The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses

Jowett lived at a cataclysmic time in the history of the Church of England. The intense inter-party disputes between Tractarians, Evangelicals and the old High and Dry and Low and Slow parties in the Church were as nothing to the more menacing developments in Germany. Scholars there began to apply to the Bible methods of criticising sources that were used in historical research. Clever dons were not perturbed that William Buckland and the geologists had disproved the literal truth of Genesis; but what of the thousands who went to church each Sunday and believed every tale in the Bible to be true? Clever dons, however, were appalled when they appreciated what the ‘higher criticism’, as it was called, was doing in Germany, where professors in the classroom mocked the miraculous doings in the Old Testament; and thus anyone suspected of being influenced by German scholarship was assumed to be unorthodox. The years of Jowett’s maturity were years marked by a series of rows, disputes, accusations of treachery and reproaches for bigotry. It was the age of the row over The Origin of Species and of the colonial bishop, John Colenso, who admitted that the questions of the simple natives to whom he ministered had shown him that the literal truth of the Bible was unsustainable. They were years when those who, however tentatively, tried to reinterpret Scripture were bound to be attacked by, for example, Henry Liddon, who became the leader of the Tractarian party. Liddon declared that if Jesus believed Moses to be the author of the first five books of the Bible, anyone who doubted this – or that Jonah lived in the belly of the whale – called Christ a liar and could not be a Christian.

Before he failed to be elected Master of Balliol Jowett had been among those reinterpreting Scripture. He and his friend Arthur Stanley published commentaries on several of St Paul’s Epistles. The leading biblical scholar of the day, Lightfoot, at Cambridge, dismissed Stanley’s work as readable, inaccurate and superficial. He thought better of Jowett. Jowett was more skilful, said Lightfoot, at destroying accepted interpretations than at forming a new one, but he praised Jowett for challenging received opinions. Jowett had set himself to reinterpret the doctrine of the Atonement. Sunday after Sunday in Evangelical and Low Church pulpits the congregation was told why Christ died for all mankind on the Cross. He died to atone for their sins. But there was a proviso. He made this bargain with God the Father provided that the sinner ‘closed with the offer’ – who must proclaim his faith that he was saved. Jowett found this offensive. Was the redemption of mankind to be compared to a huge commercial transaction? Jowett determined to sanitise this version of the central Christian dogma. He had visited Germany and consulted the renowned biblical critic Lachmann. That was enough for the traditionalists. Having humiliated Newman over the Martyrs Memorial, ‘Golly’ Go lightly now determined to humiliate Jowett.

The year after Jowett’s defeat for the mastership Dean Gaisford died and Palmerston appointed Jowett to the Regius professorship of Greek. Golightly dug up an old statute and forced Jowett to sign the Thirty-Nine Articles in front of the Vice-Chancellor. Jowett did so with contempt. He interrupted the Vice-Chancellor, who began a sententious speech to remind him what an awesome occasion this was, and stalked from the room. He met with further injustice, this time at the hands of the Tractarians. The Regius chair was worth only £40 a year and Jowett lost money by accepting it. The stipend was paid by Christ Church. Why should Christ Church, asked Pusey as a canon of Christ Church, finance a university professorship held by a man whose orthodoxy was suspect? Such was the legacy of Tractarian zeal.

To do Pusey justice he tried various devices to increase Jowett’s salary but every attempt was foiled by Jowett’s foes – and sometimes by his friends. It became more difficult when in 1860 Essays and Reviews was published. This was a book of contributions by churchmen, some of whom were trying to come to grips with the critical analysis of the Bible by German theologians. They were a distinguished lot: Temple and Pattison among them, but also four, including Jowett, who had become notorious for their unorthodox views. The book created yet another scandal. Two of the contributors were prosecuted and found guilty in the ecclesiastical courts. One of them was condemned for doubting whether the wicked would suffer Eternal Punishment in hell. In the end the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council acquitted. But the judgement had a more serious consequence. It meant that the State, not the Church, would decide whether individual clergymen were unorthodox. The rows continued to the end of the century. Good, earnest dons brought up to see themselves as defenders of the faith believed that it was their duty to protest at deviations from what had until yesterday been regarded as true; and equally good but enquiring dons believed it was their duty to show how it was possible to reconcile Christian belief with the most recent discoveries of scientists and of historical and textual research. The Privy Council’s judgement stopped dozens of priests from being ejected from their livings and the Church from being torn apart by faction.

