Chapter 7

"Because you mind it too much, my boy," said Father Payne. "You must not get soft. That's the danger of this life! It's all very well for me; I'm tough, and I'm moderately rich. But you would not have cared so much if you had not thought there _was_ something in what he said. It was very low, no doubt, and I give you leave to hate him; though, if you are going to lead the detached life, you must be detached. But now I have caught you up--and we will go back a little. The mistake you made, Vincent, if I may say so, was to be angry. You may hate people, but you must not show that you hate them. That is the practical side of the principle. The moment you begin to squabble, and to say wounding things, and to try to _hurt_ the person you hate, you are simply putting yourself on his level. And you must not be shocked or pained either. That is worse still, because it makes you superior, without making you engaging."

"Then what _are_ you to do?" said Barthrop.

"Try persuasion if you like," said Father Payne, "but you had better fall back on attractive virtue! You must ignore the nastiness, and give the pleasant qualities, if there are any, room to manoeuvre. But I admit it is a difficult job, and needs some practice."

"But I don't see any principle about it," said Vincent.

"There isn't any," said Father Payne;--"at least there is, but you must not dig it in. You mustn't use principles as if they were bayonets. Civility is the best medium. If you appear to be fatuously unconscious of other people's presence, of course they want to make themselves felt. But if you are good-humoured and polite, they will try to make you think well of them. That is probably why your friend calls me a humbug--he thinks I can't feel as polite as I seem."

"But if you are dealing with a real egotist," said Vincent, "what are you to do then?"

"Keep the talk firmly on himself," said Father Payne, "and, if he ever strays from the subject, ask him a question about himself. Egotists are generally clever people, and no clever people like being drawn out, while no egotists like to be perceived to be egotists. You know the old saying that a bore is a person who wants to talk about _himself_ when you want to talk about _yourself_. It is the pull against him that makes the bore want to hold his own. The first duty of the evangelist is to learn to pay compliments unobtrusively."

"That's rather a nauseous prescription!" said Lestrange, making a face.

"Well, you can begin with that," said Father Payne, "and when I see you perfect in it, I will tell you something else. Let's have some music, and let me get the taste of all this high talk out of my mouth!"

XV

OF WRITING

There were certain days when Father Payne would hurry in to meals late and abstracted, with, a cloudy eye, that, as he ate, was fixed on a point about a yard in front of him, or possibly about two miles away. He gave vague or foolish replies to questions, he hastened away again, having heard voices but seen no one. I doubt if he could have certainly named anyone in the room afterwards.

I had a little question of business to ask him on one such occasion after breakfast. I slipped out but two minutes after him, went to his study, and knocked. An obscure sound came from within. He was seated on his chair, bending over his writing-table.

"May I ask you something?" I said.

"Damnation!" said Father Payne.

I apologised, and tried to withdraw on tiptoe, but he said, turning half round, somewhat impatiently, "Oh, come in, come in--it's all right. What do you want?"

"I don't want to disturb you," I said.

"Come in, I tell you!" he said, adding, "you may just as well, because I have nothing to do for a quarter of an hour." He threw a pen on the table. "It's one of my very few penances. If I swear when I am at work, I do no work for a quarter of an hour; so you can keep me company. Sit down there!" He indicated a chair with his large foot, and I sat down.

My question was soon asked and sooner answered. Father Payne beamed upon me with an indulgent air, and I said: "May I ask what you were doing?"

"You may," he said. "I rejoice to talk about it. It's my novel."

"Your novel!" I said. "I didn't know you wrote novels. What sort of a book is it?"

"It's wretched," he said, "it's horrible, it's grotesque! It's more like all other novels than any book I know. It's written in the most abominable style; there isn't a single good point about it. The incidents are all hackneyed, there isn't a single lifelike character in it, or a single good description, or a single remark worth making. I should think it's the worst book ever written. Will you hear a bit of it? Do, now! only a short bit. I should love to read it to you."

"Yes, of course," I said, "there is nothing I should like better."

He read a passage. It was very bad indeed, I couldn't have imagined that an able man could have written such stuff. I had an awful feeling that I had heard every word before.

"There," he said at last, "that's rather a favourable specimen. What do you think of it? Come, out with it."

"I'm afraid I'm not very much of a judge," I said.

His face fell. "That's what everyone says," he said. "I know what you mean. But I'll publish it--I'll be d----d if I won't! Oh, dash it, that's five minutes more. No--I wasn't working, was I? Just conversing."

"But why do you write it, if you are so dissatisfied with it?" I said feebly.

