The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses

By 1839 Newman had lost the support of the old High and Dry party. In 1841 he scandalised Oxford beyond hope of redemption. That was the year when he published Tract 90, just before his fortieth birthday. In it he declared that the Thirty-Nine Articles in the Prayer Book, though they were conceived in an uncatholic age, could be ‘subscribed by those who aim at being Catholic in heart and doctrine’. Newman still believed that the Church of Rome was wrong in practice. But in dogma? Even though some of the articles expressly condemned Roman beliefs, Newman argued that a way could be found to reconcile the two churches. Indeed the articles required re-casting. ‘Let the church sit still,’ he wrote, ‘let her be content to be in bondage … let her go on teaching with the stammering lips of ambiguous formularies.’ The time would come, so Newman’s reader inferred, when the Church would be reunited with Rome.

Tract 90 confirmed what High Churchmen as well as Evangelicals had feared. It convinced them that Newman was a popish agent infiltrating the Church of England to bring it over to Rome. All but two of the heads of houses condemned it, bishop after bishop penned charges denouncing it. The row was not a theological dispute alone. It penetrated to the heart of academic life. The Provost of Oriel refused to write testimonials for those candidates for ordination known to admire Newman and Pusey. The new brand of High Churchmen had little hope of being elected to fellowships. Colleges changed the hour of hall dinner on Sunday to prevent their undergraduates from attending St Mary’s, where Newman preached. Tittle-tattle about the latest Tractarian perversions replaced urbane conversation. A lady in an omnibus turned to the clergyman next to her and asked him whether he realised that each Friday Dr Pusey sacrificed a lamb. ‘My dear Madam, I am Dr Pusey, and I assure you I do not know how to kill a lamb.’ Tell-tale informers flitted about the streets insinuating, intriguing and whispering that so and so was unsound, another a known Romaniser, a third had been seen going to Littlemore, where Newman was conducting a retreat in which each day was governed by monastic discipline from Matins and Laud to Vespers and Compline. Newman had become the most notorious don in Oxford.

In 1842, the year after Tract 90 was published, Newman in effect retired as a don. He moved to Littlemore, a village outside Oxford, to lead a life governed by monastic rules and even penances such as hair-shirts and whips. The country, as well as Oxford, waited for him to convert to Rome. They waited for three years. Then at last he took the fatal step.

When Newman went over to Rome, the effect was cataclysmic. Dozens followed him – to the grief and fury of their families. He left behind him far more who felt betrayed. They believed he had found in Anglicanism the via media between vulgar Protestantism and Roman idolatry. For him, too, it was tragic: Keble and old Dr Routh, the President of Magdalen, did not shun him, but many of his closest friends broke with him for ever. Of his own family all were estranged except for one sister.

Yet Newman had one further contribution to make as a don. Some years later as a Roman Catholic priest he was appointed President of the new Catholic university in Dublin. Was that university to be a denominational university for Roman Catholics as one bishop wanted? Or was it to be, as another wanted, solely for Irishmen and a spearhead against the English ascendancy? Newman wanted neither. He soon resigned but the experience inspired him to write his academic utopia, The Idea of a University.

‘For all the complicating effect of its religious setting,’ wrote Anthony Quinton,* ‘there is still no more eloquent and finely judged defence of intellectual culture than Newman’s.’ Pater thought it perfection in its own sphere, just as Lycidas was the perfect poem. G. M. Young considered that all other books on education could be pulped so long as we were left with Aristotle’s Ethics and Newman’s Idea.†

The university, Newman argued, was a temple for teaching universal knowledge. Students should study the sciences that advance knowledge and the arts and professions relevant to everyday life. But not vocational subjects; nor subjects that lack general ideas – antiquarianism is not history. The university did not exist to create knowledge. Its purpose was to disseminate ‘the best that is known and thought in the world’, to use his admirer Matthew Arnold’s words. Of course, the teachers should ‘study’, but the notion of systematic research did not swim into Newman’s ken. Originality, discovery, students dedicated to a single branch of learning, were contrary to his idea of a university. He accepted that some scholars want to devote themselves exclusively to study: let them do so – but in an institute. Nor did he sanction students studying whatever took their fancy – what the Germans called Lernfreiheit.

