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 passion 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 noble 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 noble 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 fashion 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 Nettleship, 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 circumstances 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
passed 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 passed 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 God, 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
mass of human kind only a predestined remnant could possibly be saved.
It is a singular interpretation of the mind of the author of the
_Institutes_:--
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 God.
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.
It was not conceivable that common sense and certain knowledge would
submit for ever to be overcrowed by the dogmas and assertions of the
new teachers. Like other powerful and wide and strongly marked
movements, like the Reformation which it combated, it was a very mixed
thing. It produced some great evils and led to some great crimes. It
started that fatal religious militia, the Jesuit order, which,
notwithstanding much heroic self-sacrifice, has formed a permanent bar
to all possible reunion of Christendom, has fastened its yoke on the
Papacy itself, and has taught the Church, as a systematic doctrine, to
put its trust in the worst expedients of human policy. The religious
wars in France and Germany, the relentless massacres of the Low
Countries and the St. Bartholomew, the consecration of treason and
conspiracy, were, without doubt, closely connected with the "Catholic
reaction." But if this great awakening and stimulating influence raised
new temptations to human passion and wickedness, it was not only in the
service of evil that this new zeal was displayed. The Council of Trent,
whatever its faults, and it had many, was itself a real reformation.
The "Catholic revival" meant the rekindling of earnest religion and
care for a good life in thousands of souls. If it produced the Jesuits,
it as truly produced Port Royal and the Benedictines. Europe would be
indeed greatly the poorer if it wanted some of the most conspicuous
products of the Catholic revival.
It is Mr. Pattison's great misfortune that through obvious faults of
temper he has missed the success which naturally might have seemed
assured to him, of dealing with these subjects in a large and
dispassionate way. Scholar, thinker, student as he is, conversant with
all literature, familiar with books and names which many well-read
persons have never heard of, he has his bitter prejudices, like the
rest of us, Protestants or Catholics; and what he hates is continually
forcing itself into his mind. He tells, with great and pathetic force,
the terrible story of the judicial murder of Calas at Toulouse, and of
Voltaire's noble and successful efforts to bring the truth to light,
and to repair, as far as could be repaired, its infamous injustice. It
is a story which shows to what frightful lengths fanaticism may go in
leading astray even the tribunals of justice. But unhappily the story
can be paralleled in all times of the world's history; and though the
Toulouse mob and Judges were Catholics, their wickedness is no more a
proof against the Catholic revival than Titus Oates and the George
Gordon riots are against Protestantism, or the Jacobin tribunals
against Republican justice. But Mr. Pattison cannot conclude his
account without an application. Here you have an example of what the
Catholic revival does. It first breaks Calas on the wheel; and then,
because Voltaire took up his cause, it makes modern Frenchmen, if they
are Catholics, believe that Calas deserved it:--
It is part of that general Catholic revival which has been working
for some years, and which like a fog is spreading over the face of
opinion.... The memory of Calas had been vindicated by Voltaire and
the Encyclopedists. That was quite enough for the Catholics....
It is the characteristic of Catholicism that it supersedes reason,
and prejudges all matters by the application of fixed principles.
It is no use that M. Coquerel flatters himself that he has set the
matter at rest. He flatters himself in vain; he ought to know his
Catholic countrymen better:--
We have little doubt that as long as the Catholic religion shall
last their little manuals of falsified history will continue to
repeat that Jean Calas murdered his son because he had become a
convert to the Catholic faith.
Are little manuals of falsified history confined only to one set
of people? Is not John Foxe still proof against the assaults of
Dr. Maitland? The habit of _à priori_ judgments as to historical
facts is, as Mr. Pattison truly says, "fatal to truth and
integrity." It is most mischievous when it assumes a philosophic
gravity and warps the criticism of a distinguished scholar.
This fixed habit of mind is the more provoking because, putting aside
the obtrusive and impertinent injustice to which it leads, Mr.
Pattison's critical work is of so high a character. His extensive and
accurate reading, the sound common sense with which he uses his
reading, and the modesty and absence of affectation and display which
seem to be a law of his writing, place him very high. Perhaps he
believes too much in books and learning, in the power which they exert,
and what they can do to enable men to reach the higher conquests of
moral and religious truth--perhaps he forgets, in the amplitude of his
literary resources, that behind the records of thought and feeling
there are the living mind and thought themselves, still clothed with
their own proper force and energy, and working in defiance of our
attempts to classify, to judge, or to explain: that there are the real
needs, the real destinies of mankind, and the questions on which they
depend--of which books are a measure indeed, but an imperfect one. As
an instance, we might cite his "Essay on the Theology of
Germany"--elaborate, learned, extravagant in its praise and in its
scorn, full of the satisfaction of a man in possession of a startling
and little known subject, but with the contradictions of a man who in
spite of his theories believes more than his theories. But, as a
student who deals with books and what books can teach, it is a pleasure
to follow him; his work is never slovenly or superficial; the reader
feels that he is in the hands of a man who thoroughly knows what he is
talking about, and both from conscience and from disposition is anxious
above all to be accurate and discriminative. If he fails, as he often
seems to us to do, in the justice and balance of his appreciation of
the phenomena before him, if his statements and generalisations are
crude and extravagant, it is that passion and deep aversions have
overpowered the natural accuracy of his faculty of judgment.
