LA 
 
 05 
 
 IRLF 
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON 
 
 IONEL A . TOLLEMACHE 
 
RECOLLECTIONS 
 
 PATTISO:N; 
 
 BY THE 
 
 HON. LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE. 
 
 if 
 
 Reprinted ivith additions from the " Journal of Education " for June, 1885. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 PRINTED, FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION, BY 
 
 C. F. HODGSON & SON, GOUGH SQUARE, 
 
 FLEET STREET. 
 
 1885. 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 '' Spectateur dans 1'univers, le penseur salt que le raonde 
 ne lui appartient que comme sujet d'etude, et que le role de 
 reformateur suppose presque toujours en ceux qui se le 
 donnent des defauts et des qualites qu'il n'a pas." RENAN. 
 
 IT was at Biarritz, in March, 1882, that I made 
 Pattison's acquaintance.* I saw much of him 
 then, and again, six months later, when he came 
 to join me in Switzerland. In June, 1883, we 
 met for the last time. He took most kindly to 
 me from the first, and in our conversations he 
 spoke with an absence of reserve which I under- 
 stand to have been unusual with him. It will, 
 however, be seen that my personal intercourse 
 with him was confined to a short period. I have 
 been fortunate in obtaining the help of several of 
 his oldest friends, who have enabled me to make 
 my portrait of him less imperfect. In the follow- 
 ing sketch I propose to discuss fully one aspect 
 of his character, which seems to me to be mis- 
 understood; in other matters, I shall as far as 
 
 * Mr. Althaus, in his very interesting and appreciative 
 Essay on Pattison, refers to this visit, and to the 
 philosophical dialogues of which Biarritz was the scene. 
 
 B 
 
 M189601 
 
* RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 possible restrict myself to a record of some of his 
 opinions and characteristic sayings, so as to let 
 him be his own interpreter. 
 
 One more personal detail by way of preface. 
 The Rector took an unmerited interest in my 
 Essays (contributed chiefly to the Fortnightly 
 Review) ; and he insisted that I should publish 
 them in a collected form, or else print them for 
 private circulation, or at any rate that I should 
 inform him of the names and dates of the articles, 
 so that he might procure copies. For private 
 reasons I chose the second alternative : my two 
 volumes, Safe Studies and Stones of Stumbling, 
 are at present unpublished ; but copies of them 
 (besides being thrown broadcast among friends) 
 have been presented to the chief public libraries,* 
 and are thus made accessible to readers. I am 
 obliged to mention these facts, since a few of the 
 Rector's sayings, which will be quoted, relate to 
 passages in those volumes. 
 
 "Wishing to learn the present state of Oxford, 
 I observed to Pattison that in my time (1856-60) 
 most of the able undergraduates were strong 
 
 * As two friendly reviewers of my volumes have urged me 
 to publish them, I should like to mention that they have 
 been presented to the British Museum, the Bodleian, the 
 Cambridge University, the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, 
 the three University Clubs in London, the Athenaeum, the 
 Savile and Albemarle Clubs, the Royal Institution, and the 
 London Library. Copies will be sent to any public library, 
 on application to the publisher of the Journal of Education. 
 
BECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 3 
 
 Liberals, both in politics and in theology, and 
 I asked whether the same could be said of the 
 present generation of undergraduates. In reply, 
 he told me, doubtless with some exaggeration, 
 that the opinions of the undergraduates are in 
 chronic opposition to those of their tutors. It 
 takes about twenty years for a budding student 
 to grow into a full-blown don. Whence it follows 
 that there are cycles of about forty years, during 
 half of which the University rises in Liberalism, 
 while during the other half it falls ; or rather, the 
 dons and the undergraduates are at the opposite 
 ends of an intellectual seesaw, so that while the 
 former are rising the latter are falling, and vice 
 versa. " When you were at Oxford," he said to 
 me, " all the good men were Liberals ; they couldnt 
 help it. But now it is all changed. Many of the 
 able undergraduates are Conservative ; and those 
 of an original turn take up jlEstheticism " ! 
 One who was his pupil in 1850 writes : 
 
 " In my own case, the greatest piece of intellectual insight 
 he showed was in persuading me to give np Natural Science 
 as my main pursuit. ' You care for the literature of science, 
 and for the results of science; you don't really care for 
 science itself. You read Bacon and Herschel's Introduction^ 
 and the Vestiges, and Humboldt's Cosmos; but you don't 
 come into chapel with the mud of Shotover and the railway 
 cuttings sticking to your knees.' " 
 
 The same pupil told Pattison, rather apologeti- 
 B 2 
 
4 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 cally, that, having been brought up in Scotland, 
 he had never learnt the Greek Grammar, but had 
 only used it as a book of reference. " I am de- 
 lighted to hear it," was the unexpected reply ; " far 
 too much time is wasted on the Greek grammar." 
 This view of Pattison's was all the more remark- 
 able, because it was expressed thirty-five years ago. 
 
 I learn from the same source that Pattison 
 (then sub-Rector) said to some of his most hard- 
 working pupils, " I will let you off my lectures on 
 Thursdays, on condition that you promise to make 
 the day a complete holiday." He evidently 
 thought that more intellectual good, or less phy- 
 sical harm, would follow from hard work for (say) 
 six hours a day for five days in the week, than 
 from hard work for five hours a day for six days. 
 
 A more recent pupil, intending to write for a 
 Prize Essay, was urged by the Rector to begin at 
 once : " No amount of hurried reading at the end 
 will take the place of the process of slow gesta- 
 tion." Pattison might have said (employing Mr. 
 Galton's metaphor) that a writer's thoughts ought 
 to be long kept within call in "the antechamber 
 of consciousness," before they are summoned to 
 the presence chamber. The principle involved in 
 the above advice was a favourite one with him. 
 He always insisted that any one engaged in 
 literary work ought, for the time being, to give 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 5 
 
 up all practical avocations. He, of course, did 
 not forget that Bacon, Macaulay, and countless 
 others attained great literary success amid the 
 distractions of public life ; but he would probably 
 have contended that those giants, had they been 
 able to devote themselves exclusively to literature, 
 might have attained a yet greater success, and 
 that ordinary mortals, if they do not so devote 
 themselves, will attain no success at all. 
 
 Certainly his standard of the requirements of a 
 literary life was rigid to the verge of pedantry. A 
 very able (and far too penitent) friend of his writes : 
 
 "He suggested that I should edit Selden's Table Talk. 
 The preparation was to be, first to get the contents practi- 
 cally by heart, then to read the whole printed literature of 
 Selden's day, and of the generation before him. In twenty 
 years he promised me that I should be prepared for the 
 work. He put the thing before me in so unattractive a 
 way that I never did it or anything else worth doing. I con- 
 sider the ruin of my misspent life very largely due to that 
 conversation." 
 
 That this severe judgment on the Rector may 
 not be taken too literally, I will quote from the 
 same letter, " He was one of the best friends 
 I ever had. He was not in the least donnish 
 when one came to know him." 
 
 One learns without surprise that, in the words 
 of a near relation, " he had a quite human fond- 
 ness for his books; nothing annoyed him so 
 
6 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 much as to hear one of them fall; and dusting 
 them, which he reduced to a science, seemed to 
 give him real pleasure. In his last illness the 
 sight of any of his favourites depressed him 
 greatly. c Ah ! J he would say, ' I am to leave my 
 books, 5 and sometimes, { They have been more to 
 me than my friends.' He would ask for them 
 one after the other, till he was literally covered 
 almost to his shoulders as he lay, and the floor 
 around him was strewn with them. He used to 
 say that the sight of books was necessary to him 
 at his work; and, once reading how Schiller 
 always kept ' rotten apples ' in his study because 
 their scent was beneficial to him, he pointed to 
 some shelves above his head, where he kept his 
 oldest and most prized editions, and said : c There 
 are my rotten apples.' ' 
 
 Such severe comments are often passed on 
 clergymen who accept the dogmas of their church 
 in a spiritual, not a literal, sense, that I feel some 
 scruple in recording Pattison's comments on the 
 orthodox theology. But one circumstance re- 
 assures me. Some of us can remember only too 
 well the consternation with which, thirteen years 
 ago, members of London Society learnt that one 
 of their own body, the Duke of Somerset, was in 
 the enemy's camp, and with what refreshing ease 
 they let themselves be convinced that Archbishop 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 7 
 
 Thomson had put the Sadducees to silence. No 
 one at all familiar with the Rector's later writings 
 can doubt that his judgment on this controversy 
 might have been conveyed in Henry YI.'s words : 
 
 " I more incline to Somerset than York." 
 
 As Pattison himself has spoken so plainly,* 
 I need not mind speaking plainly also. Never- 
 theless, " Haud ignota loquor " is not my only 
 apology for publishing what he said to me ; I have 
 obtained an assurance from those authorized to 
 speak on his behalf that they in no wise object to 
 the publication. 
 
 I asked him how it was that, being so very 
 outspoken in his writings, he yet seemed never to 
 burn his fingers, as other Broad Church clergy- 
 men did. He answered that, as a matter of fact, 
 he had burnt his fingers, but that he would have 
 burnt them much worse if the outspoken passages 
 had occurred in theological writings : editors en- 
 trusted such books as the Life of Milton to the 
 
 * I have elsewhere (Stones of Stumbling, p. 46) quoted 
 Grote's opinion that the success of Christianity was one of 
 the greatest calamities that ever befell the human race. Did 
 he mean much more by this than Pattison (Memoirs, p. 96) 
 meant by saying that " the triumph of the Church organiza- 
 tion over the wisdom and philosophy of the Hellenic world 
 .... is, to the Humanist, the saddest moment in history 
 the ruin of the painfully constructed fabric of civilization to 
 the profit of the Church "? 
 
8 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 tender mercies of lay critics such books as 
 Mr. Jowett's Commentary on St. Paul to the 
 untender mercies of clerical ones. He told me 
 that at one period he had been on the point of 
 turning Catholic, and that he had been deterred 
 chiefly by observing that on political and scientific 
 questions the only questions which admit of 
 being directly tested the Catholic Church had 
 been time after time in the wrong. He admitted 
 that he had become much more Liberal even than 
 he was when he sent his contribution to Essays 
 and Reviews. 
 
 He was asked whether he did not think that 
 the attempts made by Archdeacon Farrar and 
 others to show that the eternity of punishment 
 cannot be demonstrated from the Gospels, are 
 utterly futile. He expressed his assent by saying, 
 " If they can explain away the word cuomo?, there 
 are perfectly clear expressions to the same effect 
 in other texts." He was therefore of opinion 
 that the belief in the non-eternity of punishment 
 involves the postulate that the Master's words, as 
 reported in the Gospels, contain errors. I had 
 adopted the same view in an article in the Fort- 
 nightly Review (December, 1877). I begged him 
 to read the article carefully through, and to tell 
 me whether it contained anything to which rational 
 objection could be taken. After reading it over. 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 9 
 
 he found only one trifling matter to which he at 
 all demurred.* 
 
 He used the term "economy" (that is, hus- 
 banding, management) " of truth " to denote the 
 practice of answering fools according to their 
 folly, and of speaking parables to them that are 
 without. I was so struck with the phrase that, 
 in reprinting my article, mentioned in the last 
 paragraph, I rechristened it "Divine Economy of 
 Truth " ; but I first wrote to ask the Rector what 
 authority there was for the phrase which he so 
 often employed. He answered : 
 
 " I almost think a tract of Keble in Tracts for the Times 
 was the first in our day to bring up the word * Economy ' in 
 the sense you mean. But this was a revival, not an original 
 invention. The Greek fathers not seldom speak of the 
 olKovofjLtas o-ooTiypiov as we say, the Christian c dispensation.' 
 The idea is, that revelation itself is only a veil, half revealing, 
 half concealing, and so a test or touchstone of earnest minds, 
 only such being willing to wait and learn. And, as God 
 
 * He thought that perhaps I made too much of Jer. vii. 22 
 (Stones of Stumbling, p. 102). I was glad to be informed by 
 so comparatively orthodox a divine as Dr. Baldwin Brown 
 that he had read my article with sympathy, and that he 
 thought that the next step taken by the Broad Church party 
 will perhaps be to impugn the infallibility of the words 
 reported in the Gospels. Tillotson suggests, in Sermon xxxv., 
 that God may have represented future punishment as more 
 horrible than it really is to be, the exaggeration being the 
 only possible way of deterring men from sin. Compare 
 Selden's Table Talk, s.v. Damnation, 
 
10 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 dispenses crumbs of truth to the chosen, so in the visible 
 Church the clergy are dispensers to their flock of so much 
 truth as they think good for them. Keble's tract is entitled, 
 1 On reserve in communicating religious knowledge.' ' God 
 punishes with mental blindness those who approach religious 
 questions with a speculative mind ' is his dictum the text 
 about casting pearls before swine is dwelt upon." 
 
 A Catholic nobleman, who lived near Holywell, 
 once gave me an extraordinary account of a man, 
 to all appearance blind for many years, who re- 
 covered his sight after resorting to that sacred 
 spring. On my mentioning this incident, Patti- 
 son said, "It is seldom possible to sift the 
 evidence in such cases. There is only one real 
 test. Give the Holywell water to the inmates of 
 a blind-asylum, and see whether it cures them." 
 A Catholic would, of course, object that the appli- 
 cation of such a test would imply want of faith, 
 and that God would punish this want of faith by 
 refusing to work the miracle.* Pattison would 
 have declared, and I certainly should not deny, 
 that this objection is irrational. I merely insist 
 that, in pronouncing it to be irrational, we are 
 claiming the right of transferring, not this ques- 
 tion only, but every similar one, from the Theo- 
 
 * Orthodox Protestants made a similar objection to Sir 
 Henry Thompson's proposed method of testing the objective 
 efficacy of prayer. I would commend to their notice two 
 experimenta fidei sanctioned in the Bible : Judges vi. 36 40 ; 
 1 Kings xviii. 2339, 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 11 
 
 logical to the Scientific Court of Appeal ; we are 
 making the assumption that a knowledge of 
 natural laws is our mainstay, just as reliance on 
 supernatural aid was the mainstay of our fathers 
 in a word, that " our valours are our best* gods," 
 and that Prudence is Providence writ small. 
 