Students will graduate cack-handed unless they are taught how to relate their own specialism to every other and what the meaning is of the totality. That is why everyone must study philosophy. Philosophy will teach them the difference between scholarship and ‘viewiness’, i.e. journalism or the kind of education – so Newman and most Oxford dons considered – the University of London offered.

Learning is not the sole function of a university. It is also a milieu, a place where a spell is cast over the student that binds him to it for the rest of his life. The college inside the university was the sorcerer that cast the spell. Without the spirit of a college, run by tutors who regarded their office as a calling and not another step in the journey to rich livings or benefices in the Church, a university becomes a mere examining machine. A university is nothing unless it is a place where a student lives, eats and converses with other students, learns to socialise, to understand human beings other than himself. If you specialise and grind away at a subject you may become egotistical, self-centred, uncivilised. The true university taught a man to be a gentleman, one ‘who never inflicts pain … avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast … guards against unseasonable allusions or topics which may irritate. If he be an unbeliever, he will be too profound and large-minded to ridicule religion …’ A university is an assemblage of learned men [who] ‘adjust together the claims and relations of their respective subjects of investigation. They learn to respect, to consult and to aid each other.’

The satirical will observe that this was hardly a description of the role Newman had played in Oxford; what is more Newman did not hesitate to call the habit of mind that he was advocating ‘liberal’ (a word which in his Oxford days was synonymous with sin). It was a habit that inculcates ‘freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation and wisdom’. It will not be acquired unless the student first learns the idea of rule and exception, and the scientific method of assessing evidence. Nor will he acquire it merely by reading books. The cultivation of the intellect is a goal in itself. Newman had no fear in accepting science as a fit study, whereas Michael Oakeshott’s utopia of a university (published in 1949) dismissed science as a subject that had scarcely been able to detach itself from vocational training. But then came the all-important qualification. Knowledge has to be guided and purified by religion.

The American scholar Sheldon Rothblatt* unravelled the subtlety of the qualification. The scholar or scientist, wrote Newman, should be ‘free, independent, unshackled in his movements’, untroubled by any threat that he was going too far or causing a scandal. But then no one surely could argue that a scientist would be shackled if he accepted that he would not use his science to contradict the dogmas of faith. Nor would such a scientist be unaware that among his students were those with immature minds; and he would naturally avoid scandal at all costs. The cultivation of the intellect is not enough. Without religion it is but a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. The filthiest Catholic beggar woman, if she be chaste and receives the sacraments, has a better chance of reaching heaven than the most upright gentleman if all he has to exhibit at St Peter’s gate are his virtues. Knowledge has to be guided by religion, Did not this qualification torpedo the lovely vessel he had built?

Newman loved to needle. ‘It would be a gain,’ he once said, ‘to the country were it vastly more superstitious.’ G. M. Young noted that Newman’s mind was forged and tempered in the schools of Oxford where Aristotle’s logic was practised: a mind ‘always skimming along the verge of a logical catastrophe and always relying on his dialectical agility to save himself from falling: always exposing what seems to be an unguarded spot, and always revealing a new line of defence when the unwary assailant has reached it’. Kingsley was the unwary assailant and his denunciation of Newman provoked Newman’s Apologia, a masterpiece of spiritual autobiography. Yet, Young adds,

If the public, or the modern reader, said ‘Never mind all that: what we want to know is, when Dr Newman or one of his pupils tells us a thing, can we believe it as we should believe it if the old-fashioned parson said it?’ I am afraid that the upshot of the Apologia and its appendices is No. What is one to make of a man, especially of a preacher, whose every sentence must be put under a logical microscope if its full sense is to be revealed?

