The feature which is characteristic in all his work is his profound value for learning, the learning of books, of documents, of all literature. He is a thinker, a clear and powerful one; he is a philosopher, who has explored the problems of abstract science with intelligence and interest, and fully recognises their importance; he has taken the measure of the political and social questions which the progress of civilisation has done so little to solve; he is at home with the whole range of literature, keen and true in observation and criticism; he has strongly marked views about education, and he took a leading part in the great changes which have revolutionised Oxford. He is all this; but beyond and more than all this he is a devotee of learning, as other men are of science or politics, deeply penetrated with its importance, keenly alive to the neglect of it, full of faith in the services which it can render to mankind, fiercely indignant at what degrades, or supplants, or enfeebles it. Learning, with the severe and bracing discipline without which it is impossible, learning embracing all efforts of human intellect—those which are warning beacons as well those which have elevated and enlightened the human mind—is the thing which attracts and satisfies him as nothing else does; not mere soulless erudition, but a great supply and command of varied facts, marshalled and turned to account by an intelligence which knows their use. The absence of learning, or the danger to learning, is the keynote of a powerful but acrid survey of the history and prospects of the Anglican Church, for which, in spite of its one-sidedness and unfairness, Churchmen may find not a little which it will be useful to lay to heart. Dissatisfaction with the University system, in its provision for the encouragement of learning and for strengthening and protecting its higher interests, is the stimulus to his essay on Oxford studies, which is animated with the idea of the University as a true home of real learning, and is full of the hopes, the animosities, and, it may be added, the disappointments of a revolutionary time. He exults over the destruction of the old order; but his ideal is too high, he is too shrewd an observer, too thorough and well-trained a judge of what learning really means, to be quite satisfied with the new.
The same devotion to learning shows itself in a feature of his literary work, which is almost characteristic—the delight which he takes in telling the detailed story of the life of some of the famous working scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These men, whose names are known to the modern world chiefly in notes to classical authors, or occasionally in some impertinent sneer, he likes to contemplate as if they were alive. To him they are men with individual differences, each with a character and fortunes of his own, sharers to the full in the struggles and vicissitudes of life. He can appreciate their enormous learning, their unwearied labour, their sense of honour in their profession; and the editor of texts, the collator of various readings and emendations, the annotator who to us perhaps seems but a learned pedant appears to him as a man of sound and philosophic thought, of enthusiasm for truth and light—perhaps of genius—a man, too, with human affections and interests, with a history not devoid of romance. There is something touching in Mr. Pattison's affection for those old scholars, to whom the world has done scant justice. His own chief literary venture was the life of one of the greatest of them, Isaac Casaubon. We have in these volumes sketches, not so elaborate, of several others, the younger Scaliger, Muretus, Huet, and the great French printers, the Stephenses; and in these sketches we are also introduced to a number of their contemporaries, with characteristic observations on them, implying an extensive and first-hand knowledge of what they were, and an acquaintance with what was going on in the scholar world of the day. The most important of these sketches is the account of Justus Scaliger. There is first a review article, very vigorous and animated. But Mr. Pattison had intended a companion volume to his Casaubon; and of this, which was never completed, we have some fragments, not equal in force and compactness to the original sketch. But sketch and fragments together present a very vivid picture of this remarkable person, whose temper and extravagant vanity his biographer admits, but who was undoubtedly a marvel both of knowledge and of the power to use it, and to whom we owe the beginning of order and system in chronology. Scaliger was to Mr. Pattison the type of the real greatness of the scholar, a greatness not the less real that the world could hardly understand it. He certainly leaves Scaliger before us, with his strange ways of working, his hold of the ancient languages as if they were mother tongues, his pride and slashing sarcasm, and his absurd claim of princely descent, with lineaments not soon forgotten; but it is amusing to meet once more, in all seriousness, Mr. Pattison's bête noire of the Catholic reaction, in the quarrels between Scaliger and some shallow but clever and scurrilous Jesuits, whom he had provoked by exposing the False Decretals and the False Dionysius, and who revenged themselves by wounding him in his most sensitive part, his claim to descent from the Princes of Verona. Doubtless the religious difference envenomed the dispute, but it did not need the "Catholic reaction" to account for such ignoble wrangles in those days.
These remains show what a historian of literature we have lost in Mr. Pattison. He was certainly capable of doing much more than the specimens of work which he has left behind; but what he has left is of high value. Wherever the disturbing and embittering elements are away, it is hard to say which is the more admirable, the patient and sagacious way in which he has collected and mastered his facts, or the wise and careful judgment which he passes on them. We hear of people being spoilt by their prepossessions, their party, their prejudices, the necessities of their political and ecclesiastical position; Mr. Pattison is a warning that a man may claim the utmost independence, and yet be maimed in his power of being just and reasonable by other things than party. As it is, he has left us a collection of interesting and valuable studies, disastrously and indelibly disfigured by an implacable bitterness, in which he but too plainly found the greatest satisfaction.
Mr. Pattison used in his later years to give an occasional lecture to a London audience. One of the latest was one addressed, we believe, to a class of working people on poetry, in which he dwelt on its healing and consoling power. It was full of Mr. Pattison's clearness and directness of thought, and made a considerable impression on some who only knew it from an abstract in the newspapers; and it was challenged by a working-man in the Pall Mall Gazette, who urged against it with some power the argument of despair. Perhaps the lecture was not written; but if it was, and our recollection of it is at all accurate, it was not unworthy of a place in this collection.
