Jacob Bernays

MEDEDELINGEN DER KONINKLIJKE NEDERLANDSE AKADEMIE VAN WETENSCHAPPEN. AFD. LETTERKUNDE NIEUWE REEKS - DEEL 32 - No. 5 JACOB BERNAYS ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO NORTH-HOLLAND PUBLISHING COMPANY - AMSTERDAM - LONDON - 1969 AANGEBODEN IN DE VERGADERING VAN 10 J'EBRUABI 1969 I In 1839, at the age of twenty-four, Jacob Bachofen came to England to study mediaevallaw. Fifteen years later the time he had spent in England still seemed to him the best of his life. The only unpleasant experience was a visit to Oxford : "Oxford entsprach meinen Erwartungen nicht"l). But he escaped from Oxford to Cambridge, and there he found what he wanted. There he indulged in his favourite hunt for mediaeval "Prozessualisten". The good Cambridge dons did not quite understand what he was after, but apparently Magdalene College offered him a fellowship. Before the end of 1840 Bachofen was back in his native Basle where he settled down for the rest of his life. His different reactions to Oxford and Cambridge are not sur prising. Oxford was then in the middle of the Anglo-Catholic revival led by Newman. Mark Pattison, who was born two years before Bachofen in 1813, was busy transcribing mediaevallives of saints, not mediaeval "Prozessualisten". At Cam bridge , the ApostIes were studying Niebuhr and Savigny, and even G. B. Vico. Connop Thirlwall, soon to become the Bishop of St. David's (1840), had translated Niebuhr and was writing a History of Greece according to Niebuhr's method2). Bachofen, a pupil of Savigny, was gure of a good reception in that group. Nobody could guess that within a few years Bachofen would have developed into the most fiery opponent of Niebuhr and would have disagreed with Savigny - affection notwithstanding. Oxford went German when the Oxford Movement was defeated. In 1845 Newman left Oxford, in 1850 the Royal Commission was set up. The fust to change, though gradually, was Mark Pattison himself who emerged from the Oxford Movement as a free thinker in holy orders with a strong bias towards German "Wissenschaft" . His revulsion from Newman is best expressed by a passage in his Memoirs: "A. P. Stanley once said to me 'How different the fortunes of the Church of England might have been if Newman had been able to read German'. That puts the matter in a nut-shell"3). The failure to become the Rector of Lincoln in 1851 gave Pattison ten years of sadness and of leisure which he .exploited not only 1) J. Ba.chofen, Selbstbiographie und Antrittsrede, ed. A. Baeumler, Ha.lle 1927, 18 ff. I) K. Doekhom, Der deutsche Historismus in England, Göttingen 1950; D. Forbes, The Liberal Anglican ldea of History, Ca.mbridge 1952. S) M. Pattison, Memoirs, London 1885, 210. 151 4 JACOB BERNAYS for solitary fishing in Y orkshire and Scotland, but also for visits to Germany. In 1859 he was there in his official capacity as an inspector appointed by the Education Committee of the Privy Council to report on elementary education in Prussia and other German States. More frequently he went to German universities to learn. When at last in 1861 he became the very inHuential head of his own College he made it his business to encourage Oxford dons to go to Germany to complete their studies. John Sparrow, who knows more than anybodyelse about Mark Pattison, has recently devoted an absorbing little book to the difficulties in which Pattison involved himself by advocating in Oxford the Humboldtian idea of a university4). Pattison had started with the assumption that, in Oxford, Colleges had to be developed as independent units and that College tutors, not the University professors, were the potential scholars in a German sense. He recognized at the end that the Royal Commission had transformed Oxford into a "cramming-shop". Examinations-not "Kultur" - had become the main preoccupation of tutors and undergraduates. Thus in 1868 Pattison wrote his suggestions for academic organisation to reverse this trend. He now championed professors against tutors. He proposed the abolition of the Colleges and of the fellowships and the transfer of their endowments to the University. Those Colleges which did not become headquarters of Faculties might be used as non-compulsory halls of residence. In Pattison's dream students would Hock to Oxford for the mere love of learning. If any of this was really meant as a practical suggestion, he lived long enough, until 1884, to be disabused. The Warden of All Souls is not the man to miss the relevance of Pattison's experience to our 1965 or 1968 university problems. Old Pattison had to admit what young Pattison had not needed to know: that a vocational training and a liberal education are not inter changeabie. But the Warden's account of Pattison is deliberately unilateral. He does not examine Pattison's scholarly work, nor does he examine the nature of his relations with German scholars. Something is therefore inevitably lacking in his interpretation of Pattison's idea of a university. II The type of research which Pattison made his own and for which he remained famous was common neither in England nor in 4) J. Sparrow, Mark PattiBon and the ldea of a UniverBity, Ca.mbridge 1967. Cf. V. H. H. Green, Oxlord Gommon Room, London 1957; W. R. Wa.rd, Victorian Oxjord, London 1965. 