There had been some vague ethical discussion during dinner in which Father
Payne had not intervened; but he suddenly joined in briskly, though I don't
remember who or what struck the spark out. "You are running logic too
hard," he said; "the difficulty with all morality is not to know where it
is to begin, but where it is to stop."
"I didn't know it had to stop," said Vincent; "I thought it had to go on."
"Yes, but not as morality," said Father Payne; "as instinct and
feeling--only very elementary people indeed obey rules, _because_ they
are rules. The righteous man obeys them because on the whole he agrees with
them."
"But in one sense it isn't possible to be too good?" said Vincent.
"No," said Father Payne, "not if you are sure what good is--but it is quite
easy to be too righteous, to have too many rules and scruples--not to live
your own life at all, but an anxious, timid, broken-winged sort of life,
like some of the fearful saints in the _Pilgrim's Progress_, who got
no fun out of the business at all. Don't you remember what Mr. Feeblemind
says? I can't quote--it's a glorious passage."
Barthrop slipped out and fetched a _Pilgrim's Progress_, which he put
over Father Payne's shoulder. "Thank you, old man," said Father Payne,
"that's very kind of you--that is morality translated into feeling!"
He turned over the pages, and read the bit in his resonant voice:
"'I am, as I said, a man of a weak and feeble mind, and shall be offended
and made weak at that which others can bear. I shall like no Laughing: I
shall like no gay Attire: I shall like no unprofitable Questions. Nay, I am
so weak a man, as to be offended with that which others have a liberty to
do. I do not know all the truth: I am a very ignorant Christian man;
sometimes, if I hear some rejoice in the Lord, it troubles me, because I
cannot do so too.'"
"There," he said, "that's very good writing, you know--full of
freshness--but you are not meant to admire the poor soul: _that's_ not
the way to go on pilgrimage! There is something wrong with a man's
religion, if it leaves him in that state. I don't mean that to be happy is
always a sign of grace--it often is simply a lack of sympathy and
imagination; but to be as good as Mr. Feeblemind, and at the same time as
unhappy, is a clear sign that something is wrong. He is like a dog that
_will_ try to get through a narrow gap with a stick in his mouth--he
can't make out why he can't do his duty and bring the stick--it catches on
both sides, and won't let him through. He knows it is his business to bring
the thing back at once, but he is prevented in some mysterious way. It
doesn't occur to him to put the stick down, get through himself, and then
pull it through by the end. That is why our duty is often so hard, because
we think we ought to do it simply and directly, when it really wants a
little adjusting--we regard the momentary precept, not the ultimate
principle."
"But what is to tell us where to draw the line," said Vincent, "and when to
disregard the precept?"
"Ah," said Father Payne, "that's my great discovery, which no one else will
ever recognise--that is where the sense of beauty comes in!"
"I don't see that the sense of beauty has anything to do with morality,"
said Vincent.
"Ah, but that is because you are at heart a Puritan," said Father Payne;
"and the mistake of all Puritans is to disregard the sense of beauty--all
the really great saints have felt about morality as an artist feels about
beauty. They don't do good things because they are told to do them, but
because they feel them to be beautiful, splendid, attractive; and they
avoid having anything to do with evil things, because such things are ugly
and repellent."
"But when you have to do a thoroughly disagreeable thing," said Vincent,
"there often isn't anything beautiful about it either way. I'll give you a
small instance. Some months ago I had been engaged for a fortnight to go to
a thoroughly dull dinner-party with some dreary relations of mine, and a
man asked me to come and dine at his club and meet George Meredith, whom I
would have given simply anything to meet. Of course I couldn't do it--I had
to go on with the other thing. I had to do what I hated, without the
smallest hope of being anything but fearfully bored: and I had to give up
doing what would have interested me more than anything in the world. Of
course, that is only a small instance, but it will suffice."
"It all depends on how you behaved at your dinner-party when you got
there," said Father Payne, smiling; "were you sulky and cross, or were you
civil and decent?"
"I don't know," said Vincent; "I expect I was pretty much as usual. After
all, it wasn't their fault!"