Today it is no longer possible to define a university in terms of a single idea. British universities differ vastly. Some still pursue original enquiry and, unlike Newman’s utopia, engage in fundamental research. Others contain departments for specialist learning and act as a service centre for vocational, professional and technological demands made on them by government. Whether it was wise to call them all universities is another matter. Nevertheless Newman’s ideal was not all that far from the distinguished liberal arts colleges in America, and some new universities in Britain tried to set up separate colleges within the campus. For many years Newman’s Idea was cited as the justification of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges and of the special status of Oxbridge as distinct from other universities. To this day Oxford and Cambridge colleges scarcely doubt that, from whatever class their students come, they exist to educate Newman’s elite.

‘Credo in Newmanum’ was not an idle joke. His magnetism lasted long after he disappeared from Oxford. He haunted those who knew him in their dreams. His disciple W. G. Ward, who in turn had to resign from his lectureships at Balliol and then was degraded to the status of undergraduate for publishing The Ideal of a Christian Church, dreamt that he was talking to a veiled lady and telling her that her voice fascinated him as Newman’s once had done. ‘I am John Henry Newman,’ she said, throwing back her veil. Another dreamt he was travelling in a first-class carriage and talking to an elderly clergyman whom he suddenly recognised as Newman and who said to him in a tone of surpassing sweetness, ‘Will you not come and join me in my third-class carriage?’

Newman’s charisma was unmatched. As knowledge became more specialised and Oxford and Cambridge grew larger, no don could hope to appeal to the whole university as Newman was able to do. Some thought Ruskin might do so; and T. H. Green, who appeared as Mr Gray in Mrs Humphry Ward’s novel Robert Elsmere, intrigued so many students that Jowett feared he was indoctrinating them. But neither of them rivalled Newman. Although brilliant lecturers over the years bewitched their audience few could expect many students from faculties other than their own to attend. Scientists often regarded the head of the lab, ‘the prof’, with awe and affection; but no mass audience of undergraduates hung on the utterances of Rutherford or Florey. To see charisma at work in the twentieth century you had to go to a smaller institution such as the London School of Economics. There Laski* exerted a pervasive influence among generations of students, particularly those from India; though perhaps the truer charismatic figure was R. H. Tawney, the famous socialist historian, recognised by colleagues and students alike as something of a saint. Tawney held out hopes of a better world to come, and he possessed a quality that impressed all who met him: purity of heart. The Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore possessed this quality and so, in a fierce, uncompromising way, did Wittgenstein. But though everyone knows of Moore’s influence on Bloomsbury, the numbers these Cambridge philosophers spoke to, immured as they were in a tiny faculty that spoke to none other, were sparse. At Oxford it was different. Philosophy was integral to Greats (the second part of the degree in classics) and in Modern Greats (the degree in philosophy, politics and economics). In the midcentury Ryle, Ayer and Austin, the Robespierre of linguistic philosophy, held audiences agog. But no one thought of comparing any of them to Newman.

Perhaps the don in recent years who reminds one of Newman was F. R. Leavis in Cambridge. Leavis used some of Newman’s tactics to create a following. Like Newman he was proud to be both persecutor and persecuted. He accused his colleagues in the faculty of English of betraying the true principles of literary criticism, insinuated they were dullards or featherweights, and was aggrieved when those who were in fact excellent critics, but were not crusaders, were promoted and he was not. He was more successful than Newman in persuading a wider public that he had been ill-treated and embodied the true ethos of Cambridge. Each number of Scrutiny which he edited was a ‘Tract for the Times’. That he was an outstanding literary critic was beyond question. What is more he declared that criticism, not philosophy (let alone theology), was to be queen of the sciences. Leavis claimed to reveal not just the meaning of literature but the meaning of life. He told the young which values to praise and which to denounce and who, present as well as past, was to be despised.

That was why his disciples were as ardent as Newman’s. They admired his austerity and his unremitting seriousness. They were fortified when he toppled poets and novelists of long-established reputations – why waste time on them, he declared, when those whose vision of life was supremely important beckoned? Writing about Newman, Owen Chadwick* judged that the Oxford students flocked to hear him because he was a revolutionary. They admired him precisely because he enraged the heads of houses, the proctors, the tutors and other symbols of authority in the university. Leavis, too, made himself an outcast, embattled, friendly and helpful to those who accepted him and sat at his feet and correspondingly hostile to those who did not accept that there is in the end only one way to live and only a handful of great poets and novelists who teach one how to do so.

