Part 12 (1/2)

MARK PATTISON[27]

[27]

_Guardian_, 6th August 1884.

The Rector of Lincoln, who died at Harrogate this day week, was a man about whom judgments are more than usually likely to be bia.s.sed by prepossessions more or less unconscious, and only intelligible to the mind of the judge. There are those who are in danger of dealing with him too severely. There are also those whose temptation will be to magnify and possibly exaggerate his gifts and acquirements--great as they undoubtedly were,--the use that he made of them, and the place which he filled among his contemporaries. One set of people finds it not easy to forget that he had been at one time closer than most young men of his generation to the great religious leaders whom they are accustomed to revere; that he was of a nature fully to understand and appreciate both their intellectual greatness and their moral and spiritual height; that he had shared to the full their ideas and hopes; that they, too, had measured his depth of character, and grasp, and breadth, and subtlety of mind; and that the keenest judge among them of men and of intellect had pirlud him out as one of the most original and powerful of a number of very able contemporaries. Those who remember this cannot easily pardon the lengths of dislike and hitterness to which in after life Pattison allowed himself to be carried against the cause which once had his hearty allegiance, and in which, if he had discovered, as he thought, its mistakes and its weakness, he had once recognised with all his soul the n.o.bler side. And on the other hand, the partisans of the opposite movement, into whose interests he so disastrously, as it seems to us, and so unreservedly threw himself, naturally welcomed and made the most of such an accession to their strength, and such an unquestionable addition to their literary fame.

To have detached such a man from the convictions which he had so professedly and so earnestly embraced, and to have enlisted him as their determined and implacable antagonist--to be able to point to him in him maturity and strength of his powers as one who, having known its best aspects, had deliberately despaired of religion, and had turned against its representatives the scorn and hatred of a pa.s.sionate nature, whose fires burned all the more fiercely under its cold crust of reserve and sarcasm--this was a triumph of no common order; and it might conceivably blind those who could rejoice in it to the comparative value of qualities which, at any rate, were very rare and remarkable ones.

Pattison was a man who, in many ways, did not do himself justice. As a young man, his was a severe and unhopeful mind, and the tendency to despond was increased by circ.u.mstances. There was something in the quality of his unquestionable ability which kept him for long out of the ordinary prizes of an Oxford career; in the cla.s.s list, in the higher compet.i.tion for Fellows.h.i.+ps, he was not successful. There are those who long remembered the earnest pleading of the Latin letters which it was the custom to send in when a man stood for a Fellows.h.i.+p, and in which Pattison set forth his ardent longing for knowledge, and his narrow and unprosperous condition as a poor student. He always came very near; indeed, he more than once won the vote of the best judges; but he just missed the prize. To the bitter public disappointments of 1845 were added the vexations caused by private injustice and ill-treatment. He turned fiercely on those who, as he thought, had wronged him, and he began to distrust men, and to be on the watch for proofs of hollowness and selfishness in the world and in the Church.

Yet at this time, when people were hearing of his bitter and unsparing sayings in Oxford, he was from time to time preaching in village churches, and preaching sermons which both his educated and his simple hearers thought unlike those of ordinary men in their force, reality, and earnestness. But with age and conflict the disposition to harsh and merciless judgments strengthened and became characteristic. This, however, should be remembered: where he revered ho revered with genuine and unstinted reverence; where he saw goodness in which he believed he gave it ungrudging honour. He had real pleasure in recognising height and purity of character, and true intellectual force, and he maintained his admiration when the course of things had placed wide intervals between him and those to whom it had been given. His early friends.h.i.+ps, where they could be retained, he did retain warmly and generously even to the last; he seemed almost to draw a line between them and other things in the world. The truth, indeed, was that beneath that icy and often cruel irony there was at bottom a most warm and affectionate nature, yearning for sympathy, longing for high and worthy objects, which, from the misfortunes especially of his early days, never found room to expand and unfold itself. Let him see and feel that anything was real--character, purpose, cause--and at any rate it was sure of his respect, probably of his interest. But the doubt whether it was real was always ready to present itself to his critical and suspicious mind; and these doubts grew with his years.

People have often not given Pattison credit for the love that was in him for what was good and true; it is not to be wondered at, but the observation has to be made. On the other hand, a panegyrie, like that which we reprint from the _Times_, sets too high an estimate on his intellectual qualities, and on the position which they gave him. He was full of the pa.s.sion for knowledge; he was very learned, very acute in his judgment on what his learning brought before him, very versatile, very shrewd, very subtle; too full of the truth of his subject to care about seeming to be original; but, especially in his poetical criticisms, often full of that best kind of originality which consists in seeing and pointing out novelty in what is most familiar and trite.