 The Rector's attention was called to the start- 
 ling amount of evidence which Herodotus brings 
 forward on behalf of portents which we now 
 reject as a matter of course; and he was asked 
 whether, after pondering on that evidence, he did 
 not doubt the conclusiveness of the testimony, 
 even of the " 500 brethren at once," which is 
 adduced by a more famous writer in support of a 
 far greater miracle. " What weight," asked he, 
 " can you attach to such testimony? It rests on 
 the ipse dixit of a single reporter, who places his 
 own vision on the same level with the rest of the 
 evidence." In reference to the prophetic, I mean 
 predictive, power which is claimed for the Founders 
 of Christianity, he made the remark : Of all the 
 momentous events that have occurred since the 
 destruction of Jerusalem, not one was foretold in 
 the New Testament. He defined orthodoxy as 
 " Stoicism plus a legend." 
 
 It will be convenient to speak of his political 
 forebodings further on. At present I will merely 
 mention that he considered political pessimism to 
 
12 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 be on the increase, and that he attributed the 
 increase to two causes. The first cause is, the 
 disappointment which was felt by Liberals after 
 1848. He exclaimed with exaggerative vehe- 
 mence : " Before 1848 men expected to get every- 
 thing by revolutions ; they soon learnt that they 
 were not a bit better off than before." The 
 second cause is an indirect and negative one. 
 Men are apt to infer from the Divine Goodness 
 that good must be the final goal of ill, and that an 
 increasing purpose must run through all the ages. 
 And, as a matter of fact, men commonly hold that 
 the nineteenth century fares (so to say) better 
 than the eighteenth, and the eighteenth than the 
 seventeenth; therefore, the twentieth will fare 
 better than the nineteenth, and for evermore each 
 n + 1 th will fare better than each n ih . But, alas, 
 this vision of an earthly Paradise men of science 
 are ruthlessly consigning to dreamland. Either 
 freezing or frying, they tell us, is to be the lot 
 of our remote descendants; and this unpleasing 
 catastrophe is likely to be ushered in by long ages 
 of decline : during those ages each % + l th century 
 will fare tvorse than each n ih . Of course, this 
 does not prove that the twentieth will fare worse 
 than the nineteenth. But it breaks the spell of the 
 a priori reasoning on which, according to Patti- 
 son, the belief in progress mainly rests ; and thus 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PADTISON. 13 
 
 it infuses into philosophers a restless unfaith a 
 sentiment akin to that of o7vo? ftaa-ikevet, rov A I' 
 or at least to that of 
 
 Usque adeo res humanas vis abdita quaedam 
 Obterit. 
 
 A few of the Rector's literary criticisms may 
 find a place here. Some interest may be felt in 
 the miscellaneous intellectual diet which he pre- 
 scribed to me in a letter (14th October, 1883) : 
 
 "You will read Spielhagen's Quisisana, and Trollope's 
 Autobiograpliy. I myself find much fireside sympathy in 
 Twining's Reminiscences but it is mild tobacco, and has a 
 special flavour of eighteenth century about it, which may 
 not be to everyone's taste. Have you ever read A. Gellius' 
 Nodes Atticce ? You will find some curious matters there, 
 though perhaps Jevons' Social Essays may be more to your 
 liking. Above all, read the speeches of the clericals at the 
 Reading Congress quite time for some one to rap them on 
 the head." 
 
 He also urged me, and many other friends, to 
 read Amiel's Journal Intime. May not his relish 
 for AmieFs moral self -dissection have been due to 
 his sympathy with one who suffered from great 
 mental depression depression aggravated by con- 
 sidering how much had been expected from him, 
 and how little he had performed ?* 
 
 To a friend who complained of not caring for 
 the character of ^Eneas, Pattison observed that 
 the interest of the ^Eneid is derived neither from 
 * See the Note at the end of this essay. 
 
14 BECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 its characters nor from its plot, but merely from 
 its being a Handbook of Roman Antiquities. 
 This conversation probably occurred some years 
 before he spoke to me on the same subject in 
 very different terms. I understood him to say 
 that the charm of Virgil lies in his power of 
 exciting " successive waves of emotion " in the 
 reader's mind. He read with very great interest 
 Mr. Myers's Essay on the poet, which he described 
 as something quite out of the common. He went 
 the length of saying that, in the beauty of occa- 
 sional passages, Virgil is unsurpassed by any poet, 
 ancient or modern; and he gave as an instance 
 the encomium on Italy (Georg. II. 136 176), 
 which reaches its climax in the line, 
 
 " Salve, magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus, 
 Magna virum." 
 
 He told me that he thought he should never 
 like Dante, and he knew he should never like 
 Carlyle. His aversion to Carlyle is referred to in 
 a letter which I received from a member of his 
 family : 
 
 " I don't think that he cared at all about Carlyle ; he used 
 to call him a juggler with words, and to speak contemp- 
 tuously of anything infected with his style. He belonged to 
 the Browning Society, and even took the chair at one of its 
 meetings, but he would not allow that Mr. Browning is a 
 poet ; he never read his works for pleasure, but merely to 
 see what it was that people talked about. Wordsworth 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 15 
 
 seemed to give him more pleasure than any English poet, 
 and he loved to read Schiller's Gedichte. He was glad of an 
 excuse for turning up Pope, and, if we met with a quotation 
 from him in our reading, he would insist on finding the 
 context, and reading it aloud with a peculiar swing and tone 
 of voice which he always used for Pope. His delight over 
 his favourite epigrams was most amusing. The couplet 
 
 * On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore, 
 Which Jews might kiss, and infidels adore.' 
 
 he was never tired of declaring to be inimitable." 
 
 He told me that, in order to enjoy Wordsworth 
 thoroughly, I ought to be familiar with the Lake 
 district. Indeed, he seems to have thought it 
 extremely important to take poets (in this literal 
 sense) on their own ground. Miss Swanwick has 
 kindly authorized me to mention that she was 
 somewhat amused by the persistence with which 
 he urged her to go all the way to Sicily in order 
 to be able to appreciate Theocritus, " an acquaint- 
 ance with Sicilian scenery, and with the Sicilian 
 people, being, in his opinion, essential for the full 
 enjoyment of the Idylls" She also informs me 
 that, on their first meeting, he opened fire by 
 asking, " Which do you think the finest poem in 
 the world ? " She replied that the question 
 needed deliberation, and asked which he thought 
 the finest poem. He at once answered, " The 
 Agamemnon" She suggested that in such a com- 
 parison, other things being equal, the length of a 
 
16 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTlSON. 
 
 poem must count for something, and that, there- 
 fore, the Iliad might have a prior claim. He, 
 however, stuck to his opinion that the Agamemnon 
 is " the grandest work of creative genius in the 
 whole range of literature," and added that, the 
 oftener he read it, the more he admired it. 
 
 Others of his friends besides Miss Swanwick 
 had experience of his attempts to break the social 
 ice by plunging headlong into a discussion. A 
 very shy young lady, paying him a first visit, was 
 startled by the question : " Which is your favourite 
 English sonnet ? " He himself was especially 
 fond of Wordsworth's sonnet on Westminster 
 Bridge, and of Blanco White's only sonnet. I 
 am told that he sometimes asked ladies what they 
 thought of this last sonnet, as a sure test of their 
 literary judgment. He cared little for John 
 Inglesant. To a lady who inquired whether he 
 liked it, he gave what in the Art of Pluck is called 
 the answer indirect : " You are asking me what 
 everybody asks me everywhere." I am now 
 bordering on a province of my subject which I 
 enter with some trepidation. 
 
 " Like all good men," says Mr. Leslie Stephen, 
 " [Samuel] Johnson loved good women, and liked 
 to have on hand a flirtation or two, as warm as 
 might be within the bounds of due decorum." It 
 is undeniable that this somewhat exclusive test of 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 1? 
 
 goodness would not exclude Pattison, who at 
 times seemed to agree with the hero of Amours de 
 Voyage, that Vir sum, nihil foeminei a me alienum 
 puto. To speak more seriously, he sought and 
 obtained what has been called the one compensa- 
 tion of growing old. The praise which "Words- 
 worth bestowed on Nature, may more truly be 
 applied to a good woman she never yet betrayed 
 the heart that loved her; and Pattison stood in 
 special need of that restful sympathy which women 
 know how to give, which good women will give 
 when they feel that it is valued, but which men 
 can neither give nor take away. Yet he learnt 
 by experience that even this rose is not thornless. 
 In particular, he found that the art of instructing 
 and correcting women without affronting them is 
 not easily acquired. The mode of its acquisition, 
 like everything else in which he took an interest, 
 he subjected to critical analysis. "The art of 
 pleasing," I heard him say, " consists in entire 
 self-effacement." This opinion is sanctioned by 
 the high authority of Rochefoucauld (Maximes, 
 139) ; yet, for all that, it represents only a 
 half-truth. Those who are always taking their 
 own line whose individuality asserts itself in 
 their own despite often make the deepest im- 
 pression on the world. This quality is noticed by 
 Goethe as the chief characteristic of Englishmen : 
 
18 RECOLLECTIONS OP PATTISON. 
 
 " Their deportment in society is as full of confidence, and 
 as easy as if they were lords everywhere and the whole world 
 belonged to them. This it is which pleases our women. . . . 
 They [Englishmen] have the courage to be that for which 
 nature made them. There is nothing vitiated or spoilt about 
 them, there is nothing half-way or crooked ; but, such as they 
 are, they are complete men. That they are also sometimes 
 complete fools, I allow with all my heart ; but that is still 
 something, and has still always some weight in the scale of 
 nature."* 
 
 The Rector, however, might fairly have re- 
 joined that, now at any rate, the ordinary John 
 Bull is not a favourite with Germans, and that a few 
 lessons in self-effacement would do him no harm. 
 
 I drew Pattison's attention to a statement 
 which he had made in an article in the Academy, 
 that " it is difficult to be loved too much by one 
 sex and enough by the other " ; and I asked how 
 he explained the anomaly. He answered that it is 
 not so much that a lady's man (in the best sense 
 of the term) excites jealousy in other men, but 
 rather that there is something in his temperament 
 by which they are repelled. May not the fact be that 
 all women, except the very best, like " more self- 
 effacement " in men, than men like in each other ? 
 Goethe has noted how hard and important it is in 
 friendship to avoid being either too confidential or 
 
 * Eckermann's Conversations (Oxenford's translation). 
 Compare Sterne's Sentimental Journey, Character Versailles. 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 19 
 
 too reserved. The difficulty is closely allied to 
 one pointed out by Horace to that of hitting the 
 exact mean between Scurrantis species and Aspe- 
 ritas agrestis et inconcinna, the mean between 
 being hypocritical and hypercritical, or rather be- 
 tween an excessive desire to please and a blunt- 
 ness which degenerates into brutality. Unfortu- 
 nately, women, as a rule, like the mean to incline 
 towards the former of these extremes, while men 
 like it to incline towards the latter. In support 
 of this view, I will remark that women are pleased 
 by a man who keeps conversation going, whereas 
 men prefer one who seldom speaks unless he has 
 something to say. 
 
 The Eector once reminded me what a different 
 thing it is to understand a subject and to be able 
 to teach it. He said this with special reference to 
 the difficulty of teaching women unofficially. The 
 social superiority of their sex has, as he expressed 
 it, " passe dans les moeurs." And this superiority 
 is wont to clash with the instructor's superiority 
 in age and in knowledge. Female pupils do not 
 receive the moral tonic which is given to male 
 pupils. If they are silly or obstinate, their 
 teacher seldom contradicts them sharply, and 
 never ridicules them. The anomaly of this rela- 
 tion was felt by Pattison all the more, because he 
 had rather strong views as to the intellectual 
 
 c2 
 
20 
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 inferiority of the average woman to the average 
 man. Indeed, his love of paradox led him to 
 speak as if he imagined Ens rationale to be the 
 definition, not of Homo, but of Vir. I asked 
 him what he thought of the unchivalrous remark 
 attributed to Disraeli, that all women require 
 flattery : did the author of this remark merely use 
 the word flattery as a satirical equivalent to 
 egards ? did he merely mean that women receive 
 and expect, in compensation for their weakness, a 
 deferential homage from men not wholly unlike 
 that which a Prime Minister pays to a constitu- 
 tional Sovereign? "What Disraeli calls flattery," 
 replied Pattison, " I call economy of truth. I 
 feel that, when I, an old man of seventy, am 
 talking on intellectual subjects to a young girl of 
 seventeen, she and I are on quite different planes 
 of thought ; and it is necessary to translate my 
 ideas into her language. If she talks nonsense, I 
 take refuge in flight. I always agree ; but, when 
 she thinks that her prejudices are quite secure, I 
 slowly try to undermine them." (He emphasized 
 the word undermine by moving his out-stretched 
 hand diagonally downwards.) Of his tendency to 
 self -caricature of his seeming to take the in- 
 verted motto, Video pejora prologue, without 
 adding, Sed meliora sequor more will be said 
 presently. I will now merely observe that such 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 21 
 
 utterances of his as the above are to be taken 
 cum grano salis, or rather cum pleno salino. The 
 truth which probably underlies his exaggeration is 
 that, in arguing with women (always excepting 
 the very best), it is hard for men to maintain the 
 same perfect frankness, or rather directness, which 
 they maintain in arguing with each other. The 
 Rector, so far from being a dissembler or even a 
 self-effacer, was in reality somewhat over-frank. 
 He was visited by a young lady who wrote 
 well, but who in his opinion talked less well. He 
 resolved to admonish her of this defect; but, 
 instead of trying in any of the thousand-and-one 
 possible ways to hint, while commending her 
 writings, that more was now expected of her dis- 
 course laudando prcecipere, as Bacon would have 
 said, he embarrassed her by the blunt rebuke : 
 " Your conversational utterances are feeble." 
 
 The following abridgment of an account which 
 he gave of his meeting an American young lady 
 at a foreign table d'hote, reproduces his character- 
 istic sayings almost, if not quite, verbatim : " She 
 was only nineteen, but she knew everything. She 
 told me the exact amount of affection which the 
 Princess C. has for her future husband ; and she 
 gave me a full account of the divorce laws in all 
 the States of America. She appealed to me some- 
 times ; of course I agreed. At last, she asked 
 
22 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 whether I did not think she could write a book ; 
 and I told her that she was the most ignorant girl 
 I ever met ! But I took care to say so in such a 
 way that she couldn't mind it." I doubt not that 
 in this description the Eector was jocularly over- 
 stating both the parts which he acted the part of 
 assentator and the part of candid friend. Still, 
 after making allowance for such exaggeration, I 
 wonder whether in the latter character he was quite 
 as agreeable to the young lady as he imagined. 
 
