r-hearted, self-restrained, gentle,
sensitive, beauty-loving. He loved beauty as much as any man who ever
lived--beautiful conduct, beautiful life--and then his gift of expression!
There's a marvellous thing. It's pure poetry, most of the _Apologia_:
look at the way he flashes into metaphor, at his exquisite pictures of
persons, at his irony, his courtesy, his humour, his pathos. He and Ruskin
knew exactly how to confide in the world, how to humiliate themselves
gracefully in public, how to laugh at themselves, how to be gay--it's all
so well-bred, so delicate! Depend upon it, that's the way to make the world
love you--to tell it all about yourself like a charming child, without any
boasting or bragging. The world is awfully stupid! It adores well-bred
egotism. We are all deeply inquisitive about _people_; and if you can
reveal yourself without vanity, and are a lovable creature, the world will
overwhelm you with love. You can't pay the world a greater compliment than
to open your heart to it. You must not bore it, of course, nor must you
seem to be demanding its applause. You must just seem to be in need of
sympathy and comfort. You must be a little sad, a little tired, a little
bewildered. I don't say that is easy to do, and a man must not set out to
do it. But if a man has got something childlike and innocent about him, and
a naive way with him, the world will take him to its heart. The world loves
to pity, to compassionate, to sympathise, much more than it loves to
admire."

"But what about the religious side of it all?" I said.

"Ah," said Father Payne, "I think that is more touching still. The people
who change their religion, as it is called,--there is something extremely
captivating about them as a rule. To want to change your form of religion
simply means that you are unhappy and uneasy. You want more beauty, or more
assurance, or more sympathy, or more antiquity. Have you never noticed how
all converts personify their new Church in feminine terms? She becomes a
Madonna, something at once motherly and young. It is the passion with which
the child turns away from what is male and rough, to the mother, the nurse,
the elder sister. The convert isn't really in search of dogmas and
doctrines: he is in love with a presence, a shape, something which can
clasp and embrace and love him. I don't feel any real doubt of that. The
man who turns away to some other form of faith wants a home. He sees the
ugliness, the spite,