I suppose I had said something high-minded, showing a supposed contempt of
money, for Father Payne looked at me in silence.
"You mustn't say such things," said he, at last. "I'll tell you why! What
you said was perfectly genuine, and I have no doubt you feel it--but, if
I may say so, it's like talking about a place where you have never been, as
if you had visited it, when you have only read about it in the guide-book.
I don't mean that you wish to deceive for an instant--but you simply don't
know! That's the tragic thing about money--that it is both so important and
so unimportant. If you have enough money, you need never give it a thought;
if you haven't, it's the devil! It's like health--no one who hasn't been on
the wrong side of the dividing line knows what a horrible place the wrong
side is. Those two things--I daresay there are others--poverty and
ill-health--put a man on the rack. The healthy man, and the man with a
sufficient income, are apt to think that the poor man and the ill man make
a great fuss about very little. I don't know about ill-health, but by
George, I know all about poverty--and I'll tell you once for all. For
twenty years I was poor, and this is what that means. To be tied hand and
foot to a piece of hideous drudgery--morning by morning, month by month,
and with the consciousness too that, if health fails you, or if you lose
your work, you will either starve or have to sponge on your friends--never
to be able to do what you like or go where you like--to know that the world
is full of beautiful places, delightful people, interesting ideas, books,
talk, art, music--to sicken for all these things, and not even to have the
time or energy to get hold of such scraps of them as can be found cheap in
London--to feel time slipping away, and all your instincts for beautiful
things unused and unsated--to live a solitary, grubby, nasty life--never
able to entertain a friend, or to go a trip with a friend, or to do a
kindness, or to help anyone generously--and yet to feel that with an income
which many people would regard as ridiculously inadequate, you could do
most of these things--the slavery, the bondage, the dreariness of it!" He
broke off, much moved.
"But," said I, "don't many quite poor people live happily and contentedly
and kindly with minute incomes?"
"Why, yes," said Father Payne, "of course they do!--and I'm willing enough
to admit that I ought to have done better than I did. But then I had been
brought up differently, and by the time I had done with Oxford, I had all
the tastes and instincts of the well-to-do man. That was the mischief, that
I had tasted freedom. Of course, if I had been cast in a stronger and
nobler mould, it would have been different--but all my senses had been
acutely developed, my faculties of interest and enjoyment and
appreciation--not gross things, mind you, nor feelings that _ought_ to
be starved, but just the wholesome delights of the well-educated man. I did
not want to be extravagant, and I knew too that there were millions of
people in the same case as myself. There was every reason why I should
behave decently about it! If I had been really interested in my work, I
could have done better--but I did not believe in the value of my work--I
taught men, not to educate them, but that they might pass an examination
and never look at the beastly stuff again. Whenever I reached the point at
which I became interested, I had to hold my hand. And then, too, the work
tired me without exercising my mind. There were the vacations, of
course--but I couldn't afford to leave London--I simply lived in hell. I
don't say that I didn't get some discipline out of it--and my escape gave
me a stock of gratitude and delight that has been simply inexhaustible. The
misery of it for me was that I had to live an unreal life. If I had been
poor, and had had my leisure, and had worked at things I cared about, with
a set, let us say, of young artists, all working too at things which they
cared about, it would have been different--but I hadn't the energy left to
make friends, or the time to find any congenial people. I can't describe
what a nightmare it all was--so that when I hear you speaking as if money
didn't really matter, I simply feel that you don't know what a tragedy it
can be, or what your own income saves you from. You and I have the
Epicurean temperament, my boy; it's no good pretending we haven't--things
appeal to our mind and senses in a way they don't appeal to everyone. So I
don't think that people ought to talk lightly about money, unless they have
known poverty and _not_ suffered under it. I used to ask myself in
those days if it was possible to suffer more, when every avenue reaching
away out of my life to the things I loved and cared for seemed to be closed
to me by an impassable barrier."
"But one can practise oneself in doing without things?" I said.
"With about as much success," said Father Payne, "as you can practise doing
without food."
"But isn't it partly that people are unduly reticent about money?" I said.
"If people could only say frankly what they can and what they can't afford,
it would simplify things very much."
