Born, at Camberwell, 15 April 1817. At St. Paul’s School, 16 June 1829 to 1836. Scholar, Balliol Coll., Oxford, Dec. 1835 to 1839; matric. 30 Nov. 1836; Hertford Scholar, 1837; Fellow, Balliol Coll., 1838–70; Tutor, 1843–70. B.A., 1839; Latin Essay Prize, 1841; M.A., 1842. M.A., Durham, 1842. Ordained Deacon, 1842;. Priest, 1845; Mem. of Commission on I. C. S. Exams., 1853. Regius Prof. of Greek, Oxford, 1855–93. Master of Balliol Coll., 1870–93. Hon. Doc. Leyden Univ., Feb. 1875. Vice-Chancellor of Oxford Univ., 1882–86. Hon. LL.D., Edinburgh, 1884; Hon. LL.D., Dublin, 1886; Hon. LL.D., Cambridge, 1890. Died, at Oxford, 1 Oct. 1893. Works: “De Etruscorum Cultu,” 1841; Edition of “Epistles to Galatians, Thessalonians and Romans” (2 vols.), 1855; “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” in “Essays and Reviews,” 1860; Translation of Plato’s Dialogues (4 vols.), 1871; “Lord Lytton,” 1873; Translation of Thucydides (2 vols.), 1881; Translation of the “Politics” of Aristotle (2 vols.), 1885. Posthumous: “College Sermons,” ed. by Hon. W. H. Fremantle, 1895. Life: by E. Abbott and L. Campbell, 1897
Personal
This morning the sermon was preached by Jowett (not of South Quay, but) of Balliol College. This man has the reputation of being an infidel, simply because he has a profound contempt for show, and humbug, and external rites. His sermon was beautiful, and seemed to me to indicate a heart sincerely interested in the subject. He is a pale, boyish, almost effeminate-looking man, something like little Deemster Drinkwater.
Jowett, as you say, believes very firmly in an ordering God, a moral, personal, law-giving God. He does so because he cannot help it, because it has been too deeply stereotyped in his nature to be effaced, because when questioning and parting with all else, he has never stirred this, because, perhaps, he belongs to the generation of Newman and not to its successor, because he is an ordained priest, because, again I say, he cannot help it.
For a man who had a great and a deserved renown as a talker, Dr. Jowett was often singularly silent. He was silent unless the company pleased him, and unless the topic pleased him. Some of those who saw him but seldom, and then not in favourable circumstances, have called him rude. He never was rude, or never consciously so, but he had no doubt a certain intellectual arrogance which, though it was entirely intellectual, expressed itself at times in a way which gave offence. He had fits of apparent abstraction. When they seemed to be deepest, they were broken by a remark which indicated that nothing of what had been said had escaped him, and that nothing had pleased him. These hard sayings were delivered with a gentleness of demeanour which added to the sting. Woe to the man who talked on a subject he did not understand, if he talked pretentiously. For pretence and for the insincerity of character which it implies, Jowett had no mercy.
Of the average academic or collegiate one is inclined to think that, in Rossetti’s accurate phrase, “he dies not—never having lived—but ceases”: of Mr. Jowett it is almost impossible at first to think as dead. I, at any rate, never found it harder, if so hard, to realize the death of any one. There was about him a simple and spontaneous force of fresh and various vitality, of happy and natural and well-nigh sleepless energy, which seemed not so much to defy extinction as to deride it. “He laboured, so must we,” says Ben Jonson of Plato in a noble little book which I had the pleasure of introducing to Mr. Jowett’s appreciative acquaintance; and assuredly no man lived closer up to that standard of active and studious life than the translator of Plato. But this living energy, this natal force of will and action, was coloured and suffused and transfigured by so rare a quality of goodness, of kindness, of simple and noble amiability, that the intellectual side of his nature is neither the first nor the last side on which the loving and mourning memory of any one ever admitted to his friendship can feel inclined or will be expected to dwell.
Jowett’s person was, like his mind, dainty. An irreverent writer once spoke of his face as of the tombstone-cherub order; and the phrase was descriptive. But cherubs too frequently have something gross in their chubbiness; and everything about the Master was delicate and fine. Perhaps it was his appearance which helped to create the affection which mingled with our awe and respect; he was the Doctor Seraphicus of the College. Yet we trembled when we had to go and see him, even at a breakfast party, to say nothing of less agreeable occasions. In his clear little staccato voice he could say such biting things…. Yet he could be very kind to the obscure. Meeting a young graduate making a living by “coaching” or private tuition, he asked him how he was getting on. He was told that there had been few pupils that term, and that the coach had been obliged to give up his hope of going to Germany in the vacation. A few days later the coach was sent for and given an envelope with the words: “I hope you will go to Germany; good-bye.” Four years later the Master had quite forgotten he had ever drawn that check.
