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

to struggle out, with its pinions fouled and dabbled, wondering miserably what it has done to be so filthily hampered."

He stopped for a minute, and I could see that his eyes were full of tears.

"It is no good giving up the game!" he said. "We are in the devil of a mess, no doubt: and even if we try our best to avoid it, we dip into the slime sometimes! But we must hold fast to the beautiful things, and be on the look-out for them everywhere. Not shut our eyes in a rapture of sentiment, and think that we can:


"'Walk all day, like the Sultan of old, in a garden
of spice!'


"That won't do, of course! We can't get out of it like that! But we must never allow ourselves to doubt the beauty and goodness of God, or make any mistake about which side He is on. The marvel of dear old Mrs. Chetwynd is just that beauty has triumphed, in spite of everything. With every kind of trouble, every temptation to be dispirited and spiteful and wretched, that fine spirit has got through--and, by George, I envy her the awakening, when that sweet old soul slips away from the cage where she is caught, and goes straight to the arms of God!"

He turned away from me as he said this, and I could see that he struggled with a sob. Then he looked at me with a smile, and put his arm in mine. "Old man," he said, "I oughtn't to behave like this--but a day like this, when the world looks as it was meant to look, and as, please God, it _will_ look more and more, goes to my heart! I seem to see what God desires, and what He can't bring about yet, for all His pains. And I want to help Him, if I can!


"'We too! We ask no pledge of grace,
No rain of fire, no heaven-hung sign.
Thy need is written on Thy face--
Take Thou our help, as we take Thine!'


"That's what I mean by worship--the desire to be _used_ in the service of a Power that longs to make things pure and happy, with groanings that cannot be uttered. The worst of some kinds of worship is that they drug you with a sort of lust for beauty, which makes you afraid to go back and pick up your spade. We mustn't swoon in happiness or delight, but if we say 'Take me, use me, let me help!' it is different, because we want to share whatever is given us, to hand it on, not to pile it up. Of course it's little enough that we can do: but think of old Mrs. Chetwynd again--what has she to give? Yet it is more than Solomon in all his beauty had to offer. We must be simple, we mustn't be ambitious. Do you remember the old statesman who, praising a disinterested man, said that he was that rare and singular type of man who did public work for the sake of the public? That's what I want you to do--that is what a writer can do. He can remind the world of beauty and simplicity and purity. He can be 'a messenger, an interpreter, one among a thousand, _to show unto man his uprightness_!' That's what you have got to do, old boy! Don't show unto man his nastiness--don't show him up! Keep on reminding him of what he really is or can be."

He went on after a moment. "I ought not to talk like this," he said, "because I have failed all along the line. 'I put in my thumb and pull out a plum,' like Jack Homer. I try a little to hand it on, but it is awfully nice, you know, that plum! I don't pretend it isn't."

"Why, Father," I said, much moved at his kind sincerity, "I don't know anyone in the world who eats fewer of his plums than you!"

"Ah, that's a friendly word!" said Father Payne. "But you can't count the plum-stones on my plate."

We did not say much after this. We walked back in the summer twilight, and my mind began to stir and soar, as indeed it often did when Father Payne showed me his heart in all its strength and cleanness. No one whom I ever met had his power of lighting a flame of pure desire and beautiful hopefulness, in the fire of which all that was base and mean seemed to shrivel away.


XLV


OF A CHANGE OF RELIGION

I was walking one day with Father Payne; he said to me, "I have been reading Newman's _Apologia_ over again--I must have read it a dozen times! It is surely one of the most beautiful and singular books in the whole world?--and I think that the strangest sentence in it is this,--'Who would ever dream of making the world his confidant?' Did Newman, do you suppose, not realise that he had done that? And what is stranger still, did he not know that he had told the world, not the trivial things, the little tastes and fancies which anyone might hear, but the most intimate and sacred things, which a man would hardly dare to say to God upon his knees. Newman seems to me in that book to have torn out his beating and palpitating heart, and set it in a crystal phial for all the world to gaze upon. And further, did Newman really not know that this was what he always desired to do and mostly did--to confide in the world, to tell his story as a child might tell it to a mother? It is clear to me that Newman was a man who did not only desire to be loved by a few friends, but wished everybody to love him. I will not say that he was never happy till he had told his tale, and I will not say that artist-like he loved applause: but he did _not_ wish to be hidden, and he earnestly desired to be approved. He craved to be allowed to say what he thought--it is pathetic to hear him say so often how 'fierce' he was--and yet he hated suspicion and hostility and misunderstanding: and though he loved a refined sort of quiet, he even more loved, I think, to be the centre of a fuss! I feel little doubt in my own mind that, even when he was living most retired, he wished people to be curious about what he was doing. He was one of those men who felt he had a special mission, a prophetical function. He was a dramatic creature, a performer, you know. He read the lessons like an actor: he preached like an actor; he was intensely self-conscious. Naturally enough! If you feel like a prophet, the one sign of failure is that your audience melts away."

