Mark Pattison & John Henry Newman: (unpublished paper delivered at Mark Pattison bicentennial colloquium, Lincoln College Oxford, 20 September 2013).

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PATTISON & NEWMAN

‘If I have not dared to approach you in any way of recent years, it has only been from the veneration and affection which I felt for you at the time you left us, which are in no way diminished, and however remote my intellectual standpoint may now be from your own, I can truly say that I learnt more from you than from anyone else with whom I have ever been in contact’.This avowal from Mark Pattison to his one-time mentor John Henry Newman represents a large claim and one which initially might needsome reconciling with the somewhatsour and embittered tone which wasto characterise the famous Rector of Lincoln College’s Memoirs, in which he expresses relief at

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having escaped from what he then called ‘the whirlpool of Tractarianism’; the Oxford Movement there being characterisedas an intellectual distraction andforce for reaction to which his temporary submission as a followerwas presented as a mental aberration on his part. Are the two reconcilable? Which is true? They are reconcilable and both represent Pattison’s state of mindat the time in question but different audiences were involved and Pattison’s private and personal admission to Newman has aring of sincerity while the account in the Memoirs can be readas an intellectual self-defence with posterity in mind. For deeper

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explanations, we need to dig belowthe surface, as Stuart Jones has done in his admirable intellectualbiography on which some of the following draws. For the subject of Newman and Pattison is too large to attempt to do it justice in this short presentation but it is hoped that a few of the ideas and reflections that I will offer can be the basis for discussion here and for a fuller study at a later date. It is not of course that others have not attempted to do this – of course Stuart Jones has given us great insights in hisPattison biography while recent, current and on-going research and writings over many years by a distinguished American literary

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scholar, Donald Sniegowski on the correspondence and intellectual sparring between Pattison and his female cousin Philippa Meadows (a one-time rationalist who came under Tractarian influence and converted to Roman Catholicism) also sheds much light on the relationship. One can add Fergal Nolan’s Oxford doctoral thesis on Pattison’s religious experience upuntil 1850. However, the older studies by Warden Sparrow and V.H.H. Green were much more focused on Pattison the man than on his ideas and intellectual and spiritual relationships. There is clearly more to say and Pattison’sproblematic relation to Newman hasits place in current scholarship

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on ‘receptions of the Tractarian Newman’ by one-time disciples and acolytes on which I am currently engaged, while a forthcoming studyby Edward Short on ‘Newman and hisCritics’ will no doubt shed more light on the interaction between the master and one-time disciple. 1. Religious background: Pattison’s Evangelical religious background and recoil to liberalism while an undergraduate at Oriel provides the background to his later relationship with Newman. Coming up in 1832, Pattison just misses the period ofNewman as tutor. Pattison’s disenchantment and isolation made him vulnerable to powerful new impressions and influences. As an

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Oriel undergraduate, he had, however, little contact with Newman – after Newman had returnedfrom the Mediterranean, his rooms in Michaelmas Term 1833 were apparently opposite Pattison’s andon the same staircase, but the first direct meeting appears to have been in 1834 when Newman was Dean and had to reprimand Pattisonfor some minor misdemeanour (Pattison was caught up with an unruly crowd of undergraduates making a commotion in the streets). Pattison even sided withRenn Dickson Hampden, author of some supposedly heterodox Bampton Lectures in 1832, in the famous controversy involving the Regius Professor of Divinity (1836)

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against whom Newman turned all hisrhetorical and polemical powers. 2. Getting to know Newman: Pattison’s close personal contact with Newman really dates from 1838when he was an unsuccessful candidate for an Oriel Fellowship which Richard Church secured (Newman wrote to Pattison pointedly telling him that some thought he had performed the best). He came under Newman’s spell and became a Tractarian disciple. As Stuart Jones observes, moves from Evangelicalism to Tractarianism were a common feature in Newman’s disciples as with Newman himself, but a move via liberalism was muchmore unusual, if not unique. This

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intermediate phase in Pattison’s outlook is too often overlooked (though not by Nolan) and may contain a secret of his later ‘lapse’ to agnosticism, if not atheism at the end (a point not pursued by Nolan). 3. Newman’s attraction: What was the secret of Pattison’s ‘attraction’ to Newman? – was it intellectual stimulation? Pattisonseemed to relish being ‘put to work’ for hours a day in Bodleian on the ‘Library of Fathers’ and later, ‘The Lives of the Saints’, edited by Newman. While working onStephen Langton for Newman’s edition of ‘The Lives of the Saints’, he even tells one of his sisters: ‘It is a long time since