But, not merely as a practical but as a speculative writer, he was apt to be too much under the empire and pressure of the one idea which at the moment occupied and interested his mind. He could not resist it; it came to him with exclusive and overmastering force; he did not care to attend to what limited it or conflicted with it. And thus, with all the force and sagacity of his University theories, they were not always self-consistent, and they were often one-sided and exaggerated. He was not a leader whom men could follow, however much they might rejoice at the blows which he might happen to deal, sometimes unexpectedly, at things which they disliked. And this holds of more serious things than even University reform and reconstruction.

And next, though every competent reader must do justice to Pattison's distinction as a man of letters, as a writer of English prose, and as a critic of what is n.o.ble and excellent and what is base and poor in literature, there is a curious want of completeness, a frequent crudity and hardness, a want, which is sometimes a surprising want, of good sense and good taste, which form unwelcome blemishes in his work, and just put it down below the line of first-rate excellence which it ought to occupy. Morally, in that love of reality, and of all that is high and n.o.ble in character, which certainly marked him, he was much better than many suppose, who know only the strength of his animosities and the bitterness of his sarcasm. Intellectually, in reach, and fulness, and solidity of mental power, it may be doubted whether he was so great as it has recently been the fas.h.i.+on to rate him.

XXIV

PATTISON'S ESSAYS[28]

[28]

_Essays by the late Mark Pattison, sometime Rector of Lincoln College_. Collected and arranged by Henry Nettles.h.i.+p, M.A., Corpus Professor of Latin in the University of Oxford. _Guardian_, 1st May 1889.

This is a very interesting but a very melancholy collection of papers.

They are the remains of the work of a man of first-rate intellect, whose powers, naturally of a high order, had been diligently and wisely cultivated, whose mind was furnished in a very rare degree with all that reading, wide and critical, could give, and which embraced in the circle of its interest all that is important to human life and society.

Mr. Pattison had no vulgar standard of what knowledge is, and what goodness is. He was high, sincere, exacting, even austere, in his estimates of either; and when he was satisfied he paid honour with sometimes unexpected frankness and warmth. But from some unfortunate element in his temperament, or from the effect upon it of untoward and unkindly circ.u.mstances at those critical epochs of mental life, when character is taking its bent for good and all, he was a man in whose judgment severity--and severity expressing itself in angry scorn--was very apt to outrun justice. Longing for sympathy and not ill-fitted for it, capable of rare exertions in helping those whom he could help, he pa.s.sed through life with a reputation for cynicism which, while he certainly exhibited it, he no less certainly would, if he had known how, have escaped from. People could easily tell what would incur his dislike and opposition, what would provoke his slow, bitter, merciless sarcasm; it was never easy to tell what would satisfy him, what would attract his approval, when he could be tempted to see the good side of a thing. It must not be forgotten that he had gone through a trial to which few men are equal. He had pa.s.sed from the extreme ranks and the strong convictions of the Oxford movement--convictions of which the translation of Aquinas's _Catena Aurea_, still printed in the list of his works, is a memorial--to the frankest form of Liberal thought. As he himself writes, we cannot give up early beliefs, much less the deep and deliberate convictions of manhood, without some shock to the character. In his case the change certainly worked. It made him hate what he had left, and all that was like it, with the bitterness of one who has been imposed upon, and has been led to commit himself to what he now feels to be absurd and contemptible, and the bitterness of this disappointment gave an edge to all his work. There seems through all his criticism, powerful as it is, a tone of harshness, a readiness to take the worst construction, a sad consciousness of distrust and suspicion of all things round him, which greatly weakens the effect of his judgment. If a man will only look for the worst side, he will only find the worst side; but we feel that we act reasonably by not accepting such a teacher as our guide, however ably he may state his case. There is a want of equitableness and fairness in his stern and sometimes cruel condemnations; and yet not religion only, but the wisest wisdom of the world tells of the indispensable value of this equitableness, this old Greek virtue of [Greek: epieikeia], in our views of men and things. It is not religion only, but common sense which says that ”sweetness and light,” kindliness, indulgence, sympathy, are necessary for moral and spiritual health. Scorn, indignation, keenly stinging sarcasm, doubtless have their place in a world in which untruth and baseness abound and flourish; but to live on these is poison, at least to oneself.