Father Payne paused a moment, lost in thought.

"But," I said, "do you mean that Newman calculated all his effects?"

"Oh, not deliberately," said Father Payne, "but he was an artist pure and simple--he was never less by himself than when he was alone, as the old Provost of Oriel said of him. He lived dramatically by a kind of instinct. The unselfconscious man goes his own way, and does not bother his head about other people: but Newman was not like that. When he was reading, it was always like the portrait of a student reading. That's the artist's way--he is always living in a sort of picture-frame. Why, you can see from the _Apologia_, which he wrote in a few weeks, and often, as he once said, in tears, how tenderly and eagerly he remembered all he had ever done or thought. His descriptions of himself are always romantic: he lived in memories, like all poets."

"But that gives one a disagreeable sense of unreality--of pose," I said.

"Ah, but that's very short-sighted," said Father Payne. "Newman's was a beautiful spirit--wonderfully tender-hearted, self-restrained, gentle, sensitive, beauty-loving. He loved beauty as much as any man who ever lived--beautiful conduct, beautiful life--and then his gift of expression! There's a marvellous thing. It's pure poetry, most of the _Apologia_: look at the way he flashes into metaphor, at his exquisite pictures of persons, at his irony, his courtesy, his humour, his pathos. He and Ruskin knew exactly how to confide in the world, how to humiliate themselves gracefully in public, how to laugh at themselves, how to be gay--it's all so well-bred, so delicate! Depend upon it, that's the way to make the world love you--to tell it all about yourself like a charming child, without any boasting or bragging. The world is awfully stupid! It adores well-bred egotism. We are all deeply inquisitive about _people_; and if you can reveal yourself without vanity, and are a lovable creature, the world will overwhelm you with love. You can't pay the world a greater compliment than to open your heart to it. You must not bore it, of course, nor must you seem to be demanding its applause. You must just seem to be in need of sympathy and comfort. You must be a little sad, a little tired, a little bewildered. I don't say that is easy to do, and a man must not set out to do it. But if a man has got something childlike and innocent about him, and a naive way with him, the world will take him to its heart. The world loves to pity, to compassionate, to sympathise, much more than it loves to admire."

"But what about the religious side of it all?" I said.

"Ah," said Father Payne, "I think that is more touching still. The people who change their religion, as it is called,--there is something extremely captivating about them as a rule. To want to change your form of religion simply means that you are unhappy and uneasy. You want more beauty, or more assurance, or more sympathy, or more antiquity. Have you never noticed how all converts personify their new Church in feminine terms? She becomes a Madonna, something at once motherly and young. It is the passion with which the child turns away from what is male and rough, to the mother, the nurse, the elder sister. The convert isn't really in search of dogmas and doctrines: he is in love with a presence, a shape, something which can clasp and embrace and love him. I don't feel any real doubt of that. The man who turns away to some other form of faith wants a home. He sees the ugliness, the spite, the malice, the contentiousness of his own Church. He loathes the hardness and uncharitableness of it; he is like a boy at school sick for home. To me Newman's logic is like the effort of a man desperately constructing a bridge to escape to the other side of the river. The land beyond is like a landscape seen from a hill, a scene of woods and waters, of fields and hamlets--everything seems peaceful and idyllic there. He wants the wings of a dove, to flee away and be at rest. It is the same feeling which makes people wish to travel. When you travel, the new land is a spectacular thing--it is all a picture. It is not that you crave to live in a foreign land: you merely want the luxury of seeing life without living life. No ordinary person goes to live in Italy because he has studied the political constitution and organisation of Italy, and prefers it to that of England.