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I have felt so eager in any subject of study as I do at this present in this’. There is no hinthere (diary) that the Oxford Movement was an intellectual aberration or distraction. As Stuart Jones puts it, Pattison’s labours for Newman were part of what we would now call his ‘training in research’. Many of Newman’s letters to him in this period are sometimes rather peremptory requests to chase up this or that source or reference in the Bodleian and to collate or compare this or that rare manuscript. Pattison describes hisown ‘herculean’ efforts in workingon an edition of Aquinas’s Catena Aurea. Commentary on the Four Gospels for

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the ‘Library of the Fathers’. Newman closely read and modified where he felt necessary Pattison’sarticles/essays on behalf of the Tractarian cause (occasionally, asin the case of Pattison’s piece on‘Earliest English Poetry’ for the British Critic in November 1841, even slightly toning it down – evidenceof Pattison’s then identification with the extreme ‘Romanising’ group among Newman’s followers). 4. Pattison the Tractarian: Why did Pattison become a Tractarian and follower of Newman? Central here was Pattison’s character & his religious impulse – his moral seriousness; he was at ease with toil, rigour, asceticism. In the Memoirs, alongside his aspersions

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on the Movement’s intellectual priorities, Pattison pays full tribute to the attraction Tractarianism held for someone like him in terms of ‘religious practices and exercises’ and its promotion of ‘seriousness of character’. He contrasts this withwhat he describes as a hitherto ‘indifference’ to ‘religious questions’. He explains – and there is no reason to doubt him – that this ‘was the side I was first taken by’ and the pietisme ofhis Yorkshire Evangelical upbringing helped prepare his receptivity to Newman’s message. Pattison then has no ‘problem’ with this side of the Oxford Movement. On the contrary,

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Pattison responded enthusiastically to the stern message of Newman’s sermons such as ‘Holiness necessary for future blessedness’. He made his own, Newman’s idea that outward acts ofgood works (often underrated in atleast Calvinist Evangelical spirituality) were important not so much in themselves (certain Evangelicals might even decry themas marks of ‘legalism’) but by their tendency or effect in nurturing inward good habits. In short, it was the spiritual effects of good actions that mattered. He became interested in the monastic ideal and his acts ofself-denial (e.g. giving up diningin Hall in Lincoln in 1843), while

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not in the same league as Hurrell Froude’s ascetical extravagances, were real enough. His diary is full of statements of determination to pursue an eremitical life. Moreover, for Pattison at this time, the Tractarians were anti-establishment and radical, overturning the laxity and comfortable conservatism of the ruling powers in the University. However, the spiritual influence of Newman (preaching) appears to have preceded the doctrinal and theological influence, though Pattison was certainly impressed by his reading of Newman’s Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church when it came out in 1836-7. By

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1838 Pattison also began to doubt the ‘soundness’ or orthodoxy of Hampden’s controversial Bampton Lectures (1832) which he had hitherto defended. However, it should be noted, as Nolan suggests, that Pattison’s support for Hampden was probably more to do with his Whig/liberal politics than theological agreement as such. In short, it is not so clearhow theologically liberal Pattisonreally was in this intermediate period. On the other hand, Nolan suggests that Pattison’s rediscovery of a seriousness of religious and moral purpose by around 1836-7 seemed about to carry him back to his Evangelical roots. Contact with Newman, thanks

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to the way in which Tractarianism was increasingly subsuming or substituting for the disillusionedEvangelicalism of Oxford’s new generation, was to make all the difference. William Whyte has characterised Pattison’s becoming a Tractarian as rather ‘jumping ona bandwagon’. This perhaps underestimates Pattison’s genuine commitment to the cause at this juncture in his life, only in retrospect and with benefit of hindsight does such an explanationgain superficial plausibility. 5. Dynamics of Pattison-Newman relationship: There was perhaps less warmth on Newman’s side, compared to his relations with some other disciples; there

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seems perhaps, at least at first reading, to be a rather brusque tone to Newman’s side of the correspondence but this could be afalse impression. To read Newman’seditorial demands in the letter might suggest that Pattison was almost treated as a ‘work horse’, not only chasing up references forNewman in libraries and doing dutyfor him at St Mary’s. A typical laconic entry from Pattison’s diary a ten day stay at Littlemorein 1843 hints at this: - ‘Newman kinder, but not perfectly so…How uncomfortable have I made myself all this evening by a childish fancy…a weak jealousy of N[ewman]’s good opinion’. This perhaps says more about Pattison

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and his extreme dependency (in modern parlance, ‘neediness’ and craving for reassurance) than about Newman. At any rate, Pattison was already becoming impatient with many of Newman’s Littlemore disciples by this time,and this was also a factor in his own later renversement. Even at thistime in his diary Pattison adopteda somewhat superior, if not disdainful, tone about Newman’s other disciples at Littlemore whomhe then observed at close quarters, noting: ‘Indeed it was ageneral wonder how Newman himself could be content with the society of men like Bowles, Coffin, Dalgairns, St John, Lockhart and others’. This again says perhaps

