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."