BOOKS.
PATTISON'S ESSAYS.*
EIGHTEEN of the twenty-one " Essays" contained in these two volumes appeared in various periodicals between the years 1845-1882. " Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750," was one of the once-famous Essays and Reviews.
• Essays by the late Mark Pattison. Collected and Arranged by Henry Nettleship, M.A. 2 vols. London : Clarendon Press. 1882. and may be said to have escaped with less animadversion than any of its companions, not so much because it was orthodox, as because it eluded the grasp of hostile critics. " Oxford Studies " appeared in the volume entitled Oxford Essays, in 1855. A generation has passed since then ; and the Univer- sity of to-day, if still very unlike Mr. Pattison's ideal, has accepted many of the changes which he advocated. Finally, we have a fragment now published for the first time, " The Life of Joseph Scaliger." To this fragment a melancholy interest attaches. To write " The Lives of the Scaligers " was a purpose formed by Mr. Pattison in his early manhood, as soon as he had passed out of his first, or, as we may describe it, his ecclesiastical phase of thought. Then came a great disappoint- ment. He found that he had been anticipated by a great German scholar, Jacob Bernays, so far as the more interesting part of the subject, Joseph Justus, or the younger Scaliger, was concerned. Professor Bernays' work was reviewed by him in the Quarterly in July, 1860 (the book had appeared five years before). The present writer well remembers the melan- choly reply which Mr. Pattison made, somewhere about the earlier date, to a question about the progress of the magnum opus,—" Ah ! some German has been beforehand with me." He remembers also how, having a well-founded though probably ignorant belief that "Pattison could do the thing as well as any German," he argued against the abandonment of the design. Mr. Pattison could not or would not believe that there was plenty of room for an English book on the subject. Any readers in this country for whom it would be worth while to write would, he thought, certainly have made themselves acquainted with the work of Professor Bernays, and would not want anything more. The plan was consequently dropped. But some of the materials gathered were used for the Quarterly review, which shows throughout an uncommon fullness of knowledge. Afterwards it was taken up again, but com- paratively little was done. Four fragments have been found among the author's manuscripts, the latest of them dated 1880, when his physical powers had begun to fail. The whole do not fill fifty pages. Still, the world had some compensa- tion for the loss. He dropped the Scaligers to take up Casaubon, in one way. thanks mainly to the Ephemerides, a richer subject, and produced one of these delightful books which one can take down from the shelf at any time and any number of times, and still read with undiminished pleasure.
Something of the charm that attaches to the Life of Casaubon will be found wherever in these volumes Mr. Pattison deals with the life and work of a scholar. We find it in " The Ante- cedents of the Reformation," an account of the Epistoln Obseurorunt Virorum., and still more in the articles, repub- lished from the Quarterly, on Robert and Henry Stephens, and on Peter Daniel Huet, and in the account of Wolf, which appeared in the North British Review, 1865. Mr. Pattison was not one of those technical scholars who have all the subtle- ties of Greek and Latin usage at their fingers' ends, and he had, we fancy, but a slender interest in or acquaintance with philology, properly so called; but he had the learning which is now almost banished from the Universities, and, indeed, from England, by the autocrat Examination. The atmosphere of learning was that in which he lived by preference, though he could come forth on occasion and deal as shrewd a blow at an adversary as any partisan who cares only for the present. But learning called out his best nature. As long as he was within its precincts, he was sympathetic, and even genial. And his knowledge is, so to speak, solid all through. He has not to veneer it, after the manner of some writers, over large surfaces of ignorance and commonplace. Masses of information, which elsewhere might be expanded into an essay, are dismissed in a sentence, or even an allusion.
Of Mr. Pattison's work as University Reformer something has already been said. His Oxford Studies is profoundly in- teresting, both for what has been done and for what has not been done of the things which he proposed, to any one who has watched the history of Oxford since the Commission of 1851. His chief defect was, we conceive, that he did not or would not see facts as they are, and as they must be till human nature undergoes a change which is certainly not at hand. " We do not want to turn out poets or philosophers," he writes. " If such are of any use La very characteristic phrase], Nature will provide them. But we can and ought to set before ourselves and the students a high ideal of intellectual expansion and cultivation." This is an admirable sentiment.