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more about Pattison than Newman – was he jealous of their closer proximity to Newman or was it thathe really thought they were intellectual lightweights? If the latter, it suggests that Pattison may have given more weight to the purely intellectual in relation tothe spiritual and moral faculties than could ever be the case with Newman, and perhaps demonstrates how little Pattison really understood Newman.6. Pyschoanalyising Pattison: Psychological interpretations of religious figures can be problematic and those who have attempted it in the case of Newman(Geoffrey Faber, Frank Turner) have laid themselves open to

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charge of reductionism and anachronism. Yet in the case of Pattison, we cannot avoid psycho-history and an attempt to understand his exceptionally difficult (morose, self-pitying, melancholic etc) personality – hisawkward manner & solitariness – these can be read as perhaps factors in his willingness to be ‘taken up’ (‘made use of’ might better characterise it?) by Newmanand put to work on the ‘Library ofthe Fathers’ in the ‘coenbitum’ or ‘monastery’ - the house which Pusey rented for the purpose St Aldates etc. In the Memoirs, Pattison depicts his undergraduateself as being consumed by a ‘chameleon-like readiness to take

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any shade of colour’ – hence his new-found dependence on Newman. Ashe explains it there, it was only later after the ‘parting of friends’ moment with Newman in 1845 that he found or asserted ‘myown right to be what I was’. Yet this was his verdict of hindsight and retrospect. In fact, one can also say that Pattison was no lessasserting his independence of his Evangelical upbringing and family constraints when he first got to know Newman and embraced the Tractarian cause. What helped thisprocess was that, as mentioned, heregarded Newman and the Tractarians as a necessary reaction against the laxity and conservatism of Oxford

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establishment old guard of the 1830s; only retrospectively did he‘read back’ a reactionary, clericalist and un-intellectual agenda. But even so even in the Memoirs, Pattison’s one-time sympathies break through e.g. in his ‘siding’ with Newman against Provost Hawkins in his later account of Oriel tuition controversy etc. 7. Pattison & Newman’s conversionto Rome: Pusey later said of Pattison: ‘We expected him to become a Roman Catholic the first of all’. This actually says more about Pusey’s poor judgment of character than it provides insightinto Pattison’ real intentions. Pattison’s attitude to Newman’s

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conversion and why he did not follow (many thought he might) is revealing. There is not the feeling of betrayal for Pattison that some of Newman’s more ‘Anglican loyalist’ Tractarian followers (e.g. J.B. Mozley) felt.Is it even possible to link Pattison’s new found sense of the conflict between creedal orthodoxyand free enquiry in matters of religion? Pattison seems to have come to this conclusion partly through reading Blanco White’s Autobiography (which happened to come out around the time of Newman’s conversion). One can be said is that Pattison represents in some way or other one of the ‘casualties’ of Newman’s

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departure. Yet Newman may only have been an unwitting catalyst ina longer process that Pattison hadbeen undergoing – as Stuart puts it, the struggle for emancipation not only from a state of bondage to society and upbringing but fromdependence on or even bondage to others, only latterly in his case Newman. Pattison’s recovery of what he portrays in his Memoirs ashis ‘real’, ‘rational self’ in theaftermath or period of Newman’s conversion, was in itself almost akin to a religious conversion experience. From now, as he says in the Memoirs, surely with Newman in mind (?), he forced himself to observe a new principle – ‘that ofnever allowing myself to be the

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passive recipient of anyone’s thoughts or opinions, but to thinkout for myself every statement, and to stop upon it until I had found if it ranged with what I hadalready accepted’. Pattison himself preferred the more mundanereason that he was too preoccupiedwith his new position as Tutor in Lincoln in 1845, though this mightimply that he would have had simply too much to give up. Certainly Nolan’s explanation – that Pattison had not until now (1845) really faced up to the logic of carrying out his principles, rings true. He was ‘trapped’ and ultimately baulked because when presented with the reality of the option, he simply

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could not face up to the consequences of following Newman and embracing Roman Catholicism. His experience of French Catholicism on visits in 1843 and 1845 also served to put him off. It should also be noted that it was the defeat in Convocation in February 1845 of the third proposal by the Hebdomadal Board of Heads of Houses to impose effectively a new theological ‘test’ by making all members of the University liable to re-sign the 39 Articles in accord with theviews of their framers (though in practice with those of the imponens), that really let Pattison ‘off the yoke’. He might otherwise been put in a more

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immediate quandary as to whether to make a personal decision in favour of Rome.8. Epilogue: The last years – whyPattison calls on Newman and hintsas to what might have passed between them at the end. In short,did Pattison secretly again revertto discipleship and receptivity toNewman once again at the end? 9. Some final conclusions & reflections.Pattison’s relationship with Newman was a complex and multi-layered one. There is clearly a contradiction between Pattison’s later relief, as expressed in the Memoirs, at having escaped ‘the whirlpool of Tractarianism’ and

