We were discussing Keats and his premature death. Someone had said that,
beside being one of the best, he was also one of the most promising of
poets; and Father Payne had remarked that reading Keats's letters made him
feel more directly in the presence of a man of genius than any other book
he knew. Kaye had added that the death of Keats seemed to him the most
ghastly kind of waste, at which Father Payne had smiled, and said that that
presupposed that he was knocked out by some malign or indifferent force.
"It is possible--isn't it?" he added, "that he was needed elsewhere and
summoned away." "Then why was he so elaborately tortured first?" said Kaye.
"Well," said Father Payne, "I can conceive that if he had recovered his
health, and escaped from his engagement with Fanny Brawne, he might have
been a much finer fellow afterwards. There were two weak points in Keats,
you know--his over-sensuousness and a touch of commonness--I won't call it
vulgarity," he added, "but his jokes are not of the best quality! I do not
feel sure that his suffering might not have cleared away the poisonous
stuff."
"Perhaps," said Kaye; "but doesn't that make it more wasteful still? The
world needs beauty--and for a man to die so young with his best music in
him seems to me a clumsy affair."
"I don't know," said Father Payne; "it seems to me harder to define the
word _waste_ than almost any word I know. Of course there are cases
when it is obviously applicable--if a big steamer carrying a cargo of wheat
goes down in a storm, that is a lot of human trouble thrown away--and a war
is wasteful, because nations lose their best and healthiest parental stock.
But it isn't a word to play with. In a middle-class household it is applied
mainly to such things as there being enough left of a nice dish for the
servants to enjoy; and, generally speaking, I think it might be applied to
all cases in which the toil spent over the making of a thing is out of all
proportion to the enjoyment derived from it. But the difficulty underlying
it is that it assumes a knowledge of what a man's duty is in this
world--and I am not by any means sure that we know. Look at the phrase 'a
waste of time.' How do we know exactly how much time a man ought to allot
to sleep, to work, to leisure? I had an old puritanical friend who was very
fond of telling people that they wasted time. He himself spent nearly two
hours of every day in dressing and undressing. That is to say that when he
died at the age of seventy-six, he had spent about six entire years in
making and unmaking his toilet! Let us assume that everyone is bound to
give a certain amount of time to doing the necessary work of the
world--enough to support, feed, clothe, and house himself, with a margin to
spare for the people who can't support themselves and can't work. Then
there are a lot of outlying things which must be done--the work of
statesmen, lawyers, doctors, writers--all the people who organise, keep
order, cure, or amuse people. Then there are all the people who make
luxuries and comforts--things not exactly necessary, but still reasonable
indulgences. Now let us suppose that anyone is genuinely and sensibly
occupied in any one of these ways, and does his or her fair share of the
world's work: who is to say how such workers are to spend their margin of
time? There are obviously certain people who are mere drones in the
hive--rich, idle, extravagant people: we will admit that they are wasters.
But I don't admit for a moment that all the time spent in enjoying oneself
is wasted, and I think that people have a right to choose what they do
enjoy. I am inclined to believe that we are here to live, and that work is
only a part of our material limitations. A great deal of the usefulness of
work is not its intrinsic value, but its value to ourselves. It isn't only
what we perform that matters; it is the fact that work forces us into
relations with other people, which I take to be the experience we all need.
In the old dreary books of my childhood, the elders were always hounding
the young people into doing something useful--useful reading, useful
sewing, and so forth. But I am inclined to believe that sociability and
talk are more useful than reading, and that solitary musing and dreaming
and looking about are useful too. All activity is useful, all interchange,
all perception. What isn't useful is anything which hides life from you,
any habit that drugs you into inactivity and idleness, anything which makes
you believe that life is romantic and sentimental and fatuous. I wouldn't
even go so far as to say that _all_ the time spent in squabbling and
quarrelling is useless, because it brings you up against people who think
differently from yourself. That becomes wasteful the moment it leaves you
with the impotent desire to hurt your adversary. No, I am inclined to think
that the only thing which is wasteful is anything which suspends interest
and animation and the love of life; and I don't blame idle and extravagant
people who live with zest and liveliness for doing that. I only blame them
for not seeing that their extravagance is keeping people at the other end
of the scale in drudgery and dulness. Of course the difficulty of it is,
that if we offered the lowest stratum of workers a great increase of
leisure, they would largely misuse it; and that is why I believe that in
the future a large part of the education of workers will be devoted to
teaching them how to employ their leisure agreeably and not noxiously. And
I believe that there are thousands of cases in the world which are
infinitely worse than the case of Keats--who, after all, had more joy of
the finest quality in his short life than most of us achieve. I mean the
cases of men and women with fine and sensitive instincts, who by being born
under base and down-trodden conditions are never able to get a taste of
clean, wholesome, and beautiful life at all--that's a much darker
problem."
"But how do you fit that into your theories of life at all?" said Vincent.
"Oh, it fits my theory of life well enough," said Father Payne. "You see, I
believe it to be a real battle, and not a sham fight. I believe in God as
the source of all the fine, beautiful, and free instincts, casting them
lavishly into the world, against a horribly powerful and relentless but
ultimately stupid foe. 'Who put the evil there?' you may say, 'and how did
it get there first?' Ah, I don't know that--that is the origin of evil. But
I don't believe that God put it there first, just for the interest of the
fight. I don't believe that He is responsible for waste--I think it is one
of the forces He is fighting. He pushes battalion after battalion to the
assault, and down they go. It's cruel work, but it isn't anything like so
cruel as to suppose that He arranged it all or even permitted it all. That
would indeed sicken and dishearten me. No, I believe that God never wastes
anything; but it's a fearful and protracted battle; and I believe that He
will win in the end. I read a case in the paper the other day of a little
child in a workhouse that had learnt a lot of infamous language, and cursed
and swore if it was given milk instead of beer or brandy. Am I to believe
that God was in any way responsible for putting a little child in that
position?--for allowing things to take shape so, if He could have checked
it? No, indeed! I do not believe in a God as helpless or as wicked as that!
There is something devilish there, for which He is not responsible, and
against which He is fighting as hard as He can."
"But doesn't heredity come in there?" said Vincent. "It isn't the child's
fault, and probably no amount of decent conditions would turn that child
into anything respectable."
"Yes," said Father Payne; "heredity is just one of the evil devices--but
don't you see the stupidity of it? It stops progress, but it also helps it
on--it hinders, but it also helps; and nothing in the world seems to me so
Divine as the way in which God is using and mastering heredity for good. It
multiplies evil, but it also multiplies good; and God has turned that
weapon against the contriver of it. The wiser that the world grows, the
more they will see how to use heredity for happiness, by preventing the
tainted from continuing to taint the races. The slow civilisation of the
world is the strongest proof I know that the battle is going the right way.
The forces of evil are being slowly transformed into the forces of good.
The waste of noble things is but the slow arrival of the new armies of
light. There is something real in fighting for a General who has a very
urgent and terrible business on hand. There is nothing real about fighting
for one who has brought both the armies into the field. It doesn't do to
sentimentalise about evil, and to say that it is hidden good! The world is
a probation, I don't doubt--but it is testing your strength against
something which is really there, and can do you a lot of harm, not against
something which is only there for the purpose of testing what might have
been made and kept both innocent and strong."