"Why?" he said in a loud voice. "Why? Because I love it. I'm besotted by it. It's like strong drink to me. I doubt if there's a man in England who enjoys himself more than I do when I'm writing. The worst of it is, that it won't come out--it's beautiful enough when I think of it, but I can't get it down. It's my second novel, mind you, and I have got plans for three more. Do you suppose I'm going to sit here, with all you fellows enjoying yourselves, and not have my bit of fun? But it's hopeless, and I ought to be ashamed of myself. There simply isn't anything in the world that I should not be better employed in doing than in scribbling this stuff. I know that; but all the authors I know say that writing a book is the part they enjoy--they don't care about correcting proofs, or publishing, or seeing reviews, or being paid for it. Very disinterested and noble, of course! Now I should enjoy it all through, but I simply daren't publish my last one--I should be hooted in the village when the reviews appeared. But I am going to have my fun--the act of creation, you know! But it's too late to begin, and I have had no training. The beastly thing is as sticky as treacle. It's a sort of vomit of all the novels I have ever read, and that's the truth!"

"I simply don't understand," I said. "I have heard you criticise books, I have heard you criticise some of our work--you have criticised mine. I think you one of the best critics I ever heard. You seem to know exactly how it ought to be done."

"Yes," he said, frowning, "I believe I do. That's just it! I'm a critic, pure and simple. I can't look at anything, from a pigstye to a cathedral, or listen to anything, from a bird singing to an orchestra, or read anything, from Bradshaw to Shakespeare, without seeing when it is out of shape and how it ought to be done. I'm like the man in Ezekiel, whose appearance was like the appearance of brass, with a line of flax in his hand and a measuring reed. He goes on measuring everything for about five chapters, and nothing comes of it, as far as I can remember! I suppose I ought to be content with that, but I can't bear it. I hate fault-finding. I want to make beautiful things. I spent months over my last novel, and, as Aaron said to Moses, 'There came out this calf!' I'm a very unfortunate man. If I had not had to work so hard for many years for a bare living, I could have done something with writing, I think. But now I'm a sort of plumber, mending holes in other people's work. Never mind. I _will_ waste my time!"

All this while he was eyeing the little clock on his table. "Now be off!" he said suddenly, "My penance is over, and I won't be disturbed!" He caught up his pen. "You had better tell the others not to come near me, or I'm blessed if I won't read the whole thing aloud after dinner!" And he was immersed in his work again.

Two or three days later I found Father Payne strolling in the garden, on a bright morning. It was just on the verge of spring. There were catkins in the shrubbery. The lilacs were all knobbed with green. The aconite was in full bloom under the trees, and the soil was all pricked with little green blades. He was drinking it all in with delighted glances. I said something about his book.

"Oh, the fit's off!" said he; "I'm sober again! I finished the chapter, and, by Jove, I think it's the worst thing I have done yet. It's simply infamous! I read it with strong sensations of nausea! I really don't know how I can get such deplorable rubbish down on paper. No matter, I get all the rapture of creation, and that's the best part of it. I simply couldn't live without it. It clears off some perilous stuff or other, and now I feel like a convalescent. Did you ever see anything so enchanting as that aconite? The colour of it, and the way the little round head is tucked down on the leaves! I could improve on it a trifle, but not much. God must have had a delicious time designing flowers--I wonder why He gave up doing it, and left it to the market-gardeners. I can't make out why new flowers don't keep appearing. I could offer a few suggestions. I dream of flowers sometimes--great banks of bloom rising up out of crystal rivers, in deep gorges, full of sunshine and scent. How nice it is to be idle! I'm sure I've earned it, after that deplorable chapter. It really is a miracle of flatness! You go back to your work, my boy, and thank God you can say what you mean! And then you can bring it to me, and I'll tell you to an inch what it is worth!"

XVI

OF MARRIAGE

We were all at dinner one day, and Father Payne came in, in an excited mood, with a letter in his hand. "Here's a bit of nonsense," he said. "Here's my old friend Davenport giving me what he calls a piece of his mind--he can't have much left--about my 'celibate brotherhood,' as he calls it. It's all the other way! I am rather relieved when I hear that any of you people are happily engaged to be married. Celibacy is the danger of my experiment, not the object of it."

"Do you wish us to be married?" said Kaye. "That's new to me. I thought this was a little fortress against the eternal feminine."

"What rubbish!" said Father Payne. "The worst of using ridiculous words like feminine is that it blinds people to the truth. Masculine and feminine have nothing to do with sex. In the first place, intellectual people are all rather apt to be sexless; in the next place, all sensible people, men and women alike, are what is meant by masculine--that is to say, spirited, generous, tolerant, good-natured, frank. Thirdly, all suspicious, scheming, sensitive, theatrical, irritable, vain people are what is meant by feminine. And artistic natures are all prone to those failings, because they desire dignity and influence--they want to be felt. The real difference between people is whether they want to live, or whether they want to be known to exist. The worst of feminine people is that they are probably the people who ought not to marry, unless they marry a masculine person; and they are not, as a rule, attracted by masculinity."

