Father Payne by Arthur Christopher Benson (novels in english .TXT) 📖

expect they are both of them very happy men, as happy as a man who goes to bed comfortably drunk. But, good God, the awakening!" Father Payne relapsed into a long silence, with knitted brows. I tried to start him afresh.

"But you often tell us to be serious, to be deadly earnest, about our work?" I said.

"Oh yes," said Father Payne, "that's another matter. We have to work hard, and put the best of ourselves into what we do. I don't want you to be an amiable dilettante. But I also want you to see past even the best art. You mustn't think that the stained-glass window is the body of heaven in its clearness. The sort of worshippers I object to are the men who shut themselves up in a church, and what with the colour and the music and the incense-smoke, think they are in heaven already. It's an intoxication, all that. I don't get you men to come here to make you drunk, but to get you to loathe drunkenness. God--that's the end of it all! God, who reveals Himself in beauty and kindness, and trustfulness, and charm and interest, and in a hundred pure and fine forces--yet each of them are but avenues which lead up to Him, the streets of the city, full of living water. But it is movement I am in search of--and I would rather be drowned in the depth of the sea than mislead anyone, or help him to sit still. I have made an awful row about it all," said Father Payne, relapsing into a milder mood--"But you will forgive me, I know. I can't bear to see these worthy men blocking the way with their unassailable, unabridged, authentic editions. They are like barbed-wire entanglements: and the worst of it is that, in spite of all their holy air of triumph, they enjoy few things more than tripping each other up! They condemn each other to eternal perdition for misplacing a date or misspelling a name. It's like getting into a bed of nettles to get in among these little hierophants. They remind me of the bishops at some ancient Church Council or other who tore the clothes off two right reverend consultants, and literally pulled them limb from limb in the name of Christ. That's the end of these holy raptures, my boy! They unchain the beast within."


LXII


OF CONSISTENCY

There had been a little vague talk about politics, and someone had quoted a definition of a true Liberal as a man who, if he had only to press a button in a dark room to annihilate all cranks, faddists, political quacks, extremists, propagandists, and nostrum-mongers, would not dream of doing so, as a matter of conscience, on the ground that everyone has a right to hold his own beliefs and to persuade the world to accept them if he can. Father Payne laughed at this; but Rose, who had been nettled, I fancy, at a lack of deference for his political experience, his father being a Unionist M.P., said loudly, "Hear, hear! that's the only sort of Liberal whom I respect."

A look of sudden anger passed over Father Payne's face--unmistakable and uncompromising wrath. "Come, Rose," he said, "this isn't a political meeting; and even if it were, why proclaim yourself as accepting a definition which is almost within the comprehension of a chimpanzee?"

There was a faint laugh at this, but everyone had an uncomfortable sense of thunder in the air. Rose got rather white, and his nostrils expanded. "I'm sorry I put it in that way," he said rather frostily, "if you object. But I mean it, I think. I don't like diluted Liberalism."

"Yes, but you beg the question by calling it diluted," said Father Payne. "If anyone had said that the only Tory he respected was a man who if he could press a button in a still darker room, and by doing so bring it to pass that all institutions on the face of the earth would remain immutably fixed for ever and ever, and would feel himself bound conscientiously to do it, you wouldn't accept that as a definition of Conservatism? These things are not hard and fast matters of principle--they are only tendencies. Toryism is an instinct to trust custom and authority, Liberalism is an instinct to welcome development and change. All that the definition of Liberalism which was quoted means is, that the Liberal has a deep respect for freedom of opinion; and all that my grotesque definition of Toryism means is that a Tory prefers to trust a fixed tradition. But, of course, both want a settled Government, and both have to recognise that the world and its conditions change. The Tory says, 'Look before you leap'; the Liberal says, 'Leap before you look.' But it is really all a matter of infinite gradations, and what differentiates people is merely their idea of the pace at which things can go and ought to go. Why should you say that you can only respect a man who wants to go at sixty miles an hour, any more than I should say I can only respect a man who wants to remain absolutely still?"

Rose had by this time recovered his temper, and said, "It was rather crude, I admit. But what I meant was that if a man feels that all opinions are of equal value, he must give full weight to all opinions. The doctrinaire Liberal seems to me to be just as much inclined to tyrannise as the doctrinaire Tory, and to use his authority on the side of suppression when it is convenient to do so, and against all his own principles."