 I asked him whether he agreed with Sainte-Beuve 
 in thinking that the advice contained in Lord Ches- 
 terfield's Letters was such as Horace might have 
 given to his son, if he had had one. The only 
 answer which I could get from him was, " Horace 
 would have thought a son a great bore." Yet he 
 regarded Chesterfield's Letters as a repertory of 
 maxims which might be useful to the social tac- 
 tician. Indeed, he himself (as we have seen) was 
 theoretically an adept in gyncecology the science 
 of womankind. But I doubt his being equally 
 successful in the practical application of that 
 science. A lady once complained, " The Rector 
 treats me like an intellectual machine." And 
 I suspect that in general, when he had but just 
 removed the scales from a female pupil's eyes, he 
 was too apt to shed on her a dry (or rather an 
 achromatic) light thought uncoloured by feeling. 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 23 
 
 On the whole, I am less disposed to think that he 
 was much liked by all, or by most women, than 
 that he was very much liked by a few. 
 
 Biography is sometimes autobiography in dis- 
 guise. The following extract from the Life of 
 Milton is obviously founded indeed, its author 
 admitted that it is founded more or less on per- 
 sonal experience : 
 
 " Milton longed to be loved that he might love again. But \ 
 he had to pay the penalty of all who believe in their own 
 ideas, in that their ideas come between them and the persons 
 that approach them, and constitute a mental barrier which 4 
 can only be broken down by sympathy. And sympathy for 
 ideas is hard to find, just in proportion as those ideas are 
 profound, far reaching, the fruit of long study and medita- 
 tion. Hence it was that Milton did not associate readily 
 with his contemporaries, but was affable and instructive in 
 conversation with young persons, and those who would 
 approach him in the attitude of disciples." 
 
 More than once, when " disciples " were staying 
 with the Rector, he and they together concocted a 
 translation which was sent in for the Prize offered 
 by the Journal of Education. I was startled when 
 he told me that one of these joint productions ob- 
 tained only a 4th Class. At first I conjectured that 
 this was a practical illustration of the maxim OVK 
 ayaObv iro\vKOLpanrj a mishap, such as often befalls 
 a plurality of generals in the waging of war or a 
 plurality of cooks in the making of broth. But 
 
24 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 I found that this explanation would not serve : 
 the Rector assured me that he revised the transla- 
 tion so thoroughly as to make it virtually his own. 
 I was therefore still more amazed when I heard 
 from a sleeping partner, so to say, in the transla- 
 tors' firm, that one of their compositions fell as 
 low as the 7th Class. But my surprise was les- 
 sened when my informant added that Pattison's 
 translation was a very free one so free, indeed, 
 that, finding sentiments or metaphors in the 
 original which were not to his liking, he took 
 upon himself to be wise above that which was 
 written, and to idealise instead of reproducing ! * 
 This masterful mode of translating tallies well 
 with his strong desire that his pupils and friends 
 should always use the best phrases and forms of 
 speech. He protested even against the common 
 error of calling a sarcastic smile a sardonic one. 
 He and I once talked over the old tradition a 
 tradition mentioned, I think, by a Scholiast on 
 Homer from which the word " sardonic " is said 
 to have sprung. In very early times the natives 
 of Sardinia were wont to eat such of their country- 
 men as were worn out by age. But, as manners 
 grew milder, it was not thought seemly that a 
 patriarch should be thus doomed without his own 
 
 * Pattison would doubtless have endorsed Moritz Haupt's 
 paradox, " Translation is the death of understanding." 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 25 
 
 consent; and, in proof that his consent was freely 
 given, he was himself chosen to bid the guests. 
 Such, however, was the force of public opinion 
 (opponents of euthanasia should make a note of 
 this) that the veteran always issued the invita- 
 tions to the supper where, in Hamlet's phraseo- 
 logy, he would not eat but be eaten. The courteous 
 smile which beamed on the old gentleman's coun- 
 tenance as he was doing this last act of hospi- 
 tality e/ccov aeKovri ye 0v/j,q) is the prototype of all 
 sardonic smiles. For the truth of this ghastly 
 story the Rector would not vouch ; but he insisted 
 that the word " sardonic" should be used in the 
 sense which the story indicates. In short, he 
 wished his pupils to remember that a sardonic 
 laugh is a laugh at one's own expense, and on the 
 wrong side of one's mouth. From the following 
 remarks, it will appear that he himself laughed 
 sardonically at the world. 
 
 The passage chosen as motto for this article 
 has been severely condemned by Mazzini, and to 
 many it may appear cynical. But I have chosen 
 it as putting into a clear light the point of view 
 from which Pattison should be judged. He once 
 remarked to me emphatically, " There has only 
 been one Goethe." Yet, on another occasion, he 
 protested against the attempts that are often made 
 
26 EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 to exalt Goethe into a moral hero, and even 
 described him as stamping morality under his 
 feet. This censure is doubtless exaggerated, and 
 indeed was probably not meant to be taken lite- 
 rally. Yet the Rector's judgment of Goethe, both 
 on its favourable and on its unfavourable side, 
 has much in common with the following extract 
 from a famous writer : 
 
 " Chaque ordre de grandeur a sa maitrise a part et ne doit 
 point etre compare a d'antres. Un philanthrope qui, ayant a 
 juger Goethe, le mettrait en parallele avec Vincent de Paule, 
 se trouverait amene a ne voir dans le pins grand genie des 
 temps modernes qn'nn egoiste qui n'a rien fait pour le bon- 
 heur et I'amelioration morale de ses contemporains."* 
 
 I quote this passage because Pattison, as well 
 as Goethe, has been accused of moral insensibility. 
 The charge against the Rector is unjust, but not 
 wholly inexplicable. He was, at least in his later 
 years, essentially a scholar, valuing the spread of 
 knowledge more 
 
 " Than aught, divine or holy, else enjoyed 
 In vision beatific." 
 
 The French employ their barely translatable 
 term V ideal to include le vrai, le beau, and le bien. 
 It would seem that many persons who devote 
 
 *A similar sentiment is expressed by Mommsen when 
 contrasting the merits of the Romans with those of the 
 Greeks. The passage is quoted in Safe Studies, p. 278, Note. 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 27 
 
 themselves to seeking I'ideal through le beau or 
 through le vrai, have a special difficulty in seeking 
 it through what in the narrower sense may be 
 called le lien : in other words, scholars and philo- 
 sophers often lack the enthusiasm of humanity. 
 / This is one reason why saints and sages so seldom 
 \ quite understand one another. Dean Church can 
 as little do justice to Bacon as Bacon could have 
 written the Life of St. Anselm. 
 
 In order to illustrate further our view of Patti- 
 son's ethical langour, it will be needful to dwell at 
 some length on his scepticism and cynicism. He 
 told me that he objected to auricular confession 
 chiefly because it made people examine themselves 
 too closely. He expressed this opinion in reply to 
 a question as to what he thought of the following 
 sentiment of Goethe : 
 
 " It has at all times been said and repeated that man 
 should strive to know himself. This is a singular requisi- 
 tion, with which no one complies, or indeed ever will 
 comply. ... I know not myself, and God forbid I should." 
 
 How was it that, whereas the greatest moral 
 teacher of antiquity took as his motto, " Know 
 thyself," this great modern teacher virtually said, 
 "Know not thyself "? Are the two maxims as 
 much opposed to one another as at first sight 
 appears ? The answer probably is that they are 
 not; for, while Socrates addressed his exhorta- 
 
28 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 tion to the mass of men, Goethe limited his admo- 
 nition to the few who are possessed with the 
 demon of self-consciousness. Our meaning will 
 be made clearer by an illustration. Aurora Leigh 
 says, of one whom she elsewhere calls a " good " 
 man, that 
 
 " He sets his virtues on so raised a shelf, 
 To keep them at the grand millennial height, 
 He has to mount a stool to get at them ; 
 And, meantime, lives on quite the common way, 
 With everybody's morals." 
 
 Now, it is plain that, when this " good " man 
 acquiesced (as almost everyone acquiesces) in the 
 moral code of those around him, more qualms 
 would be felt by him than by men whose ideal 
 was less exalted; and also that, if he was given 
 to honest introspection, those qualms might become 
 very inconvenient. It is indeed possible that, by 
 fostering this introspection, he would be converted 
 into a hero. But it is quite as likely that he 
 would be unfitted for action, would become power- 
 less to prevent the pale cast of his thoughts from 
 discolouring resolution and enthusiasm ^tXo- 
 aofalv avev /LtaXa/cta?. The fact seems to be that, 
 while most good men require the brightest ideals of 
 character and conduct to light them on the road 
 to virtue, the. too clear sight of some philosophers 
 is dazzled by the contrast between the brightness 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 29 
 
 of those ideals and the dark shade of the actual. 
 Cynicism is, as it were, the smoked glass which 
 these latter employ to prevent being dazzled over- 
 much. 
 
 We never, says Goethe, feel so much at ease 
 with our own consciences as when we are dwelling 
 complacently on the faults of others. And it is 
 by reason of the restlessness of the intellectual 
 conscience that the intellectual man of the world 
 is tempted to use cynical language, which shocks 
 and startles unintellectual men who are not a bit 
 less worldly than himself.* We thus understand 
 why Talleyrand, being informed of two faults of 
 a lady of his acquaintance, exclaimed, " Elle est 
 detestable, elle n'a que ces deux fautes-la" ; why 
 Disraeli, if rightly reported, censured a Liberal 
 statesman as not having even " a redeeming vice " ; 
 why Goethe maintained that Spinozism, when 
 manipulated by reflection, becomes Machiavellism ; 
 and why Gibbon seems happier when discovering 
 the sins of the good and the follies of the wise, 
 even than when relating the murder of a priest. 
 
 It is probable that one cause of the strange 
 
 * It is my experience that, while most intellectual men 
 prefer Thackeray to Dickens, nearly all women prefer 
 Dickens to Thackeray. If this is so, is it not because 
 women, being rarely troubled with self-knowledge, have no 
 relish for cynicism ? 
 
30 BECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 repugnance which such men as these feel for 
 heroic virtue, is to be found in their sympathy 
 with those whose welfare has been more or less 
 directly, more or less completely, sacrificed with 
 the sons of Brutus and the brother of Timoleon. 
 But a more important cause is, that a degree of 
 disinterestedness, of which introspective minds are 
 even too apt to think themselves incapable, is 
 contemplated in others only with pain. 
 
 These considerations are meant to explain, not 
 to justify, the ordinary type of cynicism. They 
 must be pushed somewhat further to cover the 
 case of Pattison. A distinguished pupil of his 
 assures me that, at the time of the Tractarian 
 movement, he had a high spiritual ideal, that he 
 lost that ideal when he changed his views, and 
 that he keenly felt the loss of it.* At this crisis 
 of his life, he had much in common with the 
 exiled Psalmist, whose affections would not take 
 root in a strange country, and who looked wist- 
 fully back on the days when Stantes erant pedes 
 
 * This paragraph had been written before I had read the 
 Memoirs ; I leave it in its original form as an independent 
 testimony. To Pattison may be applied some of Macanlay's 
 remarks about Shrewsbury, who, after a long and painful 
 struggle, shook off the yoke of his early Catholic training : 
 " The shock which had overturned his early prejudices had 
 at the same time unfixed all his opinions " [and some of his 
 principles]. History, Vol. IL, p. 128, ed. 1866. 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTlSON. 31 
 
 nostri in atriis tuis, Jerusalem. To the typical 
 scholar of our generation may be applied the 
 words of its typical poet : 
 
 " Of all the creatures under heaven's wide cope, 
 We are most hopeless, who had once most hope, 
 And most beliefless, that had most believed." 
 
 It is not impossible that the line preceding these, 
 
 "Eat, drink, or die, for we are souls bereaved," 
 
 would express the despairing state into which he 
 fell. A great writer has remarked that we feel 
 what our ancestors thought, and that posterity 
 will feel what we think. May not much of the 
 spiritual anguish of our generation be due to the 
 fact that many of us think with philosophers, 
 while feeling with theologians ? It was perhaps 
 through being in this condition that Pattison con- 
 tinued long in the Slough of Despond. There is 
 even reason to fear that, for some years, the loss 
 of the ideal had on him a natural but melancholy 
 effect, similar to that which (in the fable) the loss 
 of the tail had on the fox. It is, however, right 
 to mention that his mental struggles affected his 
 nerves, and that these reacted on his mental con- 
 dition. Speaking of his state at this time, my 
 friend writes : 
 
 " What his physical condition was then, without being 
 ill, may be judged from one fact. He most kindly gave 
 
32 
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 me a private lecture in Magna Charta ; we both adopted the 
 position of seekers. During an animated discussion of 
 Hallam's views, I turned aside to collate some reading. On 
 looking round, Pattison was fast asleep ; and this is how he 
 often seemed in those years, wearied out with vexations, and 
 as if he might sink into an exhausted sleep at any moment." 
 
 It should also be stated that my informant was 
 intimate with Pattison chiefly when he was smart- 
 ing under a sense of grievous injustice after the 
 failure of his first candidature for the Rectorship ; 
 and it is thought that haply, for some years, the 
 loss of his ideal and the loss of his election com- 
 bined to give bitterness to his conversation. 
 This is important as throwing light both on the 
 origin and on the original form of his cynicism. 
 But, when I knew him, his state of mind was 
 different. I never detected in him the least re- 
 semblance to the esprit fort (or faible) who 
 exclaimed : " Lord, I cannot believe ; help thou 
 mine unbelief." His cynicism seemed to me to 
 be the outcome of deliberate reason, and to have 
 become a second nature to him : and as such I 
 shall attempt to describe it. 
 
 " It is not desirable," says Bagehot, " to take 
 this world too much au serieux ; most persons 
 will not; and the one in a thousand who will, 
 should not." In other words, a man of that 
 abnormal type ought to make a conscious effort, 
 if not to become what the French call a farceur ', 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 33 
 
 and what Bacon in his essay on Fortune calls 
 poco di matto, at least to avoid being righteous 
 over-much, and being over-wise. This was just 
 the sort of exhortation which Pattison needed, 
 which he knew that he needed, and which he 
 tried, not very successfully, to follow : he was, 
 as it were, an homme serieux malgre lui. 
 