Jowett did not escape censure. Pusey launched proceedings in the Vice-Chancellor’s court to convict Jowett of having published doctrines contrary to those of the Church. The prosecution failed but never again was Jowett to express his theological opinions in public. What exactly did he believe? Pusey was not the only one to ask that question. As the years passed the rationalists looked at him with suspicion. Frederic Harrison, the Positivist follower of Auguste Comte, and Leslie Stephen the agnostic, both considered that the only course open to Jowett was to become a layman. Certainly there are passages in the official biography of Jowett which suggest that he believed neither in a personal God nor in a corporeal resurrection. The best that can be said for him, Stephen suggested, was that Jowett was only following Mill’s advice to liberal clergymen, which was to stay in the Church and throw their weight in favour of tolerance in order to prevent the Church falling into the hands of fanatics. Shortly after Essays and Reviews appeared Stephen gave up his fellowship at Cambridge because he could no longer believe in the truth of Christianity; and so, a few years later, did Henry Sidgwick, whose reputation as a scholar was far higher than that of Jowett. Stephen thought Jowett should have followed his example. Should he have done so?

A don ought to revere the intellect and believe in the power of reason. Jowett didn’t. His perplexity about Christian dogma seems to have affected his attitude to the whole of knowledge. He was interested in Hegel – indeed was among the first in England ever to study him. That was as far as it went. ‘Logic,’ he used to say, ‘is neither a science nor an art but a dodge.’ Maybe: but the aphorism showed that he did not think anyone could write anything valuable. ‘How I hate learning!’ he once exclaimed. He disliked ‘useless learning’, yes – but this grew into contempt for research. To say as Jowett did, ‘One man is as good as another until he has written a book,’ was a typical piece of dreary donnish irony. Leslie Stephen’s most biting sentence on Jowett runs: ‘“He stood,” said one of his pupils, “at the parting of the ways,” and he wrote, one must add, “No thoroughfare” upon them all.’

Yet no one who reads his letters or his works can doubt that he believed himself to be a Christian, and many sincere Anglicans believed far less than he did. He was less concerned with the truth or the all-importance of Christianity than with the inadequacy of the forms and the words in which to express it. It is not fair to brand him with moral cowardice and infer that he would not stand up for what he believed to be true. In his wisdom Jowett realised that he himself had not the genius to redefine Christian doctrine; and this being so it would be better to remain silent rather than add to the din raised by Tractarians. He thought little of the best liberal theologian, F. D. Maurice: what had he done but substitute one form of mysticism for another? But the Church owed more to Maurice than to Jowett’s attempts to strip Christianity of its eschatology, its mysteries, its paradoxes and perplexities. He knew that his reputation did not rest on his published work: ‘What I do is by sparks and flashes and not by steady thought.’ His lectures were called ‘Glimpses of the Obvious’. He left his pupil T. H. Green to pursue Hegel and become the most influential philosopher in Oxford in the seventies (Jowett admired and deplored Green and was buried next to him). Augustine Birrell* put forward a worldly apologia: ‘Why should men sell out of a still-going and dividend-paying concern when they have not the faintest idea where to look for another investment for their money? Where was Jowett to go if he gave up Balliol? … So he stayed where he was and Balliol … turned out a number of excellent young fellows warranted to come and go anywhere except to the gallows and the stake.’ It was not an explanation that would have satisfied Leslie Stephen. But it satisfied George Eliot and Tennyson.

The tide had at last turned for him when in 1870 he met Gladstone and they had a long talk about Ireland. Jowett disagreed with the line Gladstone took, but Gladstone was impressed. Could he do something for Jowett? he asked one of his cabinet colleagues. He did the one thing that Jowett wanted – he got Scott out of the Master’s Lodgings by offering him the lucrative deanery of Rochester. Jowett was at last Master of Balliol, and rumours mounted about impending reforms. The ceremony of grace at hall dinner was modified and a new head chef was appointed. That was all.

