Father Payne Part 19

"But what did it all come to?" said Rose.

"Well," said Father Payne, "to tell you the truth, it didn't amount to very much! At the time I was dazzled and stupefied--but subsequent reflection has convinced me that the cooking was better than the food, so to speak."

"You mean that it was mostly humbug?" said Rose.

"Well, I wouldn't go quite as far as that," said Father Payne, "but it was not very nutritive--no, the nutriment was lacking! Come, I'll tell you frankly what I did think, as I came away. I thought these pretty people very adventurous, very quick, very friendly. But I don't truly think they were interested in the real thing at all--only interested in the words of the wise, and in the unconsidered trifles of the Major Prophets, so to speak. I didn't think it exactly pretentious--but they obviously only cared for people of established reputation. They didn't admire the ideas behind, only the reputations of the people who said the things. They had undoubtedly seen and heard the great people--I confess it amazed me to think how easily the men of mark can be exploited--but I did not discern that they cared about the things represented,--only about the representatives. The American was different. He, I think, cared about the ideas, though he cared about them in the wrong way. I mean that he claimed to find everything distinct, whereas the big things are naturally indistinct. They loom up in a shadowy way, and the American was examining them through field-gla.s.ses. But my other friends seemed to me to be only interested in the people who had the entree, so to speak--the priests of the shrine. They had noticed everything that doesn't matter about the high and holy ones--how they looked, spoke, dressed, behaved. It was awfully clever, some of it; one of the women imitated Legard the essayist down to the ground--the way he pontificates, you know--but nothing else. They were simply interested in the great men, and not interested in what make the great men different from other people, but simply in their resemblance to other people. Even great people have to eat, you know! Legard himself eats, though it's a leisurely process; and this woman imitated the way he forked up a bit, held it till the bit dropped off, and put the empty fork into his mouth. It was excruciatingly funny--I'll admit that. But they missed the point, after all. They didn't care about Legard's books a bit--they cared much more about that funny cameo ring he wears on his tie!"

"It all seems to me horribly vulgar," said Kaye.

"No, it was no more vulgar than a dance of gnats," said Father Payne. "They were all alive, those people. They were just gnats, now I come to think of it! They had stung all the great men of the day--even drawn a little blood--and they were intoxicated by it. Mind, I don't say that it is worth doing, that kind of thing! But they were having their fun--and the only mistake they made was in thinking they cared about these people for the right reasons. No, the only really rueful part of the business was the revelation to me of what the great people can put up with, in the way of being feted, and the extent to which they seem able to give themselves away to these pretty women. It must be enervating, I think, and even exhausting, to be so pawed and caressed; but it's natural enough, and if it amuses them, I'm not going to find fault. My only fear is that Legard and the rest think they are really _living_ with these people. They are not doing that; they are only being roped in for the fun of the performance. These charming ladies just ensnare the big people, make them chatter, and then get together, as they did to-day, and compare the locks of hair they have snipped from their Samsons. But it isn't a bit malicious--it's simply childish; and, by Jove, I enjoyed myself tremendously. Now, don't pull a long face, Kaye! Of course it was very cheap--and I don't say that anyone ought to enjoy that sort of thing enough to pursue it. But if it comes in my way, why, it is like a dish of sweetmeats! I don't approve of it, but it was like a story out of Boccaccio, full of life and zest, even though the pestilence was at work down in the city. We must not think ill of life too easily! I don't say that these people are living what is called the highest life. But, after all, I only saw them amusing themselves. There were some children about, nice children, sensibly dressed, well-behaved, full of go, and yet properly drilled. These women are good wives and good mothers; and I expect they have both spirit and tenderness, when either is wanted. I'm not going to bemoan their light-mindedness; at all events, I thought it was very pleasant, and they were very good to me. They saw I wasn't a first-hander or a thoroughbred, and they made it easy for me. No, it was a happy time for me--and, by George, how they fed us! I expect the women looked after all that. I daresay that, as far as economics go, it was all wrong, and that these people are only a sort of sc.u.m on the surface of society. But it is a pretty sc.u.m, shot with bright colours. Anyhow, it is no good beginning by trying to alter _them_! If you could alter everything else, they would fall into line, because they are good-humoured and sensible. And as long as people are kindly and full of life, I shall not complain; I would rather have that than a dreary high-mindedness."

Father Payne rose. "Oh, do go on, Father!" said someone.

