Part 15 (1/2)
We stood for awhile upon one of the terraces, looking at the old house, and Father Payne said, ”I'm not sure that I approve of the taste for ruins; there is something to be said for a deserted castle, because it is a reminder that we do not need to safeguard ourselves so much against each others' ill-will; but a roofless church or a crumbling house--there's something sad about them. It seems to me a little like leaving a man unburied in order that we may come and sentimentalise over his bones. It means, this house, the decay of an old centre of life--there's nothing evil or cruel about it, as there is about a castle; and I am not sure that it ought not to be either repaired or removed--
”'And doorways where a bridegroom trode Stand open to the peering air.'”
”I don't know,” I said; ”I'm sure that this is somehow beautiful. Can't one feel that nature is half-tender, half-indifferent to our broken designs?”
”Perhaps,” said Father Payne, ”but I don't like being reminded of death and waste--I don't want to think that they can end by being charming--the vanity of human wishes is more sad than picturesque. I think Dr. Johnson was right when he said, 'After all, it is a sad thing that a man should lie down and die.'”
A little while afterwards he said, ”How strange it is that the loneliness of this place should be so delightful! I like my fellow-beings on the whole--I don't want to avoid them or to abolish them--but yet it is one of the greatest luxuries in the world to find a place where one is pretty sure of not meeting one of them.”
”Yes,” I said, ”it is very odd! I have been feeling to-day that I should like time to stand still this summer afternoon, and to spend whole days in rambling about here. I won't say,” I said with a smile, ”that I should prefer to be quite alone; but I shouldn't mind even that in a place like this. I never feel like that in a big town--there is always a sense of hostile currents there. To be alone in a town is always rather melancholy; but here it is just the reverse.”
”Indeed, yes,” said Father Payne, ”and it is one of the great mysteries of all to me what we really want with company. It does not actually take away from us our sense of loneliness at all. You can't look into my mind, nor can I look into yours; whatever we do or say to break down the veil between us, we can't do it. And I have often been happier when alone than I have ever been in any company.”
”Isn't it a sense of security?” I said; ”I suppose that it is an instinct derived from old savage days which makes us dread other human beings. The further back you go, the more hatred and mistrust you find; and I suppose that the presence of a friend, or rather of someone with whom one has a kind of understanding, gives a feeling of comparative safety against attack.”
”That's it, no doubt,” said Father Payne; ”but if I had to choose between spending the rest of my life in solitude, or in spending it without a chance of solitude, I should be in a great difficulty. I am afraid that I regard company rather as a wholesome medicine against the evils of solitude than I regard solitude as a relief from company. After all, what is it that we want with each other?--what do we expect to get from each other? I remember,” he said, smiling, ”a witty old lady saying to me once that eternity was a nightmare to her.--'For instance,' she said, 'I enjoy sitting here and talking to you very much; but if I thought it was going on to all eternity, I shouldn't like it at all.' Do we really want the company of any one for ever and ever? And if so, why? Do we want to agree or to disagree? Is the point of it that we want similarity or difference? Do we want to hear about other people's experiences, or do we simply want to tell our own? Is the desire, I mean, for congenial company anything more than the pleasure of seeing our own thoughts and ideas reflected in the minds of others; or is it a real desire to alter our own thoughts and ideas by comparing them with the experiences of others? Why do we like books, for instance? Isn't it more because we recognise our own feelings than because we make acquaintance with unfamiliar feelings? It comes to this? Can we really ever gain an idea, or can we only recognise our own ideas?”
”It is very difficult,” I said; ”if I answered hastily, I should say that I liked being with you because you give me many new ideas; but if I think about it, it seems to me that it is only because you make me recognise my own thoughts.”
”Yes,” said Father Payne, ”I think that is so. If I see another man behaving well where I should behave ill, I recognise that I have all the elements in my own mind for doing the same, but that I have given undue weight to some of them and not enough weight to others. I don't think, on the whole, that anyone can give one a new idea; he can only help one to a sense of proportion. But I want to get deeper than that. You and I are friends--at least I think so; but what exactly do we give each other? How do you affect my solitude, or I yours? I'm blessed if I know. It looks to me, indeed, as if you and I might be parts of one great force, one great spirit, and that we recognise our unity, through some material condition which keeps us apart. I am not sure that it isn't only the body that divides us, and that we are a part of the same thing behind it all.”
”But why, if that is so,” said I, ”do we feel a sense of unity with some people, and not at all with others? There are people, I mean, with whom I feel that I have simply nothing in common, and that our spirits could not possibly mix or blend. With you, to speak frankly, it is different. I feel as though I had known you far longer than a few months, and should never be in any real doubt about you. I recognise myself in you and yourself in me.
But there are many people in whom I don't recognise myself at all.”