 If I were asked to what he owed this peculiarity 
 of temperament, I should say that it was partly 
 due to his retentiveness of memory, or rather to 
 his inability to forget. Darwin, in explaining 
 the genesis of morals among primitive men, 
 attributes much to the influence of memory. 
 When the best of our early ancestors saw a 
 neighbour suffering, they were haunted by 
 the recollection of what they themselves had 
 suffered. When they were tempted to do 
 wrong, they could not always banish the 
 thought of their own resentment when injured. 
 This importunateness of memory, arising under 
 different conditions and associated (as it often is) 
 with nervous weakness, contributes much both to 
 the merits and to the defects of such men as the 
 Rector : they cannot get rid of their former 
 selves. Of the many illustrations of my mean- 
 ing, the most obvious must suffice. When a 
 man labours to avert or to postpone a change 
 which he regards as hurtful or premature, it is 
 
 D 
 
34 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 hardly possible for him to avoid exaggerating 
 the evils of that change, and thus becoming an 
 alarmist. When another or the same man seeks 
 to evolve the energy needful for carrying out 
 some great reform or establishing a scientific 
 truth, it is perhaps impossible for him to avoid 
 greatly exaggerating the importance of his un- 
 dertaking, and thus becoming a strong optimist. 
 It is through this and other causes that nearly 
 every one of us oscillates between a modified 
 pessimism (or at least uneasiness about the future) 
 and a decided optimism ; and during these oscil- 
 lations an ordinary Philistine, however strong 
 his affirmations may be on either side, has an, 
 enviable faculty of believing in himself. To 
 Pattison and his peers this convenient self-decep- 
 tion is impossible. Their Liberal zeal is checked 
 by the unwelcome memory of their fits of pessi- 
 mism, and their Conservative zeal by the memory 
 of their fits of optimism. No doubt, they are 
 thus preserved from much extravagance ; but 
 they tend, in the phraseology of Burns, to become 
 " tideless blooded." This word exactly expresses 
 Pattison's chief fault, or rather his misfortune; 
 for it was his misfortune that states of feeling 
 which appear to ordinary men as a series of dis- 
 solving views, each distinct in itself, blended 
 themselves before his mind's-eye and made a sort 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 35 
 
 of blur.* Renan has said, " Presque tous nous 
 sommes doubles," and has somewhere maintained 
 the paradox : " Woe to the man who does not 
 contradict himself at least once a day."t In a 
 like spirit, Pattison, when reminded that some 
 principle or policy which he was upholding was 
 opposed to principles laid down in his writings, 
 used to exclaim jestingly, " It is more than five 
 minutes ago that I wrote that," or again, " Who 
 ever dreamt of reconciling practice and theory ?" 
 Yet, while thus professing indifference, he was 
 really anxious, perhaps over-anxious, to see prac- 
 tice and theory fitting one another like hand and 
 glove. To quote again from the writer who so 
 well illustrates this subject : " The man," says 
 Goethe, " who would do all that is expected of 
 him, must overrate himself a little perhaps more 
 
 * Since writing this, I have learnt that he once quoted the 
 following passage (from Lewes's Life of Goethe) in explanation 
 of his own character : " There is in men of active intellects, 
 and especially in men of imaginative, apprehensive intellects, 
 a fluctuation of motives keeping the volition in abeyance, 
 which practically amounts to weakness. This is the weak- 
 ness of imaginative men." This reminds one of Macaulay's 
 character of Halifax. 
 
 f Mr. Maurice notes " one important quality of Boswell. 
 He never stumbled at contradictions. Johnson often said 
 things directly inconsistent with each other. Most thought- 
 ful men who speak what they mean, and feel strongly at any 
 given time, do." 
 
 D2 
 
36 KECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 
 
 than a little, if he thinks about himself at all." 
 And, on the other hand, he who dwells constantly 
 on the seamy side of his own work, needs to be 
 reminded that there is just as seamy a side to the 
 work of others, or he will think himself the worst 
 sempster in the world. In the phrase of the 
 eminent Oxonian who is now, as he was thirty 
 years ago, the greatest teacher in the University, 
 such a man is too much " under the dominion of 
 logic." Pattison was under that dominion ; and, 
 when logical power, mnemonic power, and ner- 
 vous weakness are combined as they were in 
 him, they indicate a person to whom, not indeed 
 pecca fortiter, but /u,a0e Tral&v would be wholesome 
 advice : 
 
 " amara lento 
 
 Temperet risn ; nihil est ab omni 
 Parte beatum." 
 
 Such a man as we have described could hardly 
 fail to be given to paradoxes ; and, in fact, as we 
 have already intimated, Pattison revelled in them. 
 Sometimes he was paradoxically sceptical. I once 
 asked him whether it is not certain that we owe 
 much to the Catholic Church for the wisdom with 
 which in the Middle Ages she insisted on the 
 celibacy of the priests, as the only means of 
 securing their independence of the barons. " We 
 always say so/' was his characteristic rejoinder, 
 
EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 37 
 
 " but I don't know on what evidence." On one 
 occasion, his paradoxical temper found vent in an 
 anti-Liberal ebullition worthy of Carlyle : "I 
 should like to see the anniversary of the day on 
 which Cromwell closed the door of the House of 
 Commons kept as the greatest day of our calen- 
 dar/' This, however, seems to have represented 
 a passing phase of his opinions ; for I am assured 
 that he sometimes defended constitutional govern- 
 ment as the least unsatisfactory of all forms of 
 government. I once discussed with him the sin- 
 gular superiority, in point of ability, of the Liberal 
 to the Conservative party in the House of Com- 
 mons. " Yes," he observed, " the best thing about 
 parliamentary government is that it tends to bring 
 the ablest men to the front." 
 
 I spoke to him about the last patriarch of 
 Benthamism, Mr. George Norman, who, like his 
 friend, Mr. Grote, inclined to Conservatism in 
 his old age. Mr. Norman once said to me, " I 
 only wish that Gladstone would leave us without 
 organic changes for the next forty years " (a sen- 
 timent which sounds very like " Apres moi et 
 mon fils le deluge ") : and, on another occasion, 
 he made the gloomy prediction : " Sooner or later, 
 there must be a struggle between those who have 
 got and those who want, and I don't see how it is 
 to be settled except by the sword. But I sup- 
 
38 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 pose that those who have got will win." " True," 
 said Pattison, when this augury of ill was re- 
 peated to him ; " in the end those who have got 
 will win. But, in the meantime, everything will 
 have been lost which had been gained during the 
 half -century before ; and, soon after the civil strife 
 is settled, it will be ready to break out again." 
 
 The halting attitude which he was wont to 
 assume when confronted by wide generalizations, 
 may be illustrated by his view of the great prin- 
 ciple that representation ought to be coextensive 
 with taxation. It is plain that, as every one, 
 directly or indirectly, pays taxes, the principle, 
 pressed to its extreme conclusions, would give 
 manhood and womanhood, if not what may be 
 termed childhood, suffrage to every inhabitant, 
 civilized or uncivilized, of our entire Indian and 
 Colonial empire ; and that it would lead to the 
 parcelling out of the empire into equal electoral 
 districts. It will doubtless be objected that the 
 franchise should not be given to incompetent per- 
 sons. But, in truth, this qualification is an all- 
 important one. That, in strict theory, the fran- 
 chise ought to be given to every taxpayer, but 
 that, in practice, it should be withheld from unfit 
 persons, and that the present holders of power are 
 to be judges of their unfitness, this is a principle 
 to which the highest Tory need not demur. 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 39 
 
 After we had touched on these points, Pattison 
 said thoughtfully : " In fact, it comes to this, 
 the principle will not bear examination." Never- 
 theless, he doubtless thought that the old Whigs 
 acted wisely in assuming the correctness of this 
 exaggerated ideal as a basis for carrying the 
 Reform Bill, and that future reformers will have 
 to follow their example. Indeed, he approvingly 
 quoted an Aristotelian maxim to the effect that, 
 when we would obtain a little from mankind, it 
 is often needful to ask for a great deal. 
 
 He brought a like spirit to bear on the ques- 
 tion of nationality. " The age of patriotism," he 
 said, " is passing away, and the age of cosmopo- 
 litanism is taking its place." Irish Home Eule 
 was not to his liking ; and he regarded the cry 
 " Egypt for the Egyptians " as, if not a reductio 
 ad absurdum, at least a natural sequel of the cry 
 " Ireland for the Irish." On my asking whether 
 he was not of opinion that the Irish Land Bill 
 was opposed to the principles of political economy, 
 as those principles used to be commonly under- 
 stood, he interrupted me by saying, " Of course, 
 it is confiscation." Yet he was not prepared to 
 deny that, in the present state of public opinion, 
 the Bill was inevitable. It should be added that 
 he regretted the sympathy shown by some Oxford 
 Liberals for Lord Beaconfield's foreign policy. 
 
40 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 In a word, he was a Whig, and not a 
 Jingo. 
 
 It may be instructive to observe that between 
 Pattison and Charles Austin there were many 
 points of comparison and a few of contrast. The 
 chief difference between them was, that Pattison 
 had far less political and patriotic enthusiasm 
 than Austin had. Austin (as his brother told me), 
 shortly before he died, went to a public meeting 
 at St. James's Hall, where the band suddenly 
 struck up the Marseillaise. He had long since 
 laid aside his juvenile sympathy with the French 
 Revolution ; yet, on hearing the old familiar strain, 
 he rose from his seat (old and infirm as he was), 
 and the tears came to his eyes. Personally I 
 never saw him thus give way to his feelings ; but 
 I remember his saying that he pitied the man 
 whose spirit was not stirred by the cry for 
 deliverance in the Per see : 
 
 e TrarpiS', eAcv0epo{;T Sc 
 TratSag, yvvcuKas, 6tiov T Trarpwcov ZSrj. 
 
 Pattison, so far as I could judge, had hardly a 
 spark of this patriotic zeal. His want of interest 
 in the politics of the day is well shown by a habit 
 of his, which is reported to me at first hand. He 
 never turned to the newspapers till 9 p.m., and 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 41 
 
 then chiefly from a sense of duty.* Generally, 
 instead of reading them himself, he would lie 
 down on his sofa, take out his watch, and shut his 
 eyes, while his niece looked down the columns, and 
 gave him the shortest possible epitome of the 
 Times. If she got through it in less than twenty 
 minutes, she was commended. But he liked to 
 hear, at least, the heading of everything ; and, if 
 any event was afterwards mentioned which she 
 had overlooked, he would say reproachfully, "I 
 suppose that was not in our copy." 
 
 We once talked over the romantic visit paid to 
 Greece by the statesman whom the Greeks called 
 o (f>i\e\\'rjv KOI Treptyrj/Aos T\daTu>v. In the conversa- 
 tion, a passage from the Acharnians was applied 
 to the visit 
 
 e/?po'vra, gvvKVK.a ryv 'EAAaSa. 
 
 Pattison seemed pleased with the quotation, and 
 begged to hear it again. In referring to the 
 modern Pericles (scholar, orator, reformer), he 
 acknowledged that he had little sympathy with 
 him ; adding, " It is strange that he is the living 
 representative of the Liberal cause, the cause of 
 
 * He told a friend that lie did not like to have the 
 news " hot " he preferred giving it time to cool. According 
 to Goethe, you may often with advantage delay reading 
 newspapers, as to-morrow's news may correct to-day's, 
 
42 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 wisdom and righteousness throughout all time." 
 On my asking whether some share of the credit 
 was not due to the Conservative party on the 
 ground that it cunctando restituit rem s he merely 
 answered, " Sir Stafford Northcote is the repre- 
 sentative of everything which distinguishes Eng- 
 lishmen from Americans." This damning with 
 faint praise may prepare my readers for his having 
 said, in his half-jesting way, " Though I am 
 always abusing the Liberals, I call myself a 
 Liberal, and I am one." He expressed his regret 
 at the death of the Prince Consort by saying that 
 it was as great a misfortune as a ten-years' 
 innings of the Conservative party. He was told 
 of a very lukewarm Liberal who said that, so far 
 as the society is concerned, he would rather belong 
 to the Carlton than to the Reform Club. " He is quite 
 right," said the Rector; " Reformers are gener- 
 ally so rough and rude. Of course, the Whigs of 
 Holland House were exceptions. But, as a general 
 rule, my advice is to live with the Tories and to vote 
 with the Whigs." A cynic might add that those 
 who purpose following this advice, would be wise 
 in taking full advantage of the Ballot, and not 
 letting their High Tory friends suspect that they 
 vote against them. 
 
 His Liberalism did not incline him to what is 
 called the Birmingham School. In reference to 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 43 
 
 an eminent writer and editor who has become a 
 strong Radical, he said : " He has taken so much 
 pains about Vart d'ecrire, that he has not left 
 himself time to acquire I'art de vivre. The two 
 arts are very different, and the one often unfits 
 a man for the other." I asked him whether De 
 Tocqueville had not stated too broadly that the 
 advent of democracy was inevitable. " Since 
 he died," answered the Rector, " everything 
 seems to be fulfilling his predictions. Nothing 
 can stop the movement. The more you give the 
 people, the more they will want." I called his 
 attention to an assertion of Mr. Herbert Spencer 
 to the effect, that the time will come when one 
 man will not be suffered to enjoy, without working, 
 that which another man works for without enjoy- 
 ing ; and I asked him whether such a state of 
 public opinion would not exclude domestic ser- 
 vice, and, indeed, all social inequalities. " I fear 
 it must be so," he replied. " Everything seems to 
 be ten ding to wards Socialism. I hate it" I asked 
 why, if so great an evil is approaching, he and 
 those who think with him do not try to stop it. 
 " Look there," he said, pointing to the sea at 
 Biarritz. " Just as men can construct moles and 
 breakwaters against the waves, so individuals can, 
 in some slight degree, modify passing events. 
 They are as powerless against the tide of history, 
 
44 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 as they are against the tide of the ocean. No ; 
 what is to be, will be, in spite of you and me." 
 