"No, my boy," said Father Payne, "I'm boiling over with impressions--rooms, carpets, china, flowers, ladies' dresses! But that must all settle down a bit. In a few days I'll interrogate my memory, like Wordsworth, and see if there is anything of permanent worth there!"

XLVIII

OF AMBIGUITY

Father Payne had been listening to some work of mine: and he said at the end, "That is graceful enough, and rather attractive--but it has a great fault: it is sometimes ambiguous. Several of your sentences can have more than one meaning. I remember once at Oxford," he said, smiling, "that Collins, one of our lecturers, had been going through a translation-paper with me, and had told me three quite distinct ways of rendering a sentence, each backed by a great scholar. I asked him, I remember, whether that meant that the original writer--it was Livy, I think--had been in any doubt as to what his words were meant to convey. He laughed, and said, 'No, I don't imagine that Livy intended to make his meaning obscure. I expect, if we took the pa.s.sage to him with the three renderings, he would deride at least two of them, and possibly all three, and would point out that we simply did not know the usage of some word or phrase which would have been absolutely clear to a contemporary reader,' But Collins went on to say that there might also be a real ambiguity about the pa.s.sage: and then he quoted the supposed remark of the bishop who declined to wear gaiters, and said, 'I shall wear no clothes to distinguish myself from my fellow-Christians.'

This was printed in his biography, 'I shall wear no clothes, to distinguish myself from my fellow-Christians.' 'That sentence may be fairly called ambiguous,' Collins said, 'when its sense so much depends upon punctuation.'

"Now," Father Payne went on, "you must remember, in writing, that you write for the eye, you don't write for the ear. A book isn't primarily meant to be read aloud: and you mustn't resort to tricks of emphasis, such as italics and so forth, which can only be rendered by voice-inflections. It is your first duty to be absolutely clear and limpid. You mustn't write long involved sentences which necessitate the mind holding in solution a lot of qualifying clauses. You must break up your sentences, and even repeat yourself rather than be confused. There is no beauty of style like perfect clearness, and in all writing mystification is a fault. You ought never to make your reader turn back to the page before to see what you are driving at."

"But surely," I said, "there are great writers like Carlyle and George Meredith, for instance, who have been difficult to understand."

"Yes," said Father Payne, "but that's a fault, though it may be a magnificent fault. It may mean such a pressure of ideas and images that the thing can hardly be written at length--and it may give you a sense of exuberant greatness. You may have to forgive a great writer his exuberance--you may even have to forgive him the trouble it costs to penetrate his exact thoughts, for the sake of steeping yourself in the rush and splendour of the style. But obscurity isn't a thing to aim at for anyone who is trying to write; it may be, in the case of a great writer, a sort of vociferousness which intoxicates you: and the man may convey a kind of inspiration by his very obscurities. But it must be an impulse which simply overpowers him--it mustn't be an effect deliberately planned. You may perhaps feel the bigness of the thought all the more in the presence of a writer who, for all his power, can't confine the stream, and comes down in a cataract of words. But if you begin trying for an effect, it is like splashing about in a pool to make people believe it is a rushing river. The movement mustn't be your own contortions, but the speed of the stream. If you want to see the bad side of obscurity, look at Browning. The idea is often a very simple one when you get at it; it's only obscure because it is conveyed by hints and jerks and nudges. In _Pickwick_, for instance, one does not read Jingle's remarks for the underlying thought--only for the pleasure of seeing how he leaps from stepping-stone to stepping-stone. You mustn't confuse the pleasure of unravelling thought with the pleasure of thought. If you can make yourself so attractive to your readers that they love your explosions and collisions, and say with a half-compa.s.sionate delight--'how characteristic--but it _is_ worth while unravelling!'

you have achieved a certain success. But the chance is that future ages won't trouble you much. Disentangling obscurities isn't bad fun for contemporaries, who know by instinct the nuances of words; but it becomes simply a bore a century later, when people are not interested in old nuances, but simply want to know what you thought. Only scholars love obscurity--but then they are detectives, and not readers."

"But isn't it possible to be too obvious?" I said--"to get a namby-pamby way of writing--what a reviewer calls painfully kind?"

