operations. I expect that Browning was too humble; he loved a gentlemanly convention, and Wordsworth certainly did not do that. If you want to know how a poet should _live_, read Dorothy Wordsworth's journals at Grasmere; if you want to know how he should _feel_, read the letters of Keats."

XXXIII

OF MEEKNESS

I had been having some work looked over by Father Payne, who had been somewhat trenchant. "You have been beating a broken drum, you know," he had said, with a smile.

"Yes," I said. "It's poor stuff, I see. But I didn't know it was so bad when I wrote it; I thought I was making the best of a poor subject rather ingeniously. I am afraid I am rather stupid."

"If I thought you really felt like that," said Father Payne, "I should be sorry for you. But I expect it is only your idea of modesty?"

"No," I said, "it isn't modesty--it's humility, I think."

"No one has any business to think himself humble," said Father Payne. "The moment you do that, you are conceited. It's not a virtue to grovel. A man ought to know exactly what he is worth. You needn't be always saying what you are, worth, of course. It's modest to hold your tongue. But humility is, or ought to be, extinct as a virtue. It belongs to the time when people felt bound to deplore the corruption of their heart, and to speak of themselves as worms, and to compare themselves despondently with God. That in itself is a piece of insolence; and it isn't a wholesome frame of mind to dwell on one's worthlessness, and to speak of one's righteousness as filthy rags. It removes every stimulus to effort. If you really feel like that, you had better take to your bed permanently--you will do less harm there than pretending to do work in the value of which you don't believe."

"But what is the word for the feeling which one has when one reads a really splendid book, let us say, or hears a perfect piece of music?" I said.

"Well, it ought to be gratitude and admiration," said Father Payne. "Why mix yourself up with it at all?"

"Because I can't help it," I said; "I think of the way in which I muddle on with my writing, and I feel how hopeless I am."

"That's all wrong, my boy," said Father Payne; "you ought to say to yourself--'So that is _his_ way of putting things and, by Jove, it's superb. Now I've got to find my way of putting things!' You had better go and work in the fields like an honest man, if you don't feel you have got anything to say worth saying. You have your own point of view, you know: try and get it down on paper. It isn't exactly the same as, let us say, Shakespeare's point of view: but if you feel that he has seen everything worth seeing, and said everything worth saying, then, of course, it is no good going on. But that is pure grovelling; no lively person ever does feel that--he says, 'Hang it, he has left _some_ things out!' After all, everyone has a right to his point of view, and if it can be expressed, why, it is worth expressing. We want all the sidelights we can get."

"That's one comfort!" I said.

"Yes," said Father Payne, "but you know perfectly well that you knew it before I told you. Why be so undignified? You need not want to astonish or amuse the whole civilised world. You probably won't do that; but you can fit a bit of the mosaic in, if you have it in you. Now look you here! I know exactly what I am worth. I can't write--though I think I can when I'm at it--but I can perceive, and see when a thing is amiss, and lay my finger on a fault; I can be of some use to a fellow like yourself--and I can manage an estate in my own way, and I can keep my tenants' spirits up. I have got a perfectly definite use in the world, and I'm going to play my part for all that I'm worth. I'm not going to pretend that I am a worm or an outcast--I don't feel one; and I am as sure as I can be of anything, that God does not wish me to feel one. He needs me; He can't get on without me just here; and when He can, He will say the word. I don't think I am of any far-reaching significance: but neither am I going to say that I am nothing but vile earth and a miserable sinner. I'm lazy, I'm cross, I'm unkind, I'm greedy: but I know when I am wasting time and temper, and I don't do it all the time. It's no use being abject. The mistake is to go about comparing yourself with other people and weighing yourself against them. The right thing to do is to be able to recognise generously and desirously when you see anyone doing something finely which you do badly, and to say, 'Come, that's the right way! I must do better.' But to be humble is to be grubby, because it makes one proud, in a nasty sort of way, of doing things badly. 'What a poor creature I am,' says the humble man, 'and how nice to know that I am so poor a creature; how noble and unworldly I am.' The mistake is to want to do a thing better than Smith or Jones: the right way is to want to do it better than yourself."