 It may be well to insert the epitome of a con- 
 versation which sets forth the Rector's manner of 
 dealing with this subject, though it shows him in 
 an unusual attitude an attitude of defence. I 
 reminded him that in one of his writings he had 
 expressed a view (seemingly shared by Hallam) 
 that Englishmen were, on the whole, better off in 
 the reign of George II. than either before or 
 since. He told me that he had been taken to task 
 for this assertion, but he seemed prepared to 
 defend it, and also to predict that England would 
 go on declining. I insisted that, in discussing 
 the question, we must start with the assumption 
 that there is more good than evil in life. " I 
 don't see," he exclaimed, " why I should assume 
 anything of the sort ; I think I shall take up the 
 view of Schopenhauer." I recalled to him some of 
 the conclusions that may be drawn from that 
 wildly anti- social theory such conclusions, for 
 instance, as the following : Ought not these very 
 numerous persons who say that they would not, if 
 they could, live their lives over again in other 
 words, that, so far as their experience goes, the 
 good of life is a minus quantity, ought not these 
 Schopenhauerites to rejoice instead of sorrowing 
 at the sight or news of a shipwreck ? " Well," he 
 
BECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 45 
 
 said, " suppose I grant that life is a good, what 
 has that to say to human progress ? " " For con- 
 venience of figures," I answered, "let us com- 
 pare the present time with a time when the popu- 
 lation of England was one-third of what it now is, 
 and let us suppose that the average Englishman 
 was twice as happy as now even on this extreme 
 supposition, the aggregate of happiness in England 
 would be half as great again now as then ; English- 
 men, in tripling their numbers, would have gained 
 more collectively than they have lost individually." 
 " Yes, yes," he said, with amused impatience, 
 " but this is not what is generally meant by pro- 
 gress." I never could draw him further than this 
 on the optimistic path. Indeed, he seemed gene- 
 rally half to expect, as the most eminent of 
 French critics half expects,* that, when reformers 
 have done their perfect work, the world, destitute 
 of variety and originality, will become a sort of 
 universal China a lubberland of lotos-eaters. 
 Nor could he fail to see the inferences that might 
 be drawn from such a prognostication. A great 
 living philologist has expressed the opinion that 
 the classical languages and literatures paid for 
 their temporary splendour by their premature 
 
 * Scherer Etudes, Vol. v. pp. 316, 317 (on Renan), and 
 Vol vii. p. 64 (on Carlyle). 
 
46 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 decay. If it is likewise true that all civilization 
 tends to decay, analogy might warrant the con- 
 jecture that patriotic and philanthropic zealots 
 are, so to say, making the world live its life too 
 fast, and hurrying it on to its senile decrepitude. 
 If so, it is not a mere counsel of imperfection fitted 
 for men of the world, a mere concession to the 
 hardness of their hearts, but the highest Utili- 
 tarian ideal, that is embodied in the suggestion 
 of the most philosophical of our judges, that 
 perhaps " the respectable man . . . who led an 
 easy life will turn out to have been right after all, 
 and enthusiastic believers of all creeds to have 
 been quite wrong." I enunciate this violent 
 paradox, not as expressing the settled convictions 
 of any one, but as furnishing a sample of a class 
 of doubts which, more or less consciously, present 
 themselves to men like Pattison, and effectually 
 deprive them, if not of the enthusiasm of humanity, 
 at least of what may be termed the enthusiasm of 
 progress. 
 
 We have before stated that Pattison was not, as 
 indeed no one can be, a consistent pessimist. By 
 urging on education and other reforms, he showed 
 that he was practically a believer in progress. 
 Yet, even as a believer in progress, he was per- 
 plexed by ethical puzzles which differ from the 
 pessimistic ones, but are hardly less embarrass- 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 47 
 
 ing. He was amused or troubled amused as the 
 only alternative of being troubled by such anropiai 
 as the following : Would not an ideal philanthro- 
 pist allow himself only the minimum of relaxation 
 that might be necessary for the greatest efficiency 
 of his work ? Would he not sell his gold watch 
 and take third-class railway tickets, so as to have 
 more money to spare for the Anti-Mendicity 
 Society and the Cancer Hospital ? Ought not the 
 passionate lover, before putting the momentous 
 question, to satisfy himself, not merely that he 
 has the means to support a family, but also that 
 the population of the world stands in need of an 
 increase ? Ought we not, when ill, to forsake the 
 medical Philistine who would treat us simply with 
 a view to our own cure, and to resort to the 
 nobler practitioner who would experiment on us 
 for the good of posterity ? To this last question, 
 Pattison laughingly objected that the " neigh- 
 bour " whom we are commanded to love as our- 
 selves, cannot mean the unborn; but he knew 
 full well that to laugh was not to solve the riddle. 
 He knew also that these difficulties are increased 
 (or nullified) by a further one, which may be re- 
 garded as a phase of pessimism, though it repre- 
 sents a novel aspect of that Protean creed. Mill 
 insists that the Utilitarian principle should be 
 applied, not to man only, but to the entire sentient 
 
48 EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 universe ; and certainly it is less easy to show that 
 the principle ought not to be so extended, than 
 that, if so extended, it might involve a reductio ad 
 euthanasiam. May it not be argued that, from 
 the philozoic point of view, the existence of the 
 human race is altogether a mishap? Does the 
 Unconstitutional Monarchy of Man minister to 
 " the greatest happiness of the greatest number " 
 of sentient beings (including earwigs and animal- 
 cules) ? " I never could see," said the Rector, 
 when dealing seriously with such questions, " any 
 way of disposing of extreme cases, except by 
 taking the matter at the other end, and asking : 
 What reason can you allege for the obligation of 
 self -sacrifice ? " Perhaps it was in consequence 
 of this fundamental doubt that he disliked, as he 
 informed me, to label himself a Utilitarian. His 
 friend, Henry Smith, told me that he also demurred 
 to the designation, and for a similar reason. But, 
 after all, the question is one of words. Charles 
 Austin, the Utilitarian par excellence, sometimes 
 avowed a logical scepticism as complete as Patti- 
 son's ; more often, he expressed an opinion dif- 
 ferent in appearance, but substantially the same. 
 Goethe has observed that a universal scepticism 
 always takes refuge in a qualified belief. And 
 thus there was, in fact, a latent scepticism in a 
 remark which Austin once made : " I know of no 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 49 
 
 olbiometer : so we must take the conventional 
 estimate of what leads to pleasure or pain."* In 
 other words, we must not be too logical, but must 
 acquiesce in the moral standard of the good men 
 and women among whom we live. This, I repeat, 
 was Pattison's view; and, if I describe his ethical 
 creed as Utilitarianism tempered by Pyrrhonism, 
 I must be understood to mean no more than this. 
 After all, if he was wrong, he was kept in coun- 
 tenance by the virtuous, nay, over-scrupulous 
 poet who was remarkable for what Bagehot has 
 called a " pleasant cynicism," and who gave a 
 cynical turn even to such pathetic self -revelations 
 as Dipsychus, Amours de Voyage, and In the Great 
 Metropolis. Mr. Jowett, too, in his strictures on 
 Casuistry, adopts a view similar to that of the 
 best of the Questioned Spirits, the Spirit who cut 
 ethical knots by exclaiming, 
 
 " I know not, I will do my duty " ; 
 
 and whose note was at times saddened into 
 
 " I know not, I must do as other men are doing." 
 
 * A similar view is very strongly expressed by Scherer, in 
 Etudes, VL, p. 213 (on Sterne), and in the introduction to 
 Amiel's Journal, pp. Ixvi., Ixvii. (" La vie exige des menage- 
 
 ments, j'allais dire des ruses L'art de vivre, c'est de 
 
 se faire une raison, de souscrire aux compromis, de se preter 
 
 aux fictions La vie ne supporte pas d'etre serree de 
 
 [tout] pres. C'est une croute mince sur laquelle il faut 
 
 E 
 
50 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 The application of this principle may be shown 
 by an example. " Pattison," writes one who knew 
 him well, " was very fond of fishing, but he had 
 grave misgivings as to the moral character of the 
 amusement. He confessed to these, but I do not 
 know that he allowed them to interfere with his 
 practice." Likewise, Austin doubted the morality 
 of field sports, and yet he preserved game for his 
 guests. It is probable that both of these philoso- 
 phers were acting against what may be termed 
 their logical conscience ; but they were not, in any 
 ordinary sense of the word, unconscientious. The 
 worst that can be said about them is, that they 
 were of the marble of which sages are made, but 
 not of the gold of which saints are made. Might 
 they not have contended that they were merely 
 conforming to a custom likely to be considered 
 barbarous by a remote posterity, and that, if we 
 would conform to no custom likely to be so re- 
 garded, we (in St. Paul's phrase) " must needs go 
 out of the world " ? * 
 
 It will now be understood what I meant when I 
 represented the Rector's cynicism as wholly unlike 
 the vulgar cynicism of less analytical minds. 
 
 marcher sans appnyer ; dormer dii talon dedans, vons ferez 
 nn trou ou vous disparaitrez.") 
 
 * My view is further illustrated in Safe Studies, pp. 230 
 234, See also p. 287, note. 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 51 
 
 From the premise, Omnia exeunt in absurdum, he 
 drew the conclusion, Omnia vanitas. He feared 
 moral and religious enthusiasm, for he knew not 
 whither it might lead. In the "Memoirs" he 
 remarks quaintly very quaintly for a clergyman 
 that "Religion is a good servant, but a bad 
 master," which is the exact equivalent of Goethe's 
 famous aphorism : " Religion is not an end, but a 
 means, to lead us through the purest tranquillity 
 of mind to the highest culture." In like manner, 
 he felt that Imperat aut servit recti mens conscia 
 cuique. He was (to use his own phrase) " haunted 
 by the ideal, and baffled by philosophical perplexi- 
 ties," haunted and baffled all the more painfully, 
 because others, far inferior to him in intellect, 
 rose, through being unweighted by those per- 
 plexities, to a somewhat Pharisaical ideal be- 
 cause they, not having tasted of the Tree of 
 Knowledge, ate and condemned him for not eating 
 of the Tree of Life. This being duly considered, 
 it will be found that his sceptical, caustic, and 
 jaunty sayings generally leave in the mouth no 
 taste save that of a tonic bitter. We may, there- 
 fore, without scruple, give a few more examples 
 of the cynicism which so belonged to him that one 
 almost missed it if ever he laid it aside. 
 
 We will begin with an aphorism of his which 
 may have been suggested by Mill's well-known 
 
 E2 
 
52 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 statement that in England the upper classes for 
 the most part do not lie, and that the lower 
 classes, though almost habitually liars, are gene- 
 rally ashamed of lying. "Englishmen," said 
 Pattison, " lie as much as foreigners ; but En- 
 glishmen have a dim consciousness that they are 
 lying, while foreigners believe all the while that 
 they are telling the truth." This preferring of 
 conscious guilt to guilt born of self-deceit, will at 
 once recall Aristotle's comparison between a/cpaala 
 and a/coXaala, and perhaps is not wholly unlike 
 St. Paul's comparison between doing wrong things 
 and having pleasure in them that do them. I re- 
 member asking Charles Austin if he did not think 
 that too much fuss was made when a late Bishop 
 of Durham appointed a highly respectable son-in- 
 law to a good living. Being in a paradoxical vein, 
 he answered : "What I mind is, not the thing 
 that was done, but the sanctimonious way in 
 which it was done. If Ben Stanley had done 
 anything of the kind, he would have written in 
 big letters in his diary, This is a job, and that 
 would not have been half as bad. I should not 
 hate Torquemada so much if I did not know that 
 he was thoroughly convinced that he was doing 
 his duty." Carlyle has paid Frederic the equivocal 
 compliment that, although he often deceived others, 
 he never deceived himself. 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 53 
 
 Pattison was coaching an undergraduate in the 
 Ethics. The pupil, perplexed by Aristotle's rea- 
 soning, embarrassed his teacher by his importunate 
 desire to understand it. At last Pattison said 
 tartly : " Never mind understanding it, only get 
 it up." The pupil was naturally hurt by this 
 unpleasant rebuke; which, however, probably 
 meant that the time was short, and that, if the 
 pupil insisted on discussing first principles, 
 instead of merely learning the answers which 
 would satisfy the examiners, he might be disap- 
 pointed in his degree, as Pattison himself had 
 been. Nevertheless, Pattison' s impatience may 
 have been partly due to want of sympathy with , 
 the subject. When I knew him, and when he 
 wrote his Memoirs, he was an Aristotelian. But 
 he was originally a Platonist, and it was only by j 
 slow degrees that the influence of Oxford wrought ' 
 the change in him. Many years ago, when 
 speaking of the late Dr. Jeune as a successful 
 man of the world whom he disliked, he said, 
 " I divide men into those who love Plato and 
 those who do not ; Jeune, I am certain, does not." 
 
 When a new edition of Shakespeare came out, 
 he said to a friend, " Instead of bringing out 
 these old plays, why don't the editors write new 
 ones?" My informant understood him to mean 
 that the prevalent Shakespearolatry is a mere 
 
54 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 delusion. If he really held this opinion, he had 
 given it up when he wrote his Life of Milton, 
 and when I knew him. He told me, however, 
 that he thought that there is much exaggeration 
 in the popular judgment on the subject, and that 
 the great excellence of Shakespeare is to be 
 sought in the beautiful passages that abound in 
 his plays, rather than in his power of delineating 
 character. He took greater delight in reading 
 the Sonnets than the Plays ; he found fault with 
 Romeo and Juliet , and even The Tempest was not 
 one of his favourites. Every old man, says 
 Goethe, is a King Lear. It is characteristic of 
 Pattison that he regarded King Lear and Pere 
 Goriot as superior in tragic interest- to any other 
 modern works of fiction. 
 
 He certainly used odd language about poets. 
 In an article on Tennyson, I had contrasted the 
 poet with more mature thinkers. Pattison wrote 
 to me: "The phrase, 'more mature thinkers, 5 
 implies that Tennyson is a thinker at all. Is he 
 so ? Is he not a poet, and are not poets and 
 thinkers incompatibles ?" This can only have 
 meant that a poet, qua poet, is not a thinker, and 
 that it would go hardly even with the greatest 
 poets if we subjected their reasoning to the severe 
 test which we apply to the reasoning of philoso- 
 phers. Hamlet's soliloquy assuredly could not 
 bear that test. 
 
EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 55 
 
 " The religion of uneducated [unphilosophical] 
 persons is the same everywhere, and has been the 
 same since the foundation of the world." This 
 oracular sentence was addressed by Pattison to a 
 brother clergyman who, though a Broad Church- 
 man, was rather shocked by it. Its meaning (so 
 far as it has any) probably resembles that of 
 Charles Austin's favourite quotation 1 the line in 
 which the Tory and orthodox Dryden affirms that 
 " priests of all religion are the same." 
 