XXV
BISHOP FRAZER[29]
[29] Guardian, 28th October 1885.
Every one must be deeply touched by the Bishop of Manchester's sudden, and, to most of us, unexpected death; those not the least who, unhappily, found themselves in opposition to him in many important matters. For, in spite of much that many people must wish otherwise in his career as Bishop, it was really a very remarkable one. Its leading motive was high and genuine public spirit, and a generous wish to be in full and frank sympathy with all the vast masses of his diocese; to put himself on a level with them, as man with man, in all their interests, to meet them fearlessly and heartily, to raise their standard of justice and large-heartedness by showing them that in their life of toil he shared the obligation and the burden of labour, and felt bound by his place to be as unsparing and unselfish a worker as any of his flock. Indeed, he was as original as Bishop Wilberforce, though in a different direction, in introducing a new type and ideal of Episcopal work, and a great deal of his ideal he realised. It is characteristic of him that one of his first acts was to remove the Episcopal residence from a mansion and park in the country to a house in Manchester. There can be no doubt that he was thoroughly in touch with the working classes in Lancashire, in a degree to which no other Bishop, not even Bishop Wilberforce, had reached. There was that in the frankness and boldness of his address which disarmed their keen suspicion of a Bishop's inevitable assumption of superiority, and put them at their ease with him. He was always ready to meet them, and to speak off-hand and unconventionally, and as they speak, not always with a due foresight of consequences or qualifications. If he did sometimes in this way get into a scrape, he did not much mind it, and they liked him the better for it. He was perfectly fearless in his dealings with them; in their disputes, in which he often was invited to take a part, he took the part which seemed to him the right one, whether or not it might be the unpopular one. Very decided, very confident in his opinions and the expression of them, there yet was apparent a curious and almost touching consciousness of a deficiency in some of the qualities—knowledge, leisure, capacity for the deeper and subtler tasks of thought—necessary to give a strong speaker the sense of being on sure ground. But he trusted to his manly common sense; and this, with the populations with which he had to deal, served him well, at least in the main and most characteristic part of his work.
And for his success in this part of his work—in making the crowds in Manchester feel that their Bishop was a man like themselves, quite alive to their wants and claims and feelings, and not so unlike them in his broad and strong utterances—his Episcopate deserves full recognition and honour. He set an example which we may hope to see followed and improved upon. But unfortunately there was also a less successful side. He was a Bishop, an overseer of a flock of many ways of life and thought, a fellow-worker with them, sympathetic, laborious, warm-hearted. But he was also a Bishop of the Church of Christ, an institution with its own history, its great truths to keep and deliver, its characteristic differences from the world which it is sent to correct and to raise to higher levels than those of time and nature. There is no reason why this side of the Episcopal office should not be joined to that in which Bishop Frazer so signally excelled. But for this part of it he was not well qualified, and much in his performance of it must be thought of with regret. The great features of Christian truth had deeply impressed him; and to its lofty moral call he responded with conviction and earnestness. But an acquaintance with what he has to interpret and guard which may suffice for a layman is not enough for a Bishop; and knowledge, the knowledge belonging to his profession, the deeper and more varied knowledge which makes a man competent to speak as a theologian, Bishop Frazer did not possess. He rather disbelieved in it, and thought it useless, or, it might be, mischievous. He resented its intrusion into spheres where he could only see the need of the simplest and least abstruse language. But facts are not what we may wish them, but what they are; and questions, if they are asked, may have to be answered, with toil, it may be, and difficulty, like the questions, assuredly not always capable of easy and transparent statement, of mathematical or physical science; and unless Christianity is a dream and its history one vast delusion, such facts and such questions have made what we call theology. But to the Bishop's practical mind they were without interest, and he could not see how they could touch and influence living religion. And did not care to know about them; he was impatient, and even scornful, when stress was laid on them; he was intolerant when he thought they competed with the immediate realities of religion. And this want of knowledge and of respect for knowledge was a serious deficiency. It gave sometimes a tone of thoughtless flippancy to his otherwise earnest language. And as he was not averse to controversy, or, at any rate, found himself often involved in it, he was betrayed sometimes into assertions and contradictions of the most astounding inaccuracy, which seriously weakened his authority when he was called upon to accept the responsibility of exerting it.
Partly for this reason, partly from a certain vivacity of temper, he certainly showed himself, in spite of his popular qualities, less equal than many others of his brethren to the task of appeasing and assuaging religious strife. The difficulties in Manchester were not greater than in other dioceses; there was not anything peculiar in them; there was nothing but what a patient and generous arbiter, with due knowledge of the subject, might have kept from breaking out into perilous scandals. Unhappily he failed; and though he believed that he had only done his duty, his failure was a source of deep distress to himself and to others. But now that he has passed away, it is but bare justice to say that no one worked up more conscientiously to his own standard. He gave himself, when he was consecrated, ten or twelve years of work, and then he hoped for retirement. He has had fifteen, and has fallen at his post. And to the last, the qualities which gave his character such a charm in his earlier time had not disappeared. There seemed to be always something of the boy about him, in his simplicity, his confiding candour and frankness with his friends, his warm-hearted and kindly welcome, his mixture of humility with a sense of power. Those who can remember him in his younger days still see, in spite of all the storms and troubles of his later ones, the image of the undergraduate and the young bachelor, who years ago made a start of such brilliant promise, and who has fulfilled so much of it, if not all. These things at any rate lasted to the end—his high and exacting sense of public duty, and his unchanging affection for his old friends.