Chapter 6
He laughed at this. "Yes, I don't think we can insist on it as being a levée," he said, "where one is expected to come and make one's bow and pay formal compliments. That idea is an old anthropomorphic one, of course. It is superstitious--it is almost debasing to think of God demanding praise as a duty incumbent on us. 'To thee all angels cry aloud'--I confess I don't like the idea of heaven as a place of cheerful noise--that isn't attractive!
"And also I think that the attention demanded in our service is a mistake--it's a mixture of two ideas; the liturgical ceremony which touches the eye and the emotion, rather than the reason; and the sermon and the prayer in which the reason is supposed to be concerned. I think the Catholic idea is a better one, a solemnity performed, in which you don't take part, but receive impressions. There's no greater strain on the mind than forcing it to follow a rapid and exalted train of intellectual and literary thought and expression. I confess I don't attempt that, it seems to me just a joyful and neighbourly business, where one puts the mind in a certain expectant mood, and is lucky if one carries a single thrill or aspiration away."
"What do you _do_, then?" I said.
"Well, I meditate," said Father Payne. "I believe in meditation very much, and in solitude it is very hard work. But the silent company of friends, and the old arches and woodwork, some simple music, a ceremony, and a little plan of thought going on--that seems to me a fruitful atmosphere. Some verse, some phrase, which I have heard a hundred times before, suddenly seems written in letters of gold. I follow it a little way into the dark, I turn it over, I wonder about it, I enjoy its beauty. I don't say that my thoughts are generally very startling or poignant or profound; but I feel the sense of the Fatherly, tolerant, indulgent presence of God, and a brotherly affection for my fellow-men. It's a great thing to be in the same place with a number of people, all silent, and on the whole thinking quiet, happy, and contented thoughts. It all brings me into line with my village friends, it gives me a social mood, and I feel for once that we all want the same things from life--and that for once instead of having to work and push for them, we are fed and comforted. 'Open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it'--that's a wholesome, childlike verse, you know. The whole thing seems to me a simple device for producing a placid and expectant mood--I don't know anything else that produces it so well."
"You mean it is something mystical--almost hypnotic?" I said.
"Perhaps I should if I knew what those big words meant," said Father Payne, smiling. "No; church seems to me a thing that has really grown up out of human nature, not a thing imposed upon it. I don't like what may be called ecclesiasticism, partly because it emphasizes the intellectual side of belief, partly because it tries to cast a slur on the people who don't like ceremonial, and whom it does not suit--and most of all because ecclesiasticism aims at making you believe that other people can transact spiritual business on your account. In these democratic days, you can't have spiritual authority--you have got to find what people need, and help them to find it for themselves. The plain truth is that we don't want dogma. Of course it isn't to be despised, because it once meant something, even if it does not now. Dogmas are not unintelligible intellectual propositions imposed on the world. They are explanations, interpretations, attempts to link facts together. They have the sacredness of ideas which people lived by, and for which they were prepared to die. But many of them are scientific in form only, and the substance has gone out of them. We know more in one sense about life and God than we did, but we also know less, because we realise there is so much more to know. But now we want, I believe, two or three great ideas which everyone can understand--like Fatherhood and Brotherhood, like peace and orderliness and beauty. I think that a church service means all these things, or ought to. What people need is simplicity and beauty of life--joy and hope and kindness. Anything which helps these things on is fine; anything which bewilders and puzzles and gives a sense of dreariness is simply injurious. I want to be told to be quiet, to try again, not to be disheartened by failures, not to be angry with other people, to give up things, rather than to get them with a sauce of envy and spite--the feeling of a happy and affectionate family, in fact. The sort of thing I don't want is the Athanasian Creed. I can't regard it simply as a picturesque monument of ancient and ferocious piety. It seems to me an overhanging cloud of menace and mystification! It doesn't hurt the unintelligent Christian, of course--he simply doesn't understand it; but to the moderately intelligent it is like a dog barking furiously which may possibly get loose; a little more intelligence, and it is all right. You know the dog is safely tied up! Again, I don't mind the cursing psalms, because they give the parson the power of saying: 'We say this to remind ourselves that it was what people used to feel, and which Christ came to change.' I don't mind anything that is human--what I can't tolerate is anything inhuman or unintelligible. No one can misunderstand the Beatitudes; very few people can follow the arguments of St. Paul! You don't want only elaborate reasons for clever people, you want still more beautiful motives for simple people. It isn't perfect, our service, I admit, but it does me good."
"Tell me," I said--"to go back for a moment--something more about meditating--I like that!"
