"Thank G.o.d, 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 coa.r.s.ened 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 G.o.d, 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!"
x.x.xI
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 pa.s.sing 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."
x.x.xII
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 n.o.ble and prophetic. The later poems are not beautiful, but they issue from a beautiful idea--a pa.s.sion of some kind.
But the later Browning poems are not pa.s.sionate--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."
x.x.xIII
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 G.o.d. 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 grat.i.tude and admiration," said Father Payne. "Why mix yourself up with it at all?"