UPTON,
Sept. 20, 1904.
DEAR HERBERT,--I have been reading lately, not for the first time, but
with increased interest, the Memoir of Mark Pattison. It was, you will
remember, dictated by himself towards the end of his life, and
published after his death with a few omissions. It was not favourably
received, and was called cowardly, cynical, bitter, a "cry in the
dark," treacherous, and so forth. It is very difficult not to be
influenced by current opinion in one's view of a book; one comes to it
prepared to find certain characteristics, and it is difficult to detach
one's mind sufficiently to approach a much-reviewed volume with perfect
frankness. But I have read the book several times, and my admiration
for it increases. It does not reveal a generous or particularly
attractive character, and there are certain episodes in it which are
undoubtedly painful. But it is essentially a just, courageous, and
candid book. He is very hard on other people, and deals hard knocks. He
shows very clearly that he was deficient in tolerance and sympathy, but
he is quite as severe on himself. What I value in the book is its
absolute sincerity. He does not attempt to draw an ideal picture of his
own life and character at the expense of other people. One sees him
develop from the shy, gauche, immature boy into the mature, secluded,
crabbed, ungracious student. If he had adopted a pose he might have
sketched his own life in beautiful subdued colours; he might have made
himself out as misrepresented and misunderstood. He does none of these
things. He shows clearly that the disasters of his life were quite as
much due to his own temperamental mistakes as to the machinations of
others. He has no illusions about himself, and he does not desire that
his readers should have any. The sadness of the book comes from his
failure, or rather his constitutional inability, to see other people
whole. After all, our appreciations for other people are of the nature
of a sum. There is a certain amount of addition and subtraction to be
done; the point is whether the sum total is to the credit of the person
concerned. But with Mark Pattison the process of subtraction was more
congenial than the process of addition. He saw and felt the weakness of
those who surrounded him so keenly that he did not do justice to their
good qualities. This comes out very clearly when he deals with Newman
and Pusey. Pattison was a member for a time of the Tractarian set, but
he must have been always at heart a Liberal and a Rationalist, and the
spell which Newman temporarily cast over him appeared to him in after
life to have been a kind of ugly hypnotism, to which he had limply
submitted. Certainly the diary which he quotes concerning his own part
in the Tractarian movement, the conversations to which he listened, the
morbid frame of mind to which he succumbed are deplorable reading.
Indeed the reminiscences of Newman's conversation in particular, the
pedantry, the hankering after miracles, the narrowness of view, are an
extraordinary testimony to the charm with which Newman must have
invested all he did or said. Pattison is even more severe on Pusey, and
charges him with having betrayed a secret which he had confided to him
in confession. It does not seem to occur to Pattison to consider
whether he did not himself mention the fact, whatever it was, to some
other friend.
On the other hand the book reveals an extraordinary intellectual ideal.
It holds up a standard for the student which is profoundly impressive;
and I know no other book which displays in a more single-minded and
sincere way the passionate desire of the savant for wide, deep, and
perfect knowledge, which is to be untainted by any admixture of
personal ambition. Indeed, Pattison speaks of literary ambition as
being for the student not an amiable weakness, but a defiling and
polluting sin.
Of course it is natural to feel that there is a certain selfish aridity
about such a point of view. The results of Mark Pattison's devotion are
hardly commensurate with his earnestness. He worked on a system which
hardly permitted him to put the results at the disposal of others; but
there is at the same time something which is both dignified and stately
in the idea of the lonely, laborious life, without hope and without
reward, sustained only by the pursuit of an impossible perfection.
It is not, however, as if this was all that Mark Pattison did. He was a
great intellectual factor at Oxford, especially in early days; in later
days he was a venerable and splendid monument. But as tutor of his
college, before his great disappointment--his failure to be elected to
the Rectorship--he evidently lived a highly practical and useful life.
There is something disarming about the naive way in which he records
that he became aware that he was the possessor of a certain magnetic
influence to which gradually every one in the place, including the old
Rector himself, submitted.
The story of his failure to be elected Rector is deeply pathetic.
Pattison reveals with terrible realism the dingy and sordid intrigues
which put an unworthy man in the place which he himself had earned. But
it may be doubted whether there was so much malignity about the whole
matter as he thought; and, at all events, it may be said that men do
not commonly make enemies without reason. It does not seem to occur to
him to question whether his own conduct and his own remarks may not
have led to the unhappy situation; and indeed, if he spoke of his
colleagues in his lifetime with the same acrimony with which his
posthumous book speaks of them, the mystery is adequately explained.
His depression and collapse, which he so mercilessly chronicles, after
the disaster, do not appear to me to be cowardly. He was an
over-worked, over-strained man, with a strong vein of morbidity in his
constitution; and to have the great prize of a headship, which was the
goal of his dearest hopes, put suddenly and evidently quite
unexpectedly in his hands, and then in so unforeseen a manner torn
away, must have been a terrible and unmanning catastrophe. What is
ungenerous is that he did not more tenderly realise that eventually it
all turned out for the best. He recognises the fact somewhat
grudgingly. Yet he was disengaged by the shock from professional life.
He gained bodily strength and vigour by the change; he began his work
of research; and then, just at the time when his ideal was
consolidated, the Rectorship came to him--when it might have seemed
that by his conduct he had forfeited all hopes of it.
In another respect the book is admirable. Mark Pattison attained high
and deserved literary distinction; but there is no hint of complacency
on this subject, rather, indeed, the reverse; for he confesses that
success had upon him no effect but to humiliate him by the
consideration that the completed work might have been so much better
both in conception and execution than it actually was.
I feel, on closing the book, a great admiration for the man, mingled
with infinite pity for the miseries which his own temperament inflicted
on him; it gives me, too, a high intellectual stimulus; it makes me
realise the nobility and the beauty of knowledge, the greatness of the
intellectual life. One may regret that in Pattison's case this was not
mingled with more practical power, more sympathy, more desire to help
rather than to pursue. But here, again, one cannot have everything, and
the life presents a fine protest against materialism, against the
desire of recognition, against illiberal and retrograde views of
thought. Here was a great and lonely figure haunted by a dream which
few of those about him could understand, and with which hardly any
could sympathise. He writes pathetically: "I am fairly entitled to say
that, since the year 1851, I have lived wholly for study. There can be
no vanity in making this confession, for, strange to say, in a
university ostensibly endowed for the cultivation of science and
letters, such a life is hardly regarded as a creditable one."
The practical effect of such a book on me is to make me realise the
high virtue of thoroughness. It is not wholly encouraging, because at a
place like this one must do a good deal of one's work sloppily and
sketchily; but it makes me ashamed of my sketchiness; I make good
resolutions to get up my subjects better, and, even if I know that I
shall relapse, something will have been gained. But that is a
side-issue. The true gain is to have been confronted with a real man,
to have looked into the depth of his spirit, to realise differences of
temperament, to be initiated into a high and noble ambition. And at the
same time, alas! to learn by his failures to value tact and sympathy
and generosity still more; and to learn that noble purpose is
ineffective if it is secluded; to try resolutely to see the strong
points of other workers, rather than their feeblenesses; and to end by
feeling that we have all of us abundant need to forgive and to be
forgiven--Ever yours,