"Well," said Father Payne, "it's like anchoring to a thought. Thought is a fidgety thing, restless, perverse. It anchors itself very easily on to a grievance, or an unpleasant incident, or a squabble. Don't you know the misery of being jerked back, time after time, by an unpleasant thought? I think one ought to practise the opposite--and I know now by experience that it is possible. I will make a confession. I don't care for many of the Old Testament lessons myself. I think there's too much fact, or let us say incident, in them, and not enough poetry. Well, I take up my Bible, and I look at Job, or Isaiah, or the Revelation, and I read quietly on. Suddenly there's a gleam of gold in the bed of the stream--some splendid, deep, fine thought. I follow it out; I think how it has appeared in my own life, or in the lives of other people--it bears me away on its wings, I pray about it, I hope to be more like that--and so on. Sometimes it is a sharp revelation of something ugly and perverse in my own nature--I don't dwell long on that, but I see in imagination how it is likely to trouble me, and I hope that it will not delude me again; because these evil things delude one, they call noxious tricks by fine names. I say to myself, 'What you pretend is self-respect, or consistency, is really irritable vanity or stupid unimaginativeness.' But it is a mistake, I think, to dwell long on one's deficiencies: what one has got to do is to fill one's life full of positive, active, beautiful things, until there is no room for the ugly intruders. And, to put it shortly, a service makes me think about other people and about God; I fear it doesn't make me contrite or sorrowful. I don't believe in any sort of self-pity, nor do I think one ought to cultivate shame; those things lie close to death, and it is life that I am in search of--fulness of life. Don't let us bemoan ourselves, or think that a sign of grace!"
"But if you find yourself grubby, nasty, suspicious, irritable, isn't it a good thing to rub it in sometimes?" I said.
"No, no," said Father Payne, "life will do that hard enough. Turn your back on it all, look at the beautiful things, leave a thief to catch a thief, and the dead to bury the dead. Don't sniff at the evil thing; go and get a breath of fresh air."
XIII
OF NEWSPAPERS
Father Payne was a very irregular reader of the newspaper; he was not greedy of news, and he was incurious about events, while he disliked the way in which they were professionally dished up for human consumption. At times, however, he would pore long and earnestly over a daily paper with knitted brows and sighs. "You seem to be suffering a good deal over your paper to-day, Father!" said Barthrop once, regarding him with amusement. Father Payne lifted up his head, and then broke into a smile. "It's all right, my boy!" he said. "I don't despair of the world itself, but I feel that if the average newspaper represents the mind of the average man, the human race is very feeble--not worth saving! This sort of thing"--indicating the paper with a wave of his hand--"makes me realise how many things there are that don't interest me--and I can't get at them either through the medium of these writers' minds. They don't seem to want simply to describe the facts, but to manipulate them; they try to make you uncomfortable about the future, and contented with the past. It ought to be just the other way! And then I ask myself, 'Ought I, as a normal human being, to be as one-sided, as submissive, as trivial, as sentimental as this?' These vast summaries of public opinion, do they represent anyone's opinion at all, or are they simply the sort of thing you talk about in a railway-carriage with a man you don't know? Does anyone's mind really dwell on such things and ponder them? The newspapers do not really know what is happening--everything takes them by surprise. The ordinary person is interested in his work, his amusements, the people he lives with--in real things. There seems to be nothing real here; it is all shadowy, I want to get at men's minds, not at what journalists think is in men's minds. The human being in the newspapers seems to me an utterly unreal person, picturesque, theatrical, fatuous, slobbering, absurd. Does not the newspaper-convention misrepresent us as much as the book-convention misrepresents us? We straggle irregularly along, we are capable of entertaining at the same moment two wholly contrary opinions, we do what we don't intend to do, we don't carry out our hopes or our purposes. The man in the papers is agitated, excited, wild, inquisitive--the ordinary person is calm, indifferent, and on the whole fairly happy, unless some one frightens him. I can't make it out, because it isn't a conspiracy to deceive, and yet it does deceive; and what is more, most people don't even seem to know that they are being misrepresented. It all seems to me to differ as much from real life as the Morning Service read in church differs from the thoughts of the congregation!"
"How would you mend it?" said Barthrop. "It seems to me it must represent _something_."
"Something!" said Father Payne. "I don't know! I don't believe we are so stupid and so ignoble! As to mending it, that's another question. Writing is such a curious thing--it seems to represent anything in the world except the current of a man's thoughts. Reverie--has anyone ever tried to represent that? I have been out for a walk sometimes, and reflected when I came in that if what has passed through my mind were all printed in full in a book, it would make a large octavo volume--and precious stuff, too! Yet the few thoughts which do stand out when it is all over, the few bright flashes, they are things which can hardly be written down--at least they never are written down."
"But what would you do?" I said--"with the newspapers, I mean."