"Well, of course, the thought must be tough," said Father Payne, "but it's your duty to make a tough thought digestible, not to make an easy thought tough. No, my boy, you may depend upon it that, if you want people to attend to you, you must be intelligible. Don't, for G.o.d's sake, think that Carlyle or Meredith or Browning _meant_ to be unintelligible, or even thought they were being unintelligible. They were only thinking too concisely or too rapidly for the reader. But don't you try to produce that sort of illusion. Try to say things like Newman or Ruskin--big, beautiful, profound, delicate things, with an almost childlike navete. That is the most exquisite kind of charm, when you find that half-a-dozen of the simplest words in the language have expressed a thought which holds you spell-bound with its truth and loveliness. That is what lasts. People want to be fed, not to be drugged: That, I believe, is the real difference between romance and realism, and I am one of those who gratefully believe that romance has had its day. We want the romance that comes from realism, not the romance which comes by neglecting it. But that's another subject."

XLIX

OF BELIEF

"I don't think there is a single word in the English language," said Father Payne, "which is responsible for such unhappiness as the word 'believe.' It is used with a dozen shades of intensity by people; and yet it is the one word which is always being used in theological argument, and which, like the unG.o.dly, 'is a sword of thine.'"

"I always mean the same thing by it, I believe!" I said.

"Excuse me," said Father Payne, "but if you will take observations of your talk, you will find you do not. At any rate, _I_ do not, and I am more careful about the words I use than many people. If I have a heated argument with a man, and think he takes up a perverse or eccentric opinion, I am quite capable of saying of him, 'I believe he must be crazy.' Now such a sentence to a foreigner would carry the evidence of a deep and clear conviction; but, as I say it, it doesn't really express the faintest suspicion of my opponent's sanity--it means little more than that I don't agree with him; and yet when I say, 'If there is one thing that I do believe, it is in the actual existence of evil,' it means a slowly acc.u.mulated and almost unalterable opinion. In the Creed, one uses the word 'believe' as the nearest that conviction can come to knowledge, short of indisputable evidence; and some people go further still, and use it as if it meant an almost higher sort of knowledge. The real meaning is just what Tennyson said,

"'Believing where we cannot prove,'

where it signifies a conviction which we cannot actually test, but on which we are content to act."

"But," I said, "if I say to a friend--'You are a real sceptic--you seem to me to believe nothing,' I mean to imply something almost cynical."

"Yes," said Father Payne, "you mean that he has no enthusiasm or ideals, and holds nothing sacred, because those are just the convictions which cannot be proved."

"Some people," I said, "seem to me simply to mean by the word 'believe'

that they hold an opinion in such a way that they would be upset if it turned out to be untrue."

"Yes," said Father Payne, "it is the intrusion of the nasty personal element which spoils the word. Belief ought to be a very impersonal thing.

It ought simply to mean a convergence of your own experience on a certain result; but most people are quite as much annoyed at your disbelieving a thing which they _believe_, as at your disbelieving a thing which they _know_. You ought never to be annoyed at people not accepting your conclusions, and still less when your conclusion is partly intuition, and does not depend upon evidence. This is the sort of scale I have in my mind--'practically certain, probable, possible, unproved, unprovable.' Now, I am so far sceptical that, apart from practical certainties, which are just the convergence of all normal experience, the fact that any one person or any number of persons believed a thing would not affect my own faith in it, unless I felt sure that the people who believed it were fully as sceptical as and more clear-headed than myself, and had really gone into the evidence. But even so, as I said, the things most worth believing are the things that can't be proved by any evidence."

"What sort of things do you mean?" I said.

"Well, a thing like the existence of G.o.d," said Father Payne; "that at best is only a generalisation from an immense range of facts, and a special interpretation of them. But the amazing thing in the world is the vast number of people who are content to believe important things on hearsay, because, on the whole, they love or trust the people who teach them. The word 'believing,' when I use it, doesn't mean that a good man says it, and that I can't disprove it, but a sort of vital a.s.sent, so that I can act upon the belief almost as if I knew it. It means for me some sort of personal experience, I could not love or hate a man on hearsay, just because people whom I loved or trusted said that they either loved or hated him. I might be so far bia.s.sed that I should meet him expecting to find him either lovable or hateful, but I could not adopt a personal emotion on hearsay--that must be the result of a personal experience; and yet the adoption of a personal emotion on hearsay is just what most people seem to me to be able to do. I might believe that a man had done good or bad things on hearsay: but I could have no feeling about him unless I had seen him. I could not either love or hate a historical personage: the most I could do would be to like or dislike all stories told about him so much that I could wish to have met him or not to have met him."

