Father Payne, Arthur Christopher Benson [reading tree .TXT] 📗

partly because it emphasizes the intellectual side of belief, partly because it tries to cast a slur on the people who don't like ceremonial, and whom it does not suit--and most of all because ecclesiasticism aims at making you believe that other people can transact spiritual business on your account. In these democratic days, you can't have spiritual authority--you have got to find what people need, and help them to find it for themselves. The plain truth is that we don't want dogma. Of course it isn't to be despised, because it once meant something, even if it does not now. Dogmas are not unintelligible intellectual propositions imposed on the world. They are explanations, interpretations, attempts to link facts together. They have the sacredness of ideas which people lived by, and for which they were prepared to die. But many of them are scientific in form only, and the substance has gone out of them. We know more in one sense about life and God than we did, but we also know less, because we realise there is so much more to know. But now we want, I believe, two or three great ideas which everyone can understand--like Fatherhood and Brotherhood, like peace and orderliness and beauty. I think that a church service means all these things, or ought to. What people need is simplicity and beauty of life--joy and hope and kindness. Anything which helps these things on is fine; anything which bewilders and puzzles and gives a sense of dreariness is simply injurious. I want to be told to be quiet, to try again, not to be disheartened by failures, not to be angry with other people, to give up things, rather than to get them with a sauce of envy and spite--the feeling of a happy and affectionate family, in fact. The sort of thing I don't want is the Athanasian Creed. I can't regard it simply as a picturesque monument of ancient and ferocious piety. It seems to me an overhanging cloud of menace and mystification! It doesn't hurt the unintelligent Christian, of course--he simply doesn't understand it; but to the moderately intelligent it is like a dog barking furiously which may possibly get loose; a little more intelligence, and it is all right. You know the dog is safely tied up! Again, I don't mind the cursing psalms, because they give the parson the power of saying: 'We say this to remind ourselves that it was what people used to feel, and which Christ came to change.' I don't mind anything that is human--what I can't tolerate is anything inhuman or unintelligible. No one can misunderstand the Beatitudes; very few people can follow the arguments of St. Paul! You don't want only elaborate reasons for clever people, you want still more beautiful motives for simple people. It isn't perfect, our service, I admit, but it does me good."

"Tell me," I said--"to go back for a moment--something more about meditating--I like that!"

"Well," said Father Payne, "it's like anchoring to a thought. Thought is a fidgety thing, restless, perverse. It anchors itself very easily on to a grievance, or an unpleasant incident, or a squabble. Don't you know the misery of being jerked back, time after time, by an unpleasant thought? I think one ought to practise the opposite--and I know now by experience that it is possible. I will make a confession. I don't care for many of the Old Testament lessons myself. I think there's too much fact, or let us say incident, in them, and not enough poetry. Well, I take up my Bible, and I look at Job, or Isaiah, or the Revelation, and I read quietly on. Suddenly there's a gleam of gold in the bed of the stream--some splendid, deep, fine thought. I follow it out; I think how it has appeared in my own life, or in the lives of other people--it bears me away on its wings, I pray about it, I hope to be more like that--and so on. Sometimes it is a sharp revelation of something ugly and perverse in my own nature--I don't dwell long on that, but I see in imagination how it is likely to trouble me, and I hope that it will not delude me again; because these evil things delude one, they call noxious tricks by fine names. I say to myself, 'What you pretend is self-respect, or consistency, is really irritable vanity or stupid unimaginativeness.' But it is a mistake, I think, to dwell long on one's deficiencies: what one has got to do is to fill one's life full of positive, active, beautiful things, until there is no room for the ugly intruders. And, to put it shortly, a service makes me think about other people and about God; I fear it doesn't make me contrite or sorrowful. I don't believe in any sort of self-pity, nor do I think one ought to cultivate shame; those things lie close to death, and it is life that I am in search of--fulness of life. Don't let us bemoan ourselves, or think that a sign of grace!"

"But if you find yourself grubby, nasty, suspicious, irritable, isn't it a good thing to rub it in sometimes?" I said.

"No, no," said Father Payne, "life will do that hard enough. Turn your back on it all, look at the beautiful things, leave a thief to catch a thief, and the dead to bury the dead. Don't sniff at the evil thing; go and get a breath of fresh air."


