Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3)
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CRITICAL
MISCELLANIES
BY
JOHN MORLEY
VOL. III.
ESSAY 5: ON PATTISON'S MEMOIRS
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1904
ON PATTISON'S MEMOIRS.
His influence 133
Industry and spirit his best credentials 135
Youth 136
Went as a freshman to Oriel in 1832 139
Affected by a profound weakness of will and character 140
The motto of his life--'Quicquid hic operis fiat poenitet' 142
Newman 145
Mr. Goldwin Smith 161
_Life of Milton_ 169
Contributes five biographies to the new edition of the
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_ 171
Delivers a lecture on Books and Critics, 1877 171
In 1871 and 1872 published editions of the _Essay on Man_
and _The Satires and Epistles of Pope_ 172
ON PATTISON'S MEMOIRS.[1]
To reckon the subject of this volume among leading minds who have
stamped a deep influence on our generation, is not possible even to the
friendliest partiality. That was not his position, and nobody could be
less likely than he would himself have been to claim it. Pattison
started no new problem. His name is associated with no fertile
speculation, and with no work of the first degree of importance. Nor was
he any more intended for a practical leader than for an intellectual
discoverer. He did not belong to the class of authoritative men who are
born to give decisions from the chair. Measured by any standard
commensurate to his remarkable faculties, Pattison's life would be
generally regarded as pale, negative, and ineffectual. Nevertheless, it
is undeniable that he had a certain singular quality about him that made
his society more interesting, more piquant, and more sapid than that of
many men of a far wider importance and more commanding achievement.
[1] _Memoirs._ By Mark Pattison, late Rector of Lincoln
College, Oxford. London, 1885.
Critics have spoken of his learning, but the description is only
relatively accurate. Of him, in this respect, we may say, what he said
of Erasmus. 'Erasmus, though justly styled by Muretus, _eruditus sane
vir ac multae lectionis_, was not a learned man in the special sense of
the word--not an _erudit_. He was the man of letters. He did not make a
study a part of antiquity for its own sake, but used it as an instrument
of culture.' The result of culture in Pattison's actual life was not by
any means ideal. For instance, he was head of a college for nearly a
quarter of a century, and except as a decorative figure-head with a high
literary reputation, he did little more to advance the working interests
of his college during these five-and-twenty years than if he had been
one of the venerable academic abuses of the worst days before reform.
But his temperament, his reading, his recoil from Catholicism, combined
with the strong reflective powers bestowed upon him by nature, to
produce a personality that was unlike other people, and infinitely more
curious and salient than many who had a firmer grasp of the art of right
living. In an age of effusion to be reserved, and in days of universal
professions of sympathy to show a saturnine front, was to be an
original. There was nobody in whose company one felt so much of the
ineffable comfort of being quite safe against an attack of platitude.
There was nobody on whom one might so surely count in the course of an
hour's talk for some stroke of irony or pungent suggestion, or, at the
worst, some significant, admonitory, and almost luminous manifestation
of the great _ars tacendi_. In spite of his copious and ordered
knowledge, Pattison could hardly be said to have an affluent mind. He
did not impart intellectual direction like Mill, nor morally impress
himself like George Eliot. Even in pithy humour he was inferior to
Bagehot, who was certainly one of the most remarkable of the secondary
figures of our generation. But he made every one aware of contact with
the reality of a living intelligence. It was evident that he had no
designs upon you. He was not thinking of shaking a conviction, nor even
of surprising admiration.
Everlasting neutrality, no doubt, may soon become a tiresome
affectation. But we can afford to spare a few moments from our solid day
to the Sage, if we are so lucky as to hit upon one; always provided that
he be not of those whom La Bruyere has described as being made into
sages by a certain natural mediocrity of mind. Whatever else may be said
of Pattison, at least he was never mediocre, never vapid, trite, or
common. Nor was he one of those false pretenders to the judicial mind,
who 'mistake for sober sense And wise reserve, the plea of indolence.'
On the contrary, his industry and spirit of laborious acquisition were
his best credentials. He was invested to our young imaginations with the
attraction of the literary explorer, who had 'voyaged through strange
seas of thought alone,' had traversed broad continents of knowledge, had
ransacked all the wisdom of printed books, and had by native courage and
resource saved himself from the engulfing waters of the great Movement.