"Isn't it a question of imagination?" I said.

"Yes," said Father Payne, "and most ordinary religious belief is simply an imaginative personification: but that is a childish affair, not a reasonable affair: and that is why most religious teachers praise what they call a childlike faith, but what is really a childish faith. I don't honestly think that our religious beliefs ought to be a dog-like kind of fidelity, unresentful, unquestioning, undignified confidence. The love of Bill Sikes' terrier for Bill Sikes doesn't make Bill Sikes an admirable or lovable man: it only proves his terrier a credulous terrier. The only reason why we admire such a faith is because it is pleasant and convenient to be blindly trusted, and to feel that we can behave as badly as we like without alienating that sort of trust. I have sometimes thought that the deepest anguish of G.o.d must lie in His being loved and trusted by people to whom He has been unable so far to show Himself a loving and careful Father.

I don't believe G.o.d can wish us to love Him in an unreasonable way--I mean by simply overlooking the bad side of things. A man, let us say, with some hideous inherited disease or vice ought not to love G.o.d, unless he can be sure that G.o.d has not made him the helpless victim of disease or vice."

"But may the victim not have a faith in G.o.d through and in spite of a disease or a vice?" I said.

"Yes, if he really faces the fact of the evil," said Father Payne; "but he must not believe in a muddled sort of way, with a sort of abject timidity, that G.o.d may have brought about his weakness or his degradation. He ought to be quite clear that G.o.d wishes him to be free and happy and strong, and grieves, like Himself, over the miserable limitation. He must have no sort of doubt that G.o.d wishes him to be healthy or clean-minded. Then he can pray, he can strive for patience, he can fight his fault: he can't do it, if he really thinks that G.o.d allowed him to be born with this horror in his blood. If G.o.d could have avoided evil--I don't mean the sharp sorrows and trials which have a n.o.ble thing behind them, but the ailments of body or soul that simply debase and degrade--if He could have done without evil, but let it creep in, then it seems to me a hopeless business, trying to believe in G.o.d's power or His goodness. I believe in the reality of evil, and I believe too in G.o.d with all my heart and soul. But I stand with G.o.d against evil: I don't stand facing G.o.d, and not knowing on which side He is fighting. Everything may not be evil which I think evil: but there are some sorts of evil--cruelty, selfish l.u.s.t, spite, hatred, which I believe that G.o.d detests as much as and far more than I detest them. That is what I mean by a belief, a conviction which I cannot prove, but on which I can and do act."

"But am I justified in not sharing that belief?" I said.

"Yes," said Father Payne; "if you, in the light of your experience, think otherwise, you need not believe it--you cannot believe it! But it is the only interpretation of the facts which sets me free to love G.o.d, which I do not only with heart and soul, but with mind and strength. If I could believe that G.o.d had ever tampered with what I feel to be evil, ever permitted it to exist, ever condoned it, I could fear Him--I should fear Him with a ghastly fear--but I could not believe in Him, or love Him as I do."

L

OF HONOUR

"No, I couldn't do that," said Lestrange to Barthrop, in one of those unhappy little silences which so often seemed to lie in wait for Lestrange's most plat.i.tudinal utterances. "It wouldn't be consistent with a sense of honour."

Father Payne gave a chuckle, and Lestrange looked pained, "Oughtn't one to have a code of honour?" he said.

"Why, certainly!" said Father Payne, "but you mustn't impose your code on other people. You mustn't take for granted that your idea of honour means the same thing to everyone. Suppose you lost money at cards, and called it a debt of honour, and thought it dishonourable not to pay it; while at the same time you didn't think it dishonourable not to pay a poor tradesman whose goods you had ordered and consumed, am I bound to accept your code of honour?"

"But there _is_ a difference there," said Rose, "because the man to whom you owe a gambling debt can't recover it by law, while a tradesman can. All that a debt of honour means is that you feel bound to pay it, though you are not legally compelled to do so."

"Yes," said Father Payne, "that is so, in a sense, I admit. But still, one mustn't shelter oneself behind big words unless one is certain that they mean exactly the same to one's opponent. When I was at school there was a master who used to be fond, as he said, of putting the boys on their honour: but he never asked if we accepted the obligation. If I say, 'I give you my honour not to do a thing,' then I can be called dishonourable if I don't do it; but you can't put me on my honour unless I consent."

"But surely honour means something quite definite?" said Lestrange.