"I don't know," said Father Payne. "Money is one of those curious
things--uninteresting if you have enough, tragic if you haven't. I don't
think talking about money is vulgar--I think it is simply dull: to discuss
poverty is like discussing a disease--to discuss wealth is like talking
about food or wine. The poverty that simply humiliates and pinches can't be
joked about--it's far too serious for that! Of course, there are men who
don't really feel the call of life. Look at our friend Kaye! If Kaye had to
live in London lodgings, he wouldn't mind a bit, if he could get to the
Museum Reading-Room--he only wants books and his own work--he doesn't want
company or music or art or talk or friends. He is wholly indifferent to
nasty food or squalor. Poverty is not a real evil to him. If he had money
he wouldn't know how to spend it. I read a book the other day about a
priest who lived a very devoted life in the slums--he had two rooms in a
clergy-house--and there was a chapter in praise of the way in which he
endured his poverty. But it was all wrong! What that man really enjoyed was
preaching and ceremonial and company--he had a real love of human beings.
Well, that man's life was crammed with joy--he got exactly what he wanted
all day long. It wasn't a self-sacrificing life--it would have been to you
and me--but he no doubt woke day after day, with a prospect of having his
whole time taken up with things he thoroughly enjoyed."
"But what about the people," I said, "who really enjoy just the sense of
power which money gives them, without using it--or the people whose only
purpose in using it is the pleasure of being known to have it?"
"Oh, of course, they are simply barbarians," said Father Payne, "and it
doesn't do _them_ any harm to be poor. No, the tragedy lies in the
case of a man with really expansive, generous, civilised instincts, to whom
the world is full of wholesome and urgent delights, and whose life is
simply starved out of him by poverty. I have a great mind to send you to
London for a couple of months, to live on a pound a week, and see what you
make of it."
"I'll go if you wish it," I said.
"It might bring things home to you," said Father Payne, smiling, "but again
it probably would not, because it would only be a game--the real pinch
would not come. Most people would rather enjoy migrating to hell from
heaven for a month--it would just give them a sharper relish for heaven."
"But do you really think your poverty hurt you?" I said.
"I have no doubt it did," said Father Payne. "Of course I was rescued in
time, before the bitterness really sank down into my soul. But I think it
prevented my ever being more than a looker-on. I believe I could have done
some work worth doing, if I could have tried a few experiments. I don't
know! Perhaps I am ungrateful after all. My poverty certainly gave me a
wish to help things along, and I doubt if I should have learnt that
otherwise. And I think, too, it taught me not to waste compassion on the
wrong things. The people to be pitied are simply the people whose minds and
souls are pinched and starved--the over-sensitive, responsive people, who
feel hunted and punished without knowing why. It's temperament always, and
not circumstance, which is the happy or the unhappy thing. I felt, when you
said what you did about poverty, that you neither knew how harmless it
could be, or how infinitely noxious it might be. I don't take a high-minded
view of money myself. I don't tell people to despise it. I always tell the
fellows here to realise what they can endure and what they can't. The first
requisite for a sensible man is to find work which he enjoys, and the next
requisite is for him to earn as much as he really needs--that is to say
without having to think daily and hourly about money. I don't over-estimate
what money can do, but it is foolish to under-estimate what the want of it
can do. I have seen more fine natures go to pieces under the stress of
poverty than under any other stress that I know. Money is perfectly
powerless as a shield against many troubles--and on the other hand it can
save a man from innumerable little wretchednesses and horrors which destroy
the beauty and dignity of life. I don't believe mechanically in humiliation
and renunciation and ignominy and contempt, as purifying influences. It all
depends upon whether they are gallantly and adventurously and humorously
borne. They often make some people only sore and diffident, and I don't
believe in learning to hate life. Not to learn your own limitations is
childish: and one of the insolences which is most heavily punished is that
of making a sacrifice without knowing if you can endure the consequences of
it. The people who begin by despising money as vulgar are generally the
people who end by making a mess which other people have to sweep up. So
don't be either silly or prudent about money, my boy! Just realise that
your first duty is not to be a burden on yourself or on other people. Find
out your minimum, and secure it if you can; and then don't give the matter
another thought. If it is any comfort to you, reflect that the best authors
and artists have almost invariably been good men of business, and don't
court squalor of any kind unless you really enjoy it."