"Well," said Father Payne, "a great deal of the news most worth telling can be told best in pictures. I believe very much in illustrated papers. They really do help the imagination. That's the worst of words--a dozen scratches on a bit of paper do more to make one realise a scene than columns of description. I would do a lot with pictures, and a bit of print below to tell people what to notice. Then we must have a number of bare facts and notices--weather, business, trade, law--the sort of thing that people concerned must read. But I would make a clean sweep of fashion, and all sensational intelligence--murders, accidents, sudden deaths. I would have much more biography of living people as well as dead, and a few of the big speeches. Then I would have really good articles with pictures about foreign countries--we ought to know what the world looks like, and how the other people live. And then I would have one or two really fine little essays every day by the very best people I could get, amusing, serious, beautiful articles about nature and art and books and ideas and qualities--some real, good, plain, wise, fine, simple thinking. You want to get people in touch with the best minds!"
"And how many people would read such a paper?" I said.
"Oh, I don't know, I'm sure," said Father Payne with a groan. "I would for one! I want to have the feeling of being in touch day by day with the clever, interesting, lively, active-minded people, as if I had been listening to good talk. Isn't that possible? Instead of which I sit here, day after day, overflowing with my own ridiculous thoughts--and the world discharging all its staleness and stupidity like a sewer in these horrible documents. Take it away from me, someone! I'm fascinated by the disgusting smell of it!" I withdrew the paper from under his hands. "Thank you," said Father Payne feebly. "That's the horror of it--that the world isn't a dull place or a sensational place or a nasty place--and those papers make me feel it is all three!"
"I'm sorry you are so low about it," said Barthrop.
"Yes, because journalism ought to be the finest thing in the world," said Father Payne. "Just imagine! The power of talking, without any of the inconveniences of personality, to half-a-million people."
"But why doesn't it improve?" said Barthrop. "You always say that the public finds out what it wants, and will have it."
"In books, yes!" said Father Payne; "but in daily life we are all so damnably afraid of the truth--that's what is the matter with us, and it is that which journalism caters for. Suppress the truth, pepper it up, flavour it, make it appetising--try to persuade people that the world is romantic--that's the aim of the journalist. He flies from the truth, he makes a foolish tale out of it, he makes people despise the real interests of life, he makes us all want to escape from life into something that never has been and never will be. I loathe romance with all my heart. The way of escape is within, and not without."
"You had better go for a walk," said Barthrop soothingly.
"I must," said Father Payne. "I'm drunk and drugged with unreality. I will go and have a look round the farm--no, I won't have any company, thank you. I shall only go on fuming and stewing, if I have sympathetic listeners. You are too amiable, you fellows. You encourage me to talk, when you ought to stop your ears and run from me." And Father Payne swung out of the room.
XIV
OF HATE
It was at dinner, one frosty winter evening, and we were all in good spirits. Two or three animated conversations were going on at the table. Father Payne was telling one of his dreams to the three who were nearest to him, and, funny as most of his dreams were, this was unusually so. There was a burst of laughter and a silence--a sudden sharp silence, in which Vincent, who was continuing a conversation, was heard to say to Barthrop, in a tone of fierce vindictiveness, "I hate him like the devil!" Another laugh followed, and Vincent blushed. "Perhaps I ought not to say that?" he said in hurried tones.
"You are quite right," said Father Payne to Vincent, encouragingly--"at least you may be quite right. I don't know of whom you were speaking."
"Yes, who is it, Vincent?" said someone, leaning forwards.
"No, no," said Father Payne, "that's not fair! It was meant to be a private confession."
"But you don't hate people, Father?" said Lestrange, looking rather pained.
"I, dear man?" said Father Payne. "Yes, of course I do! I loathe them! Where are your eyes and ears? All decent people do. How would the world get on without it?"
Lestrange looked rather shocked. "I don't understand," he said. "I always gathered that you thought it our business to--well, to love people."
"Our business, yes!" said Father Payne; "but our pleasure, no! One must begin by hating people. What is there to like about many of us?"
"Why, Father," said Vincent, "you are the most charitable of men!"
Father Payne gave him a little bow. "Come," he said, "I will make a confession. I am by nature the most suspicious of mankind. I have all the uncivilised instincts. There are people of whom I hate the sight and the sound, and even the scent. My natural impulse is to see the worst points of everyone. I admit that people generally improve upon acquaintance, but I have no weak sentiment about my fellow-men--they are often ugly, stupid, ill-mannered, ill-tempered, unpleasant, unkind, selfish. It is a positive delight sometimes to watch a thoroughly nasty person, and to reflect how much one detests him. It is a sign of grace to do so. How otherwise should one learn to hate oneself? If you hate nobody, what reason is there for trying to improve? It is impossible to realise how nasty you yourself can be until you have seen other people being nasty. Then you say to yourself, 'Come, that is the kind of thing that I do. Can I really be like that?'"