"Yes," I said, "that's perfectly true, Father: and I won't be such a fool again."

"You haven't been a fool, so far as I am aware," said Father Payne. "It is only that you are just a thought too polite. You mustn't be polite in mind, you know--only in manners. Politeness only consists in not saying all you think unless you are asked. But humility consists in trying to believe that you think less than you think. It's like holding your nose, and saying that the bad smell has gone--it is playing tricks with your mind: and if you get into the way of doing that, you will find that your mind has a nasty way of playing tricks upon you. Here! hold on! I am rapidly becoming like Chadband! Send me Vincent, will you--there's a good man? He comes next."

XXXIV

OF CRITICISM

Father Payne had told me that my writing was becoming too juicy and too highly-scented. "You mustn't hide the underlying form," he said; "have plenty of plain spaces. This sort of writing is only for readers who want to be vaguely soothed and made to feel comfortable by a book--it's a stimulant, it's not a food!"

"Yes," I said with a sigh, "I suppose you are right."

"Up to a certain point, I am right," he replied, "because you are in training at present--and people in training have to do abnormal things: you can't _live_ as if you were in training, of course; but when you begin to work on your own account, you must find your own pace and your own manner: and even now you needn't agree with me unless you like."

I determined, however, that I would give him something very different next time. He suggested that I should write an essay on a certain writer of fiction. I read the novels with great care, and I then produced the driest and most technical criticism I could. I read it aloud to Father Payne a month later. He heard it in silence, stroking his beard with his left hand, as his manner was. When I had finished, he said: "Well, you have taken my advice with a vengeance; and as an exercise--indeed, as a _tour-de-force_--it is good. I didn't think you had it in you to produce such a bit of anatomy. I think it's simply the most uninteresting essay I ever heard in my life--chip, chip, chip, the whole time. It won't do you any harm to have written it, but, of course, it's a mere caricature. No conceivable reason could be assigned for your writing it. It's like the burial of the dead--ashes to ashes, dust to dust!"

"I admit," I said, "that I did it on purpose, to show you how judicious I could be."

"Oh yes," he said, "I quite realise that--and that's why I admire it. If you had produced it as a real thing, and not by way of reprisal, I should think very ill of your prospects. It's like the work of an analytical chemist--I tell you what it's like, it's like the diagnosis of the symptoms of some sick person of rank in a doctor's case-book! But, of course, you know you mustn't write like that, as well as I do. There must be some motive for writing, some touch of admiration and sympathy, something you can show to other people which might escape them, and which is worth while for them to see. In writing--at present, at all events--one can't be so desperately scientific and technical as all that. I suppose that some day, when we treat human thought and psychology scientifically, we shall have to dissect like that; but even so, it will be in the interests of science, not in the interests of literature. One must not confuse the two, and no doubt, when we begin to analyse the development of human thought, its heredity, its genesis and growth, we shall have a Shelley-culture in a test-tube, and we shall be able to isolate a Browning-germ: but we haven't got there yet."

"In that case," I said, "I don't really see what was so wrong with my last essay."

"Why, it was a mere extemporisation," said Father Payne; "a phrase suggested a phrase, a word evoked a lot of other words--there was no real connection of thought. It was pretty enough, but you were not even roving from one place to another, you were just drifting with the stream. Now this last essay is purely business-like. You have analysed the points--but there's no beauty or pleasure in it. It is simply what an engineer might say to an engineer about the building of a bridge. Mind, I am not finding fault with your essay. You did what you set out to do, and you have done it well. I only say there is not any conceivable reason why it should have been written, and there is every conceivable reason why it should not be read."

"It was just an attempt," I said, "to see the points and to disentangle them."