Father Payne put his arm through mine, ”Well, old man,” he said, ”we must be content to have found each other, but we mustn't give up trying to find other people too. I think that is what civilisation means--a mutual recognition--we're only just at the start of it, you know. I'm in no doubt as to what you give me--it's a sense of trust. When I think about you, I feel, 'Come, there is someone at all events who will try to understand me and to forgive me and to share his best with me'--but even so, my boy, I shall enjoy being alone sometimes. I shall want to get away from everyone, even from you! There are thoughts I cannot share with you, because I want you to think better of me than I do of myself. I suppose that is vanity--but still old Wordsworth was right when he wrote:
”'And many love me; but by none Am I enough beloved.'”
x.x.xIX
OF THE WRITER'S LIFE
I was walking once with Father Payne in the fields, and he was talking about the difficulties of the writer's life. He said that the great problem for all industrious writers was how to work in such a way as not to be a nuisance to the people they lived with. ”Of course men vary very much in their habits,” he said; ”but if you look at the lives of authors, they often seem tiresome people to get on with. The difficulty is mostly this,”
he went on, ”that a writer can't write to any purpose for more than about three hours a day--if he works really hard, even that is quite enough to tire him out. Think what the brain is doing--it is concentrated on some idea, some scene, some situation. Take a novelist: he has to have a picture in his mind all the time--a clear visualisation of a place--a room, a garden, a wood; then he must know how his people move and look and speak, and he has to fly backwards and forwards from one to another; then he has the talk to create, and he has to be always rejecting thoughts and impressions and words, good enough in themselves, but not characteristic.
It is a fearful strain on imagination and emotion, on phrase-making and word-finding. The real wonder is not that a few people can do it better than others, but that anyone can do it at all. The difference between the worst novelist and the best is much less than the difference between the worst novelist and the person who can't write at all.
”Well, then, there is such a thing as inspiration; most creative writers get a book in their minds, and can think of nothing else, day and night, while it is on. The difficulty is to know what a writer is to do in the intervals between his books, and in the hours in which he is not writing.
He has got to take it easy somehow, and the question is what is he to do.
He can't, as a rule, do much in the way of hard exercise. Violent exercise in the open air is pleasant enough, but it leaves the brain torpid and stagnant. A man who really makes a business of writing has got to live through ten or twelve hours of a day when he isn't writing. He can't afford to read very much--at least he can't afford to read authors whom he admires, because they affect his style. There is something horribly contagious about style, because it is often much easier to do a thing in someone else's way than to do it in one's own. Pater was asked once if he had read Stevenson or Kipling, I forget which--'Oh no, I daren't!' he said, 'I have peeped into him occasionally, but I can't afford to read him. I have learnt exactly how I can approach and develop a subject, and if I looked to see how he does it, I should soon lose my power. The man with a style is debarred from reading fine books unless they are on lines entirely apart from his own.' That is perfectly true, I expect. There is nothing so dreadful as reading a writer whom one likes, and seeing that he has got deflected from his manner by reading some other craftsman. The effect is a very subtle one. If you really want to see that sort of sympathy at work, you should look at Ruskin's letters--his letters are deeply affected by the correspondent to whom he is writing. If he wrote to Carlyle or to Browning, he wrote like Carlyle and Browning, because, as he wrote, they were strongly in his mind.
”With a painter or a musician it is different--a lot of hand-work comes in which relieves the brain, so that they can work longer hours. But a writer, as a rule, while he is writing, can't even afford to talk very much to interesting people, because talking is hard work too.
”Well, then, a writer, as an artistic person, is rather easily bored. He likes vivid sensations and emphatic preferences--and it is not really good for him to be bored; a man may read the paper, write a few letters, stroll, garden, chatter--but if he takes his writing seriously, he must somehow be fresh for it. It isn't easy to combine writing with any other occupation, and it leaves many hours unoccupied.
”Carlyle is a terrible instance, because he was wretched and depressed when he was not writing; he was melancholy, peevish, physically unwell; and when he was writing, he was wholly absorbed very impatient of his labour, and most intolerable. Indeed, it does not look as if the home lives of writers have generally been very happy--there is too often a patent conspiracy to keep the great irritable babyish giant amused--and that's a bad atmosphere for anyone to live in--an unreal, a royal sort of atmosphere, of deferential scheming.”
I said something about Walter Scott. ”Ah yes,” said Father Payne, ”but Scott's work was amazing--it just seemed to overflow from a gigantic reservoir of vitality. He could do his day's work in the early hours, and then tramp about all day, chattering, farming, planting, entertaining--endlessly good-humoured. Of course he wore himself out at last by perfectly ghastly work--most of it very poor stuff. Browning and Thackeray were men of the same sort, sociable, genial, exuberant. They overflowed too--they didn't batter things out.