"But one can't get married in cold blood," said Vincent. "I often wish that marriages could just be arranged, as they do it in France. I think I should be a very good husband, but I shall never have the courage or the time to go in search of a wife."

"That's why I send you all out into the world," said Father Payne. "Most people ought to be married. It's a normal thing--it isn't a transcendental thing. In my experience most marriages are successful. It does everyone good to be obliged to live at close quarters with other people, and to be unable to get away from them."

"I didn't know you were interested in such matters," said someone.

"I have gone into it pretty considerably, sir," said Father Payne, "The one thing that does interest me is human admixtures. It does no one any good to get too much attached to his own point of view."

"But surely," said Rose, "there are some marriages which are obviously bad for all concerned--real incompatibilities? People who can't understand each other or their children--children who can't understand their parents? It always seems to me rather horrible that people should be shut up together like rats in a cage."

"I expect we shall have legislation before long," said Father Payne, "for breaking up homes where some definite evil like drunkenness is at work--but I don't want industrial schools for children; that is even more inhuman than a bad home. We want more boarding out, but that's expensive. Someone has to pay, if children are to be planted out, and to pay well. There's no motive of duty so strong for an Englishman as good wages. People are honest about giving fair money's worth. But it is no good talking about these things, because they are all so far ahead of us. The question is whether anyone can suggest any practical means of filing away any of the roughnesses of marriage. I do not believe that the problem is very serious among workers. It is the marriage of idle people that is apt to be disastrous."

"The thing that damages many marriages," said Rose, "is the fact that people have got to see so much of each other. What people really want is a holiday from each other."

"Yes, but that is impossible financially," said Father Payne. "Apart from love and children, marriage is a small joint-stock company for cheap comfort. But it is of no use to go vapouring on about these big schemes, because in a democracy people won't do what philosophers wish, but what they want. Let's take a notorious case, known to everyone. Can anyone say what practical advice he could have given to either Carlyle or to Mrs. Carlyle, which would have improved that witches' cauldron? There were two high-principled Puritanical people, which is the same thing as saying that they both were disposed to consider that anyone who disagreed with them did so for a bad motive, and exalted their own whims and prejudices into moral principles; both of them irritable and sensitive, both able to give instantaneous and elaborate expression to their vaguest thoughts,--Carlyle himself with eloquence which he wielded like a bludgeon, and Mrs. Carlyle with incisiveness which she used like a sharp knife--Carlyle with too much to do, and Mrs. Carlyle with less than nothing to do--each passionately attached to the other as soon as they were separated, and both capable of saying the sweetest and most affectionate things by letter, which they could not for the life of them utter in talk. They did, as a matter of fact, spend an immense amount of time apart; and when they were together, Carlyle, having been trained as a peasant and one of a large family, roughly neglected Mrs. Carlyle, while Mrs. Carlyle, with a middle-class training, and moreover indulged as an only daughter, was too proud to complain, but not proud enough not to resent the neglect deeply. What could have been done for them? Were they impossible people to live with? Was it true, as Tennyson bluntly said, that it was as well that they married, because two people were unhappy instead of four?"

"They wanted a child as a go-between!" said Barthrop.

"Of course they did!" said Father Payne. "That would have pulled the whole ménage together. And don't tell me that it was a wise dispensation that they were childless! Cleansing fires? The fires in which they lived, with Carlyle raging about porridge and milk and crowing cocks, working alone, walking alone, flying off to see Lady Ashburton, sleeping alone; and Mrs. Carlyle, whom everyone else admired and adored, eating her heart out because she could not get him to value her company;--there was not much that was cleansing about all that! The cleansing came when she was dead, and when he saw what he had done."

"I expect they have made it up by now," said Kaye.

"You're quite right!" said Father Payne. "It matters less with those great vivid people. They can afford to remember. But the little people, who simply end further back than they began, what is to be done for them?"

XVII

OF LOVING GOD

Father Payne suddenly said to me once in a loud voice, after a long silence--we were walking together--"Writers, preachers, moralists, sentimentalists, are much to blame for not explaining more what they mean by loving God--perhaps they do not know! Love is so large a word, and covers so great a range of feelings. What sort of love are we to give God--the love of the lover, or the son, or the daughter, or the friend, or the patriot, or the dog? Is it to be passion, or admiration, or reverence, or fidelity, or pity? All of these enter into love."

"What do you think yourself?" I said.

"How am I to tell?" said Father Payne. "I am in many minds about it--it cannot be passion, because, whatever one may say, something of physical satisfaction is mingled with that. It cannot be a dumb fidelity--that is irrational. It cannot be an equal friendship, because there is no equality possible. It cannot be that of the child for the mother, because the mind is hardly concerned in that. Can one indeed love the Unknown? Again, it cannot be all receiving and no giving. We must have something to give God which He desires to have and which we can withhold. To say that the answer is, 'My son, give Me thy heart,' begs the question, because the one thing certain about love is that we _cannot_ give it to whom we will--it must be evoked; and even if it is wanted, we cannot always give it. We may respect and reverence a person very much, but, as Charlotte Brontë said, 'our veins may run ice whenever we are near him.'