"You are all right, my boy," said Father Payne; "you have got the sense of
beauty right enough, though you probably call it by some uncomfortable
name. I won't make you blush by praising you, but I give you a good mark
for the whole affair. If you had excused yourself, or asked to be let off,
or told a lie, it would have been ugly. What you did was in the best taste:
and that is what I mean. The ugly thing is to clutch and hold on. You did
more for yourself by being polite and honest than even George Meredith
could have done for you. What I mean by the sense of beauty, as applied to
morality, is that a man must be a gentleman first, and a moralist
afterwards, if he can. It is grabbing at your own sense of righteousness,
if you use it to hurt other people. Your own complacency of conscience is
not as important as the duty of not making other people uncomfortable. Of
course there are occasions when it is right to stand up to a moral bully,
and then you may go for him for all you are worth: but these cases are
rare; and what you must not do is to get into the way of a sort of moral
skirmishing. In ordinary life, people draw their lines in slightly
different places according to preference: you must allow for temperament.
You mustn't interfere with other people's codes, unless you are prepared to
be interfered with. It is impossible to be severely logical. Take a thing
like the use of money: it is good to be generous, but you mustn't give away
what you can't afford, because then your friends have to pay your bills.
What everyone needs is something to tell him when he must begin practising
a virtue, and when to stop practising it. You may say that common sense
does that. Well, I don't think it does! I know sensible people who do very
brutal things: there must be something finer than common sense: it must be
a mixture of sense and sympathy and imagination, and delicacy and humour
and tact--and I can't find a better way of expressing it than to call it a
sense of beauty, a faculty of judging, in a fine, sweet-tempered, gentle,
quiet way, with a sort of instinctive prescience as to where the ripples of
what you do and say will spread to, and what sort of effect they will
produce. That's the right sort of virtue--attractive virtue--which makes
other people wish to behave likewise. I don't say that a man who lives like
that can avoid suffering: he suffers a good deal, because he sees ugly
things going on all about him; but he doesn't cause suffering--unless he
intends to--and even so he doesn't like doing it. He is never spiteful or
jealous. He often makes mistakes, but he recognises them. He doesn't erect
barriers between himself and other people. He isn't always exactly popular,
because many people hate superiority whenever they see it: but he is
trusted and loved and even taken advantage of, because he doesn't go in for
reprisals."
"But if you haven't got this sense of beauty," said Vincent, "how are you
to get it?"
"By admiring it," said Father Payne. "I don't say that the people who have
got it are conscious of it--in fact they are generally quite unconscious of
it. Do you remember what Shelley--who was, I think, one of the people who
had the sense of beauty as strongly as anyone who ever lived--what he said
to Hogg, when Hogg told him how he had shut up an impertinent young
ruffian? 'I wish I could be as exclusive as you are,' said Shelley with a
sigh, feeling, no doubt, a sense of real failure--'but I cannot!' Shelley's
weakness was a much finer thing than Hogg's strength. I don't say that
Shelley was perfect: his imagination ran away with him to an extent that
may be called untruthful; he idealised people, and then threw them over
when he discovered them to be futile; but that is the right kind of mistake
to make: the wrong kind of mistake is to see people too clearly, and to
take for granted that they are not as delightful as they seem."
"You mean that if one must choose," said Vincent, "it is better to be a
fool than a knave."
"Why, of course," said Father Payne; "but don't call it 'a fool'--call it
'a child': that's the kind of beauty I mean, the unsuspicious, guileless,
trustful, affectionate temper--that to begin with: and you must learn, as
you go on, a quality which the child has not always got--a sense of humour.
That is what experience ought to give you--a power, that is, of seeing what
is really there, and of being more amused than shocked by it. That helps
you to distinguish real knavishness from childish faults. A great many of
the absurd, perverse, unkind, unpleasant things which people do are not
knavish at all--they are silly, selfish little diplomacies, guileless
obedience to conventions, unreasonable deference to imaginary authority.
People don't mean any harm by such tricks--they are the subterfuges of
weakness: but when you come upon real cynical deliberate knavishness--that
is different. There's nothing amusing about that. But you must be indulgent
to weakness, and only severe with strength."
"I'm getting a little confused," said Vincent.
"Not as much as I am," said Father Payne; "I don't know where I have got
to, I am sure. I seem to have changed hares! But one thing does emerge, and
that is, that a sort of inspired good taste is the only thing which can
regulate morals. The root of all morals is ultimately beauty. Why are we
not all as greedy and dirty as the old cave-men? For the simple reason that
something, for which he was not responsible, began to work in the caveman's
mind. He said to himself, 'This is not the way to behave: it would be nicer
not to have killed Mary when I was angry.' And then, when that impulse is
once started, human beings go too fast, and want to carry out their new
discoveries of rules and principles too far: and you must have a regulating
force: and if you can find a better force than the instinct for what is
beautiful, tell me, and I'll undertake to talk for at least as long about
it. I must stop! My sense of beauty warns me that I am becoming a bore."