To regard Newman solely as a don would do him monstrous injustice. Newman changed the face of the Church of England. The Oxford Movement brought back the mystery of the sacraments, and the beauty of worship. He understood the romance of Oxford, the dignity of its buildings, its gardens and the flowers in them, whose genius loci cast a spell of lasting loyalty over its alumni. The university ceased to be merely a corporate body with endowments and privileges. It became, as Sheldon Rothblatt puts it, ‘a thrilling emotion-laden higher order conception of higher education’, and the colleges centres of aristocratic culture linked to certain schools, grammar as well as public schools, which fed them with pupils. Newman did not go quite as far as Pusey, who asserted that it was no part of a university to advance science, or make discoveries ‘or produce works in Medicine, Jurisprudence or even Theology’: though he agreed with Pusey that a university existed to ‘form minds religiously, morally, intellectually, which shall discharge aright whatever duties God, in his Providence, shall appoint to them’. Newman considered the university’s role was to teach universal knowledge. Let the scientists and their laboratories go elsewhere. That is why, Rothblatt noted, Victorian researchers were more famed for the learned societies, the botanical gardens, the museums, libraries and other specialised institutions they created, than for the publications by which their German confrères made their reputation.

Newman breathed a new spirit into a university that had become complacent and becalmed. But ‘the voice that breathed o’er Eden’ was not the gentle Keble’s voice. It was the voice of a doctrinaire – indubitable, incontestable; and the reverberations were disagreeable. Accusations of heterodoxy flew about and the atmosphere of the university became sour and embittered. The tempest-tossed seas that charismatic dons leave behind them take some time to subside, and Newman’s career was to trouble the man who, more than any other, gave meaning to the word don: Benjamin Jowett, tutor and Master of Balliol College.

* Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), fellow of Trinity Hall (1854–64), mountaineer, rowing coach, literary critic and first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography.

* Anthony, Lord Quinton, life peer 1982, fellow of All Souls (1949–55), New College (1955–78), President of Trinity College, Oxford (1978–87); philosopher.

† G. M. Young (1882–1959) fellow of All Souls, civil servant in the Board of Education, scholar of the Victorian era and author of Portrait of an Age (1936).

* Sheldon Rothblatt, professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley since 1963 and some time Director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education.

* Harold Laski (1893–1950), professor and teacher on politics at LSE for thirty years; prominent Fabian Society member and publicist for socialism.

* Owen Chadwick, OM, Regius professor of modern history (1968–83), Master of Selwyn College (1956–83).

CHAPTER FOUR Benjamin Jowett and the Balliol Tradition

For a century and a half Balliol has been one of the most splendid colleges at Oxford or Cambridge. It sent a host of distinguished graduates into all walks of life; its successes in the schools were proverbial; its junior common room provided a scene of animated intellectual life which few other undergraduate societies could rival. It was a society with a history of academic distinction and the nursery of statesmen, pro-consuls, scholars, lawyers and men of letters. When Harrovians sang, ‘the Balliol comes to us now and then’, they acknowledged that a Balliol scholarship was prized higher by headmasters than that of any other college – because the winner would have had to have faced the stiffest competition. How did this come about? The answer is that it was the work of Benjamin Jowett.

