"That's true enough," said Father Payne, "and of course it is a risk—a man must run the risk of sacrificing a good deal of his time and energy to recording unimportant details, perhaps quite uselessly, but with this possibility ahead of him, that he may produce an immortal book—and I grant you that the infernal vanity and self-glorification of authors is a real difficulty in the way."
He was silent for a minute or two, and then he said: "Now, I'll tell you another difficulty, that at present people only want biographies of men of affairs, of big performers, men who have done things—I don't want that. I want biographies of people who wielded a charm of personality, even if they didn't do things—people, I mean, who deserve to live and to be loved.—Those are the really puzzling figures a generation later, the men who lived in an atmosphere of admiring and delighted friendship, radiating a sort of enchanting influence, having the most extravagant things said and believed about them by their friends, and yet never doing anything in particular. People, I mean, like Arthur Hallam, whose letters and remains are fearfully pompous and tiresome—and who yet had In Memoriam written about him, and who was described by Gladstone as the most perfect human being, physically, intellectually and morally, he had ever seen. Then there is Browning's Domett—the prototype of Waring—and Keats's friend James Rice, and Stevenson's friend Ferrier—that's a matchless little biographical fragment, Stevenson's letter about Ferrier—those are the sort of figures I mean, the men who charmed and delighted everyone, were brave and humorous, gave a pretty turn to everything they said—those are the roses by the wayside! They had ill-health some of them, they hadn't the requisite toughness for work, they even took to drink, or went to the bad. But they are the people of quality and tone, about whom one wants to know much more than about sun-burnt and positive Generals—the strong silent sort—or overworked politicians bent on conciliating the riff-raff. I don't want to know about men simply because they did honest work, and still less about men who never dared to say what they thought and felt. You can't make a striking picture out of a sense of responsibility! I'm not underrating good work—it's fine in every way, but it can't always be written about. There are exceptions, of course. Nelson and Wellington would have been splendid subjects, if anyone had really Boswellised them. But Nelson had a theatrical touch about him, and became almost too romantic a hero; while the Duke had a fund of admirable humour and almost grotesque directness of expression,—and he has never been half done justice to, though you can see from Lord Mahon's little book of Table Talk and Benjamin Haydon's Diary, and the letters to Miss J., what a rich affair it all might have been, if only there had been a perfectly bold, candid, and truthful biographer."
"But the charming people of whom you spoke," I said—"isn't the whole thing often too evanescent to be recorded?"
"Not a bit of it!" said Father Payne, "and these are the people we want to hear about, because they represent the fine flower of civilisation. If a man has a delightful friend like that, always animated, fresh, humorous, petulant, original, he couldn't do better than observe him, keep scraps of his talk, record scenes where he took a leading part, get the impression down. It may come to nothing, of course, but it may also come to something worth more than a thousand twaddling novels. The immense use of it—if one must think about the use—is that such a life might really show commonplace and ordinary people how to handle the simplest materials of life with zest and delicacy. Novels don't really do that—they only make people want to escape from middle-class conditions, what everyone is the better for seeing is not how life might conceivably be handled, but how it actually has been handled, freshly and distinctly, by someone in a commonplace milieu. Life isn't a bit romantic, but it is devilish interesting. It doesn't go as you want it to go. Sometimes it lags, sometimes it dances; and horrible things happen, often most unexpectedly. In the novel, everything has to be rounded off and led up to, and you never get a notion of the inconsequence of life. The interest of life is not what happens, but how it affects people, how they meet it, how they fly from it: the relief of a biography is that you haven't got to invent your setting and your character—all that is done for you: you have just got to select the characteristic things, and not to blur the things that you would have wished otherwise. For God's sake, let us get at the truth in books, and not use them as screens to keep the fire off, or as things to distract one from the depressing facts in one's bank-book. I welcome all this output of novels, because it at least shows that people are interested in life, and trying to shape it. But I don't want romance, and I don't want ugly and sensational realism either. That is only romance in another shape. I want real men and women—not from an autobiographical point of view, because that is generally romantic too—but from the point of view of the friends to whom they showed themselves frankly and naturally, and without that infernal reticence which is not either reverence or chivalry, but simply an inability to face the truth,—which is the direct influence of the spirit of evil. If one of my young men turns out a good biography of an interesting person, however ineffective he was, I shall not have lived in vain. For, mind this—very few people's performances are worth remembering, while very many people's personalities are."
LIX
OF EXCLUSIVENESS
Rose told a story one night which amused Father Payne immensely. He had been up in town, and had sate next a Minister's wife, who had been very confidential. She had said to Rose that her husband had just been elected into a small dining-club well known in London, where the numbers were very limited, the society very choice, and where a single negative vote excluded a candidate. "I don't think," said the good lady, "that my husband has ever been so pleased at anything that has befallen him, not even when he was first given office—such a distinguished club—and so exclusive!" Father Payne laughed loud and shrill. "That's human nature at its nakedest!" he said. "It's like Miss Tox, in Dombey and Son, you know, who, when Dombey asked her if the school she recommended was select, said, 'It's exclusion itself!' What people love is the power of being able to exclude—not necessarily disagreeable people, or tiresome people, but simply people who would like to be inside—
"'Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.'
"Those are the two great forces of society, you know—the exclusive force, and the inclusive force: the force that says, 'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers'; and the force which says, 'The more the merrier.' The exclusive force is represented by caste and class, by gentility and donnishness, by sectarianism and nationalism, and even by patriotism—and the inclusive force is represented by Walt Whitmanism and Christianity."
"But what about St. Paul's words," said Lestrange, "'Honour all men: love the brotherhood'?"