Born, at Hornby, Yorks, 10 Oct. 1813. Educated by his father. Matric., Oriel Coll., Oxford, 2 April 1832; B.A., 1836; M.A., 1840; Fellow of Lincoln Coll., 8 Nov. 1839 to 1860; Tutor, 1842–55. Ordained Deacon, 1841; Priest, 1843. Denyer Theological Prize, Oxford, 1841 and 1842; B.D., 1851. Frequent contributor to periodicals, 1842–83. Rector of Lincoln Coll., Oxford, 1861–84. Married Emilia Frances Strong, 10 Sept. 1861. Mem. of Athenæum Club, 1862. Died, at Harrowgate, 30 July 1884. Buried in Harlow Hill Churchyard. Works: “Casauboniana” (anon.), 1840; “Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688–1750,” in “Essays and Reviews,” 1860; “Suggestions on Academical Organization,” 1868 [1867]; “Isaac Casaubon,” 1875; “Milton,” 1879. Posthumous: “Memoirs,” ed. by his wife, 1885; “Sermons,” 1885; “Essays,” ed. by H. Nettleship (2 vols.), 1889. He edited: Pope’s “Essay on Man,” 1869; Pope’s “Satires and Epistles,” 1872; Milton’s “Sonnets,” 1883.

Personal

  I have really no history but a mental history. When I read other person’s autobiographies I feel that they were justified in writing them by the variety of experiences they have gone through, and the number of interesting persons they have known. Harriet Martineau, e. g., or Leigh Hunt, were in the way of seeing historic names, and can tell one much about them. I have seen no one, known none of the celebrities of my own time intimately, or at all, and have only an inaccurate memory for what I hear. All my energy was directed upon one end—to improve myself, to form my own mind, to sound things thoroughly, to free myself from the bondage of unreason, and the traditional prejudices which, when I began first to think, constituted the whole of my intellectual fabric. I have nothing beyond trivial personalities to tell in the way of incident. If there is anything of interest in my story, it is as a story of mental development.

  I always considered him the best-read man at Oxford. Anywhere, but at Oxford he would have grown into a Lessing.

  Measured by any standard commensurate to his remarkable faculties, Pattison’s life would be generally regarded as pale, negative, and ineffectual. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that he had a certain singular quality about him that made his society more interesting, more piquant, and more rapid than that of many men of a far wider importance and more commanding achievement…. The result of culture in Pattison’s actual life was not by any means ideal. For instance, he was head of a college for nearly a quarter of a century, and except as a decorative figurehead with a high literary reputation, he did little more to advance the working interests of his college during these five-and-twenty years, than if he had been one of the venerable academic abuses of the worst days before reform. But his temperament, his reading, his recoil from Catholicism, combined with the strong reflective powers bestowed upon him by nature to produce a personality that was unlike other people, and infinitely more curious and salient than many who had a firmer grasp of the art of right living. In an age of effusion to be reserved, and in days of universal professions of sympathy to show a saturnine front, was to be an original. There was nobody in whose company one felt so much of the ineffable comfort of being quite safe against an attack of platitude. There was nobody on whom one might so surely count in the course of an hour’s talk for some stroke of irony or pungent suggestion, or, at the worst, some significant, admonitory, and almost luminous manifestation of the great ars tacendi. In spite of his copious and ordered knowledge, Pattison could hardly be said to have an affluent mind. He did not impart intellectual direction like Mill, nor morally impress himself like George Eliot. Even in pithy humour he was inferior to Bagehot, who was certainly one of the most remarkable of the secondary figures of our generation. But he made everyone aware of contact with the reality of a living intelligence. It was evident that he had no designs upon you. He was not thinking of shaking a conviction, nor even of surprising admiration.

  If we attempt to judge the life of Mark Pattison from an ideal standpoint, we must pronounce it a failure—a magnificent failure perhaps, but still a failure. This it was because he not only did not succeed in fully realising the aim he put before himself, but also because he showed in his own character and career the inadequacy of that aim. His conceptions of an elevated philosophic education, of the functions of a University, of the obligations and attractions of the scholar’s life, will always be found inspiring by those who are fit to appreciate them; but he only partially succeeded in illustrating by his example what he had illuminated by his learning; and the impression which his “Memoirs” give us of a life of misery, the intensity of which is only brought into relief by the brilliancy of his attainments, shows us the inadequacy as a guide to life of purely intellectual aspirations.

