Father Payne Part 4

"You have no more right to make a row than you have to use a strong scent or to blow a post-horn--that's not liberty!" The result of this was that the house was a singularly quiet one, and this sense of silence and subdued sound lives in my memory as one of its most refreshing characteristics. "A row is only pleasant if it is deliberate and organised," he used to say.

"Native woodnotes wild are all very well, but they are not civilisation. To talk audibly and quietly is the best proof of virtue and honour!"

XI

CONVERSATION

I am going to try to give a few impressions of talks with Father Payne--both public and private talks. It is, however, difficult to do this without giving, perhaps, a wrong impression. I used to get into the habit of jotting down the things he had said, and I improved by practice. But he was a rapid talker and somewhat discursive, and he was often deflected from his main subject by a question or a discussion. Yet I do not want it to be thought that he was fond of monologue and soliloquy. He was not, I should say, a very talkative man; days would sometimes pa.s.s without his doing more than just taking a hand in conversation. He liked to follow the flow of a talk, and to contribute a remark now and then; sometimes he was markedly silent; but in no case was he ever oppressive. Occasionally, and more often in _tete-a-tete,_ he went ahead and talked copiously, but this was rather the exception than the rule. I have not thought it worth while to try to give the effect of our own talk. We were young, excitable, and argumentative, and, though it was at the time often delightful and stimulating, it was also often very crude and immature. Father Payne was good at helping a talker out, and would often do justice to a clumsily-expressed remark which he thought was interesting. But he was by far the most interesting member of the circle; he spoke easily and flowingly when he was moved, and there always seemed to me a sense of form about his talk which was absent from ours. But under no circ.u.mstance did he ever become tedious--indeed he was extremely sensitive to the smallest signs of impatience. We often tried, so to speak, to draw him out; but if he had the smallest suspicion that he was being drawn, he became instantly silent.

There is more coherence about some of the talks I have recorded than was actually the case. He would diverge to tell a story, or he would call one's attention to some sight or sound.

Moreover his face, his movements, his gestures, all added much to his talk.

He had a way of wrinkling up his brows, of shaking his head, of looking round with an awestruck expression, his eyes wide open, his mouth pursed up, especially when he had reached some triumphantly absurd conclusion. He had two little quick gestures of the hands as he spoke, opening his fingers, waving a point aside, emphasizing an argument by a quick downward motion of his forefinger. He had, too, a quick, loud, ebullient laugh, sometimes shrill, sometimes deep; and he abandoned himself to laughter at an absurd story or jest as completely as anyone I have ever seen. Rose was an excellent mimic, and Father Payne used to fall into agonising paroxysms of laughter at many of his representations. But he always said that laughter was with him a social mood, and that he had never any inclination to laugh when he was alone.

So the record of his talks must be taken not as typical of his everyday mood, but as instances of the kind of things he said when he was moved to speak at large; and even so they give, I am aware, too condensed an impression. He never talked as if he were playing on a party or a companion with a hose-pipe. There was never anyone who was more easily silenced or diverted. But to anyone who knew him they will give, I believe, a true impression of his method of talk; and perhaps they may give to those who never saw him a faint reflection of his lively and animated mind, the energy with which he addressed himself to small problems, and the firm belief which he always maintained, that any evidence of life, however elementary, was more encouraging and inspiring than the most elaborate logic or the profoundest intellectual grasp of abstract subjects.

XII

OF GOING TO CHURCH

I had been to church one summer Sunday morning--a very simple affair it was, with nothing sung but a couple of hymns; but the Vicar read beautifully, neither emphatically nor lifelessly, with a little thrill in his voice at times that I liked to hear. It did not compel you to listen so much as invite you to join. Lestrange played the organ most divinely; he generally extemporised before the service, and played a simple piece at the end; but he never strained the resources of the little organ, and it was all simple and formal music, princ.i.p.ally Bach or Handel.

Father Payne himself was a regular attendant at church, and Sunday was a decidedly leisurely day. He advised us to put aside our writing work, to write letters, read, make personal jottings, talk, though there was no inquisition into such things.

Father Payne was a somewhat irregular responder, but it was a pleasure to sit near him, because his deep, rapid voice gave a new quality to the words. He seemed happy in church, and prayed with great absorption, though I noticed that his Bible was often open before him all through the service.

The Vicar's sermons were good of their kind, suggestive rather than provocative, about very simple matters of conduct rather than belief. I have heard Father Payne speak of them with admiration as never being discursive, and I gathered that the Vicar was a great admirer of Newman's sermons.

We came away together, Father Payne and I, and we strolled a little in the garden. I felt emboldened to ask him the plain question why he went to church. "Oh, for a lot of reasons," he said, "none of them very conclusive!

I like to meet my friends in the first place; and then a liturgy has a charm for me. It has a beauty of its own, and I like ceremony. It is not that I think it sacred--only beautiful. But I quite admit the weakness of it, which is simply that it does not appeal to everyone, and I don't think that our Anglican service is an ideal service. It is too refined and formal; and many people would feel it was more religious if it were more extempore--prayer and plain advice."

I told him something of my old childish experience, saying that I used to regard church as a sort of calling-over, and that G.o.d would be vexed if one did not appear.

He laughed at this. "Yes, I don't think we can insist on it as being a levee," 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 superst.i.tious--it is almost debasing to think of G.o.d demanding praise as a duty inc.u.mbent 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 Beat.i.tudes; 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 G.o.d; 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 amus.e.m.e.nt.

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 amus.e.m.e.nts, 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, s...o...b..ring, 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 ign.o.ble! 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 pa.s.sed 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 doc.u.ments. 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 d.a.m.nably 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