The feature which is characteristic in all his work is his profound
value for learning, the learning of books, of documents, of all
literature. He is a thinker, a clear and powerful one; he is a
philosopher, who has explored the problems of abstract science with
intelligence and interest, and fully recognises their importance; he
has taken the measure of the political and social questions which the
progress of civilisation has done so little to solve; he is at home
with the whole range of literature, keen and true in observation and
criticism; he has strongly marked views about education, and he took a
leading part in the great changes which have revolutionised Oxford. He
is all this; but beyond and more than all this he is a devotee of
learning, as other men are of science or politics, deeply penetrated
with its importance, keenly alive to the neglect of it, full of faith
in the services which it can render to mankind, fiercely indignant at
what degrades, or supplants, or enfeebles it. Learning, with the severe
and bracing discipline without which it is impossible, learning
embracing all efforts of human intellect--those which are warning
beacons as well those which have elevated and enlightened the human
mind--is the thing which attracts and satisfies him as nothing else
does; not mere soulless erudition, but a great supply and command of
varied facts, marshalled and turned to account by an intelligence which
knows their use. The absence of learning, or the danger to learning, is
the keynote of a powerful but acrid survey of the history and prospects
of the Anglican Church, for which, in spite of its one-sidedness and
unfairness, Churchmen may find not a little which it will be useful to
lay to heart. Dissatisfaction with the University system, in its
provision for the encouragement of learning and for strengthening and
protecting its higher interests, is the stimulus to his essay on Oxford
studies, which is animated with the idea of the University as a true
home of real learning, and is full of the hopes, the animosities, and,
it may be added, the disappointments of a revolutionary time. He exults
over the destruction of the old order; but his ideal is too high, he is
too shrewd an observer, too thorough and well-trained a judge of what
learning really means, to be quite satisfied with the new.
The same devotion to learning shows itself in a feature of his literary
work, which is almost characteristic--the delight which he takes in
telling the detailed story of the life of some of the famous working
scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These men, whose
names are known to the modern world chiefly in notes to classical
authors, or occasionally in some impertinent sneer, he likes to
contemplate as if they were alive. To him they are men with individual
differences, each with a character and fortunes of his own, sharers to
the full in the struggles and vicissitudes of life. He can appreciate
their enormous learning, their unwearied labour, their sense of honour
in their profession; and the editor of texts, the collator of various
readings and emendations, the annotator who to us perhaps seems but a
learned pedant appears to him as a man of sound and philosophic
thought, of enthusiasm for truth and light--perhaps of genius--a man,
too, with human affections and interests, with a history not devoid of
romance. There is something touching in Mr. Pattison's affection for
those old scholars, to whom the world has done scant justice. His own
chief literary venture was the life of one of the greatest of them,
Isaac Casaubon. We have in these volumes sketches, not so elaborate, of
several others, the younger Scaliger, Muretus, Huet, and the great
French printers, the Stephenses; and in these sketches we are also
introduced to a number of their contemporaries, with characteristic
observations on them, implying an extensive and first-hand knowledge of
what they were, and an acquaintance with what was going on in the
scholar world of the day. The most important of these sketches is the
account of Justus Scaliger. There is first a review article, very
vigorous and animated. But Mr. Pattison had intended a companion volume
to his Casaubon; and of this, which was never completed, we have some
fragments, not equal in force and compactness to the original sketch.
But sketch and fragments together present a very vivid picture of this
remarkable person, whose temper and extravagant vanity his biographer
admits, but who was undoubtedly a marvel both of knowledge and of the
power to use it, and to whom we owe the beginning of order and system
in chronology. Scaliger was to Mr. Pattison the type of the real
greatness of the scholar, a greatness not the less real that the world
could hardly understand it. He certainly leaves Scaliger before us,
with his strange ways of working, his hold of the ancient languages as
if they were mother tongues, his pride and slashing sarcasm, and his
absurd claim of princely descent, with lineaments not soon forgotten;
but it is amusing to meet once more, in all seriousness, Mr. Pattison's
_bête noire_ of the Catholic reaction, in the quarrels between Scaliger
and some shallow but clever and scurrilous Jesuits, whom he had
provoked by exposing the False Decretals and the False Dionysius, and
who revenged themselves by wounding him in his most sensitive part, his
claim to descent from the Princes of Verona. Doubtless the religious
difference envenomed the dispute, but it did not need the "Catholic
reaction" to account for such ignoble wrangles in those days.
These remains show what a historian of literature we have lost in Mr.
Pattison. He was certainly capable of doing much more than the
specimens of work which he has left behind; but what he has left is of
high value. Wherever the disturbing and embittering elements are away,
it is hard to say which is the more admirable, the patient and
sagacious way in which he has collected and mastered his facts, or the
wise and careful judgment which he passes on them. We hear of people
being spoilt by their prepossessions, their party, their prejudices,
the necessities of their political and ecclesiastical position; Mr.
Pattison is a warning that a man may claim the utmost independence, and
yet be maimed in his power of being just and reasonable by other things
than party. As it is, he has left us a collection of interesting and
valuable studies, disastrously and indelibly disfigured by an
implacable bitterness, in which he but too plainly found the greatest
satisfaction.