The Memoirs of such a man may not be one of the monuments of literature.
His little volume is not one of those romantic histories of the soul,
from the Confessions of Augustine to the Confessions of Jean Jacques, by
which men and women have been beguiled, enlightened, or inspired in
their pilgrimage. It is not one of those idealised and highly
embellished versions of an actual existence, with which such superb
artists as George Sand, Quinet, and Renan, have delighted people of good
literary taste. What the Rector has done is to deliver a tolerably plain
and unvarnished tale of the advance of a peculiar type of mind along a
path of its own, in days of intellectual storm and stress. It stirs no
depths, it gives no powerful stimulus to the desire after either
knowledge or virtue--in a word, it does not belong to the literature of
edification. But it is an instructive account of a curious character,
and contains valuable hints for more than one important chapter in the
mental history of the century.
Mark Pattison, born in 1813, passed his youthful days at the rectory of
Hauxwell, a village in Wensleydale, on the edge of the great uplands
that stretch northwards towards Richmond and Barnard Castle, and form an
outwork of the Pennine range and the backbone of northern England. The
scene has been described in that biography of his Sister Dora, which he
here so unceremoniously despatches as a romance. 'Hauxwell is a tiny
village lying on the southern slope of a hill, from whence an extensive
view of the moors and Wensleydale is obtained. It contains between two
and three hundred inhabitants. The rectory is a pretty little dwelling,
some half-mile from the church, which is a fine old building much shut
in by trees. The whole village, even on a bright summer day, gives the
traveller an impression of intense quiet, if not of dulness; but in
winter, when the snow lies thickly for weeks together in the narrow
lane, the only thoroughfare of the place; when the distant moors also
look cold in their garment of white, and the large expanse of sky is
covered with leaden-coloured clouds; when the very streams with which
the country abounds are frozen into silence--then indeed may Hauxwell be
called a lonely village.'
Pattison's father had been educated, badly enough, at Brasenose, but
though his own literary instincts were of the slightest, he had social
ambition enough to destine his son from the first to go to Oxford and
become the fellow of a college. But nothing systematic was done towards
making the desired consummation a certainty or even a probability. The
youth read enormously, but he did not remember a tenth of what he read,
nor did he even take in the sense of half of it as he went along. 'Books
as books,' he says, 'were my delight, irrespective of their contents. I
was already marked out for the life of a student, yet little that was in
the books I read seemed to find its way into my mind.' He found time for
much besides reading. He delighted in riding, in shooting rooks in the
Hall rookery, and in fishing for trout with clumsy tackle and worm.
Passion for country sports was followed by passion for natural history
in the ordinary shape of the boy's fancy for collecting insects and
observing birds. He fell in with White's _Natural History of Selborne_,
read it over and over again, and knew it by heart.
The love of birds, moths, butterflies, led on to the love of
landscape; and altogether, in the course of the next six or seven
years, grew and merged in a conscious and declared poetical
sentiment and a devoted reading of the poets. I don't suppose the
temperament was more inclined to aesthetic emotion in me than in
other youths; but I was highly nervous and delicate, and having
never been at school had not had sentiment and delicacy crushed out
of me; also, living on the borderland of oak woods, with green
lanes before me, and an expanse of wild heather extending into
Northumberland behind, I was favourably placed for imbibing a
knowledge by contrast of the physical features of England. My eye
was formed to take in at a glance, and to receive delight from
contemplating, as a whole, a hill and valley formation. Geology did
not come in till ten years later to complete the cycle of thought,
and to give that intellectual foundation which is required to make
the testimony of the eye, roaming over an undulating surface,
fruitful and satisfying. When I came in after years to read _The
Prelude_ I recognised, as if it were my own history which was being
told, the steps by which the love of the country-boy for his hills
and moors grew into poetical susceptibility for all imaginative
presentations of beauty in every direction (pp. 34, 35).
Perhaps it may be added that this was a preparation for something more
than merely poetical susceptibility. By substituting for the definite
intellectual impressions of a systematic education, vague sensibilities
as the foundation of character, this growth of sentiment, delicacy, and
feeling for imaginative presentations of beauty, laid him peculiarly
open to the religious influences that were awaiting him in days to come
at Oxford.