 One is sometimes startled, after knowing one 
 corner of a great man's mind well, to find how 
 many corners there are of which one knew nothing. 
 In my intercourse with Pattison, I never sus- 
 pected that he took an interest in otter-hunting 
 and horse-racing. The latter taste is well illus- 
 trated by the following anecdote, communicated 
 to me by one of his pupils : 
 
 " The year of the great match between Voltigeur and Flying 
 Dutchman, he suddenly asked me, which horse would win. 
 I answered calmly : ' It depends on the state of the ground ; 
 the Dutchman is the faster horse, but, if the ground is heavy, 
 Voltigeur will win.' He seemed delighted with such an 
 answer from a ' slow ' man, but the question followed, * How 
 did you learn that ?' ' Oh, I talked it over with the coach- 
 man on the box as I came up,' and his countenance fell." 
 
 During his lifetime I never dreamt that his 
 proficiency in croquet was such that he aspired to 
 
56 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 become Champion of all England. But I knew 
 that he took an interest in the game. This came 
 out in an odd way. On my mentioning the name 
 of a lady who is a strong advocate of Women's 
 Rights, he exclaimed eagerly, " I know something 
 
 of Miss . She was playing at croquet, and 
 
 I was acting as head of the side. "When it was 
 her turn, I told her not to try to go through the 
 hoop, but merely to place her ball in front of it. 
 She replied stiffly, e Thank you, I would rather 
 play my own game.' She tried to go through the 
 hoop, missed it, and the game was lost. I said to 
 myself, That girl has an undisciplined mind." 
 
 One evening, the Rector, as he was wishing me 
 good-night, told me rather mysteriously that he 
 was going the next day to call on the Editor of 
 the Times (Mr. Chenery). I asked whether he 
 thought him an able man. Not being in a com- 
 municative mood, he answered, " Do you know 
 that you are putting a very hard question ? It is 
 just as if you asked me well whether I think 
 Jupiter clever," and he laughed as he hurried 
 away. 
 
 He liked novel reading, and it was a sort of 
 affectation with him to seem to like it a great 
 deal (as might perhaps have been inferred from 
 the last sentence in the Life of Milton). Being 
 asked whether a former pupil, who was making 
 
EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 57 
 
 his mark in the world, kept up his taste for litera- 
 ture, he answered, " Yes, he reads all the novels 
 that come out, and he remembers them too" He 
 declared (how seriously I know not) that he pre- 
 ferred contemporary French literature (including 
 novels) to contemporary English literature. Nor 
 was this the only respect in which he was wont 
 to depreciate the intellectual atmosphere of 
 England. A friend writes : 
 
 " He spoke once somewhat bitterly of the treatment of 
 public men, and men of energy, in England. He said, 'If a 
 man was a country squire and did nothing, just lived an 
 easy, good-tempered sportsman's life, all men spoke well of 
 him, and he was popular, and life was made pleasant for him; 
 immediately a man showed energy and worked, he was 
 thwarted, calumny begun, and he became unpopular. It 
 was so with statesmen, and so with the Bishops. The 
 Bishops who did nothing were liked; Wilberforce (then of 
 Oxford, about 1849-50), who showed some energy, was 
 calumniated and hated by many, and anything was believed 
 against him/ " 
 
 Was Pattison also thinking of the contrast between 
 the French admiration for Richelieu and the 
 English abhorrence of Strafford ? 
 
 A trifling incident may show how strong was 
 his antipathy to the narrow classical instruction 
 which used to form the chief staple of our public 
 school education. I had been talking about my 
 own school-time at Harrow. He turned round 
 
58 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 and asked abruptly, " Did you learn anything 
 there?" I hesitated. "Answer me, Yes or No. 
 Can you recall a single thing worth remembering 
 that you learnt during all the years that you 
 spent there ?" I replied that, owing to my extreme 
 short sight and consequent slowness in looking 
 out words in a dictionary, I was not a good 
 sample of a Harrow boy, but that some of my 
 schoolfellows certainly learnt much. "Yes," he 
 said, doubtfully, " perhaps you may be right." 
 
 He upbraided me in a sort of semi-banter, 
 because in the Fortnightly Review I praised 
 Charles Austin for continuing, when failing health 
 drove him from the Bar, to do what active work 
 he could as Chairman of Quarter Sessions. " Do 
 you know, I feel quite hurt by your saying this ? 
 Can you seriously mean that the /3to? Trpa/crnco^ 
 is superior to the /3/09 Qewprjri/cos ? I can hardly 
 conceive anything more dreadful than for such a 
 man as Austin to have wasted his time over the 
 drudgery of Quarter Sessions." This is pitched 
 in the same key as the opinion of Goethe, quoted 
 both by Hay ward and by Pattison, that " a purely 
 poetical subject is as superior to a political one, 
 as the pure everlasting truth of Nature is to party 
 spirit." 
 
 I called the Rector's attention to a very Patti- 
 sonian confession of Sainte-Beuve, who seemed 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 59 
 
 to limit his moral aspirations to " un compose de 
 bonnes habitudes, de bonnes manieres, d'honnetes 
 precedes, reposant d'ordinaire sur un fonds plus 
 ou moins genereux, sur une nature plus ou moins 
 bien nee ;" and I asked him whether the last two 
 words mean well constituted (in the sense which 
 Mr. Galton deems so important) or well-born (as 
 opposed to risen from the ranks). He answered 
 that the latter was the meaning; and, after men- 
 tioning a very distinguished self-made man (lately 
 deceased), he put the query, " Could anything 
 have turned him into a gentleman?" 
 
 After he had delivered his lecture at Bedford 
 College in 1883, I suggested that he should send 
 it to a new and struggling periodical with which 
 I knew that he warmly sympathized. He answered 
 that the application had already been made by 
 the editor : "It was asking me to make him a 
 present of 25, to which my peyaXoTrpeTreia was not 
 equal. I know I ought to be content with the 
 approval of the Dean of St. Paul's, who wrote to 
 me, c Nothing so true and so real has been said 
 for a long time ' ; but I also remember the text, 
 
 El ev TO) a$LK(p fAa/jL/jitova TTtcrrot ov/c eyevecrOe, TO a\r)6ivov 
 
 T/? vfjiiv TTtarevo-ei ;" He therefore intended to send 
 the revised lecture to a popular magazine, but his 
 intention seems to have been relinquished through 
 failing health. This sounds very mercenary ; but, 
 
60 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 if he had not been a eavrbv Ti^aypov/jievos and a eavrov 
 KarTjyopwv, he would have said, and with substantial 
 truth, that his reason for declining the request 
 was a desire to exert an influence over the greatest 
 possible number of readers. I do not blame him 
 for thus writing to me in the cynical dialect, as he 
 knew that I should translate his words into the 
 vernacular. But it is certainly unfortunate that 
 he often used the same dialect, a dialect very open 
 to misconstruction, in addressing persons almost 
 certain to misconstrue it. 
 
 A former pupil of Pattison, an orthodox divine, 
 who, though very well off, continues to take an 
 active part in education, told me that the Rector 
 once said to him, " You are the most ungrateful 
 man in the world. Providence has given you the 
 opportunity of being idle, and you won't take 
 advantage of it." I am sorry that I never asked 
 Pattison whether, in giving this most uncharac- 
 l teristic advice, he was not thinking of Gibbon's 
 paradox that the vices of the clergy are less 
 dangerous than their virtues whether, in fact, 
 he was not resorting to an (t economy of truth" 
 in the hope of inducing his very ecclesiastical 
 friend to leave education alone. If this was not 
 his meaning, the admonition must have been one 
 of those counsels of imperfection to which I have 
 alluded. It is simply impossible that the advice 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 61 
 
 to seek delights and shun laborious days would be 
 given by the censor who has denounced the entire 
 generation of middle-aged Oxford dons as stricken 
 with intellectual palsy. His state of mind was, 
 perhaps, similar to Kenan's : " Tout en etant fort 
 applique, je me demande sans cesse si ce ne sont 
 pas les gens frivoles qui ont raison." I call atten- 
 tion to this passage, as it is about as good an 
 example as could be given of that importunateness 
 of memory and refleciton which is (so to say) the 
 presiding demon of analytical thought. 
 
 The gospel of idleness is merely a part of the 
 gospel of self-indulgence ; and the grain of salt 
 which is needed to make the former gospel pala- 
 table, or even tolerable, must now be added for 
 the seasoning of the latter. If the following say- 
 ing of Pattison, the most cynical that I shall quote, 
 can be more or less satisfactorily interpreted, all 
 his cynical sayings can be so interpreted. In 
 Safe Studies, p. 187, I enunciate the truism that 
 husband and wife should comfort and sustain one 
 another in struggling for the good of all men. 
 In page 116, I quote with disapproval a strange 
 assertion of Montaigne, " He who abandons his 
 own healthful and pleasant life to serve others, 
 takes, in my opinion, a course that is wrong and 
 unnatural." Concerning these contradictory 
 maxims Pattison wrote : " In page 187, will you 
 
62 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 stand to the words ' for the good of all men ' ? 
 Do you not much rather incline to endorse Mon- 
 taigne's opinion, p. 116, a refreshing passage, to 
 which I wish I had the reference in the original?" 
 In this frank avowal we seem to hear an echo of 
 the " Unjust Voice " in the Clouds : 
 
 ^Kti/'ai yap, a> /xctpctKiov, ev TW <T(jxf>poviv aVavTa 
 "Avea-Tiv, rjftovwv & oawv /xe'XXcts aTroorcpeur^ai, 
 ncuSwy, yvvaLKwv, KOTTa/3a>v, oi/fcuv, TTOTWV, KL^Xia-fJiutv. 
 Kairot rt (TOL rjv aiov, TOVTO>V eav crTeprjOfjs ; 
 
 Neph. 10715. 
 
 But, on the other hand, Pattison was often on 
 the side of the Just Voice) sometimes in an ex- 
 treme degree. I remember pleading for that 
 modified eccentricity, that social independence, 
 which was so dear to the heart of Mill. Pattison, 
 himself not the most conventional of men,* sur- 
 prised me by objecting, " Eccentricity seems to 
 me a form of egoism, and all egoism ought to 
 be discouraged." This little sermon of his may 
 help us to draw the sting from his Apology for 
 Montaigne. Let us observe that in that Apology 
 he uses the word " refreshing," which shows that 
 
 * For example : after he had only once met Miss Swan- 
 wick, he (having, I suppose, chanced to dine in the neigh- 
 bourhood) sent up his card one evening between 9 and 10, 
 and asked if she could receive him. She was glad to avail 
 herself of the opportunity to renew their classical discussions, 
 but was amused at the hour chosen by her untimely guest. 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 63 
 
 he stood in need of refreshment that, in fact 
 he relished Montaigne's aphorism as an anodyne 
 under an oppressive sense of the social martyrdom 
 to which ethical logic might lead. In practice, 
 no doubt, he would have differed from Mill in 
 assigning the limits of self-sacrifice ; but, theore- 
 tically, his paradoxical words perhaps mean no 
 more than Mill would have expressed by saying 
 that, in our present low state of civilization, we 
 cannot ignore the necessity of loving ourselves 
 and those near to us better than those more re- 
 mote. They certainly mean no more than Pro- 
 fessor Bain (on The Study of Character) has 
 expressed by saying that disinterestedness is "an 
 exception to the only sane principle of conduct, 
 which is, for every being to look to its own 
 pleasures and pains a brilliant exception, it is 
 true, something of the splendide mendax, but 
 never to be made the rule without even suicidal 
 consequences." 
 
 We may sum up our view of the Rector's 
 cynicism by affirming that he 
 
 " laughed that any one should weep 
 In this disjointed world for one wrong more." 
 
 Or, more shortly, we may say of him, as of De- 
 mocritus, that he laughed to prevent weeping. 
 Mr. Greg has quaintly remarked that hardly any 
 
64 KECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 one can afford to keep a conscience, that is, a 
 strictly logical one. He might have maintained 
 that no one can afford such a luxury. Clough, 
 whose poetry the Eector (strange to say) did not 
 appreciate, puts the case yet more strongly : 
 
 " We cannot act without assuming aj, 
 And at the same time y, its contradictory ; 
 Ergo, to act."* 
 
 To a sensitive nature like Pattison's, these 
 Antinomies of the Practical Reason are at times 
 not a curious enigma, but a painful reality. A 
 person thus constituted can enter into Scherer's 
 experience that Nous cotoyons I'abbne, gare au 
 vertige. He has learnt that the strivings of his 
 abnormal conscience towards its goal often need, 
 not stimulating, but checking; and his cynical 
 utterances, harsh and unnatural in their tone, are 
 naught but the grating sound of the drag which 
 is put on the wheel. 
 
 In referring to the father of all sceptics, whose 
 treatise by means of a felicitous forgery has made 
 its way into the Canon of Scripture, Renan oddly 
 remarks : " La bonte du sceptique est la plus solide 
 de toutes ; elle repose sur un sentiment profond 
 
 * See also the fifth stanza, of The Higher Courage. In The 
 Latest Decalogue, the contrast is marked between ideal and 
 conventional morality : 
 
 " Thou shalt not covet, but tradition 
 Approves all forms of competition." 
 
EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 65 
 
 de la verite supreme. Nil expedit"* I pointed 
 out this sentence to Pattison, who seemed to 
 regard it with something of approval. But he 
 would doubtless have admitted that the word 
 bonte must be referred rather to public than to 
 private virtue must be taken to denote not 
 heroism, but kindliness. So interpreted, the 
 words may be applied to Pattison himself. 
 Charles Austin was fond of a saying of Voltaire to 
 the effect that, if one would fain work for man- 
 kind, one must avoid being disgusted with man- 
 kind, and must therefore forbear seeing too much 
 of ordinary men and women. It is perhaps safer 
 to assert that some who devote their time and 
 sympathy to public objects, and all who thirst 
 after a wide popularity, impair their capacity for 
 contracting close friendships for making a few 
 men and women feel that they take a personal 
 
 * Again, in L'Antechrist, p. 101, he describes Ecclesiastes 
 as a " livre charmant, le seal livre aimable qui ait ete com- 
 pose par un Juif ;" and adds (p. 102), " Nous ne comprenons 
 pas le galant homme sans un peu de scepticisme ; nous 
 aimons que I'homme vertueux dise de temps a autre, Vertu, 
 tu ties qu'un mot" He goes on to say that the power of 
 smiling at one's own work is " la qualite essentielle d'une 
 personne distinguee," and maintains that this quality was 
 strikingly exemplified in Christ. I wish that some reader 
 would inform me what saying or sayings of Christ, Renan 
 could possibly have had in his mind when he made this 
 startling assertion. 
 