XIII


OF NEWSPAPERS

Father Payne was a very irregular reader of the newspaper; he was not greedy of news, and he was incurious about events, while he disliked the way in which they were professionally dished up for human consumption. At times, however, he would pore long and earnestly over a daily paper with knitted brows and sighs. "You seem to be suffering a good deal over your paper to-day, Father!" said Barthrop once, regarding him with amusement. Father Payne lifted up his head, and then broke into a smile. "It's all right, my boy!" he said. "I don't despair of the world itself, but I feel that if the average newspaper represents the mind of the average man, the human race is very feeble--not worth saving! This sort of thing"--indicating the paper with a wave of his hand--"makes me realise how many things there are that don't interest me--and I can't get at them either through the medium of these writers' minds. They don't seem to want simply to describe the facts, but to manipulate them; they try to make you uncomfortable about the future, and contented with the past. It ought to be just the other way! And then I ask myself, 'Ought I, as a normal human being, to be as one-sided, as submissive, as trivial, as sentimental as this?' These vast summaries of public opinion, do they represent anyone's opinion at all, or are they simply the sort of thing you talk about in a railway-carriage with a man you don't know? Does anyone's mind really dwell on such things and ponder them? The newspapers do not really know what is happening--everything takes them by surprise. The ordinary person is interested in his work, his amusements, the people he lives with--in real things. There seems to be nothing real here; it is all shadowy, I want to get at men's minds, not at what journalists think is in men's minds. The human being in the newspapers seems to me an utterly unreal person, picturesque, theatrical, fatuous, slobbering, absurd. Does not the newspaper-convention misrepresent us as much as the book-convention misrepresents us? We straggle irregularly along, we are capable of entertaining at the same moment two wholly contrary opinions, we do what we don't intend to do, we don't carry out our hopes or our purposes. The man in the papers is agitated, excited, wild, inquisitive--the ordinary person is calm, indifferent, and on the whole fairly happy, unless some one frightens him. I can't make it out, because it isn't a conspiracy to deceive, and yet it does deceive; and what is more, most people don't even seem to know that they are being misrepresented. It all seems to me to differ as much from real life as the Morning Service read in church differs from the thoughts of the congregation!"

"How would you mend it?" said Barthrop. "It seems to me it must represent _something_."

"Something!" said Father Payne. "I don't know! I don't believe we are so stupid and so ignoble! As to mending it, that's another question. Writing is such a curious thing--it seems to represent anything in the world except the current of a man's thoughts. Reverie--has anyone ever tried to represent that? I have been out for a walk sometimes, and reflected when I came in that if what has passed through my mind were all printed in full in a book, it would make a large octavo volume--and precious stuff, too! Yet the few thoughts which do stand out when it is all over, the few bright flashes, they are things which can hardly be written down--at least they never are written down."

"But what would you do?" I said--"with the newspapers, I mean."

"Well," said Father Payne, "a great deal of the news most worth telling can be told best in pictures. I believe very much in illustrated papers. They really do help the imagination. That's the worst of words--a dozen scratches on a bit of paper do more to make one realise a scene than columns of description. I would do a lot with pictures, and a bit of print below to tell people what to notice. Then we must have a number of bare facts and notices--weather, business, trade, law--the sort of thing that people concerned must read. But I would make a clean sweep of fashion, and all sensational intelligence--murders, accidents, sudden deaths. I would have much more biography of living people as well as dead, and a few of the big speeches. Then I would have really good articles with pictures about foreign countries--we ought to know what the world looks like, and how the other people live. And then I would have one or two really fine little essays every day by the very best people I could get, amusing, serious, beautiful articles about nature and art and books and ideas and qualities--some real, good, plain, wise, fine, simple thinking. You want to get people in touch with the best minds!"

"And how many people would read such a paper?" I said.

"Oh, I don't know, I'm sure," said Father Payne with a groan. "I would for one! I want to have the feeling of being in touch day by day with the clever, interesting, lively, active-minded people, as if I had been listening to good talk. Isn't that possible? Instead of which I sit here, day after day, overflowing with my own ridiculous thoughts--and the world discharging all its staleness and stupidity like a sewer in these horrible documents. Take it away from me, someone! I'm fascinated by the disgusting smell of it!" I withdrew the paper from under his hands. "Thank you," said Father Payne feebly. "That's the horror of it--that the world isn't a dull place or a sensational place or a nasty place--and those papers make me feel it is all three!"

"I'm sorry you are so low about it," said Barthrop.

"Yes, because journalism ought to be the finest thing in the world," said Father Payne. "Just imagine! The power of talking, without any of the inconveniences of personality, to half-a-million people."

"But why doesn't it improve?" said Barthrop. "You always say that the public finds out what it wants, and will have it."

"In books, yes!" said Father Payne; "but in