“You are all right, my boy,” said Father Payne; “you have got the sense of beauty right enough, though you probably call it by some uncomfortable name.  I won’t make you blush by praising you, but I give you a good mark for the whole affair.  If you had excused yourself, or asked to be let off, or told a lie, it would have been ugly.  What you did was in the best taste:  and that is what I mean.  The ugly thing is to clutch and hold on.  You did more for yourself by being polite and honest than even George Meredith could have done for you.  What I mean by the sense of beauty, as applied to morality, is that a man must be a gentleman first, and a moralist afterwards, if he can.  It is grabbing at your own sense of righteousness, 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?”