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his enthusiastic adoption of role of an acolyte at the time. Of course, he sought later to downplay the extent of his debt and indeed one-time submissivenessto Newman. What survived? Pattison clearly owed something ofhis life-long love of learning andscholarship to what might be called his ‘Tractarian apprenticeship’ under Newman’s tutelage. The intellectual and theological reaction, if not apostasy, did not entail anything like a wholesale personal or pedagogical repudiation. He carried with him certain traits and elements in the character, though not substance, of his intellectual life. Above all, he

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never ceased to value the element of the personal in a literal sensein the life of the mind. As a tutor he retained the Newmanian ideal of university teaching as the personal influence of mind upon mind. In many ways, Pattison’s intellectual and scholarly preoccupations can be viewed as a substitute or replacement for the theological and spiritual loss incurred by thereligious change of course he underwent from the late-1840s onwards (described elsewhere). However, substitution does not perhaps quite capture the reality of what seems to have taken place.We can see Pattison’s remaining true to the Newmanian spirit of

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emphasising the individual, the person, in his very attitude to scholarship and learning. For as Stuart shows, Pattison was curiously indifferent to the actual outcome of scholarship (onethinks of George Eliot’s caricature in her portrait of Casaubon in Middlemarch). What interested him was scholarship as a way of life. What mattered to him ultimately was the life of themind and the mental freedom to probe where it will. This was a key reason why, as Pattison agonised over his future in 1845-7in the wake of Newman’s conversion, he decided that he would not/could not follow Newman.Yet at the same time, as Stuart

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intriguingly suggests, was this not this attitude also perhaps a ’secularised analogue of the Tractarian call to holiness’? Stuart Jones even suggests that Pattison’s projected ‘Lives of theScholars’ was a secularised echo of Newman’s ‘Lives of the Saints’.Pattison carried over into the long rationalist and post-Christian phase of his life what Ihave called the ‘counter-cultural’quality represented by Tractarian spirituality – the antithesis of the Victorian ideal of activity, busyness, materialism and countingthe cost. For all his loss of faith, spiritual values, reappliedto the idea of learning as a vocation remained. Therefore, in

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his own way Pattison felt he was remaining true to Newman’s vision even as he decisively resisted Newman’s call to follow him to Rome. It did not seem to matter that Pattison’s learning was no longer being put to the service ofthe cause of the Church – otherwise he might have felt the contradiction represented by his later chiding of Newman and the Tractarians for betraying this vision by their submission to ecclesiastical authority. Yet, if I can play devil’s advocate here, perhaps there is something just too retrospectivelyneat and easy about pursuing such an analogy too far? Firstly, was Pattison really as unreservedly

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committed to Newman’s cause as appeared to be the case to his contemporaries? Nolan tentatively suggests otherwise and finds some self-doubt and qualifications evenin Pattison’s pro-Tractarian writings such as his essay on ‘Early English Poetry’ in the British Critic in 1841. It might also be better to concede that, unconsciously or otherwise, the ‘worldliness’ which the TractarianPattison had fought against overtook him in the end (his Lincoln position and possibilitiesin the University which began to open up). Pattison’s loss of faithwas real, if not complete, and thus his relation to Newman could never again be as it once was. Was

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not Pattison’s acute and developing sense of intellectual selfhood and self-fulfilment, his pursuit of learning for learning’ssake (an attitude akin to ‘art forart’s sake), not a complete abandonment of the Tractarian ideals of self-denial and of learning being but the instrument for a higher cause which he had embraced for so long? Moreover, Pattison’s rationalistic understanding of ‘speculative truth’ was far removed from Newman’s search for ‘The Truth’, as is clear from his diary comments on Newman’s Apologia in 1864. Yet, in his later years justoccasionally the rationalistic mask of the later Pattison slips

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and renewed contact with Newman seemed to reawaken old memories and feelings of kinship. There wassomething here within Pattison, perhaps smothered by his often sour and gloomy exterior that we may never capture but which was reflected in the last meeting herebetween the master and his one-time disciple. Newman was dismayedby Pattison’s estrangement from him but not in a selfish way – he had more sympathy for Pattison always than the latter realised, though of course one grounded by 1845 on his hopes that Pattison would follow him to Rome. Pattisonhad turned away from discipleship of Newman, perhaps to return to itat the end. Yet Newman arguably

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had never encouraged such discipleship in the first place – he attracted followers and disciples, in spite of himself, claiming that he had never sought that sort of influence: - in the Apologia he famously applied to himself the words of St Gregory Nazianzen: ‘I could’st a people raise but could not rule’. Was there then a final meeting of minds and hearts between Newman and Pattison at the end? We do notknow for certain. The mystery remains.