LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
BISHOP PATTESON.—IN MEMORIAM.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR?']
"If the poor savage that struck him down had known who and what he was, we believe he would rather have knelt to him than have slain him."—Daily News.
SIR, —It may perhaps be permitted to an intimate and deeply attached friend of the late Bishop Patteson to record a few im- pressions of him as he appeared at Oxford to a Liberal and a Broad-Churchman.
The first acquaintance of the writer with the Bishop was made at Lord's Cricket-ground, where they played against each other in the Public School's matches, the one as Captain of the Eton, the other as Captain of the Harrow Eleven. Afterwards (though the Bishop was the senior) they were undergraduates together at Balliol College, and subsequently brother Fellows of Merton. There began an intimacy the memory of which will remain one of the most cherished reccollections of the survivor. For the truth must be told, Patteson was not during his undergraduate career the man that he afterwards grew to be. Though always of high and blameless character, he was at that period colourless and almost common-place. At any rate, he was not in sympathy I with the spirit of his College, that spirit which made Balliol the most delightful society, the very focus of the most stimulating life of the University. The man who in later years developed such a remarkable linguistic and philological faculty, the man who after- wards took such a keen interest in the theological and political problems of the day, at Oxford never took to the studies of the place, was a reluctant and half-interested sojourner, was ever looking back to the playing-fields of Eton, or forward to the more congenial sphere of a country parish. And thus his influence upon his contemporaries at Oxford bore no relation to the charac- ter of the man whom we afterwards learned to know, and knowing, to venerate and love.
At college he was essentially a public-school man. He had the gifts and qualities which in combination make a boy popular at school, and popular and respected at college. Amongst his Eton friends he always went by the name of " Coley " (Coleridge) Patteson,—an infallible test of a man's popularity. He was an excellent cricketer, and at Oxford showed equal skill at tennis. In fact, whatever he did he did well. He showed this faculty in cricket and games. He showed it also in the address with which he afterwards mastered the numerous dialects of the Melanesian Islanders.
Let those who minister to the prevailing fetish of Athleticism be content to learn a moral from the example of this admirable cricketer, this adroit tennis-player, this popular captain of the Eton Eleven. With him play was never suffered to usurp the place of work. As a boy, he played as a boy with all his might ; but when he became a man, he put away boyish things,—or rather, "the boy was father to the man." The expert Eton swimmer uses his gift for carrying the Gospel to the heathen. The captain of the School Eleven becomes the navigator and commander of the mission schooner.
During the five years which intervened between his taking his degree (he got a second-class in the school of Literm Humaniores) and his ordination "he read largely, but he found time also for travelling, and took great delight in the picture-galleries of Italy and Germany. But he was not a mere pleasure tourist. At Dresden, for example, where he made a considerable stay, he applied himself to the study of Hebrew and German." Well may another Balliol friend, Mr. Edwin Palmer, whose words I am quoting, go on to say, "It was a surprise to me in his later years at Oxford to find so diligent a student of language in one who had shown so little sensibility to the attractions of classical philo- logy, and even when the first surprise was over, I was far from suspecting the remarkable aptitude for linguistic studies which he afterwards displayed."
In the year 1852-3 he again resided at Oxford as Probationer- Fellow of Merton College. He had become quite another person. Self-cultivation had done much for him. Literature and art had opened his mind, and enlarged his interests and sympathies. The moral and spiritual forces of the man were now vivified, refined, and strengthened, by the awakening of his intellectual and resthetic nature.
His early years as Fellow of Merton coincided with the period of active reform at Oxford which followed upon the Report of the Commission in 1852. What part did the future missionary bishop take in that great movement ? One who worked with him at that time—a time when University reform was as un- fashionable as it is now fashionable—well remembers. He threw himself into the work with hearty zeal ; he suggested every liberal proposal. To his loyal fidelity and solid common-sense is mainly due the success with which the reform of Merton was carried out. And yet in these first days of College reform the only sure and constant nucleus of the floating Liberal majority consisted of the Bishop and one other. Whatever others did, those two were always on the same side. And so, somehow, owing, no doubt, to the general enlightenment which distinguished the senior Fellows of Merton under the old regime—an enlightenment unquestionably due to the predominance in that college of the lay non-resident element—the new reforming spirit found itself in the ascendancy. It is to the honour of Patteson, and equally to the honour of the older Fellows of the college at that time, that so great an inroad upon old traditions should have been made with such an entire absence of provocation on the one side, or of imitation on the other. But Patteson, with all his reforming zeal, was also a high-bred gentle- man. He remembered what was due to others as well as to him- self. His bearing was one of respect for authority, of deference towards those who were his superiors in age. He knew how to differ. He showed towards others the considerate courtesy which others in return so abundantly showed towards him. And this generous forbearance of the seniors_ had its reward. It entailed
upon the juniors a reciprocity of respect. It was felt by them at the time to be an additional incentive to moderation, to sobriety, to desistance from extreme views. The result was that the work got done, and what was done left no heartburnings behind.