"But surely," said Lestrange, "if you do not try to love people, you cannot do anything for them; you cannot wish them to be different."
"Why not?" said Father Payne, laughing. "You may hate them so much that you may wish them to be different. That is the sound way to begin. I say to myself, 'Here is a truly dreadful person! I would abolish and obliterate him if I could; but as I cannot, I must try to get him out of this mess, that we may live more at ease,' It is simple humbug to pretend to like everyone. You may not think it is entirely people's fault that they are so unpleasant; but if you really love fine and beautiful things, you must hate mean and ugly things. Don't let there be any misunderstanding," he said, smiling round the table. "I have hated most of you at different times, some of you very much. I don't deny there are good points about you, but that isn't enough. Sometimes you are detestable!"
"I see what you mean," said Barthrop; "but you don't hate people--you only hate things in them and about them. It is just a selection."
"Not at all," said Father Payne. "How are you going to separate people's qualities and attributes from themselves? It is a process of addition and subtraction, if you like. There may be a balance in your favour. But when a bad mood is on, when a person is bilious, fractious, ugly, cross, you hate him. It is natural to do so, and it is right to do so. I do loathe this talk of mild, weak, universal love. The only chance of human beings getting on at all, or improving at all, is that they should detest what is detestable, as they abominate a bad smell. The only reason why we are clean is because we have gradually learnt to hate bad smells. A bad smell means something dangerous in the background--so do ugliness, ill-health, bad temper, vanity, greediness, stupidity, meanness. They are all danger signals. We have no business to ignore them, or to forget them, or to make allowances for them. They are all part of the beastliness of the world."
"But if we believe in God, and in God's goodness--if He does not hate anything which He has made," said Lestrange rather ruefully, "ought we not to try to do the same?"
"My dear Lestrange," said Father Payne, "one would think you were teaching a Sunday-school class! How do you know that God made the nasty things? One must not think so ill of Him as that! It is better to think of God as feeble and inefficient, than to make Him responsible for all the filth and ugliness of the world. He hates them as much as you do, you may be sure of that--and is as anxious as you are, and a great deal more anxious, to get rid of them. God is infinitely more concerned about it, much more disappointed about it, than you or me. Why, you and I are often taken in. We don't always know when things are rotten. I have made friends before now with people who seemed charming, and I have found out that I was wrong. But I do not think that God is taken in. It is a very mixed affair, of course; but one thing is clear, that something very filthy is discharging itself into the world, like a sewer into a river, I am not going to credit God with that; He is trying to get rid of it, you may be sure, and He cannot do it as fast as He would like. We have got to sympathise with Him, and we have got to help Him. Come, someone else must talk--I must get on with my dinner," Father Payne addressed himself to his plate with obvious appetite.
"It is all my fault," said Vincent, "but I am not going to tell you whom I meant, and Barthrop must not. But I will tell you how it was. I was with this man, who is an old acquaintance of mine. I used to know him when I was living in London. I met him the other day, and he asked me to luncheon. He was pleasant enough, but after lunch he said to me that he was going to take the privilege of an old friend, and give me some advice. He began by paying me compliments; he said that he had thought a year ago that I was really going to do something in literature. 'You had made a little place for yourself,' he said; 'you had got your foot on the ladder. You knew the right people. You had a real chance of success. Then, in the middle of it all, you go and bury yourself in the country with an old'--no, I can't say it."
"Don't mind me!" said Father Payne.
"Very well," said Vincent, "if you _will_ hear it--'with an old humbug, and a set of asses. You sit in each others' pockets, you praise each others' stuff, you lead what you call the simple life. Where will you all be five years hence?' I told him that I didn't know, and I didn't care. Then he lost his temper, and, what was worse, he thought he was keeping it. 'Very well,' he said. 'Now I will tell you what you ought to be doing. You ought to have buckled to your work, pushed yourself quietly in all directions, never have written anything, or made a friend, or accepted an invitation, without saying, "Will this add to my consequence?" We must all nurse our reputations in this world. They don't come of themselves--they have to be made!' Well, I thought this all very sickening, and I said I didn't care a d--n about my reputation. I said I had a chance of living with people whom I liked, and of working at things I cared about, and I thought his theories simply disgusting and vulgar. He showed his teeth at that, and said that he had spoken as a true friend, and that it had been a painful task; and then I said I was much obliged to him, and came away. That's the story!"
"That's all right," said Father Payne, "and I am much obliged to you for the sidelight on my character. But there is something in what he said, you know. You are rather unpractical! I shall send you back for a bit to London, I think!"
"Why on earth do you say that?" said Vincent, looking a little crestfallen.