Produced by David Newman and PG Distributed Proofreaders. Produced
from images provided by the Million Book Project.
FATHER PAYNE
By Arthur Christopher Benson
1915
PREFACE
Often as I have thought of my old friend "Father Payne," as weaffectionately called him, I had somehow never intended to write about him,or if I did, it was "like as a dream when one awaketh," a vision thatmelted away at the touch of common life. Yet I always felt that his was oneof those rich personalities well worth depicting, if the attitude andgesture with which he faced the world could be caught and fixed. Thedifficulty was that he was a man of ideas rather than of performance,suggestive rather than active: and the whole history of his experiment withlife was evasive, and even to ordinary views fantastic.
Besides, my own life has been a busy one, full of hard ordinary work: itwas not until the war gave me, like many craftsmen, a most reluctant andunwelcome space of leisure, that I ever had the opportunity of consideringthe possibility of writing this book. I am too old to be a combatant, andtoo much of a specialist in literature to transmute my activities. I latelyfound myself with my professional occupations suddenly suspended, andmoreover, like many men who have followed a wholly peaceful profession,plunged in a dark bewilderment as to the onset of the forces governing thesocial life of Europe. In the sad inactivity which followed, I set to workto look through my old papers, for the sake of distraction and employment,and found much material almost ready for use, careful notes ofconversations, personal reminiscences, jottings of characteristic touches,which seemed as if they could be easily shaped. Moreover, the past suddenlyrevived, and became eloquent and vivid. I found in the beautiful memoriesof those glowing days that I spent with Father Payne—it was only threeyears—some consolation and encouragement in my distress.
This little volume is the result. I am well aware that the busy years whichhave intervened have taken the edge off some of my recollections, while thelapse of time has possibly touched others with a sunset glow. That canhardly be avoided, and I am not sure that I wish to avoid it.
I am not here concerned with either criticising or endorsing Father Payne'sviews. I see both inconsistencies and fallacies in them. I even detectprejudices and misinterpretations of which I was not conscious at the time.I have no wish to idealise my subject unduly, but it is clear to me, and Ihope I have made it clear to others, that Father Payne was a man who had avery definite theory of life and faith, and who at all events livedsincerely and even passionately in the light of his beliefs. Moreover, whenhe came to put them to the supreme test, the test of death, they did notdesert or betray him: he passed on his way rejoicing.
He used, I remember, to warn us against attempting too close an analysis ofcharacter. He used to say that the consciousness of a man, the intuitiveinstinct which impelled him, his attack upon experience, was a thingalmost independent both of his circumstances and of his reason. He used totake his parable from the weaving of a tapestry, and say that a box full ofthread and a loom made up a very small part of the process. It was theinventive instinct of the craftsman, the faculty of designing, that wasall-important.
He himself was a man of large designs, but he lacked perhaps the practicalgift of embodiment. I looked upon him as a man of high poetical powers,with a great range of hope