"I don't think that is quite fair," said Father Payne. "You must have a working system; you can't try everyone's experiments. All that the Liberal says is, 'Persuade us if you can.' Pure Liberalism would be anarchy, just as pure Toryism would be tyranny. Both are intolerable. But just as the Liberal has to compromise and say, 'This may not be the ultimate theory of the Government, but meanwhile the world has to be governed,' so the Tory has to compromise, if a large majority of the people say, 'We will not be governed by a minority for their interest; we will be governed for our own.' The parliamentary vote is just a way of avoiding civil war; you can't always resort to force, so you resort to arbitration. But why the Liberal position is on the whole the stronger is because it says frankly, 'If you Tories can persuade the nation to ask you to govern it, we will obey you.' The weakness of the Tory position is that it has to make exactly the same concessions, while it claims to be inspired by a divine sort of knowledge as to what is just and right. I personally mistrust all intuitions which lead to tyranny. Of course, the weakness of the whole affair is that the man who believes in democracy has to assume that all have equal rights; that would be fair enough if all people were born equal in character and ability, and influence and wealth. But that isn't the case; and so the Liberal says, 'Democracy is a bad system perhaps, but it is the only system,' and it is fairer to maintain that everyone who gets into the world has as good a right as anyone else to be there, than it is to say, 'Some people have a right to manage the world and some have only a duty to obey.' Both represent a side of the truth, but neither represents the whole truth. At worst Liberalism is a combination of the weak against the strong, and Toryism a combination of the strong against the weak! I personally wish the weak to have a chance; but what we all really desire is to be governed by the wise and good, and my hope for the world is that the quality of it is improving. I want the weak to become sensible and self-restrained, and the strong to become unselfish and disinterested. It is generosity that I want to see increase--it is the finest of all qualities--the desire, I mean to serve others, to admire, to sympathise, to share, to rejoice, in other people's happiness. That would solve all our difficulties."

"Yes, of course," said Rose. "But I would like to go back again, and say that what I was praising was consistency."

"But there is no such thing," said Father Payne, "except in combination with entire irrationality. One can't say at any time of one's life, 'I know everything worth knowing. I am in a position to form a final judgment.' You can say, 'I will shut off all fresh light from my mind, and I will consider no further evidence,' but that isn't a thing to respect! I begin to suspect, Rose, that why you praised the uncompromising Liberal, as you call him, is because he is the only kind of opponent who isn't dangerous. A man who takes up such a position as I have described is practically insane. He has a fixed idea, which neither argument nor evidence can alter. The uncompromising man of fixed opinions, whatever those opinions may be, is almost the only man I do not respect, because he is really the only inconsistent person. He says, 'I have formed an opinion which is based on experience, and I shall not alter it.' That is tantamount to saying that you have done with experience; it is a claim to have attained infallibility through fallible faculties. Where is the dignity of that? It's just a deification of stupidity and stubbornness and insolence and complacency."

"But you must take your stand on _some_ certainties," said Rose.

"The fewer the better," said Father Payne. "One may learn to discriminate between things, and to observe differences; but that is very different from saying that you have got at the ultimate essence of any one thing. I am all for clearness--we ought not to confuse things with each other, or use the same names for different things; but I'm all against claiming absolute and impeccable knowledge. It may be a comfortable system for a man who doesn't want to be bothered; but he is only deferring the bother--he is like a man who stays in bed because he doesn't like dressing. But it isn't a solution to stay in bed--it is only suspending the solution. No, we mustn't have any regard for human consistency--it's a very paltry attribute; it's the opposite of anthropomorphism. That makes out God to be in the image of man, but consistency claims for man the privilege of God. And that isn't wholesome, you know, either for a man or his friends!"

"I give up," said Rose: "can nothing be logical?"

"Hardly anything," said Father Payne, "except logic itself. You have to coin logical ideas into counters to play with. No two things, for instance, can ever be absolutely equal, except imaginary equalities--and that's the mischief of logic applied to life, that it presumes an exact valuation of the ideas it works with, when no two people's valuations of the same idea are identical, and even one person's valuation varies from time to time; and logic breeds a phantom sort of consistency which only exists in the imagination. You know the story of how Smith and Jones were arguing, and Smith said, 'Brown will agree with me': 'Yes,' said Jones triumphantly, 'he will, but for my reasons!'"


LXIII


OF WRENS AND LILIES

It was the first warm and sunny day, after a cold and cloudy spring: I took a long and leisurely walk with Father Payne down a valley among woods, of which Father Payne was