"Yes, yes," said Father Payne; "I see that, and I give you full credit for it. But, after all, you must look on writing as a species of human communication. The one reason for writing is that the writer sees something which other people overlook, perceives the beauty and interest of it, gets behind it, sees the quality of it, and how it differs from other similar things. If the writer is worth anything, his subject must be so interesting or curious or beautiful to himself that he can't help setting it down. The motive of it all must be the fact that he is interested--not the hope of interesting other people. You must risk that, though the more you are interested, the better is your chance of interesting others. Then the next point is that things mustn't be presented in a cold and abstract light--you have done that here--it must be done as you see it, not as a photographic plate records it: and that is where the personality of the artist comes in, and where writers are handicapped, according as they have or have not a personal charm. That is the unsolved mystery of writing--the personal charm: apart from that there is little in it. A man may see a thing with hideous distinctness, but he may not be able to invest it with charm: and the danger of charm is that some people can invest very shallow, muddled, and shabby thinking with a sort of charm. It is like a cloak, if I may say so. If I wear an old cloak, it looks shabby and disgraceful, as it is. But if I lend it to a shapely and well-made friend, it gets a beauty from the wearer. There are men I know who can tell me a story as old as the hills, and yet make it fresh and attractive. Look at that delicious farrago of nonsense and absurdity, Ruskin's _Fors Clavigera_. He crammed in anything that came into his head--his reminiscences, scraps out of old dreary books he had read, paragraphs snipped out of the papers. There's no order, no sequence about it, and yet it is irresistible. But then Ruskin had the charm, and managed to pour it into all that he wrote. He is always _there_, that whimsical, generous, perverse, affectionate, afflicted, pathetic creature, even in the smallest scrap of a letter or the dreariest old tag of quotation. But you and I can't play tricks like that. You are sometimes there, I confess, in what you write, while I am never there in anything that I write. What I want to teach you to do is to be really yourself in all that you write."

"But isn't it apt to be very tiresome," said I, "if the writer is always obtruding himself?"

"Yes, if he obtrudes himself, of course he is tiresome," said Father Payne. "But look at Ruskin again. I imagine, from all that I read about him, that if he was present at a gathering, he was the one person whom everyone wanted to hear. If he was sulky or silent, it was everyone's concern to smoothe him down--if _only_ he would talk. What you must learn to do is to give exactly as much of yourself as people want. But it must be a transfusion of yourself, not a presentment, I don't imagine that Ruskin always talked about himself--he talked about what interested him, and because he saw five times as much as anyone else saw in a picture, and about three times as much as was ever there, it was fascinating: but the primary charm was in Ruskin himself. Don't you know the curious delight of seeing a house once inhabited by anyone whom one has much admired and loved? However dull and commonplace it is, you keep on saying to yourself, 'That was what his eyes rested on, those were the books he handled; how could he bear to have such curtains, how could he endure that wallpaper?' The most hideous things become interesting, because he tolerated them. In writing, all depends upon how much of what is interesting, original, emphatic, charming in yourself you can communicate to what you are writing. It has got to _live_; that is the secret of the commonplace and even absurd books which reviewers treat with contempt, and readers buy in thousands. They have _life!_"

"But that is very far from being art, isn't it?" I said.

"Of course!" said Father Payne, "but the use of art, as I understand it, is just that--that all you present shall have life, and that you should learn not to present what has not got life. Why I objected to your last essay was because you were not alive in it: you were just echoing and repeating things: you seemed to me to be talking in your sleep. Why I object to this essay is that you are too wide awake--you are just talking shop."

"I confess I rather despair," I said.

"What rubbish!" said Father Payne; "all I want you to do is to _live_ in your ideas--make them your own, don't just slop them down without having understood or felt them. I'll tell you what you shall do next. You shall just put aside all this dreary collection of formulae and scalpel-work, and you shall write me an essay on the whole subject, saying the best that you feel about it all, not the worst that a stiff intelligence can extract from it. Don't be pettish about it! I assure you I respect your talent very much. I didn't think it was in you to produce anything so loathsomely judicious."