These fierce antipathies warped his judgment in strange and unexpected ways. Among these papers is a striking one on Calvin. If any character in history might be expected to have little attraction for him it is Calvin. Dogmatist, persecutor, tyrant, the proud and relentless fanatic, who more than any one consecrated harsh narrowness in religion by cruel theories about G.o.d, what was there to recommend him to a lover of liberty who had no patience for ecclesiastical pretensions of any kind, and who tells us that Calvin's ”sins against human liberty are of the deepest dye”? For if Laud chastised his adversaries with whips, Calvin chastised his with scorpions. Perhaps it is unreasonable to be suprised, yet we are taken by surprise, when we find a thinker like Mr.

Pattison drawn by strong sympathy to Calvin and setting him up among the heroes and liberators of humanity. Mr. Pattison is usually fair in details, that is, he does not suppress bad deeds or qualities in those whom he approves, or good deeds or qualities in those whom he hates: it is in his general judgments that his failing comes out. He makes no attempt to excuse the notorious features of Calvin's rule at Geneva; but Mr. Pattison reads into his character a purpose and a grandeur which place him far above any other man of his day. To recommend him to our very different ways of thinking, Mr. Pattison has the courage to allege that his interest in dogmatic theology was a subordinate matter, and that the ”renovation of character,” the ”moral purification of humanity,” was the great guiding idea of him who taught that out of the ma.s.s of human kind only a predestined remnant could possibly be saved.

It is a singular interpretation of the mind of the author of the _Inst.i.tutes_:--

The distinction of Calvin as a Reformer is not to be sought in the doctrine which now bears his name, or in any doctrinal peculiarity.

His great merit lies _in his comparative neglect of dogma. He seized the idea of reformation as a real renovation of human character_. The moral purification of humanity as the original idea of Christianity is the guiding idea of his system.... He swept away at once the sacramental machinery of material media of salvation which the middle-age Church had provided in such abundance, and which Luther frowned upon, but did not reject. He was not satisfied to go back only to the historical origin of Christianity, but would found human virtue on the eternal antemundane will of G.o.d.

Again:--

Calvin thought neither of fame or fortune. The narrowness of his views and the disinterestedness of his soul alike precluded him from regarding Geneva as a stage for the gratification of personal ambition. This abegnation of self was one great part of his success.

And then Mr. Pattison goes on to describe in detail how, governed and possessed by one idea, and by a theory, to oppose which was ”moral depravity,” he proceeded to establish his intolerable system of discipline, based on dogmatic grounds--meddlesome, inquisitorial, petty, cruel--over the interior of every household in Geneva. What is there fascinating, or even imposing, in such a character? It is the common case of political and religious bigots, whether Jacobin, or Puritan, or Jesuit, poor in thought and sympathy and strong in will, fixing their yoke on a society, till the plague becomes unbearable. He seeks nothing for himself and, forsooth, he makes sacrifices. But he gets what he wants, his idea carried out; and self-sacrifice is of what we care for, and not of what we do not care for. And to keep up this supposed character of high moral purpose, we are told of Calvin's ”comparative neglect of dogma,” of his seizing the idea of a ”real reformation of human character,” a ”moral purification of humanity,” as the guiding idea of his system. Can anything be more unhistorical than to suggest that the father and source of all Western Puritan theology ”neglected dogma,” and was more of a moralist than a divine? It is not even true that he ”swept away at once the sacramental machinery” of mediaeval and Lutheran teaching; Calvin writes of the Eucharist in terms which would astonish some of his later followers. But what is the reason why Mr. Pattison attributes to the historical Calvin so much that does not belong to him, and, in spite of so much that repels, is yet induced to credit him with such great qualities? The reason is to be found in the intense antipathy with which Mr. Pattison regarded what he calls ”the Catholic reaction” over Europe, and in the fact that undoubtedly Calvin's system and influence was the great force which resisted both what was bad and false in it, and also what was good, true, generous, humane. Calvinism opposed the ”Catholic reaction”

point-blank, and that was enough to win sympathy for it, even from Mr.

Pattison.

The truth is that what Popery is to the average Protestant, and what Protestant heresy is to the average Roman Catholic, the ”Catholic reaction,” the ”Catholic revival” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in our own, is to Mr. Pattison's final judgment. It was not only a conspiracy against human liberty, but it brought with it the degradation and ruin of genuine learning. It is the all-sufficing cause and explanation of the mischief and evil doings which he has to set before us. Yet after the violence, the ignorance, the injustice, the inconsistencies of that great ecclesiastical revolution which we call by the vague name of Reformation, a ”Catholic reaction” was inevitable.