152 JAOOB BERNAYS 5 Germany 5). This was the history of classical scholllorship. Pattison also did other things after giving up the study of saints which Pusey and Newman had encouraged. His editions of Milton's sonnets and some of Pope's poems are described as first-rate by John Sparrow, who should know, but they did not take much of his time and appear to have been mostly "Parerga" ofhis old age 6). He started his work on Casaubon in 1853 and published his bio graphy of him in 1875. His biography of Scaliger dragged on from about 1855 to his death and was never completed. In writing the lives of great scholllors Pattison naturally wanted to advance the cause of pure, disinterested research, but he also tried to express some of his religious and social beliefs. In his view Casaubon had been side-tracked and then killed offby theology. All those years spent in refuting Baronius and helping King J ames to compile his theological tracts ! Pattison is even impatient with Casaubon for filling pages of his Ephemerides with mere teligious emotions. In one of his earliest biographical studies, on Bishop Huet, which he published in the Quarterly Review 1855 7), Pattison dramatised the conflict between Huet the scholar and Huet the philosopher. The lattel' belonged to "that class of philosophers who have taken up philosophy not as an end, but as a means-not for its own sake, but for the support of religion". To such philo sophers Pattison attributed "the desperate design of first ruining the territory they were preparing to evacuate". There was only one scholar in Pattison's time who had a similar interest in the history of classical scholarship: Jacob Bemays. This name is not to be found in John Sparrow's book on Pattison and is not often mentioned in Pattison's own M emoirs, but one mention in the Memoirs is of great importance. When Bernays' book on Scaliger appeared in 1855, Pattison undertook to translate it into English. A letter from Max Müller to Bernays dated February 5, 1856 makes it certain that by that time Pattison was firmly committed to the translation of Bernays' Scaliger. Max Müller remarked about Pattison: "Seine Kenntniss der deutschen Sprache ist vielleicht nicht ganz gut, er kennt aber die Sache, die damalige Zeit, und ist eine ehrliche, obwohl etwas trockene Seele"B). Pattison 5) 18aac Oaaaubon, London 1875 (2 ed. 1892); E88ay8, ed. H. NettIeship, 2 vols., Oxford 1889. One must compare the curious volume of Sermona, London 1885. 6) A bibliography of M. Pattison was compiled by J. M. Hoare in an unpublished thesis of University College London, School of Librarianship, 1953. 7) E88aY8, I, 244. 8) M. Fraenkel, Jacob Bernay8. Ein Lebenabild in Briefen, Breslau 1932, 91. Further quotations from letters in the text are taken from this book. 153 6 JAOOB BEBNAYS indeed summarised Bernays' book in two lengthy papers in the Quarterly Review 18609). What the Memoirs reveal is that Pattison was persuaded by Christian Carl Josias von Bunsen, a former Prussian envoy to the Court of St. James's, to improve upon Bernays and to write another book about Scaliger: "I soon came to view in Scaliger something more than the fust scholar of the modern age. The hint was given me in a conversation I had with Chevalier Bunsen at Charlottenburg in 1856. Speaking of Bernays' masterly monograph on Scaliger, just published, he pointed out that Bernays' creed had interfered with his seeing in Scaliger 'the Protestant hero'" 10). By linking Pattison with Bernays and Bunsen this passage provides a key to the understanding of the three persons involved. To see the Protestant hero in Scaliger proved to be more difficult than Bunsen had anticipated. Pattison never translated Bernays and never wrote his own book. One of his difficulties was that he himself was more anti-Catholic than Protestant. On the other hand, Bunsen was perhaps less certain of his Lutheranism than he cared to admit. In the twenty years, 1818-1838, in which he was a diplomat and a scholar in Rome, he was suspected of Catholic sympathies. Ris later work on the Early Church and on Oriental religions is, at least to one reader, not conspieuous for clarity of theological notions 11). Both Pattison and Bunsen admired Scaliger for qualities which were beyond their reaeh.

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