"And then, too, can we love any one who knows us perfectly, through and through? Is it not of the essence of love to be blind? Is it possible for us to feel that we are worthy of the love of anyone who really knows us?

"And then, too, if disaster and suffering and cruel usage and terror come from God, without reference to the sensitiveness of the soul and body on which they fall, can we possibly love the Power which behaves so? What child could love a father who might at any time strike him? I cannot believe that God wants an unquestioning and fatuous trust, and still less the sort of deference we pay to one who may do us a mischief if we do not cringe before him. All that is utterly unworthy of the mind and soul."

"Is it not possible to believe," I said, "that all experience may be good for us, however harsh it seems?"

"No rational man can think that," said Father Payne. "Suffering is not good for people if it is severe and protracted. I have seen many natures go utterly to pieces under it."

"What do you believe, then?" I said.

"Of course the only obvious explanation," said Father Payne, "is that suffering, misery, evil, disaster, disease do not come from God at all; that He is the giver of health and joy and light and happiness; that He gives us all He can, and spares us all He can; but that there is a great enemy in the world, whom He cannot instantly conquer; that He is doing all He can to shield us, and to repair the harm that befalls us--that we can make common cause with Him, and pity Him for His thwarted plans, His endless disappointments, His innumerable failures, His grievous sufferings. It would be easy to love God if He were like that--yet who dares to say it or to teach it? It is the dreadful doctrine of His Omnipotence that ruins everything. I cannot hold any communication with Omnipotence--it is a consuming fire; but if I could know that God was strong and patient and diligent, but not all-powerful or all-knowing, then I could commune with Him. If, when some evil mishap overtakes me, I could say to Him, 'Come, help me, console me, show me how to mend this, give me all the comfort you can,' then I could turn to Him in love and trust, so long as I could feel that He did not wish the disaster to happen to me but could not ward it off, and was as miserable as myself that it had happened. Not _so_ miserable, of course, because He has waited so long, suffered so much, and can discern so bright and distant a hope. Then, too, I might feel that death was perhaps our escape from many kinds of evil, and that I should be clasped to His heart for awhile, even though He sent me out again to fight His battles. That would evoke all my love and energy and courage, because I could feel that I could give Him my help; but if He is Almighty, and could have avoided all the sorrow and pain, then I am simply bewildered and frightened, because I can predicate nothing about Him."

"Is not that the idea which Christianity aims at?" I said.

"Yes," he said; "the suffering Saviour, who can resist evil and amend it, but cannot instantly subdue it; but, even so, it seems to set up two Gods for one. The mind cannot really _identify_ the Saviour with the Almighty Designer of the Universe. But the thought of the Saviour _does_ interpret the sense of God's failure and suffering, does bring it all nearer to the heart. But if there is Omnipotence behind, it all falls to the ground again--at least it does for me. I cannot pray to Omnipotence and Omniscience, because it is useless to do so. The limited and the unlimited cannot join hands. I must, if I am to believe in God, believe in Him as a warrior arriving on a scene of disorder, and trying to make all well. He must not have permitted the disorder to grow up, and then try to subdue it. It must be there first. It is a battle obviously--but it must be a real battle against a real foe, not a sham fight between hosts created by God. In that case, 'to think of oneself as an instrument of God's designs is a privilege one shares with the devil,' as someone said. I will not believe that He is so little in earnest as that. No, He is the great invader, who desires to turn darkness to light, rage to peace, misery to happiness. Then, and only then, can I enlist under His banner, fight for Him, honour Him, worship Him, compassionate Him, and even love Him; but if He is in any way responsible for evil, by design or by neglect, then I am lost indeed!"

XVIII

OF FRIENDSHIP

"He is the sort of man who is always losing his friends," said Pollard at dinner to Father Payne, describing someone, "and I always think that's a bad sign."

"And I, on the contrary," said Father Payne, "think that a man who always keeps his friends is almost always an ass!" He opened his mouth and drew in his breath.

"Or else it means," said Barthrop, "that he has never really made any friends at all!"

"Quite right," said Father Payne. "People talk about friendship as if it was a perfectly normal thing, like eating and drinking--it's not that! It's a difficult thing, and it is a rare thing. I do not mean mere proximities and easy comradeships and muddled alliances; there are plenty of frank and pleasant companionships about of a solid kind. Still less do I mean the sort of thing which is contained in such an expression as 'Dear old boy!' which is always a half-contemptuous phrase."

"But isn't loyalty a fine quality?" said Lestrange.