Jowett was no reformer. In the early fifties he had been one of the few to applaud Gladstone for supporting university reform, though sad that Gladstone (wisely) appointed commissioners to see that the colleges gave effect to the reforms proposed by the Royal Commission instead of trusting the dons to reform themselves. At one time he advocated creating more professorships, but when Mark Pattison put forward a scheme for endowing research, Jowett opposed it. His remark that study for its own sake was a waste of time drew from Pattison the comment that Oxford resembled a lively municipal borough.

Pattison was a singularly unattractive figure. When he became a theist he spurned his sisters, who adored him, and married his wife not for love but to look after him. She was twenty-seven years his junior. Her selfishness took the form of self-righteousness; his, self-pity. Both were hypochondriacs – as John Sparrow noted – she the more resourceful and experienced of the two. Pattison blamed her frigidity for the estrangement, but when she later married Charles Dilke* (at a time when the scandal that was to drive him from public life was beginning) Dilke never complained that she was sexually inadequate. Pattison had learnt in exile to admire German universities and their outstanding contributions to learning. Having been a champion of the tutorial system and an opponent in the fifties of increasing the professoriate, he now wanted, when at last he became Rector of Lincoln, to abolish colleges, religious tests and pass degrees. He hated the new Oxford of prizes and firsts in the schools. He was the ally of the medieval historian Freeman, who as a guest at a tutors’ dinner exclaimed, ‘I have come to see the crammers cram.’ He considered a don should devote himself to learning. Oxford should become a centre for advanced studies and colleges should become specialised departments as in civic universities.

Jowett stood for the college and the tutorial system. He made enemies. No one of his character could fail to do so. The conservatives among the dons were as jealous of his success as the liberals indignant at his hostility to research. The historian and fellow of All Souls Charles Oman called him ‘a noted and much detested figure’ representing ‘modernism, advertisement and an autocratic pose, a tendency to push the importance of the college beyond the limits of its undoubted merit’. Trollope characterised him as Mr Jobbles in The Three Clerks, and W. H. Mallock mocked him as Dr Jenkinson in The New Republic. Oman, Freeman and Pattison considered a don’s first duty was to research. On the other hand, the then Dean of Christ Church, while accepting that tutors as well as professors should write books, considered the tutor’s first duty was ‘to look after his men’. The result too often was that tutors didn’t write books.

Jowett was to be remembered for ever as a character. Undergraduates appeared before him – he saw two or three every day – and the idle were slain by his sarcasm. By now he had learnt to sympathise with their pleasures. As early as 1879 Balliol held a ball and as Vice-Chancellor he defended the Oxford University Dramatic Society against the sourpuss dons like Freeman who spoke of the ‘portentous rage for play acting’. At the end of his life Jowett said, ‘At one time I was against the boat, and cared little for its success, but now I think very differently.’ He became known as ‘The Jowler’. The terrible silences disappeared so that even Pattison could say, ‘There’s affability for you.’ He was now positively genial towards the young. One of them said he tried never to quarrel: if a man insulted him he asked him to dinner. ‘You’ll do, dear boy,’ laughed Jowett. ‘You’ll do.’ It was said that if you were a peer, a profligate or a pauper, the Master would be sure to take you up. Jowett was not the first don to institute reading parties in the vacation, but he was the first head of house to know something about all his men, and a great deal about some of them. The list of Balliol graduates in 1873–8 included Asquith, Curzon, Gell, Milner, Baden-Powell, Leveson-Gower and W. P. Ker. As undergraduates they would have been invited to meet the Master’s guests – among them Turgenev, George Eliot and G. H. Lewes, Bishop Colenso, Archbishop Tait, Lord Sherbrooke and Tyndall. He made a point of mixing the different types of undergraduates at his parties – ‘Jowett’s Jumbles’, they were called – yet Balliol was judged to be the most cliquey of all colleges.

Swinburne as well as George Eliot stayed in the Lodgings. Jowett asked Swinburne to look at his translation of Plato’s Symposium and when the poet suggested a sentence could be construed differently Jowett’s eyes widened: ‘Of course that is the meaning. You would be a good scholar if you were to study.’ Swinburne was set down in an adjoining room to continue the good work, and a friend talking to Jowett was interrupted by a cackle from next door. ‘Another howler, Master.’ ‘Thank you, dear Algernon,’ said Jowett as he shut the door. Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Republic was his most lasting contribution to learning. For years it was the most popular translation, much read in schools.

