1952: Preface
Arthur Frederick Blandy, D.Phil. (Syd.), sometime Fellow in Genealogical Studies
No figure in the declining daylight of English theology better exemplifies what one might term the aristocratic glide-path to transcendence than the Right Reverend Lord John Mallard, Bishop of Ducks‑on‑Ponds, whose life, though uneventful in any strictly spiritual sense, demonstrates the persistence (and, to this editor at least, the charm) of hereditary advantage as a form of divine intervention. It should be recognised at the outset that Mallard’s rise through the ranks of the Georgian church was not the consequence of merit—a vulgar term—but of what his contemporaries called “station,” and what later anthropologists, less tender, would name “favourable atmospheric conditions.”
The research for this volume has presented what might be described as a surfeit of documentation and an insufficiency of meaning. The Mallard family papers, housed until recently in the roofless manor of Upper Nettermouth, arrived here in Sydney faintly mildewed and smelling of consequence. I owe immense thanks to Lady Agatha Mallard‑Boote, who, in a spirit of antique resignation, allowed me to comb through the trunks, remarking only that “John never did believe a word, but he made quite a life of pretending.” I have borrowed this as the book’s subtitle.
The temptation to moralise on the discrepancy between Mallard’s disbelief and his episcopal pomp is one I have, I hope, avoided. To moralise is to suppose that anyone ever sincerely believed. More correct, I think, to observe that he perfected disbelief as an art, and thus anticipated the modern clerical mind. His papers—chiefly diaries and drafts of sermons—show a man entranced less by God than by the paraphernalia of belief: the flourishes of vestment, the acoustics of the nave. In one revealing note he writes, under the heading Private Reflections, Not for Quotation (which of course one is obliged to quote), “Faith is the perfume of power. One need not inhale to admire it.”
It is not, I suppose, my task to decide whether such statements are blasphemous or merely accurate; in any case they strike one as properly ecclesiastical in tone. Mallard’s atheism was conducted with all the courtesies of belief. When pressed, he did not deny God’s existence but congratulated Him on not requiring proof. Here we may see a certain national genius at work: the smooth suppression of substance beneath etiquette.
His diocese, though now scarcely traceable on any map (the ponds were drained for agriculture in 1832), was once famed for its punctuality. Mallard’s clergy were instructed to begin every service within “a whisker’s breadth of the clock’s will.” He compared the parishioners to “the more docile breeds of duck,” and referred to himself, not always facetiously, as “Keeper of the Basin.” Many of his letters survive to his cousin, the first Earl of Chittering, in which he describes divine service as “a sort of mechanical twittering over still water.” One senses an affection there—an affection for emptiness, ritual, orderly sound.
I have found, to my perplexity, that some readers approach clerical biography seeking uplift. They will be disappointed. Mallard’s progress was smooth, almost lubricated; the word “trial” occurs nowhere in his correspondence except in relation to the quality of port. Yet the absence of struggle grants its own fascination. It is refreshing, if slightly revolting, to watch a man proceed from chaplain to rector to bishop with the imperturbable certainty of plumbing. Nothing attaches, nothing leaks.
The central challenge in editing Mallard’s papers lay not in their scarcity (they are voluminous) but in their tone. Every sentence appears to have been composed with a mirror before him. Even his marginalia perform. One note in his Bible beside Ephesians—scribbled, most probably, during his Bath years—reads: “A cheerful fiction, though repetitive; the company tedious.” His modestly disguised atheism probably accounts for the unusually high style of his sermons, several examples of which I have included in Appendix II. Even while commending the faithful to humility, he writes as though he were delivering a lecture on modesty to a room of dogs. For instance: “The peasant believes as he breathes; we, who think, hold belief as a necessary affectation of the lungs.” Coleridge, who met him briefly, called him “a perfumed clock that keeps divine time in no one’s service.”