It was impossible to be in Jowett’s company—even if, as sometimes happened, he did not open his mouth—without recognising that he was a remarkable man. That noble forehead with its nimbus of silver hair, that mild eye and cherubic countenance, that beautiful softness of hand, that small rotund figure clad in old-fashioned garb, that venerable bearing—all combined to make up a picture which no painter has adequately reproduced. Add the thin, small voice, the deliberate intonations that could be either bitter or sweet, the abrupt questionings that sometimes quivered like a dart, the intervals of silence that were yet more formidable, the wise maxims that come only from age and experience; and some part of the secret of Jowett’s charm will be understood. No Oxford don had a wider circle of acquaintance in the outer world; none knew intimately so many generations of undergraduates. He possessed, in supreme measure, that power, invaluable to statesmen and generals, of penetrating the character of others at a glance. Of his exceeding kindness to individuals, and of his munificence when such was needed, it is not necessary to speak. His college stood to him in the place of a wife, and he took a paternal interest in the careers of its sons.
I have not unfrequently heard him preach. When I was Headmaster of Marlborough College, I asked him to come down and preach to the boys, which he readily did, and was my guest. Since then I have heard him in Balliol College and in Westminster Abbey. His sermons had all the unusual characteristics of his individuality. There was a charm about them which it was wholly impossible to explain. Just as his face was pleasing, and must once have been almost beautiful, so his style was attractive. It was exquisitely simple and lucid, and there was not a fault to find with it, unless it were that it was wholly devoid of humour, of eloquence, and of passion. But it gave the sense of continual self-repression.
The high-water mark of his religion may be indicated by saying that, like most religious philosophers of our day, but more than most of them, he cherished an ennobling aspiration which, superficially at least, is more Platonic than Christian. He was one of those happily constituted persons who keep alive the hope which is born of an ardent wish, and is its own and only justification—the hope that there is an Ideal World in which Absolute Goodness, of which the highest earthly goodness is but a feeble and transient reflection, has its habitation in perfect fulness and for ever.
There were so many Jowetts! That is what, looking back, strikes one first of all. There was the Jowett, for instance, who was the pioneer of a religious movement; there was Jowett, philosopher, teacher, scholar; there was Jowett, the cordial and skilful host, entertaining at his house, year by year, the men and women of most note in contemporary England; there was the Jowett of legendary fame—the Jowett who, by some caprice of the public, has been popularized in the general mind as the true Master of Balliol—a Jowett unsympathetic and cold, deliberately causing discomfort to shy undergraduates, habitually embarrassing his guests with intentional silences, dealing in sharp speeches, of which the unkindliness dominated the wit—the Jowett, in fact, of the innumerable anecdotes which have gathered round his name, and of which the portrait, so often and so persistently presented does not strike his friends so much in the light of a caricature—since a caricature should be, at the least, an easily recognisable exaggeration of truth—as in that of a Jowett-myth, with regard to which they hesitate between laughter and anger. And besides all these Jowetts, each in his measure familiar to the general public, there was another Jowett less well known—the Jowett with which this paper is alone concerned—the Jowett of his Friends, the kindly, intimate, and affectionate companion; the shrewd yet indulgent observer, ready at all times to impart to those of less experience the results of his observations upon human life, the steadfast, just, and wide-minded counselor.
He had a marvellous genius for friendship and could love a score as few men can love anyone. The close of his life was shadowed by their departure. Stanley, Lord Iddesleigh, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Lord Sherbrooke, Alfred Tennyson, were gone, and it was time for an old man to
| “Wrap the drapery of his couch | |
| About him and lie down to pleasant dreams.” |
Though Jowett was audacious, he was never indiscreet. If he did a bold thing—and he did many—it was not by impulse or by accident, but of set purpose; and he was too wise ever to explain it or to apologise for it, being well content to leave it to be justified or condemned by the results. His correspondence and memoranda are peculiarly instructive, and open up unexpected glimpses into the beliefs and ideals that were the springs of his action. The mind revealed in his letters and note-books is so pure, the aims so high and generous, the life so unselfish, the spirit so silent as to its own sorrows while so tender and sympathetic to those of others, that even the men who were most alien from his creed and his policy may well feel compelled to respect the man.