He liked the well-born and the famous. When the Crown-Princess of Prussia (‘little Vicky’) called on him to talk philosophy he thought her ‘quite a genius’ – and certainly she would have made a better showing than most of her women contemporaries, other than George Eliot. But he also encouraged poor men to come to Balliol and did nothing to impede the concern with working-class education and poverty that T. H. Green and Arnold Toynbee initiated and for which Balliol became so well known under the mastership of A. L. Smith and Alexander (‘Sandy’) Lindsay.

He continued to hold sharp opinions. ‘No writer,’ he said of Carlyle, ‘had done or was doing so much harm to young men as the preacher of tyranny or apologist of cruelty.’ ‘Comtism destroys the minds of men, Carlyle their morals.’ He was outraged that Governor Eyre’s* expenses should have been paid by the State. ‘A generation ago we should have hanged him.’ He hated Euripides: ‘he is immoral when he is irreligious and when he is religious, he is more immoral still.’ Staying in Scotland to deliver two lectures on Socrates he was accosted after dinner by Professor Blackie of Glasgow University, who said, ‘I hope you in Oxford don’t think we hate you.’ ‘We don’t think of you at all,’ was the reply. The snub was deserved; the professor had sung a song, unasked, called ‘The Burning of the Heretic’, which Jowett may have considered was a dig at him.

In 1882 Jowett became Vice-Chancellor for four years. Charles Fortnum again offered his collection of antique and Renaissance works of art to the Ashmolean Museum, and Arthur Evans, the prime excavator of Minoan civilisation in Crete, maintained that Jowett did his best to refuse the gift by masterly inactivity and much dissembling. In his biography Geoffrey Faber defended Jowett against this charge and pointed out that no Vice-Chancellor can accept a gift without considering what it will cost the university to accept it. Evans was young and high-handed: Fortnum, like other benefactors, hinted that his bequest could go elsewhere unless Oxford fell in with his wishes. Furthermore Jowett had always recognised that something had to be done for archaeology and for the old Ashmolean collections. Nevertheless, he acquired a reputation as one who was determined to have his way. It was said of him, ‘Parnell is not in it with him for obstruction.’ When supporters of a scheme he opposed got it put first on the agenda at the last meeting of Council, Jowett declared that no one could discuss so important a matter so late in the term and left the chair. His mode of governance lived on. Years later Lindsay, when Master of Balliol, found himself in a minority of one at a college meeting and remarked, ‘I see, we are deadlocked.’

And love? He was devoted to a giant Scotsman, Robert Morier, one of his earliest pupils who later became ambassador in St Petersburg. In the sixties he was tempted to marry the daughter of the Dean of Bristol; but when another fellow was appointed to the only fellowship in the college open to a married man, Jowett’s interest flagged. No wonder: he had fallen for Florence Nightingale. The friendship grew: he annotated three vast volumes she had written entitled Suggestions for Thought. He was impressed by her vitality, originality and by her caustic comments on the religious and social life of the day. She corresponded with him and he wrote interminable replies. Then some instinct told him that if he continued to answer her requests and some of her commands, he would wear himself out – as indeed Clough and Sidney Herbert had done. Years later the irrepressible Margot Tennant asked him outright whether he had ever been in love; and when he said he had once been very much in love she persisted and asked what she was like. ‘Very violent, my dear, very violent.’

There was another kind of love that was to confront Jowett. Disillusioned in his attempts to sustain Christianity by liberal theology, Jowett turned to Plato. Gladstone had spoken of the ‘shameless lusts which formed the incredible and indelible disgrace of Greece’, and Ruskin wondered at the ‘singular states of inferior passion which arrested the ethical as well as the formative progress of the Greek mind’. But the Aesthetic Movement began to get under way in the seventies and soon Pater’s mellifluous sentences began to be quoted and John Addington Symonds extolled the phallic ecstasy in Aristophanes. Indeed there was a falling-off of candidates for Greats and a shift towards law and the modern history school, where William Stubbs lectured (usually to classes of four or five undergraduates) on the safe subject of Parliament in the Middle Ages and never ventured later than the Thirty Years War. Greats was to recover in the eighties, when it scored twice as many firsts as history. Swinburne left no one in doubt where Jowett stood. He declared that it was impossible to confuse Jowett

with such morally and spiritually typical and unmistakable apes of the Dead Sea as Mark Pattison, or with such renascent blossoms of the Italian Renaissance as the Platonic amorist of blue-breeched gondoliers who is now in Aretino’s bosom. The cult of the calamus, as expounded by Mr Addington Symonds to his fellow calamites, would have found no acceptance or tolerance with the translator of Plato.

