ut as time went
on things grew worse. Nobody knows what deliberate impotence means who
has not chanced to sit upon a committee with Pattison. Whatever the
business in hand might be, you might be sure that he started with the
firm conviction that you could not possibly arrive at the journey's end.
It seemed as if the one great principle of his life was that the Sons of
Zeruiah must be too hard for us, and that nobody but a simpleton or a
fanatic would expect anything else. 'With a manner,' he says of himself,
'which I believe suggested conceit, I had really a very low estimate of
myself as compared with others. I could echo what Bishop Stanley says of
himself in his journal: "My greatest obstacle to success in life has
been a want of confidence in myself, under a doubt whether I really was
possessed of talents on a par with those around me."' Very late in life,
talking to Mr. Morison, he said in his pensive way, 'Yes, let us take
our worst opinion of ourselves in our most depressed mood. Extract the
cube root of that, and you will be getting near the common opinion of
your merits.'

He describes another side of the same over-spreading infirmity when he
is explaining why it was always impossible for him ever to be anything
but a Liberal. 'The restlessness of critical faculty,' he says, 'has
done me good service when turned upon myself. _I have never enjoyed any
self-satisfaction in anything I have, ever done_, for I have inevitably
made a mental comparison with how it might have been better done. The
motto of one of my diaries, "Quicquid hic operis fiat poenitet" may be
said to be the motto of my life' (p. 254). A man who enters the battle
on the back of a charger that has been hamstrung in this way, is
predestined to defeat. A frequent access of dejection, self-abasement,
distrust, often goes with a character that is energetic, persevering,
effective, and reasonably happy. To men of strenuous temper it is no
paradox to say that a fit of depression is often a form of repose. It
was D'Alembert, one of the busiest of the workers of a busy century, who
said this, or something to this effect--that low spirits are only a
particular name for the mood in which we see our aims and acts for what
they really are. Pattison's case was very different. With him, except
for a very few short years, despair was a system, and an unreasoned
pessimism the most rooted assurance of his being. He tells a thoroughly
characteristic story of himse