In 1832 Pattison went up as a freshman to Oriel. His career as an
undergraduate was externally distinguished by nothing uncommon, and
promised nothing remarkable. He describes himself as shy, awkward,
boorish, and mentally shapeless and inert. In 1833, however, he felt
what he describes as the first stirrings of intellectual life within
him. 'Hitherto I have had no mind, properly so-called, merely a boy's
intelligence, receptive of anything I read or heard. I now awoke to the
new idea of finding the reason of things; I began to suspect that I
might have much to unlearn, as well as to learn, and that I must clear
my mind of much current opinion which had lodged there. The principle of
rationalism was born in me, and once born it was sure to grow, and to
become the master idea of the whole process of self-education on which I
was from this time forward embarked.' In other words, if he could have
interpreted and classified his own intellectual type, he would have
known that it was the Reflective. Reflection is a faculty that ripens
slowly; the prelude of its maturity is often a dull and apparently
numb-witted youth. Though Pattison conceived his ideal at the age of
twenty, he was five-and-forty before he finally and deliberately
embraced it and shaped his life in conformity to it. The principle of
rationalism, instead of growing, seemed for twelve whole years to go
under, and to be completely mastered by the antagonistic principles of
authority, tradition, and transcendental faith.
The secret is to be found in what is the key to Pattison's whole
existence, and of what he was more conscious at first than he seems to
have been in later days. He was affected from first to last by a
profound weakness of will and character. Few men of eminence have ever
lived so destitute of nerve as Pattison was--of nerve for the ordinary
demands of life, and of nerve for those large enterprises in literature
for which by talent and attainment he was so admirably qualified. The
stamp of moral _defaillance_ was set upon his brow from the beginning.
It was something deeper in its roots than the temporary
self-consciousness of the adolescent that afflicted him in his early
days at Oxford. The shy and stiff undergraduate is a familiar type
enough, and Pattison is not the only youth of twenty of whom such an
account as his own is true:--
This inability to apprehend the reason of my social ill success had
a discouraging consequence upon the growth of my character. I was
so convinced that the fault was in me, and not in the others, that
I lost anything like firm footing, and succumbed to or imitated any
type, or set, with which I was brought in contact, esteeming it
better than my own, of which I was too ashamed to stand by it and
assert it. Any rough, rude, self-confident fellow, who spoke out
what he thought and felt, cowed me, and I yielded to him, and even
assented to him, not with that yielding which gives way for peace's
sate, secretly thinking itself right, but with a surrender of the
convictions to his mode of thinking, as being better than my own,
more like men, more like the world (p. 48).
This fatal trait remained unalterable to the very end, but as time went
on things grew worse. Nobody knows what deliberate impotence means who
has not chanced to sit upon a committee with Pattison. Whatever the
business in hand might be, you might be sure that he started with the
firm conviction that you could not possibly arrive at the journey's end.
It seemed as if the one great principle of his life was that the Sons of
Zeruiah must be too hard for us, and that nobody but a simpleton or a
fanatic would expect anything else. 'With a manner,' he says of himself,
'which I believe suggested conceit, I had really a very low estimate of
myself as compared with others. I could echo what Bishop Stanley says of
himself in his journal: "My greatest obstacle to success in life has
been a want of confidence in myself, under a doubt whether I really was
possessed of talents on a par with those around me."' Very late in life,
talking to Mr. Morison, he said in his pensive way, 'Yes, let us take
our worst opinion of ourselves in our most depressed mood. Extract the
cube root of that, and you will be getting near the common opinion of
your merits.'
