Father Payne came into the hall one morning after breakfast when I was
opening a parcel of books which had arrived for me. It was a fine, sunny
day, and the sun lit up the portrait framed in the panelling over the
mantelpiece, an old and skilful copy (at least I suppose it was a copy) of
Reynolds' fine portrait of James, tenth Earl of Shropshire. Father Payne
regarded the picture earnestly. "Isn't he magnificent?" he said. "But he
was a very poor creature really, and came to great grief. My
great-great-grandfather! His granddaughter married my grandfather. Now look
at that--that's the best we can do in the way of breeding! There's a man
whose direct ancestors, father to son, had simply the best that money can
buy--fine houses to live in, power, the pick of the matrimonial market, the
best education, a fine tradition, every inducement to behave like a hero;
and what did he do--he gambled away his inheritance, and died of drink and
bad courses. We can't get what we want, it would seem, by breeding human
beings, though we can do it with cows and pigs. Where and how does the
thing go wrong? His father and mother were both of them admirable
people--fine in every sense of the word.
"And then people talk, too, as if we had got rid of idolatry! We make a man
a peer, we heap wealth upon him, and then we worship him for his
magnificence, and are deeply affected if he talks civilly to us. We don't
do it quite so much now, perhaps--but in that man's day, think what an
aroma of rank and splendour is cast, even in Boswell's _Life of
Johnson_, over a dinner-party where a man like that was present! If he
paid Johnson the most trumpery of compliments, Johnson bowed low, and down
it went on Boswell's cuff! Yet we go on perpetuating it. We don't require
that such a man should be active, public-spirited, wise. If he is fond of
field-sports, fairly business-like, kindly, courteous, decently virtuous,
we think him a great man, and feel mildly elated at meeting him and being
spoken to civilly by him. I don't mean that only snobs feel that; but
respectable people, who don't pursue fashion, would be more pleased if an
Earl they knew turned up and asked for a cup of tea than if the worthiest
of their neighbours did so. I don't exaggerate the power of rank--it
doesn't make a man necessarily powerful now, but a very little ability,
backed up by rank, will go a long way. A great general or a great statesman
likes to be made an Earl; and yet a good many people would like an Earl of
long descent quite as much. There are a lot of people about who feel as
Melbourne did when he said he liked the Garter so much because there was no
d----d merit about it. I believe we admire people who inherit magnificence
better than we admire people who earn it; and while that feeling is there,
what can be done to alter it?"
"I don't think I want to alter it," I said; "it is very picturesque!"
"Yes, there's the mischief," said Father Payne, "it _is_ more
picturesque, hang it all! The old aristocrat who feels like a prince and
behaves like one, _is_ more picturesque than the person who has
sweated himself into it. Think of the old Duke who was told he _must_
retrench, and that he need not have six still-room maids in his
establishment, and said, after a brief period of reflection, 'D----n it, a
man must have a biscuit!' We _like_ insolence! That is to say, we like
it in its place, because we admire power. It's ten times more impressive
than the meekness of the saint. The mischief is that we like anything from
a man of power. If he is insolent, we think it grand; if he is stupid, we
think it a sort of condescension; if he is mild and polite, we think it
marvellous; if he is boorish, we think it is simple-minded. It is power
that we admire, or rather success, and both can be inherited. If a man gets
a big position in England, he is always said to grow into it; but that is
because we care about the position more than we care about the man.
"When I was younger," he went on, "I used to like meeting successful
people--it was only rarely that I got the chance--but I gradually
discovered that they were not, on the whole, the interesting people.
Sometimes they were, of course, when they were big animated men, full of
vitality and interest. But many men use themselves up in attaining success,
and haven't anything much to give you except their tired side. No, I soon
found out that freshness was the interesting thing, wherever it was to be
found--and, mind you, it isn't very common. Many people have to arrive at
success by resolute self-limitation; and that becomes very uninteresting.
Buoyancy, sympathy, quick interests, perceptiveness--that's the supreme
charm; and the worst of it is that it mostly belongs to the people who
haven't taken too much out of themselves. When we have got a really
well-ordered State, no one will have any reason to work too hard, and then
we shall all be the happier. These gigantic toilers, it's a sort of
morbidity, you know; the real success is to enjoy work, not to drudge
yourself dry. One must overflow--not pump!"
"But what is an artist to do," I said, "who is simply haunted by the desire
to make something beautiful?"
"He must hold his hand," said Father Payne; "he must learn to waste his
time, and he must love wasting it. A habit of creative work is an awful
thing."
"Come out for a turn," he went on; "never mind these rotten books; don't
get into a habit of reading--it's like endlessly listening to good talk
without ever joining in it--it makes a corpulent mind!"
We went and walked in the garden; he stopped before some giant hemlocks.
"Just look at those great things," he said, "built up as geometrically as a
cathedral, tier above tier, and yet not _quite_ regular. There must be
something very hard at work inside that, piling it all up, adding cell to
cell, carrying out a plan, and enjoying it all. Yet the beauty of it is
that it isn't perfectly regular. You see the underlying scheme, yet the
separate shoots are not quite mechanical--they lean away from each other,
that joint is a trifle shorter--there wasn't quite room at the start in
that stem, and the pressure goes on showing right up to the top, I suppose
our lives would look very nearly as geometrical to anyone who
_knew_--really knew; but how little geometrical we feel! I don't
suppose this hemlock is cursed by the power of thinking it might have done
otherwise, or envies the roses. We mustn't spend time in envying, or
repenting either--or still less in renouncing life."
"But if I want to renounce it," I said, "why shouldn't I?"
"Yes, there you have me," said Father Payne; "we know so little about
ourselves, that we don't always know whether we do better to renounce a
thing or to seize it. Make experiments, I say--don't make habits."
"But you are always drilling me into habits," I said.
He gave me a little shake with his hand. "Yes, the habit of being able to
do a thing," he said, "not the habit of being unable to do anything else!
Hang these metaphysics, if that is what they are! What I want you young men
to do is to get a firm hold upon life, and to feel that it is a finer thing
than any little presentment of it. I want you to feel and enjoy for
yourselves, and to live freely and generously. Bad things happen to all of
us, of course; but we mustn't mind that--not to be petty or quarrelsome, or
hidebound or prudish or over-particular, that's the point. To leave other
people alone, except on the rare occasions when they are not letting other
people alone; to be peaceable, and yet not to be afraid; not to be hurt and
vexed; to practise forgetting; not to want to pouch things! It's all very
well for me to talk," he said; "I made a sufficient hash of it, when I was
poor and miserable and overworked; and then I was transplanted out of a
slum window-box into a sunny garden, just in time; yet I'm sure that most
of my old troubles were in a way of my own making, because I hated being so
insignificant; but I fear that was a little poison lurking in me from the
Earls of Shropshire. That is the odd thing about ambitions, that they seem
so often like regaining a lost position rather than making a new one. The
truth is that we are caged; and the only thing to do is to think about the
cage as little as we can."