Yet it would be delusive to pretend to claim Bishop Patteson as a Liberal in the political sense of the word. He was no such thing. If anything, his instincts, especially in Church matters, drew him the other way. But those who knew the man, like those who have seen the Ammergau .Play, would as soon think of fastening upon that a sectarian char- acter, as of fixing him with party names. His was a catho- lic mind. What distinguished him was his open-minded- ness, his essential goodness, his singleness and simplicity of aim. He was a just man, and singularly free from perturbations of self, of temper, or of nerves. You did not care to ask what he would call himself. You felt what he was, —that you were in the pre- sence of a man too pure for party,—of one in whose presence ordinary party distinctions almost ceased to have a meaning. Such a man could scarcely be on the wrong side. Both the purity of his nature and the rectitude of his judgment would have kept Lim straight.
Bishop Patteson was a plain man. He would not have liked to have had fine things said or written about himself or his work. His life in the Melanesian Archipelago, which is poetry and romance to us, was prose to hitn,—but prose, nevertheless, that was written in the grand characters of simple duty. What that life was can scarcely be reproduced,—' in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils by his own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the sea, in weariness and painfulness, in watchinga often besides those things that were without that which cometh upon him daily, the care of all the churches.' We may indeed picture to ourselves the annual cruise among the South Pacific Islands, the apostolic Bishop himself navigating the Southern Cross—his palace his yacht—wading over the reef, or swimming across the surf out- side the coral strand ; "getting ashore in wildish places, climbing up rocks and watercourses." Or again, we may take note of his marvellous facility in acquiring, for practical and for scientific purposes, the manifold Melanesian tongues ; "in the midst of much other business trying to put together skeleton grammars of some of these dialects, about four or five-and-twenty, I suppose [of which] thirteen are done ;" or, as has been written of him, "hunting down a word—a prefix, or an affix, it may be—up Polynesia, down Melanesia, till it comes to earth in Malay." All these things we may note, and we shall not fail to recognize in the seamanship of the Southern Cross, in the mastery over the barbarous tongues, the lineaments of the old Eton skill in games, of the later Oxford devotion to language and philology. But for a life-like portrait of that devoted life, "going about doing good," we must have recourse to the Bishop's own description in the following extract from a letter addressed by him to the writer in the year 1864. And perhaps, when it has been read, whilst in our minds' eye we gaze upon the tenantless canoe drifting with the body of that good man, wrapped in the native mat, palm- oovered, towards its last home in the Pacific deep, some will be inclined to borrow his own words, and to say, " Ah ! Bishop, you will do more for our conversion by your death, than ever we shall 4337 our lives."—I am, Sir, &c.,
"I have had a heavy trial since I wrote last to you. Two very very 'dear young friends of mine, Norfolk Islanders, of twenty-one and eighteen _years old, dear to me as children of my own, though too old to be child- ren, too young to be brothers, have been taken from me. Fisher Young (eighteen) died of lock-jaw on August 22, and Edwin Nobbs (twenty-one) on September 5, in consequence of arrow wounds received on August 15 at Santa Cruz Island. Edmund Pearce (twenty-three), an Englishman, was also struck ; the arrow glanced off the breast-bone, and formed a wound running under the right pectoral muscle. I measured it after I had extracted it, five inches and three-eighths of an inch were inside him. He is, thank God, quite recovered. Santa Cruz is a fine and very populous island. The people are large, tall, and muscular. It is no doubt a very wild place,—books of hints to navigators will tell you the wildest of the Pacific, but such books contain endless myths. In 1862 I landed at seven different villages on the north (lee) coast, amidst great crowds wading Apr swimming ashore in the usual manner. They treated me well, and I was hopeful of getting some two or throe lads to come away with me on a second visit, from whom I might learn the language, after our wont. In 18631 could not get to the island, the winds being contrary. We were six in all. Rowing and sailing along the coast, I reached two large villages, where I went ashore and spent some