  Pattison was by no means a recluse. For some years after his marriage in 1861 his house was a centre of all that was best in Oxford society. Under a singularly stiff and freezing manner to strangers and to those whom he disliked, he concealed a most kindly nature, full of geniality and sympathy, and a great love of congenial, and especially of female, society. But it was in his intercourse with his pupils, and generally with those younger than himself, that he was seen to most advantage. His conversation was marked by a delicate irony. His words were few and deliberate, but pregnant with meaning, and above all stimulating, and their effect was heightened by perhaps too frequent and, especially to undergraduates, somewhat embarrassing flashes of silence. His aim was always to draw out by the Socratic method what was best in the mind of the person he conversed with, and he seemed to be seeking information and suggestions for his own use. To the last he was open to new personal impressions, was most grateful for information on subjects which were of interest to him, and was always full of generous admiration for good work, or even for work which, if not really good, was painstaking or marked by promise.

  There is no history of mental growth and struggles which is to me more touching and interesting, though it is impossible not to feel that the results were very painful.

  From Jowett to Mark Pattison is a transition popular but unphilosophic: to bracket the two men, as is often done, shows superficial knowledge of both. Both, no doubt, were clergymen, both missed disappointingly and afterwards exultingly obtained the Headship of their Colleges, both wrote in “Essays and Reviews.” Behind these accidents are life equipment, experiences, characters, temperaments, standing in phenomenal contrast. Pattison’s mind was the more comprehensive, instructed, idealistic, its evolution as intermittent and self-torturing as Jowett’s was continuous and tranquil. Pattison’s life, in its abrupt precipitations and untoward straits, resembled the mountain brook of Wordsworth’s solitary; Jowett’s floated even, strong, and full, from the winning of the Balliol scholarship by the little white-haired lad with shrill voice and cherub face, until the Sunday afternoon at Headley Park, when the old man, shrill, white-haired and cherubic still bade “farewell to the College,” turned his face to the wall, and died.

General

  It may suit Mr. Pattison’s [“Essays and Reviews”] purpose, and fill out his trial of antitheses, to sneer at the philosophy of this period as “without insight.” But it shows bad taste and defective knowledge to include in this sneer such men as Butler, the father of modern ethical science, not only in England, but for all Europe; Berkeley, the pure and refined spiritualist, and one of the most elegant writers and original philosophical thinkers that England has produced; Samuel Clarke, a co-worker with Newton, the well-matched opponent of Leibnitz, and one of the greatest masters of abstract metaphysical reasoning that the world has ever seen; and even Warburton, who, with all his defects of temper, has been well called “the last of our really great divines.”

  As an author Pattison has not made the impression which his great powers and unusual attainments might have been expected to produce. He had, indeed, within him so many impediments to large and successful authorship that the wonder is not that he wrote so little as that he wrote as much as he did. First of all he was a victim of curiosity, of his wide and sleepless interests in all manner of subjects about which he cared and read simply for themselves, without any after thought of working up his reading into a salable literary form. With a tithe of his acquisitions an expert young penman would have produced shelves of smooth readable volumes, and gained a reputation in letters, as reputations now go. He had none of the business author about him, who has one eye for his subject, and the other—the wider open of the two—on the market values of his wares in publishers’ offices. He valued knowledge too highly to make a trade of it, even if paid only in fame. In the next place he was fastidious to a fault; his taste was superior to his power of production. He was too severe a critic of his own writings. Then, his scrupulous conscientiousness was extreme, and he never felt sufficiently prepared for literary work…. And yet with all these drawbacks he has produced valuable works which the world would be unwise to neglect…. They all bear on the one theme on which his whole heart was set—the praise and commendation of learning. No one need fear that in reading the slightest thing of Pattison’s he will waste his time. He never wrote because he had to say something, but always because he had something to say.