He did more than any other man of his time to raise the ideal of University teaching and of the relation of teacher and pupil. But when we try to explain the secret of his influence, it is not easy to say anything definite. In truth, an original personality like Jowett is very difficult to describe…. He was primarily a man of very sensitive temper, with the strong desire that usually goes with such a temper for the sympathy of others. At the same time, he was naturally shy, reserved, and unwilling, or even unable, to disclose himself unless he was sure of a response; and the effect of his manner, therefore, was at first somewhat chilling, especially to those who had any kindred tendency to reserve.
Those who remember him, as the Master, will be amused at the pictures of him, as a Freshman, which his biographers preserve. He entered Balliol in a round jacket, and with a turned down collar, we are told. His appearance was juvenile in the extreme; and Hobhouse alluded to his pretty, girlish looks, his quiet voice, and his gentle, shy manner. Even in later life he was spoken of as “a middle-aged cherub” and as “a little downy owl.” But there was a good deal that was manly, and very manly, behind it all.
General
It is true that Jowett ever preached “plain living and high thinking;” but he presented them not so much as their own reward, or as the necessary conditions of learning, but as the means to worldly success. Balliol men have been better than their instruction; but who shall estimate how much the university has lost in exact scholarship and in original research? The same practical and commonsense side of Jowett’s nature was shown in his contributions to literature. Though Professor of Greek for nearly forty years, he did not conceive it his duty to represent the highest standard of Hellenic philology. The science of palæography, the fine art of emendation, the discoveries of modern archæology, were to him alike unknown and indifferent. Practically he gave no public lectures (though he did not exclude members of other colleges from his private teaching), nor did he ever edit an ancient text. But what was within his power and suited his tastes, that he did to a marvel. His translation of the whole of Plato, with introductions to the several dialogues, has already become a sort of English classic…. The translation itself is a tour de force. All the artifices of rhetoric—the breaking up of sentences, the changing of the order of words, the use of conjunctions—are intentionally employed, in order to imitate faithfully not only the thought but also the style of the original, and yet read as idiomatic English. It may be that the study of Greek will ere long become rare in England, even at the universities. If that time should arrive, Jowett’s “Plato” will at any rate permit our grandchildren to appreciate the supremest effort of imaginative prose, without the drudgery of learning the Greek grammar.
If it be asked whether Dr. Jowett was a writer whose works will live, we answer that of his sermons not half a dozen have found their way into print; that his original contributions to literature were very few in number, and were never collected; that his edition of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and Galatians—original as it was and sometimes suggestive—was marred by many inaccuracies, and must be regarded as an incursion into a domain of theological literature for which Dr. Jowett was not well adapted…. Dr. Jowett’s most permanent contributions to English literature were the translations of Thucydides, of Aristotle’s Politics, and above all, of Plato’s Dialogues. All three in their original form—especially the first and the last—were disfigured by inaccuracies. But these are removed in the later editions, and no living scholar has done anything like so much as Dr. Jowett to make the thoughts of the greatest Greeks familiar to our generation. The translation of the whole of Plato could not be accomplished without consummate diligence, and the late Master of Balliol performed his task in such a manner as renders it little likely that his work will soon be superseded.
Because the work of his life was mainly if not wholly devoted to Oxford it does not follow that it would be a mistake to assume—as certain of his official mourners or admirers might induce their hearers or readers to assume—that apart from Oxford he was not, and that his only claim to remembrance and reverence is the fact that he put new blood into the veins of an old university. He would have been a noticeable man if he had known no language but the English of which he was so pure and refined a master; and if he had never put pen to paper he would have left his mark upon the minds and the memories of younger men as certainly and as durably as he did.
He wrote well, but with much less distinction and elegance than Pattison, nor had he by any means the same taste for literature and erudition in it. But, as an influence on the class of persons from whom men of letters are drawn, no one has exceeded him in his day.
He had his weakness, like Johnson; but we feel in his case, as in Johnson’s, that the core of the man’s nature was sweet, sound, and masculine. This is part of the explanation of a problem which, I must confess, has often appeared to me as to others, to be rather enigmatic. What was the secret and the real nature of Jowett’s remarkable influence?… Jowett was a man of wide philosophical culture. He was prominent in Oxford society during some remarkable intellectual changes. He lived there for some fifty-seven years. As an undergraduate he was a looker-on at the singular and slightly absurd phenomenon called the Oxford Movement, and keenly interested in the contest finally brought to a head by his friend W. G. Ward. Soon afterwards he was a leading tutor, at a time when the most vigorous youths at Oxford were inclining rather in the direction of J. S. Mill, and some of them becoming disciples of Comte. His edition of St. Paul’s Epistles made him an arch heretic in the eyes of the High Church party, and his simultaneous appointment to the Greek Professorship gave the chance, of which its members were foolish enough to avail themselves, of putting him in the position of a martyr of free thought. His share in the “Essays and Reviews” (1860) made him a representative man in a wider sphere. Though we have now got to the stage of affecting astonishment at the sensation produced by the avowal of admitted truths in that work, nobody who remembers the time can doubt that it marked the appearance of a very important development of religious and philosophical thought. The controversy raised by “Essays and Reviews” even distracted men for a time from the far more important issues raised by the publication of Darwin’s “Origin of Species.”… Jowett was a man of mark and intellectual authority at a time when vital questions were being eagerly agitated and the most various conclusions reached…. Is any phase of speculation marked by Jowett’s personal stamp? That is the question which one naturally asks about a man who is a well-known writer upon philosophy, and one can hardly deny that the answer must be unequivocally in the negative.
