_ CHAPTER XXVII. OF ARISTOCRACY
Father Payne came into the hall one morning after breakfast when I was opening a parcel of books which had arrived for me. It was a fine, sunny day, and the sun lit up the portrait framed in the panelling over the mantelpiece, an old and skilful copy (at least I suppose it was a copy) of Reynolds' fine portrait of James, tenth Earl of Shropshire. Father Payne regarded the picture earnestly. "Isn't he magnificent?" he said. "But he was a very poor creature really, and came to great grief. My great-great-grandfather! His granddaughter married my grandfather. Now look at that--that's the best we can do in the way of breeding! There's a man whose direct ancestors, father to son, had simply the best that money can buy--fine houses to live in, power, the pick of the matrimonial market, the best education, a fine tradition, every inducement to behave like a hero; and what did he do--he gambled away his inheritance, and died of drink and bad courses. We can't get what we want, it would seem, by breeding human beings, though we can do it with cows and pigs. Where and how does the thing go wrong? His father and mother were both of them admirable people--fine in every sense of the word.
"And then people talk, too, as if we had got rid of idolatry! We make a man a peer, we heap wealth upon him, and then we worship him for his magnificence, and are deeply affected if he talks civilly to us. We don't do it quite so much now, perhaps--but in that man's day, think what an aroma of rank and splendour is cast, even in Boswell's _Life of Johnson_, over a dinner-party where a man like that was present! If he paid Johnson the most trumpery of compliments, Johnson bowed low, and down it went on Boswell's cuff! Yet we go on perpetuating it. We don't require that such a man should be active, public-spirited, wise. If he is fond of field-sports, fairly business-like, kindly, courteous, decently virtuous, we think him a great man, and feel mildly elated at meeting him and being spoken to civilly by him. I don't mean that only snobs feel that; but respectable people, who don't pursue fashion, would be more pleased if an Earl they knew turned up and asked for a cup of tea than if the worthiest of their neighbours did so. I don't exaggerate the power of rank--it doesn't make a man necessarily powerful now, but a very little ability, backed up by rank, will go a long way. A great general or a great statesman likes to be made an Earl; and yet a good many people would like an Earl of long descent quite as much. There are a lot of people about who feel as Melbourne did when he said he liked the Garter so much because there was no d----d merit about it. I believe we admire people who inherit magnificence better than we admire people who earn it; and while that feeling is there, what can be done to alter it?"
"I don't think I want to alter it," I said; "it is very picturesque!"
"Yes, there's the mischief," said Father Payne, "it _is_ more picturesque, hang it all! The old aristocrat who feels like a prince and behaves like one, _is_ more picturesque than the person who has sweated himself into it. Think of the old Duke who was told he _must_ retrench, and that he need not have six still-room maids in his establishment, and said, after a brief period of reflection, 'D----n it, a man must have a biscuit!' We _like_ insolence! That is to say, we like it in its place, because we admire power. It's ten times more impressive than the meekness of the saint. The mischief is that we like anything from a man of power. If he is insolent, we think it grand; if he is stupid, we think it a sort of condescension; if he is mild and polite, we think it marvellous; if he is boorish, we think it is simple-minded. It is power that we admire, or rather success, and both can be inherited. If a man gets a big position in England, he is always said to grow into it; but that is because we care about the position more than we care about the man.
"When I was younger," he went on, "I used to like meeting successful people--it was only rarely that I got the chance--but I gradually discovered that they were not, on the whole, the interesting people. Sometimes they were, of course, when they were big animated men, full of vitality and interest. But many men use themselves up in attaining success, and haven't anything much to give you except their tired side. No, I soon found out that freshness was the interesting thing, wherever it was to be found--and, mind you, it isn't very common. Many people have to arrive at success by resolute self-limitation; and that becomes very uninteresting. Buoyancy, sympathy, quick interests, perceptiveness--that's the supreme charm; and the worst of it is that it mostly belongs to the people who haven't taken too much out of themselves. When we have got a really well-ordered State, no one will have any reason to work too hard, and then we shall all be the happier. These gigantic toilers, it's a sort of morbidity, you know; the real success is to enjoy work, not to drudge yourself dry. One must overflow--not pump!"
"But what is an artist to do," I said, "who is simply haunted by the desire to make something beautiful?"
"He must hold his hand," said Father Payne; "he must learn to waste his time, and he must love wasting it. A habit of creative work is an awful thing."
"Come out for a turn," he went on; "never mind these rotten books; don't get into a habit of reading--it's like endlessly listening to good talk without ever joining in it--it makes a corpulent mind!"
We went and walked in the garden; he stopped before some giant hemlocks. "Just look at those great things," he said, "built up as geometrically as a cathedral, tier above tier, and yet not _quite_ regular. There must be something very hard at work inside that, piling it all up, adding cell to cell, carrying out a plan, and enjoying it all. Yet the beauty of it is that it isn't perfectly regular. You see the underlying scheme, yet the separate shoots are not quite mechanical--they lean away from each other, that joint is a trifle shorter--there wasn't quite room at the start in that stem, and the pressure goes on showing right up to the top, I suppose our lives would look very nearly as geometrical to anyone who _knew_--really knew; but how little geometrical we feel! I don't suppose this hemlock is cursed by the power of thinking it might have done otherwise, or envies the roses. We mustn't spend time in envying, or repenting either--or still less in renouncing life."
"But if I want to renounce it," I said, "why shouldn't I?"
"Yes, there you have me," said Father Payne; "we know so little about ourselves, that we don't always know whether we do better to renounce a thing or to seize it. Make experiments, I say--don't make habits."
"But you are always drilling me into habits," I said.
He gave me a little shake with his hand. "Yes, the habit of being able to do a thing," he said, "not the habit of being unable to do anything else! Hang these metaphysics, if that is what they are! What I want you young men to do is to get a firm hold upon life, and to feel that it is a finer thing than any little presentment of it. I want you to feel and enjoy for yourselves, and to live freely and generously. Bad things happen to all of us, of course; but we mustn't mind that--not to be petty or quarrelsome, or hidebound or prudish or over-particular, that's the point. To leave other people alone, except on the rare occasions when they are not letting other people alone; to be peaceable, and yet not to be afraid; not to be hurt and vexed; to practise forgetting; not to want to pouch things! It's all very well for me to talk," he said; "I made a sufficient hash of it, when I was poor and miserable and overworked; and then I was transplanted out of a slum window-box into a sunny garden, just in time; yet I'm sure that most of my old troubles were in a way of my own making, because I hated being so insignificant; but I fear that was a little poison lurking in me from the Earls of Shropshire. That is the odd thing about ambitions, that they seem so often like regaining a lost position rather than making a new one. The truth is that we are caged; and the only thing to do is to think about the cage as little as we can." _