Tell me what you think!  I suppose it is good for one to know how weak one’s armour is and how vulnerable is one’s feeble self.—­Ever yours,

T. B.

Upton,
Sept. 20, 1904.

Dear Herbert,—­I have been reading lately, not for the first time, but with increased interest, the Memoir of Mark Pattison.  It was, you will remember, dictated by himself towards the end of his life, and published after his death with a few omissions.  It was not favourably received, and was called cowardly, cynical, bitter, a “cry in the dark,” treacherous, and so forth.  It is very difficult not to be influenced by current opinion in one’s view of a book; one comes to it prepared to find certain characteristics, and it is difficult to detach one’s mind sufficiently to approach a much-reviewed volume with perfect frankness.  But I have read the book several times, and my admiration for it increases.  It does not reveal a generous or particularly attractive character, and there are certain episodes in it which are undoubtedly painful.  But it is essentially a just, courageous, and candid book.  He is very hard on other people, and deals hard knocks.  He shows very clearly that he was deficient in tolerance and sympathy, but he is quite as severe on himself.  What I value in the book is its absolute sincerity.  He does not attempt to draw an ideal picture of his own life and character at the expense of other people.  One sees him develop from the shy, gauche, immature boy into the mature, secluded, crabbed, ungracious student.  If he had adopted a pose he might have sketched his own life in beautiful subdued colours; he might have made himself out as misrepresented and misunderstood.  He does none of these things.  He shows clearly that the disasters of his life were quite as much due to his own temperamental mistakes as to the machinations of others.  He has no illusions about himself, and he does not desire that his readers should have any.  The sadness of the book comes from his failure, or rather his constitutional inability, to see other people whole.  After all, our appreciations for other people are of the nature of a sum.  There is a certain amount of addition and subtraction to be done; the point is whether the sum total is to the credit of the person concerned.  But with Mark Pattison the process of subtraction was more congenial than the process of addition.  He saw and felt the weakness of those who surrounded him so keenly that he did not do justice to their good qualities.  This comes out very clearly when he deals with Newman and Pusey.  Pattison was a member for a time of the Tractarian set, but he must have been always at heart a Liberal and a Rationalist, and the spell which Newman temporarily cast over him appeared to him in after life to have been a kind of ugly hypnotism, to which he had limply submitted.  Certainly the diary which he quotes concerning his own part in the Tractarian movement, the conversations to which he