Often as I have thought of my old friend "Father Payne," as we
affectionately called him, I had somehow never intended to write about him,
or if I did, it was "like as a dream when one awaketh," a vision that
melted away at the touch of common life. Yet I always felt that his was one
of those rich personalities well worth depicting, if the attitude and
gesture with which he faced the world could be caught and fixed. The
difficulty was that he was a man of ideas rather than of performance,
suggestive rather than active: and the whole history of his experiment with
life was evasive, and even to ordinary views fantastic.
Besides, my own life has been a busy one, full of hard ordinary work: it
was not until the war gave me, like many craftsmen, a most reluctant and
unwelcome space of leisure, that I ever had the opportunity of considering
the possibility of writing this book. I am too old to be a combatant, and
too much of a specialist in literature to transmute my activities. I lately
found myself with my professional occupations suddenly suspended, and
moreover, like many men who have followed a wholly peaceful profession,
plunged in a dark bewilderment as to the onset of the forces governing the
social life of Europe. In the sad inactivity which followed, I set to work
to look through my old papers, for the sake of distraction and employment,
and found much material almost ready for use, careful notes of
conversations, personal reminiscences, jottings of characteristic touches,
which seemed as if they could be easily shaped. Moreover, the past suddenly
revived, and became eloquent and vivid. I found in the beautiful memories
of those glowing days that I spent with Father Payne--it was only three
years--some consolation and encouragement in my distress.
This little volume is the result. I am well aware that the busy years which
have intervened have taken the edge off some of my recollections, while the
lapse of time has possibly touched others with a sunset glow. That can
hardly be avoided, and I am not sure that I wish to avoid it.
I am not here concerned with either criticising or endorsing Father Payne's
views. I see both inconsistencies and fallacies in them. I even detect
prejudices and misinterpretations of which I was not conscious at the time.
I have no wish to idealise my subject unduly, but it is clear to me, and I
hope I have made it clear to others, that Father Payne was a man who had a
very definite theory of life and faith, and who at all events lived
sincerely and even passionately in the light of his beliefs. Moreover, when
he came to put them to the supreme test, the test of death, they did not
desert or betray him: he passed on his way rejoicing.
He used, I remember, to warn us against attempting too close an analysis of
character. He used to say that the consciousness of a man, the intuitive
instinct which impelled him, his _attack_ upon experience, was a thing
almost independent both of his circumstances and of his reason. He used to
take his parable from the weaving of a tapestry, and say that a box full of
thread and a loom made up a very small part of the process. It was the
inventive instinct of the craftsman, the faculty of designing, that was
all-important.
He himself was a man of large designs, but he lacked perhaps the practical
gift of embodiment. I looked upon him as a man of high poetical powers,
with a great range of hopes and visions, but without the technical
accomplishment which lends these their final coherence. He was fully aware
of this himself, but he neither regretted it nor disguised it. The truth
was that his interest in existence was so intense, that he lacked the power
of self-limitation needed for an artistic success. What, however, he gave
to all who came in touch with him, was a strong sense of the richness and
greatness of life and all its issues. He taught us to approach it with no
preconceived theories, no fears, no preferences. He had a great mistrust of
conventional interpretation and traditional explanations. At the same time
he abhorred controversy and wrangling. He had no wish to expunge the ideals
of others, so long as they were sincerely formed rather than meekly
received. Though I have come myself to somewhat different conclusions, he
at least taught me to draw my own inferences from my own experiences,
without either deferring to or despising the conclusions of others.
The charm of his personality lay in his independence, his sympathy, his
eager freshness of view, his purity of motive, his perfect simplicity; and
it is all this which I have attempted to depict, rather than to trace his
theories, or to present a philosophy which was always concrete rather than
abstract, and passionate rather than deliberate. To use a homely proverb,
Father Payne was a man who filled his chair!
Of one thing I feel sure, and that is that wherever Father Payne is, and
whatever he may be doing--for I have as absolute a conviction of the
continued existence of his fine spirit as I have of the present existence
of my own--he will value my attempt to depict him as he was. I remember his
telling me a story of Dr. Johnson, how in the course of his last illness,
when he could not open his letters, he asked Boswell to read them for him.
Boswell opened a letter from some person in the North of England, of a
complimentary kind, and thinking it would fatigue Dr. Johnson to have it
read aloud, merely observed that it was highly in his praise. Dr. Johnson
at once desired it to be read to him, and said with great earnestness,
"_The applause of a single human being is of great consequence._"
Father Payne added that it was one of Johnson's finest sayings, and had no
touch of vanity or self-satisfaction in it, but the vital stuff of
humanity. That I believe to be profoundly true: and that is the spirit in
which I have set all this down.
_September_ 30, 1915.