But when he complains of " being occupied with the trivial, with mere school-lessons," we know what he means ; and though from one point of view we give our sympathy, from. another we are compelled to protest against his aim. To put the matter shortly, Mr. Pattison would have banished the passmen from the University. He would not recognise the fact that the average English youth must be a passman and nothing more. But the lad who can- not appreciate a " high ideal of intellectual expansion and cultivation," is not therefore a hopeless creature. He has a good deal of sturdy sense about him, and does some good work for the world. And Oxford, in spite of the frivoli- ties and follies, the estheticism and athleticism, and other " isms " which flourish there, does him some good. There was a certain intellectual scorn of average mankind in Mr. Pattison's attitude, though in his dealings with individuals he could often throw it quite aside.
Something of this scorn comes out in the article " Learning in the Church of England," reprinted from the National Review, 1863. It was called forth by a Report of the Church Congress held at Oxford in the preceding year; and a Church Congress was a function with which Mr. Pattison felt very little sympathy indeed. The temper of the audience is sometimes such as makes one feel that the descriptions of the furious passions which raged in the Councils of early Christianity are not overcharged. Add to this that a Uni- versity Reformer, accustomed to see his plans thwarted by the stolid phalanx of the country clergy in Convocation, was somewhat apt to lose his patience and to be unfair to his order in general. Nor must we forget, in estimating this essay, to take into account the change in Mr. Pattison's own theological position. He had been a High Churchman, the friend of the great leaders of the " Tractarian" movement, and he had ceased to be so. It is probable that he liked to feel that the change was not wholly in himself. " At the first rise of the Tractarian School above the horizon in 1833, and before its other features were obliterated in one desperate effort of assimilation to Ultramontanism, it was instinctively felt to be a revival of the spirit of learned research." But when he writes, thirty years afterwards, all is changed. The Tractarian movement is a success. " Anglican feeling and sentiment is now the feeling and sentiment generally diffused over the face of the Established Church." But he asks,—" With the rise of the Anglican on the ruins of the Evangelical party, has the Church of England gained in solid learning, in enlargement of view, in liberality of senti- ment P" And this question he answers in the negative. " Energy without development of either mind or character appears to define the type of clergymen which the Church revival tends to form." The model clergyman is certainly not "idle," for, as it is sarcastically remarked, "he has not spent an hour a day in solitary and studious retirement since he was ordained." Was there ever a time when "solitary and studious retirement " was a regular part in the life of the average clergyman ? There may have been, but Church history does not reveal the secret. One would expect to find it in an age when a traveller could not go a dozen miles with- out finding some foundation, more or less amply provided which was theoretically consecrated to these pursuits. But how little the monasteries did for learning ! In the eight hundred years that passed between the death of Bieda and the Dissolution, there was hardly a man who could be fairly called the equal of the Monk of Jarrow. The secular clergy of pre-Reformation days did not supply what was wanting in
the Orders. And even the golden age of the post-Reformation Church, the Caroline period, was only illuminated by a few
great names which were in no way representative of the mass. Mr. Pattison's ideal of a learned Church was as impossible as his ideal of a learned University; and he is unfair, we con- ceive, to the rank and file, who are a necessary part both of one and of the other.
Among the other essays, one of the most general interest is that entitled " A Chapter of University History." It is un- usually discursive ; but it shows the wide range of the author's reading, which extended to forgotten novels of University life, as well as to graver works. Then there is a sympathetic little sketch of Antony Wood, a man of something of the same temper, though the work of his life was of a very different kind. After this, follows a description of Oxford during the siege, and of Oxford, after the capitulation, when the King's, men, having laid down the sword, tried to fight the enemy with the weapons of academical diplomacy. Finally, we pass to the expulsion of the Fellows of Magdalen in 1687, and of Locke from his studentship at Christ Church in 1689. We cannot pass over without notice an admirable account of "The Colas Tragedy." It is worth while to quote what the writer says in conclusion, because it has a bearing beyond the particular case which calls it forth :—" It is the characteristic of Catholicism that it supersedes reason, and prejudges all matters by the application of fixed principles. And this habit of mind a Catholic carries with him from religion and philo- sophy into history and matter of fact. His question is not, Is there evidence that this man did this thing ? ' but, Which view does the Church take ? ' The mental habit thus en-
gendered is fatal to truth and integrity We have little doubt that so 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 religion." Is this the case ? What do these manuals actually say ? One would be only too glad to know that they have been maligned.
Previous page