He describes another side of the same over-spreading infirmity when he
is explaining why it was always impossible for him ever to be anything
but a Liberal. 'The restlessness of critical faculty,' he says, 'has
done me good service when turned upon myself. _I have never enjoyed any
self-satisfaction in anything I have, ever done_, for I have inevitably
made a mental comparison with how it might have been better done. The
motto of one of my diaries, "Quicquid hic operis fiat poenitet" may be
said to be the motto of my life' (p. 254). A man who enters the battle
on the back of a charger that has been hamstrung in this way, is
predestined to defeat. A frequent access of dejection, self-abasement,
distrust, often goes with a character that is energetic, persevering,
effective, and reasonably happy. To men of strenuous temper it is no
paradox to say that a fit of depression is often a form of repose. It
was D'Alembert, one of the busiest of the workers of a busy century, who
said this, or something to this effect--that low spirits are only a
particular name for the mood in which we see our aims and acts for what
they really are. Pattison's case was very different. With him, except
for a very few short years, despair was a system, and an unreasoned
pessimism the most rooted assurance of his being. He tells a thoroughly
characteristic story of himself in his days as an undergraduate. He was
on the coach between Birmingham and Sheffield. Two men shared the front
seat with him, and conversed during the whole of the journey about the
things which he was yearning to know and to learn. 'I tried once or
twice to put in my oar, but it was a failure: I was too far below their
level of knowledge; I relapsed into enchanted listening. I thought to
myself, "There exists then such a world, but I am shut out of it, not by
the accidents of college, but by my own unfitness to enter"' (p. 148).
Mankind suffers much from brassy incompetency and over-complacency, but
Pattison is only one of many examples how much more it may lose in a man
who has ability, but no fight and no mastery in him. As we have all been
told, in this world a man must be either anvil or hammer, and it always
seemed as if Pattison deliberately chose to be anvil--not merely in the
shape of a renunciation of the delusive pomps and vanities of life, but
in the truly questionable sense of doubting both whether he could do
anything, and whether he even owed anything to the world in which he
found himself.
The earliest launch was a disappointment. He had set his heart upon a
first class, but he had not gone to work in the right way. Instead of
concentrating his attention on the task in hand, he could only in later
days look back with amazement 'at the fatuity of his arrangements and
the snail-like progress with which he seemed to be satisfied.' He was
content if, on his final review of Thucydides, he got through twenty or
thirty chapters a day, and he reread Sophocles 'at the lazy rate of a
hundred and fifty lines a day, instead of going over the difficult
places only, which might have been done in a week. 'There must,' he
says, 'have been idleness to boot, but it is difficult to draw the line
between idleness and dawdling over work. I dawdled from a mixture of
mental infirmity, bad habit, and the necessity of thoroughness if I was
to understand, and not merely remember.' The dangerous delights of
literary dispersion and dissipation attracted him. Among his books of
recreation was Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_. 'This I took in slowly,
page by page, as if by an instinct; but here was a congenial subject, to
which, when free, I would return, and where I would set up my
habitation.'
It was probably a reminiscence of these vacations at Hauxwell that
inspired the beautiful passage in his _Milton_, where he contrasts the
frosty _Ode to the Nativity_ with the _Allegro and Penseroso_. 'The two
idylls,' he says, 'breathe the free air of spring and summer and of the
fields round Horton. They are thoroughly naturalistic; the choicest
expression our language has yet found of the fresh charm of country
life, not as that life is lived by the peasant, but as it is felt by a
young and lettered student, issuing at early dawn or at sunset from his
chamber and his books. All such sights and sounds and smells are here
blended in that ineffable combination which once or twice, perhaps, in
our lives has saluted our young senses before their perceptions were
blunted by alcohol, by lust, or ambition, or diluted by the social
distractions of great cities' (Pattison's _Milton_, 24).
For the examination school no preparation could have been worse. It was
no wonder that so uncalculating an adjustment of means and ends resulted
in a second class (1836). The class was not merely a misfortune in
itself, but threatened to be a bar to the fulfilment of his lifelong
dream of a fellowship. He tried his fortunes at University, where he was
beaten by Faber; and at Oriel, his own college, where he was beaten by
the present Dean of St. Paul's. 'There was such a moral beauty about
Church,' it was said by a man not peculiarly sensitive about moral
beauty, 'that they could not help liking him.' Though Pattison had
failed, Newman sent him word that there were some who thought that he
had done the best. He made two more unsuccessful attempts, in one of
them the triumphant competitor being Stanley, the famous Dean of a later
day. At last, in November 1838, he was elected to a Yorkshire fellowship
at Lincoln College. 'No moment in all my life,' he says, 'has ever been
so sweet as that Friday morning, when Radford's servant came in to
announce my election, and to claim his five shillings for doing so.' Yet
if the curtain of fate could have been raised, his election to the
Lincoln fellowship might have disclosed itself as the central misfortune
of his life.