time with the people,—great crowds of naked armed men at each. At last about noon, I reached a very large village near the south-west point of the island. I had been there in 1862. After some deliberation I got on to the reef,—uncovered, as it was low water. The boat was pulled off to a distance, and I waded across the reef, 200 yards or so, to the village. In the boat they counted upwards of 400 men all armed (wild cannibal fellows they are) crowding about me. But, you know, I am used to that, and it seems natural. I went into a largo house and sat down. I know only a few words of their language. After a time I again waded back to the edge of the reef, the people thronging round me. The boat was backed in to meet me : it is a light four-oared whale-boat : I made a stroke or two and got into the boat. Then I saw that the men swimming about had fast hold of the boat, and it was evident by the expression of their faces that they meant to hold it back. How we managed to detach their hands I can hardly tell you. They began shooting at once, being very close. Three canoes chased us as we began to got away on the boat, —men standing up and shooting. The long arrows were whizzing on every side, as you may suppose. Pearce was knocked over at once, Fisher shot light through the loft wrist, Edwin in the right cheek. No one, I suppose, thought that there was a chance of getting away. They all laboured nobly. Neither Edwin nor Fisher ever dropped their oars nor ceased pulling, dear noble lads ! and they were as good and pure as they were brave. Thank God, a third Norfolk Islander, Hunt Christian, and Joseph Atkin, an excellent lad of twenty, the only son of a neighbouring settler near Auckland, were not touched. Not a word was said, only my Pull port oars : pull on steadily.' Once dear Edwin, with the fragment of the arrow sticking in his cheek, and the blood streaming down, called out (thinking even more of me than of himself), Look out, sir, close to you!' But indeed it was on all sides they wore close to us. In about twenty minutes we were on board tho schooner. I need not tell you about the attempts I had to make at tho surgical part of it all. With difficulty I got the arrows out of Pearce's chest and Fisher's wrist. Edwin's was not a deep wound. But the thermometer was ranging from 88° to 91°, and I knew that the Norfolk Islanders (Pitcairners), like most tropical people, are very subject to lock- jaw. Oh! my dear friend, on the fourth day that dear lad Fisher said to me, I can't think what makes my jaw so stiff.' Then I knew that all hope was gone of his being spared. God has been very merciful to me. The very truthfulness and purity and gentleness and self-denial and real simple devotion that they ever manifested, and that made them so very dear to me, are now my best and truest comforts. Their patient endurance of groat sufferings—for it is an agonizing death to die—their simple trust in God through Christ, their thankful, happy, holy disposition shone out brightly through all. Nothing had power to disquiet them : nothing could cast a cloud upon that bright sunny Christian spirit. One allusion to our Lord's sufferings, when they were agonized by thirst and fearful con- vulsions, one prayer or verse of Scripture always calmed them, always brought that soft beautiful smile on their dear faces. There was not one word of complaint,--it was all perfect peace. And this was the closing scone of such lives, which made us often say, 'Would that we all could render such an account of each day's work as Edwin and Fisher could honestly do ! I am very glad,' Fisher said, that I was doing my duty. Tell my father that I was in the path of duty, and he will be so glad. Poor Santa Cruz people!' ' Ali ! my dear boy, you will do more for their conversion by your death than ever we shall by our lives.' I never witnessed anything like it ; just when the world and the flesh and the devil are in most cases beginning their work, here was this dear lad as innocent as a child, as holy and devout as an aged matured Christian saint. I need not say that I nursed him day and night with love and reverence. The last night, when I left him for an hour or two at 1 a.m. only to lie down in my clothes by his side, he said faintly (his body being then rigid as a bar of iron), 'Kiss me, Bishop: At 4 a.m. he started as if from a trance ; he had been wandering a good deal, but all his words even then were of things pure and holy. His eyes met mine, and I saw the consciousness gradually coming back into thein. 'They never stop singing there, sir, do they ?'—for his thoughts were with the angels in heaven. Then, after a short tune, the last terri- ble struggle, and then he fell asleep."
Previous page