XXXV

OF THE SENSE OF BEAUTY

There had been some vague ethical discussion during dinner in which Father Payne had not intervened; but he suddenly joined in briskly, though I don't remember who or what struck the spark out. "You are running logic too hard," he said; "the difficulty with all morality is not to know where it is to begin, but where it is to stop."

"I didn't know it had to stop," said Vincent; "I thought it had to go on."

"Yes, but not as morality," said Father Payne; "as instinct and feeling--only very elementary people indeed obey rules, _because_ they are rules. The righteous man obeys them because on the whole he agrees with them."

"But in one sense it isn't possible to be too good?" said Vincent.

"No," said Father Payne, "not if you are sure what good is--but it is quite easy to be too righteous, to have too many rules and scruples--not to live your own life at all, but an anxious, timid, broken-winged sort of life, like some of the fearful saints in the _Pilgrim's Progress_, who got no fun out of the business at all. Don't you remember what Mr. Feeblemind says? I can't quote--it's a glorious passage."

Barthrop slipped out and fetched a _Pilgrim's Progress_, which he put over Father Payne's shoulder. "Thank you, old man," said Father Payne, "that's very kind of you--that is morality translated into feeling!"

He turned over the pages, and read the bit in his resonant voice:

"'I am, as I said, a man of a weak and feeble mind, and shall be offended and made weak at that which others can bear. I shall like no Laughing: I shall like no gay Attire: I shall like no unprofitable Questions. Nay, I am so weak a man, as to be offended with that which others have a liberty to do. I do not know all the truth: I am a very ignorant Christian man; sometimes, if I hear some rejoice in the Lord, it troubles me, because I cannot do so too.'"

"There," he said, "that's very good writing, you know--full of freshness--but you are not meant to admire the poor soul: _that's_ not the way to go on pilgrimage! There is something wrong with a man's religion, if it leaves him in that state. I don't mean that to be happy is always a sign of grace--it often is simply a lack of sympathy and imagination; but to be as good as Mr. Feeblemind, and at the same time as unhappy, is a clear sign that something is wrong. He is like a dog that _will_ try to get through a narrow gap with a stick in his mouth--he can't make out why he can't do his duty and bring the stick--it catches on both sides, and won't let him through. He knows it is his business to bring the thing back at once, but he is prevented in some mysterious way. It doesn't occur to him to put the stick down, get through himself, and then pull it through by the end. That is why our duty is often so hard, because we think we ought to do it simply and directly, when it really wants a little adjusting--we regard the momentary precept, not the ultimate principle."

"But what is to tell us where to draw the line," said Vincent, "and when to disregard the precept?"

"Ah," said Father Payne, "that's my great discovery, which no one else will ever recognise--that is where the sense of beauty comes in!"

"I don't see that the sense of beauty has anything to do with morality," said Vincent.

"Ah, but that is because you are at heart a Puritan," said Father Payne; "and the mistake of all Puritans is to disregard the sense of beauty--all the really great saints have felt about morality as an artist feels about beauty. They don't do good things because they are told to do them, but because they feel them to be beautiful, splendid, attractive; and they avoid having anything to do with evil things, because such things are ugly and repellent."

"But when you have to do a thoroughly disagreeable thing," said Vincent, "there often isn't anything beautiful about it either way. I'll give you a small instance. Some months ago I had been engaged for a fortnight to go to a thoroughly dull dinner-party with some dreary relations of mine, and a man asked me to come and dine at his club and meet George Meredith, whom I would have given simply anything to meet. Of course I couldn't do it--I had to go on with the other thing. I had to do what I hated, without the smallest hope of being anything but fearfully bored: and I had to give up doing what would have interested me more than anything in the world. Of course, that is only a small instance, but it will suffice."

"It all depends on how you behaved at your dinner-party when you got there," said Father Payne, smiling; "were you sulky and cross, or were you civil and decent?"

"I don't know," said Vincent; "I expect I was pretty much as usual. After all, it wasn't their fault!"