ghteousness,
if you use it to hurt other people. Your own complacency of conscience is
not as important as the duty of not making other people uncomfortable. Of
course there are occasions when it is right to stand up to a moral bully,
and then you may go for him for all you are worth: but these cases are
rare; and what you must not do is to get into the way of a sort of moral
skirmishing. In ordinary life, people draw their lines in slightly
different places according to preference: you must allow for temperament.
You mustn't interfere with other people's codes, unless you are prepared to
be interfered with. It is impossible to be severely logical. Take a thing
like the use of money: it is good to be generous, but you mustn't give away
what you can't afford, because then your friends have to pay your bills.
What everyone needs is something to tell him when he must begin practising
a virtue, and when to stop practising it. You may say that common sense
does that. Well, I don't think it does! I know sensible people who do very
brutal things: there must be something finer than common sense: it must be
a mixture of sense and sympathy and imagination, and delicacy and humour
and tact--and I can't find a better way of expressing it than to call it a
sense of beauty, a faculty of judging, in a fine, sweet-tempered, gentle,
quiet way, with a sort of instinctive prescience as to where the ripples of
what you do and say will spread to, and what sort of effect they will
produce. That's the right sort of virtue--attractive virtue--which makes
other people wish to behave likewise. I don't say that a man who lives like
that can avoid suffering: he suffers a good deal, because he sees ugly
things going on all about him; but he doesn't cause suffering--unless he
intends to--and even so he doesn't like doing it. He is never spiteful or
jealous. He often makes mistakes, but he recognises them. He doesn't erect
barriers between himself and other people. He isn't always exactly popular,
because many people hate superiority whenever they see it: but he is
trusted and loved and even taken advantage of, because he doesn't go in for
reprisals."

"But if you haven't got this sense of beauty," said Vincent, "how are you
to get it?"

"By admiring it," said Father Payne. "I don't say that the people who have
got it are conscious of it--in fact they are generally quite unconscious of
it. Do you remember what Shelley--who was, I think, one of the pe