device for saving trouble; it saves introduction
and explanation and autobiography and elaborate civility, and makes people
willing to be pleased by the smallest sign of affability. You may depend
upon it that it was a very true instinct which made the Scotch minister
pray that all might have honourable ancestors. It isn't a sacred thing,
rank, and it isn't a magnificent thing--but it's a pleasant human sort of
thing in the right hands. What is more, in these democratic days, it tends
to make people of rank additionally anxious not to parade the fact--and I
doubt if there is anything on the whole happier than having advantages
which you don't want to parade--it gives a tranquil sort of contentment,
and it removes all futile ambitions. To be, by descent, what a desperately
industrious lawyer or a successful general feels himself amply rewarded for
his toil by becoming, isn't nothing. I'm always rather suspicious of the
people who try to pretend that it is nothing at all. The rank is but the
guinea stamp, of course. But after all the stamp is what makes it a guinea
instead of an unnegotiable disc of metal!"

LVIII

OF BIOGRAPHY

Father Payne used often to say that he was more interested in biography
than in any other form of art, and believed that there was a greater future
before it than before any other sort of literature. "Just think," I
remember his saying, "human portraiture--the most interesting thing in the
world by far--what the novel tries to do and can't do!"

"What exactly do you mean by 'can't do'?" I said.

"Why, my boy," said Father Payne, "because we are all so horrified at the
idea of telling the truth or looking the truth in the face. The novel
accommodates human nature, patches it up, varnishes it, puts it in a good
light: it may be artistic and romantic and poetical--but it hasn't got the
beauty of truth. Life is much more interesting than any imaginative
fricassee of it! These realistic fellows--they are moving towards
biography, but they haven't got much beyond the backgrounds yet."

"But why shouldn't it be done?" I said. "There's Boswell's Johnson--why
does that stand almost alone?"

"Why, think of all the difficulties, my boy," said Father Payne. "There's
nothing like Boswell's Johnson, of course--but what a subject! There's
nothing that so proves Boswells genius--we mustn't forget that--as the
other wretched stuff written about Johnson. There's a passage in Boswell,
when he didn't se