  He was full of the passion for knowledge; he was very learned, very acute in his judgment on what his learning brought before him, very versatile, very shrewd, very subtle; too full of the truth of his subject to care about seeming to be original; but, especially in his poetical criticisms, often full of that best kind of originality which consists in seeing and pointing out novelty in what is most familiar and trite. But, not merely as a practical but as a speculative writer, he was apt to be too much under the empire and pressure of the one idea which at that moment occupied and interested his mind. He could not resist it; it came to him with exclusive and overmastering force; he did not care to attend to what limited it or conflicted with it…. Though every competent reader must do justice to Pattison’s distinction as a man of letters, as a writer of English prose, and as a critic of what is noble and excellent and what is base and poor in literature, there is a curious want of completeness, a frequent crudity and hardness, a want, which is sometimes a surprising want, of good sense and good taste, which form unwelcome blemishes in his work, and just put it down below the line of first-rate excellence which it ought to occupy.

  Mark Pattison’s highest praise is, perhaps, that he was able, so long ago, to look at such things as we see them now. He kept an open mind, and so he looked towards the future, and was able to take in new ideas, to be touched by the Zeit-geist…. Workers like Mark Pattison are rare; few men have the strength and clearness to make for the ends he was striving for—for self-culture, for perfection, for such truth as he could attain. And still fewer have the restraint and unselfishness to be satisfied with wisdom as its own exceeding great reward. Among these rare and gifted beings, Mark Pattison, in spite of all that can be said, must take his place; by doing so he becomes in some sense a benefactor to his kind. The lesson he teaches those who are willing to learn it is expressed in those words of his with which this essay began: “The highest life is the art to live.” That he solved the problem of living we need not think; but at least he set a noble example to those who wish to solve it. He did his best.

  As you read his “Memoirs,” you hardly know whether he meant to give a picture of himself or a picture of the Oxford he had known. The two are blended together, and they ought not to be separated. To undertand Pattison you must take account of the university environment in which he moved, and there is no better way in entering Oxford as it was, or of understanding how it has become what it is, than to try to appreciate the character of one of the most noteworthy among its teachers. The most salient peculiarity in the character painted with such painful care by Pattison himself, is the astonishing combination of a certain intellectual strength and greatness with a quality which one cannot call by any other name than weakness. For the proper understanding of the “Memoirs,” the primary requisite is to appreciate the great and even noble side of their author’s character. There is the more reason for insisting upon this because Pattison has not really done himself justice.

  Whatever were the effects of Pattison’s arguments, [“Sermons”] whether put aside as fatal snares or followed out to extravagant conclusions, most young men must have caught from them something of his moral force and mental clearness. His lofty tone was indeed intellectual, but singularly in sympathy with, and adaptable to, spiritual aspirations; in that unity of the ascetic and philosophical life on which he always insisted. He disarmed clerical criticism by his loyal advocacy of our English Church, “a Church which has never yet broken with reasons or proscribed education”—surely the noblest praise a son of hers has ever offered her—and by the echoes which it often awakened of the golden age of English homiletics. This not only by his dignified, weighty, and truly theological handling, but by the unconscious use of quaint but perfectly exact phrases.

  Mark Pattison was too fastidious a scholar, and too indifferent to the charms of notoriety, to produce much, but what he did is the best of its kind. His life of Milton in the admirable series entitled “English Men of Letters” is certainly second to none. His edition of some of Pope’s poems in the Clarendon Press Series are models of annotation. His original inquiry into the causes of the rise and extinction of Deism in the eighteenth century, published in the famous volume of “Essays and Reviews,” has been accepted as a substantial contribution to religious history.

  For his true portrait we must look into his “Essays” and his “Life of Casaubon.” His own personality is evident in whatever he writes.

  Had a less amiable character than Stanley’s, but a greater intellect and far nicer, profounder, and wider scholarship, though he actually did very little…. It would be entirely unjust to regard him as merely a man who was “going to do something.” His actual work though not large is admirable, and his style is the perfection of academic correctness, not destitute of either vigour or grace.