Of Jowett as one of the greatest masters of English prose nothing need here be said in addition to the expression of Pater’s unqualified admiration in his letter written less than three months before his lamented death, describing Jowett’s fame among the youth of Oxford, and the impression produced when he taught the University for nothing. “Such fame,” writes Pater, “rested on his great originality as a writer and thinker. He seemed to have taken the measure not merely of all opinions, but of all possible ones, and to have put the last refinements on literary expression. The charm of that was enhanced by a certain mystery about his own philosophical and other opinions.” Mr. Abbott gives some of Jowett’s counsels of perfection in the writing of English which are worth their weight in gold. Jowett’s Plato undoubtedly exhibits his style at its best, and with the original conception of this work is connected one of the greatest intellectual benefits conferred by Jowett upon Oxford. We mean the prominent place first assigned by him in the “Humanities” course to the “Republic” of Plato—a place which it still occupies unchallenged. The reforms of his Oxford vice-chancellorship alone entitle him to rank very high among the great administrators of these days, and he has earned the fame of the second founder of the modern Balliol College.
His theological writings first attracted to him the notice of the world at large; his translations have opened the treasures of Greek thought to thousands who could profit by them, and to whom they would otherwise have remained sealed…. Jowett was not a great classical scholar, in either the German or the English sense of the word. In the field of university politics, moreover, he does not seem to have initiated any one movement of the first importance. But as Master he was a great and brilliant success, and in the college and through the college he exercised enormous influence.
He contributed more to form the mind and character of his age than many men who occupied more conspicuous positions. He fought a battle that was the more splendidly successful that it was so long without the outward signs and spoils of victory. It was not that he had transcendent gifts in any one direction; nay, in most respects he could be easily surpassed. As a scholar he had superiors both in his own and in the sister university; as a philosophical thinker he was eclipsed by some even of his own disciples; as a theologian he early fell out of the race, and though to the last wistfully anxious to take up the running, grew progressively unfit to do it; as an administrator of the university he had the defects of a man whose ends and means were too much his own to be easily adjusted to the temper and ways of an assembly which can only be deliberative by being critical. But when every deduction has been made, it will remain true that the late Master of Balliol was the most potent academic personality which Oxford, at least, has known in this century. To have been this was to be a person whose memory, especially as regards the elements and secrets of power, ought not to be willingly let die…. He was an educator rather than a scholar, and a man of letters rather than a man of learning. He is distinguished at once by the comparative feebleness of his scientific interest and the intensity of his interest in persons. He was an enthusiast for the creation of the best men for the service of the church and State; and he believed that there was no place for their creation equal to a well-equipped, well-governed, and well-disciplined college, where the most cultured minds of the present introduced the learners to the classical literatures of the past. And he lived to make the college he ruled what he conceived a college ought to be. It was a noble ambition nobly carried out.
Jowett was one of the few men who leave upon us the distinct stamp of an individual force without any weakening of the outline by the intrusion of what is conventional and commonplace. His intellectual and moral originality, his single-minded devotion to public ends,—above all, to the well-being of the University and the College over which he presided,—his integrity and consistency with himself, his great powers of working and getting others to work for the objects he sought, his wonderful memory for the characters and circumstances of his old pupils and his steadfast interest in their welfare—these with all the individual traits of severity and gentleness, of earnestness and humor, which characterized him, indelibly impressed the image of his personality upon all with whom he was brought into near relations. Perhaps not the least remarkable of his gifts, and that which prevented him from being ever less than himself, was his courage. Few men had a better claim to have inscribed on their graves the epitaph which the Regent Morton pronounced upon John Knox: “Here lies one who never feared the face of mortal man.”
He was an eminently pregnant and suggestive thinker and writer, warmly attached to what he regarded as the central truths of religion.