No famous institution owes its quality merely to one man. The foundations of Balliol’s success were laid by two former masters, Parsons and Jenkyns. Their reforms made possible the election of fellows on their merits: Jowett was elected while he was still an undergraduate. When Hawkins got rid of Newman, Froude and Robert Wilberforce as tutors, Balliol supplanted Oriel. But whereas Oriel had offered fellowships to men from other colleges, and by this means overcame the insularity of the past, Balliol found a less spectacular method of finding scholarly candidates for fellowships. Less spectacular but simple – the method was to teach the undergraduates well and train them in the traditions of the college. This was Jowett’s doing. No doubt he was helped by historical accidents – by his senior, Tait, a Balliol tutor, going to Rugby as headmaster in succession to Arnold, and sending the new breed of high-minded public schoolboy to his own college. No doubt he was helped by Balliol’s Scottish connections, so that hard-working, hard-headed Scots came there to irritate the gentlemanly idlers. But it was Jowett who directed the energies of both breeds – and those of the idlers. His own parents had been spendthrift failures; his family, once rich, had fallen on evil days. As a result he was haunted by the spectre of wasted lives and determined that his pupils should not waste theirs. ‘Usefulness in life’ was his yardstick, and he observed how often men of great ability failed because they were shy, awkward or ill mannered. His enemies declared that his only criterion was worldly success – that he felt that a pupil who had failed in life had somehow personally insulted him – that Balliol had been let down. The Warden of Merton put it differently: ‘He never affected or specifically admired an “unworldly” character … he was always disposed to regard worldly success as a test of merit … he hoped that his pupils would not like those of another great teacher “make a mess of life”.’ (The other ‘great teacher’ was, of course, Newman; and Jowett considered that those who went over with him to Rome or were bewildered and deserted, as Arthur Hugh Clough found himself, had ‘made a mess of life’.)

Jowett taught his men the secret and the delight of hard work. ‘The object of reading for the Schools,’ he said, ‘is not primarily to obtain a first class, but to elevate and strengthen the character for life.’ ‘You are a fool,’ he said to one. ‘You must be sick of idling. It is too late for you to do much. But the class [in examination] matters nothing. What does matter is the sense of power which comes from steady working.’ By power, Jowett meant the power over oneself, the ‘power in a man to control and direct his own life instead of drifting on the currents of fortune and self-indulgence’.

He used this power over himself. He was small, shy, and in his youth looked like a cherub; but he turned his shyness into an educative weapon by maintaining devastating silences followed by still more devastating remarks. After walking for three hours in silence his undergraduate companion, as they passed by a bridge, ventured to say, ‘That is a fine view.’ The silence continued until Jowett said, ‘That was a very foolish remark you made an hour ago.’ When a man showed up with an indifferent copy of Greek iambics, Jowett asked him, ‘Have you any taste for mathematics?’ He would dictate a passage from English literature and expect, poker in hand in front of his fire, his pupils to extemporise viva voce into Latin or Greek. To be able to do so ‘gave more promise than knowing the whole of Tennyson and Wordsworth’. At all times of day and night his door was open – but for study, not talk. He was not popular as a tutor. He once rebuked a fellow for being too familiar with the undergraduates. He hated slang and insisted on giving a little girl a shilling every time she said ‘awfully’ until she was ashamed. Newman had been the first to regard his duties as a tutor to be pastoral. But, as his one-time disciple and later Rector of Lincoln Mark Pattison said, Newman would have turned Oriel into a priestly seminary whereas Jowett never imposed his own beliefs on anyone.

There are few occasions more likely to produce bad blood in a college than the death or retirement of the head and the election of a successor. At Lincoln Mark Pattison had been an outstanding tutor; but outstanding tutors all too often fail to be elected head of the college – they have offended too many colleagues. Pattison was harsh, severe and sardonic; always willing to wound and never afraid to strike. Yet it looked as if he would be Rector until, by a discreditable intrigue, a non-resident fellow was brought in to vote and Pattison was outvoted. To his fury he had to connive in the election of a boorish nonentity. He threw up his tutorship and left for Germany.

At Balliol in 1854 it was different. The younger fellows voted for Jowett, the elderly for the future Archbishop Temple. The votes were equal. Then Temple’s supporters suborned two of Jowett’s party; would not Robert Scott make a suitable Master? He was part author of the standard Greek lexicon ‘Liddell and Scott’. After all, he was known to be on friendly terms with Jowett. So the deal was struck. Jowett was mortified. He did not leave for Germany, nor did he resign his tutorship. But he sulked. He no longer appeared in common room and when a dinner was given to celebrate the consecration of the new chapel, Jowett sat with the undergraduates. Some consider he was rejected on grounds of unorthodoxy. More likely he was thought to be inflexible. He bided his time and after eleven years elections to the fellowship gave him a majority and Scott was reduced to a cipher.