There exists a persistent rumour, charming and entirely unsubstantiated, that he composed his final sermon while in bed with an actress known only as Mrs. Rotch. The claim originates in a memoir, Reminiscences of the Devon Stage, 1816 (anon., probably by herself), which describes the Bishop’s “perfectly episcopal manner of kissing—half blessing, half acquisition.” I include this for its picturesque potential rather than its accuracy. No one is served by truth alone.
The reader may notice certain chronological errors in my commentary; these are, I confess, largely inherited. The Mallard family cherished confusion the way other dynasties honour martyrdom. Even his dates of birth and death are uncertain. I have followed the inscription on his memorial plaque (dismantled and shipped to Hobart in 1937): 1755–1815. Others cite 1810, but the handwriting in the family bookkeeper’s ledger is suggestive of inattention or sherry. Frankly, both seem plausible closures for so implausible a man.
Mallard’s supposed conversion at the last hour—he is said to have recanted his disbelief on his death-bed, shattering a wine-glass in triumph—should be treated with suspicion. The account derives from Memoirs of a Spiritual Visitation by the Rev. Pottle, his subordinate and great beneficiary, who shortly thereafter succeeded to the see. Pottle describes a scene in which “the dying lord grasped my hand, whispering that he at last perceived the Face of God through the mist of conversation.” This, from a man unused to perceiving through anything, seems improbable. More likely he had mistaken the Bishop’s last fit of irony for faith.
What, apart from the obvious prestige, drew Mallard to the Church? We cannot say with confidence. To view belief as motive would be sentimental; yet to view absolute cynicism as explanation would, I think, flatter him. He was too refined for conviction of any kind. The early letters betray a susceptibility to beauty: stained glass, trimmed candles, the choreography of ceremony. At university—an expression that in the eighteenth century covered a multitude of irresponsibilities—he identified religion, not incorrectly, as an aesthetic career. He later wrote: “The Church is the only theatre in which one’s applause is guaranteed in advance.” Rowanson’s caricaturist hand captured him, wineglass in one, sermon in the other, our Lord gazing upward in faint disgust.
In editing these materials, I have struck a balance between transcription and embroidery. The diaries, though suggestive, are underwritten; the handwriting is courtly yet fatiguing, the paper damp, the ink distressingly human. I have smoothed some phrases for legibility and, I hope, for sympathy. My method throughout has been one of respectful insertion—adding only what Mallard would have meant, had he meant more. Students of honesty will object, but then, students of honesty rarely publish.
I must also acknowledge the assistance of the Commonwealth Literary Fund, which enabled my research trip to Nettermouth (a three-month visit compressed, through discomfort, into five hours). The village schoolmistress’s memory of the Bishop included a single phrase: “His lordship floated.” How precisely she apprehended the man! Float he did, over doctrine, over need, over faith itself—a consequence not of grace, but of breeding.
Though the reader will find him morally unsound and spiritually absent, I confess to admiration. There is in Mallard’s disbelief a kind of chastity. He never sullied it by argument. A lesser mind might have tried to justify his atheism; Mallard allowed the world to misunderstand him, which was, if not saintly, at least well mannered. His life refutes no doctrine, asserts no truth, yet manages to exemplify both. It may be that he proves the ultimate ambition of theology: to remain socially useful while privately extinct.
In concluding (though one ought never conclude where ambiguity flowers so richly), I feel compelled, if not qualified, to acknowledge the interpretive hazards of distance. Writing in Sydney, in this provisional century, I am conscious of my imperfect position. England, which produced the likes of Mallard, still regards us as a far shore, a colony of echoes. Perhaps this is why I am drawn to him: an exile of conviction, a connoisseur of ornament in a world of labour. He stands, absurd and elegant, for everything colonial earnestness would destroy.
This edition, then, must not be read as biography alone but as an act of homage—to style unanchored by substance, to lineage without faith, to splendour admired chiefly because it is implausible. Like the man himself, I offer it with the utmost sincerity, which is to say, with appropriate uncertainty.
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