'All this while,' he says, 'I was rushing into the whirlpool of
Tractarianism; was very much noticed by Newman--in fact fanaticism was
laying its deadly grip around me.' He had come up from Yorkshire with
what he calls his 'home Puritan religion almost narrowed to two
points--fear of God's wrath and faith in the doctrine of the Atonement.'
He found Newman and his allies actively dissolving this hard creed by
means of historical, philosophical, and religious elements which they
summed up in the idea of the Church. This idea of the Church, as
Pattison truly says, and as men so far removed from sympathy with dogma
as J. S. Mill always admitted, 'was a widening of the horizon.' In
another place (_Mind_, i. 83-88) the Rector shows the stages of
speculation in Oxford during the present century. From 1800 or 1810 to
1830 the break-up of the old lethargy took the form of a vague
intellectualism; free movement, but blind groping out of the mists of
insular prejudice in which reaction against the French Revolution had
wrapped us. Then came the second period from 1830 to 1845. Tractarianism
was primarily a religious movement; it was a revival of the Church
spirit which had been dormant since the expiry of Jacobitism at the
accession of George III. But it rested on a conception, however
imperfect, of universal history; and it even sought a basis for belief
in a philosophic exposition of the principle of authority.
Pattison, like most of the superior minds then at Oxford, was not only
attracted, but thoroughly overmastered by this great tide of thought. He
worked at the Lives of the Saints, paid a visit to the cloisters at
Littlemore, and was one of Newman's closest disciples, though he thinks
it possible that Newman even then, with that curious instinct which so
often marks the religious soul, had a scent of his latent rationalism.
A female cousin, who eventually went over to Rome, counted for something
among the influences that drove him into 'frantic Puseyism.' When the
great secession came in 1845 Pattison somehow held back and was saved
for a further development. Though he appeared to all intents and
purposes as much of a Catholic at heart as Newman or any of them, it was
probably his constitutional incapacity for heroic and decisive courses
that made him, according to the Oxford legend, miss the omnibus. The
first notion of the Church had expanded itself beyond the limits of the
Anglican Communion, and been transformed into the wider idea of the
Catholic Church. This in time underwent a further expansion.
Now the idea of the Catholic Church is only a mode of conceiving
the dealings of divine Providence with the whole race of mankind.
Reflection on the history and condition of humanity, taken as a
whole, gradually convinced me that this theory of the relation of
all living beings to the Supreme Being was too narrow and
inadequate. It makes an equal Providence, the Father of all, care
only for a mere handful of species, leaving the rest (such is the
theory) to the chances of eternal misery. If God interferes at all
to procure the happiness of mankind, it must be on a far more
comprehensive scale than by providing for them a Church of which
far the majority of them will never hear. It was on this line of
thought, the details of which I need not pursue, that I passed out
of the Catholic phase, but slowly, and in many years, to that
highest development when all religions appear in their historical
light as efforts of the human spirit to come to an understanding
with that Unseen Power whose pressure it feels, but whose motives
are a riddle. Thus Catholicism dropped off me as another husk which
I had outgrown (pp. 327-328).
So a marked epoch came to its close, and this was one of the many forms
in which the great Anglican impulse expended itself. While Newman and
others sank their own individuality in religious devotion to authority
and tradition, Pusey turned what had been discussion into controversy,
and from a theologian became a powerful ecclesiastical manager. Others
dropped their religious interests, and cultivated cynicism and letters.
The railway mania, the political outbursts of 1848, utilitarian
liberalism, all in turn swept over the Oxford field, and obliterated the
old sanctuaries. Pattison went his own way alone. The time came when he
looked back upon religion with some of the angry contempt with which
George Eliot makes Bardo, the blind old humanist of the fifteenth
century, speak of his son, who had left learning and liberal pursuits,
'that he might lash himself and howl at midnight with besotted
friars--that he might go wandering on pilgrimages befitting men who knew
no past older than the missal and the crucifix.'