 F 
 
66 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 interest in them. Pattison achieved this, though 
 he laboured under a great drawback. Study 
 engrossed much of his time and interest; and, 
 perhaps on that account, he was at the close of 
 his life lacking in power of sympathy. May it 
 not have been because his small disposable fund 
 of time and sympathy was seldom drawn upon for 
 mankind in the aggregate, that he had any time 
 or sympathy to spare for the few women and 
 fewer men whom he really valued ? At any rate, 
 his misanthropy, or rather his a/philanthropy, 
 freed him from that last infirmity of noble re- 
 formers intolerance of human frailty. Other 
 causes might be mentioned ; but the foregoing 
 may serve to explain how it was that the Rector 
 enjoyed the privilege a privilege rarely vouch- 
 safed to such a hard student of inspiring the 
 few whom he admitted to his friendship with a 
 larger measure of, not admiration merely, but 
 affection. It may not be amiss to record a curious 
 instance of the enthusiasm which he once excited 
 in an unexpected quarter. One of his old pupils 
 writes : " For part of my time, Pattison' s scout 
 was also mine. He was the only honest, manly, 
 true-hearted man as a college scout that I ever 
 knew, and he almost adored Pattison." One fact 
 may serve to explain the scout's devotion to his 
 master. Pattison strongly disapproved of the 
 complete separation which, in English households 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 67 
 
 especially, subsists between masters and servants. 
 When sociably inclined, lie made spasmodic at- 
 tempts to break through the barrier. 
 
 It was with some surprise that I learnt at 
 Biarritz how unknown Pattison was, even by 
 name, to most of the travelling English. There 
 was something at once instructive and humbling 
 in the question that I heard asked, " Do you 
 know that there is a brother of Sister Dora in the 
 hotel?" implying that he was doomed to Lethe, 
 and that no one but his sister could rescue him 
 even for a short space (Juturnam misero sue- 
 currere fratri). Being consulted by an under- 
 graduate as to what he should do in the way of 
 study, Pattison startled his questioner by answer- 
 ing (in effect), " Take care of what you are, and 
 what you do will take care of itself." The world 
 is happily determined to apply this principle to 
 Pattison, to judge him, not by what he did, but 
 by what he was, and not to let him be written 
 down even by himself. One of his kinsfolk, who 
 had ample means of judging, assures me that his 
 disappointment in 1851 " weighed upon his 
 memory " far more during his last illness than it 
 had done for many years before. He had, in 
 fact, lived to become a mere 
 
 aBXiov 
 , ov yap 8r) roS' dp^atov Se/xa?. 
 
 o 2 
 
68 EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 This may partly explain the defects of his Memoirs; 
 for it is, I think, just as well as generous to refer 
 in great measure to his morbid condition the de- 
 plorable domestic and academic disclosures, and the 
 more deplorable exaggerations about Conington 
 which deface that unfortunate volume.* 
 
 " If 't be so, 
 
 Hamlet is of the faction that is wronged, 
 His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy." 
 
 The Rector was never very misanthropical when 
 talking to me ; perhaps he thought misanthropy 
 would not be good for me. Shortly after we 
 parted at Biarritz, he wrote about me to a lady 
 friend (the inscription is bilingual, being on a 
 post-card) : " Pray present my compliments to 
 our philosophe errant, and prevail upon him to se 
 
 * So far from becoming a bigoted Puseyite after his "con- 
 version," Conington was to the last very tolerant. I asked 
 him (in or about 1857) what he thought of a contemptuous 
 attack on Mr. Congreve which had recently appeared in the 
 Times. He replied that he liked far better an article in the 
 Saturday Review, which, while differing from Mr. Congreve's 
 views, treated him with consideration. On another occasion, 
 one of his Liberal friends (some of his friends were strong 
 Liberals) informed him in my presence that I had ventured 
 to tell that Tory assembly, the Oxford Union, that we owed 
 a debt of gratitude to Carlyle for importing into England a 
 taste for German theology. Conington merely looked at me 
 and said, with an amused smile, " Really, really." I have 
 elsewhere recorded his great admiration for Mill. 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 69 
 
 detendre un peu plus, if he wishes to keep the 
 machine in good order." It may have been with 
 a like feeling of goodwill that, knowing or fancy- 
 ing that I am wont to take too grave and sad a 
 view of human life, he put (so to speak) into his 
 conversation with me little of the spirit of Timon 
 and much of the spirit of Montaigne ; just as 
 Horace infused into Odes addressed to the com- 
 rades of his youth a mild Epicureanism as an 
 antidote to Republican zeal. 
 
 Thirteen years ago, I asked a distinguished 
 Oxonian to tell me whom he thought the foremost 
 man in the University. " Jowett," he replied, 
 " has a touch of genius, which Pattison has not ; 
 otherwise, taking him all round, Pattison is the 
 first man in Oxford." I would venture to add 
 that (still perhaps excepting Mr. Jowett) he was 
 the first clergyman of our time. Not, of course, 
 that his tastes were those of his clerical brethren. 
 A Scotch book called Natural Law in the Spiritual 
 World, which has had a " mad success " with old 
 maids, clergymen, and homoeopathic doctors, was 
 sent to him, perhaps in order to convert him. 
 Not relishing its author's naive attempt to keep 
 the newest wine in cracked bottles, and also to 
 found on the wholesale immorality of natural 
 forces analogies such as might more consistently 
 be used to defend the religion of Juggernaut than 
 
70 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 the religion of Jesus, he said drily to a friend, 
 " I don't think this book will suit us," and con- 
 temptuously threw it aside.* In talking with 
 him one day, I expressed surprise at the almost 
 universal obscurantism of the Bishops. " It is 
 quite natural, 5 ' he said. "After a man has been 
 consecrated ten years, he loses all sympathy with 
 the modern spirit. No ; there is one exception. 
 
 The Bishop of sometimes sits next me at 
 
 luncheon at the Athenaeum,f and asks simple 
 questions, just like a little boy, about evolution 
 and other modern speculations. This Bishop 
 really tries to keep pace with the modern spirit; 
 but he is the only one." He, however, emphati- 
 cally pronounced Dean Stanley to be a " thorough 
 Liberal," a circumstance which seemed to sur- 
 prise him on account of the Dean's imaginative 
 and perhaps unscientific cast of mind. Pattison's 
 summary condemnation of the Anglican Bishops 
 was probably meant to be taken more or less in 
 jest. But he was speaking quite seriously when 
 
 * A writer in the Contemporary Review for March, passes a 
 yet severer judgment on the book; he stigmatizes its author's 
 theory as " neither science nor theology, but a bastard Cal- 
 vinism of which Scotland ought to be ashamed." Is legiti- 
 mate Calvinism much better ? 
 
 f The Rector said that the library of the Athenaeum " is 
 the most delightful place in the world especially on a Sun- 
 day morning." 
 
KECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 71 
 
 he pronounced a very similar judgment on a far 
 more formidable body of ecclesiastics. I asked 
 him whether he did not expect that, at no distant 
 period, some wise Pope and Cardinals will (by a 
 now familiar device) seek to disburden Catholicism 
 of the belief in hell whether, in fact, they will 
 not demonstrate that the Popes who sanctioned 
 that unsavoury doctrine were not speaking ex 
 cathedra, or were misreported, or that the ques- 
 tion lies beyond the province of Papal Infalli- 
 bility; or, at any rate, that Nullum tempus oc- 
 currit Deo (see 2 Peter iii., 8), and that every 
 expedient which is used to show that the numerous 
 plain texts which seem to predict the immediate 
 end of the world do not really mean what they 
 seem to mean, will equally show that the texts 
 and other Catholic authorities which seem to pre- 
 dict the endlessness of hell need not mean what 
 they seem to mean.* " No," replied he; " Catho- 
 licism will not change. The Cardinals have no 
 conception whatever of the intellectual changes 
 going on in the world. They often show ability 
 in diplomatic matters, but in nothing else." Yet, 
 though untainted by the ecclesiastical virus, he 
 was to the last a clergyman in the best sense. 
 
 * Tillotson (Z.c.), after quoting Jonah iii. 10, to prove that 
 God may be better than his word, raises the delicious ques- / 
 tion : Would he also be better than his oath (Ps. xcv. 11) ? 
 
72 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 He rather surprised a friend by making the broad 
 statement that mankind will never be able to dis- 
 pense with religious observances. He was there- 
 upon reminded that " never" is a far-reaching 
 word, and was asked whether he did not think 
 that, at some very remote epoch, the temptations 
 to crime may be so much lessened, and public 
 opinion may be so much better organized, that 
 morality will be able to stand on its own bottom. 
 " I accept the correction," he answered frankly; 
 " such a time may come ; but, if it ever is to come, 
 it is now so extremely distant that we and our 
 children will only get into trouble by taking it 
 into practical consideration." 
 
 My readers may remember Pattison's observa- 
 tion that the idea of Deity has now been "defe- 
 cated to a pure transparency."* This queer 
 metaphor will serve as an introduction to his 
 views on the two foundation-stones of Natural 
 Theology. I asked him whether he thought that 
 either Mr. Stopford Brooke or Mr. Yoysey is 
 likely to have much permanent influence. He 
 answered in the negative ; in the present state of 
 opinion, most of those whose temperament leads 
 them to reject what Mr. Stopford Brooke and Mr. 
 Yoysey agree in rejecting, will not accept what 
 
 * Quoted by Mr. Harrison, Nineteenth Century, Vol. xv., 
 p. 496. 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 73 
 
 they agree in accepting. In short, the stream of 
 tendency is towards Agnosticism. I asked what 
 he thought of the logical strength of Agnosticism; 
 and, by way of drawing him out, I stated as 
 forcibly as I could the argument which Mr. Grote 
 the " rigid Atheist," as he was called in Ben- 
 thamite circles would certainly have used 
 against it. Mr. Grote would have insisted that 
 there is not a tittle of evidence to show that 
 fairies do not exist, and yet that, as soon as it 
 became manifest that there is no evidence to show 
 that they do exist, the case went against them by 
 default ; we do not merely doubt their existence, 
 we deny it. In like manner, Mr. Grote applied 
 to all spiritual beings the maxim that Entia non 
 sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, and he 
 would have contended that, just as Unitarianism 
 has been called a feather bed to catch a falling 
 Christian, even so Agnosticism is a feather bed to 
 catch a falling Theist.* When I laid this reason- 
 
 * An eminent jurist and philosopher, after reading this 
 paragraph, asked me how we conld possibly deny the exist- 
 ence of fairies. I answered that by the word " fairies " I mean 
 spiritual beings able and willing to act in a specified manner 
 on human affairs. If junkets mysteriously disappear, their 
 owner unhesitatingly attributes the disappearance to thieves, 
 mice, or some other natural agency ; in other words, he 
 denies that there exists any " fairy Mab " able and willing 
 to steal junkets. In like manner, we may confidently deny 
 that there exists a Spiritual Being who is able and willing 
 
74 RECOLLECTIONS OP PATTISON. 
 
 ing before Pattison, I found to my amazement 
 that it was quite unfamiliar to him. In answer 
 to it, he merely quoted with approval the words 
 of a Greek sage (I think Protagoras) : @eol el ela-lv 
 
 rj el /Lirj elcrlv a8rj\,ov. 
 
 An Oxford contemporary and friend of Patti- 
 son's, the late Sir Benjamin Brodie, used to 
 quote approvingly a very similar passage from 
 Faust : 
 
 " Wer darf ihn nennen ? 
 Und wer bekennen : 
 Ich glaub' ihn ? 
 Wer empfinden 
 Und sich iinterwinden 
 Zu sagen : Ich glaub' ihn nicht ?" 
 
 It may serve to throw light on the Rector's 
 state of mind, and perhaps, too, on the theological 
 tendencies of the University, if I advert for a 
 moment to Brodie' s opinions on these subjects. 
 He called himself an A. L. (Advanced Liberal). 
 Like Pattison, he was sceptical about miracles. 
 In rebuking a friend whom he deemed too cre- 
 dulous, he exclaimed, " You'll tell me next that 
 you believe that the serpent climbed up the tree 
 and began talking to Eve/' Yet he told me that 
 Comte's Positive Philosophy seemed to " throw a 
 wet blanket " over him ; and he rather startled 
 
 to modify Natural Laws, even with a view to the prevention 
 of sin and sorrow. 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OP PATTISON. 75 
 
 me by expressing regret at the line taken by 
 Professor Tyndall in the Belfast Address. He 
 insisted that Berkeley's Theory has never been 
 refuted (though I doubt whether the Bishop 
 would have acknowledged him as a disciple). 
 His meaning probably was that, while believing 
 in the absolute uniformity of Natural Laws, he 
 yet thought (as Mr. Romanes thinks) that the 
 ultimate causa causarum, the basis of phenomena, 
 may be Spiritual and Intelligent. " The real 
 puzzle is," he used to say, " how anything comes 
 to exist," anything whatever, either Mind or 
 Matter. He once expressed a belief or hope 
 that the course of Nature is directed by " Infinite 
 Wisdom " ; and, on being asked how he recon- 
 ciled Infinite Wisdom with the existence of evil, 
 he replied that we do not quite know what the 
 word "infinite " means. These opinions of the 
 late Professor of Chemistry are more optimistic 
 than those commonly expressed by Pattison ; but 
 they may illustrate them by pointing to a modus 
 vivendi seemingly the only one between Theism 
 and modern science. Though I could not per- 
 suade either Brodie or Pattison to expound their 
 views fully, I should conjecture that they were 
 something of this sort : 
 
 " Nature, indeed, is profoundly immoral ; 
 with reckless impartiality, she gives her sun- 
 
76 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 strokes to the evil and to the good, and causes 
 her floods to descend on the just and on the un- 
 just. Yet it is this same immoral agent which, 
 by yielding suitable conditions, has led to the 
 evolution of all our moral sentiments, and 
 may lead to the evolution of yet higher moral 
 sentiments among posterity. For aught we know, 
 those moral sentiments could not have been 
 evolved by any less painful process/ 5 
 
 Yet, though Pattison refused to acquiesce in 
 Grote's dogmatic negation, he relinquished a belief 
 which was till lately regarded as a necessary adjunct 
 of Theism, but which some disciples of Dr. Martineau 
 are now prepared to give up. I reminded him of 
 the havoc which the modern belief in the absolute 
 uniformity of Natural Law is making with the 
 older belief, the belief in supernatural interven- 
 tion ; and I asked him whether he did not feel a 
 difficulty in reconciling the modern belief with 
 the belief in the greatest of all miracles, the 
 Miracle of Creation.* " Yes," he answered 
 thoughtfully, " I suppose that Pantheism is the 
 only form of Theism which can be reconciled with 
 Evolution." Pantheism is an ugly word, and also 
 a very vague one. I imagine that, in using it, 
 
 * In my Safe Studies, pp. 390, 391, this argument is stated 
 more fully, almost in the words in which it wa addressed 
 to the Rector. 
 
EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 77 
 
 Pattison merely meant to express a view identical 
 with Goethe's : 
 
 " Was war' em Grott, der nur von aussen stiesse, 
 Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse, 
 Ihm ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, 
 Natur in Sich, Sich in Natur zn hegen, 
 So dass, was in Ihm lebt und webt nnd ist, 
 Nie Seine Kraft, nie Seinen Geist vermisst." 
 
 As in regard to Theism, so in regard to the 
 belief in immortality, Pattison (like Renan) de- 
 clined to deduce the negative conclusion which 
 some might have drawn from his premisses. He 
 spoke indeed differently at different times. Some- 
 times his view seemed to be a depressing one. 
 For instance, he once startled me with the query, 
 " Shall I have my library in heaven?" a question 
 in reply to which I certainly was unable to give 
 more definite information than he himself pos- 
 sessed, but which somehow conveyed the notion 
 that he regarded a posthumous library and a 
 posthumous life as equally improbable, or at any 
 rate that he would find the latter tedious without 
 the former. So, again, in a touching and mourn- 
 ful letter which he wrote to me three weeks 
 before he died, he said, " I am approached very 
 near now to the ' fabulae Manes et domus exilis 
 Plutonia.' ' And we learn with pain that, as his 
 end drew near, the shadows became yet darker. 
 
78 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 But he would assuredly have maintained that his 
 real views were those which he held in the fulness 
 of health, though even in health a man of his 
 temperament may have forebodings that the ghost 
 of his old belief will haunt him in the last scene, 
 
 " Pale and pitiful now, but terrible then to the dying " ; 
 
 in other words, that posthumous fears will over- 
 whelm him in the sad hour when the impressions 
 of childhood are often relatively the strongest, 
 and when the nerves are so weakened and the 
 thoughts are so uncontrolled that even the 
 mightiest of spiritual reformers are tempted to 
 utter the cry of loneliness and despair, " My God, 
 my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? "* When 
 Pattison was at his best, his anticipations in re- 
 
 * Suppose an angel (or devil) were to offer us the choice 
 between painless annihilation and the necessity of drawing 
 from a prophetic lottery containing 1000 tickets marked 
 heaven and one ticket marked hell : most of us, I conceive, 
 would prefer the euthanasian alternative to the risk, the 
 extremely small risk, of everlasting torments. And may 
 not a dying philosopher, whose nerves have been unstrung by 
 illness, be excused if he shudders at the very barest possibility 
 that the belief in posthumous discomfort, a belief held by 
 some persons as honest and as learned as he is, may be well 
 founded, and if he is tempted to follow the example of the 
 numerous penitents, from Cephalus to Littre, who at the 
 eleventh hour 
 
 " advertunt animos ad religionem, . . . 
 Aeternas quoniam poenas in morte timendum est " ? 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 79 
 
 gard to immortality were such as might be re- 
 solved into the formula, Aut caelum aut nihil ; 
 he refused to close the door on religious hope. 
 Goethe has well said that Man is always more 
 anthropomorphic than he thinks. It is equally 
 true indeed, it is another aspect of the same 
 truth that Man is always more optimistic than 
 he thinks. And perhaps it was in consequence of 
 an irrepressible aspiration that a passage of Ten- 
 nyson which exactly expressed Pattison's own 
 relation to those whom he had loved and lost, 
 suggested itself, when the news of his death came, 
 to one at least of his sorrowing friends : 
 
 " It may be that the gulfs will wash us down, 
 It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 
 And see the great Achilles whom we knew." 
 
 In conclusion, we will turn from this cheerless 
 subject to one or two of the Rector's criticisms 
 on life, which show him at his best. To a friend 
 who complained that old age made our pleasures 
 less numerous and less vivid, he answered, in a 
 spirit worthy of Cato Major: " What we lose in 
 the number and vividness of our pleasures, we 
 gain in Sidvoia : we set a juster value on those 
 which remain to us." 
 
 When I saw Charles Austin for the last time, 
 he was less of a pessimist than I had ever known 
 him ; and likewise to Pattison, just before his 
 
80 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 fatal illness began, there was vouchsafed a sort 
 of Indian summer. He was more cheerful than 
 usual, and yet he had a presentiment that his days 
 were numbered. " I never," he said, " felt life 
 to be so precious as now when it is ebbing 
 away."* He was talking to one whom he had 
 every reason to love and value ; so he laid aside 
 reserve and took a retrospect of his career. En- 
 larging on a topic which cannot but recall the 
 choice of Solomon, he gave reasons for thinking 
 that, if he had coveted wealth or worldly distinc- 
 tion, he might have secured either or both. But 
 he had preferred the path of knowledge. " I am 
 glad," he concluded, " that I made this choice ; 
 and, if with my present experience I could live 
 my life over again, I would lay it out on the same 
 lines." Adapting his Master's words, he might 
 have said: Unum est necessarium. Optimum 
 partem elegi, quae non auferetur a me. 
 
 * He was thus confirming from personal experience a saving 
 of Goethe's which he used often to quote : " Life resembles 
 the Sibylline book ; it becomes dearer the less there remains 
 of it." Does not this explain the anomaly, that some per- 
 manent invalids say that they would willingly live their lives 
 over again, while many strong persons foolishly declare that 
 they would not ? He who knows that his life is precarious, 
 feels that it is priceless. 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 81 
 
 NOTE. 
 
 "They also serve who only stand and wait." MILTON. 
 
 IN reference to the observations made in this article as to 
 the interest taken by Pattison in Amiel's Journal Intime, M. 
 Scherer published in the Times (June 2, 1885) the following 
 letter addressed by Pattison to himself : 
 
 " Richmond, Yorkshire, July 9, 1883. 
 
 " Dear Sir, It is so long since we met that I have felt 
 some hesitation as to addressing you by letter, lest in the 
 crowd of new faces and figures your memory should fail to 
 recognize me. 
 
 " The occasion of my writing is the Journal of Amiel, of 
 which you are the editor. I wish to convey to you, Sir, the 
 thanks of one at least of the public for giving the light to 
 this precious record of a unique experience. I say unique, 
 but I can vouch that there is in existence at least one other 
 soul which, has lived through, the same struggles, mental and 
 moral, as Amiel. In your pathetic description of the 
 " volonte qui voudrait vouloir, mais impuissante a se fournir 
 a elle-meme des motifs " of the repugnance for all action 
 the soul petrified by the sentiment of the infinite, in all this 
 I recognise myself ! 
 
 " * Celui qui a dechiffre le secret de la vie finie, qui en a 
 lu le mot, est sorti du monde des vivants, il est mort de fait.' 
 
 " I can feel forcibly the truth of this, as it applies to 
 myself ! 
 
 " It is not, however, with the view of thrusting my ego- 
 tism upon you that I have ventured upon addressing yon. 
 As I cannot suppose that so peculiar a psychological revela- 
 tion will enjoy a wide popularity, I think it a duty to the 
 editor to assure him that there are persons in the world 
 whose souls respond, in the depths of their inmost nature, to 
 
 G 
 
82 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 the cry of anguish which makes itself heard in the pages of 
 these remarkable confessions. 
 
 " Believe me to be, dear Sir, yours faithfully, 
 
 " MARK PATTISON." 
 
 I am tempted to follow M. Scherer's example by inserting 
 a letter written by Pattison to me on receipt of my " Safe 
 Studies." It is not without scruple that I print it even for 
 private circulation, owing to the personal reference in the 
 last sentence. But the whole letter seems to me instructive 
 and characteristic of its author, and, as I have already quoted 
 its most paradoxical and cynical expressions it is perhaps fair 
 to show from the context that Pafctison at times used language 
 far removed from paradox and cynicism. 
 
 " Lincoln College, Oxford, January 13, 1884. 
 
 " My dear Sir, The literary event of the week has been your 
 book a stirring event to a sick man almost confined to his sofa. 
 I have been reading, reading for three days, and have gone 
 through the whole (except the Engadine), much of it more 
 than once. The level of the collected papers stands so high, 
 that I now regret the volume was not published for your 
 credit that is, since, as a collector, an unpublished volume is 
 five times as precious to me. The material aspect of the 
 book is worthy, in binding, paper, and type, of its author. 
 But how could you give in to the American plan of cutting 
 down the margin; a plan which makes it impossible to 
 have a book bound, when its cloth cover shall be used up ? 
 
 " If I may venture on a general remark, I should say that 
 the papers, as a whole, show a union which is very uncom- 
 mon, of two opposite qualities, viz., a dominant interest in 
 speculation of a wide and human character, with vast re- 
 sources in the memory, of single facts, incidents, or mots, of 
 famous men. How, with your eyesight, you ever compassed 
 such a range of reading, as is here brought to bear at all 
 points of your argument, must be matter of wonder. It 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 83 
 
 seems as if you could draw at pleasure upon all literature, 
 from the Classics down to Robert Montgomery and Swin- 
 burne. In this respect, I desiderate references in the foot- 
 notes to the sources, that one might have the great pleasure 
 of turning out the citations in their original place. But no 
 doubt it would have been difficult for you, where you are, 
 destitute of books, to have supplied these in many cases. 
 Had I been in health I could have revelled in a notice, 
 through many columns of the Academy ; but, in my present 
 condition, it is not possible for me to undertake any literary 
 work, even of the lightest kind. If I now venture upon 
 making some small notes upon single passages, you must not 
 suppose that I am setting up to correct yon, but am only 
 desirous to show with what attention I have read you. In 
 page 12, I feel a slight difficulty with the sentence which 
 begins with the words, 'As the confusion.' The two 'its' 
 must be relative to the noun ' confusion ' ; then, what is the 
 opinion meant in the concluding words of the sentence ? 
 In page 27, I am brought up by Grote saying that the 
 * Geocentric theory was once as firmly held as ' Grote surely 
 could not mean that firmly held is the smallest evidence of 
 truth ? The transmutation of metals and the powers of 
 witches were equally firmly held ; and we believe, or accept, 
 the Heliocentric theory on its own evidence, and because the 
 Geocentric theory has been proved* to be false, and not be- 
 
 * In what sense " proved " ? In scientific matters, the very 
 few experts of each generation form their own judgment 
 indeed, but form it in accordance with the canons of evidence 
 which are deemed conclusive in that generation. The very 
 numerous inexperts, if they are sensible, follow the judgment 
 of the experts : they follow it, however, not as infallible, but 
 as less likely to be wrong than the judgment of any one else, 
 This is true of the nineteenth century as well as of the 
 sixteenth. [L. A. T.] 
 
84 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 canse it is firmly and universally held. Tn page 187, will you 
 stand to the words of the bottom line, ' for the good of all 
 men ' ? Do you not much rather incline to endorse Mon- 
 taigne's opinion, quoted in page 116, a refreshing passage, 
 to which I wish I had the reference in the original ? In 
 page 194, would not Disraeli's mot have gained in effect by 
 giving it to him by name ? In page 172, Chevalier Ramsay 
 is injured by the prefix * A certain ' ; he was a very well- 
 known man in his day, just before or contemporary with 
 Hume, and his books were the popular books of his day, 
 especially * Les Voyages de Cyprus,' an imitation of Tele- 
 machus, which was translated into all the languages on the 
 Continent. He had an Oxford D.C.L. conferred upon him, 
 but probably more in consideration of his Jacobitism he 
 was at one time tutor in the Pretender's family than his 
 literary repute. All that is related of Grote is most inter- 
 esting ; but I cannot forgive him for stigmatizing Paley as 
 disingenuous, one of the most honest clergymen of the period. 
 In page 209 the phrase ' more mature thinkers ' implies that 
 Tennyson is a thinker at all. Is he so ? Is he not a poet, 
 and are not poet and thinker incompatibles ? In page 165, 
 any young Curate or Priest who pronounced the Benediction 
 over the head of his Bishop would be committing a gross 
 breach of clerical etiquette. In page 180, did you notice 
 that you were speaking of the Quarterly Review as a con- 
 temporary, though I suppose you intended to discard in 
 what are now ' Studies ' the original form of article ? In 
 page 223, ' the saying of a great orator ' (who ?) of the House 
 of Lords that it is * not made for perpetuity,' had already 
 appeared on page 175. 
 
 " By this time I must have tired your patience with my 
 trivial remarks, of which I hope you will take as little 
 notice as they deserve. I have had to explain to everyone, 
 to whom I have shown the book, the meaning of the title 
 * Safe.' It is, I say, a vox praegnans, immo gravida, e cujus 
 sinu proles altera, prodigiosa, periculosa, damnosa, exitura 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 85 
 
 sit ! As for those people whose feet were cold because they 
 washed them, it is no doubt quite true, but then they 
 washed them in warm water ; had they bathed them every 
 morning in cold water, they would have been as warm as 
 the dirty man's. That is a melancholy sentence with which 
 your preface concludes. Though it is by no means my view 
 that a man should be always producing books, or putting his 
 thoughts in print, yet he cannot renounce a life which has 
 hitherto been one of moral and philosophical discussion, 
 without falling to a lower grade in the rational scale. For 
 my part, I cannot expect ever to see you again ; and I must 
 be content with here recording my experience that your 
 conversation was to me more stimulating than that of any 
 man I ever met. With kind regards, 
 
 " Believe me to be, 
 
 " Sincerely yours, 
 
 " MARK PATTISON." 
 
 Even the far too friendly expression of opinion in the con- 
 cluding sentence has a biographical value as testifying to 
 its author's sympathetic kindliness a quality for which, 
 among men at least, he had little credit. In reply, I ven- 
 tured to point out what seemed to me one or two oversights. 
 For example, I explained that, when I spoke of a young 
 Curate pronouncing the Benediction in the presence of an 
 Archbishop, I was assuming the Archbishop not to be 
 taking any part in the service, but merely to be one of the 
 congregation. I touched also on private matters ; and at 
 last, with real emotion, I thanked Pattison for all his kind- 
 ness and bade him farewell 
 
 . . . spargens flores et functus inani 
 Munere. 
 
 London: Printed by C. F. Hodgson & Son, 1 Gough Square, Fleet Street. 
 
' 
 
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 37 
 
 
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M18PG01 
 
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