The translator of Plato did indeed on one occasion take action. A Balliol undergraduate, William Hardinge, sent Pater sonnets praising homosexual love. Pater responded by signing himself ‘Yours lovingly’. Jowett was told: confronted both, expelled Hardinge from Balliol and never spoke to Pater again.

Jowett left two legacies. The first he could not have foreseen, a legacy that influenced higher education throughout the twentieth century. Those who have read the most famous of all public school novels, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, will remember that at supper after the football match in which School house has defeated the School, young Tom hears the captain, ‘old Brooke’, say in his speech, ‘I know I’d sooner win two schoolhouse matches running than get the Balliol Scholarship any day.’ Of course other colleges offered scholarships but by ancient statute they might be confined to those who could claim descent from the founder of the college: ‘Founder’s Kin’. Or they were reserved for those from a particular school – at New College for Wykehamists or at King’s for Etonians. Or at Trinity and all other colleges at Cambridge they were awarded after an undergraduate had been in residence for a year or more. But by the end of the century the colleges, in response to the commissioners’ criticism that poor men of talent could not afford to enter the ancient universities, offered scholarships for the less well-to-do. The requirements for entry to the university remained as unexacting as possible: few wanted to frighten away the sons of the well-to-do, whose fees kept the colleges afloat.

The scholarship exam in each college did more than provide a bursary for poor undergraduates. It became the blue riband for the public schools and the grammar schools. Schools prided themselves on winning one or more each year. Later Oxford and Cambridge established examining boards that granted exemption from the modest university entrance exam. You were exempt if you obtained five credits in the School Certificate – a test that an intelligent fifteen-year-old or a clever fourteen-year-old could pass. What were schoolboys and – girls to do for the last three to four years at their school? The answer was to work for the scholarship exam in classics, or maths, or science, or history, or modern languages. When the Oxbridge examining boards set up a new sixth-form exam, the Higher Certificate or Advanced Level (A Level, as it was later called), it followed the pattern of the scholarship exam. Of course the colleges insisted that ancillary subjects must be taken as well as papers in the specialism that the candidate had chosen. A history specialist had to be tested in Latin and French and one other foreign language; a scientist in maths; but everyone knew that those who shone in their specialism were those who won the prize.

And so the notorious English specialism in secondary schools took root. Boys and girls chose which way they would jump as early as fourteen; and at fifteen opted either for maths and science or for the humanities. If for the latter, they never opened a maths textbook again. The system suited the dons: boys and girls arrived at the university knowing something about the scholarly debates in their specialism. It suited the professions: after leaving school a doctor could qualify in seven years, a lawyer in six. It suited the Treasury because the first degree took only three years. Boys and girls were content: no longer would those with a mathematical block have to try to master the calculus.

But did it suit the nation? During the twentieth century the complaints grew. Industry complained that graduates in science and engineering had such narrow minds, and commerce that arts graduates were innumerate. Even the Civil Service at last rebelled. They rebelled because critics argued that the skills which a civil servant needed at the end of the twentieth century were not tested by the kind of examination so dear to the hearts of the dons. In the nineteenth century the dons had got government to agree that entry to the public service should be met by a competitive examination on the same lines as the final examination in the universities. At one time all you had to do was to reproduce in the Civil Service or Foreign Service exam those qualities that had won you high honours in the university; though it must be said, you had to pass an interview. From time to time variations were introduced; and your examiners, who were dons themselves, might not sympathise with the spin that you put on your answers to questions. (When Keynes sat for the Civil Service exam he got his lowest mark for economics and as a result entered the India Office and not the Treasury.) No one dissented from the principle. It seemed self-evident-to Macaulay, to Charles Trevelyan, to Jowett and the younger dons. So indeed it seemed until the very end of the twentieth century.