: B. ILK L 

 
 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 MASTER OF BALLIOL
 
 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 MASTER OF BALLIOL 
 
 BY THE HON. 
 
 LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE 
 
 AUTHOR OF 'SAFE STUDIES,' ETC. 
 
 EDWARD ARNOLD 
 
 publisher to tht Inbia ffia 
 
 LONDON NEW YORK 
 
 37 BEDFORD STREET 70 FIFTH AVENUE
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THESE Recollections, which first appeared in the 
 Journal of Education for May, 1895, are now 
 republished with considerable additions. 
 
 It may be at first thought that my record of 
 Jowett's opinions is too often diluted with the 
 addition of opinions of my own. It should, how- 
 ever, be remembered that I have always accounted 
 myself one of his disciples. It is, therefore, 
 perhaps not wholly irrelevant to give expression to 
 some of my opinions, in the formation of which I 
 have been, directly or indirectly, conscious of his 
 influence. In such cases my own views are hi some 
 measure the outcome of his teaching; and thus 
 they may be said to represent his views at second- 
 hand, or, at any rate, his views with a difference. 
 By their fruits ye shall knoiv them.
 
 BENJAMIN JOWETT, D.D., 
 
 MASTER OF BALLIOL. 
 
 I. 
 
 ' I cannot hide that some have striven, 
 Achieving calm, to whom was given 
 The joy that mixes man with heaven. 
 
 Who, rowing hard against the stream, 
 Saw distant gates of Eden gleam, 
 And did not dream it was a dream ; 
 ***** 
 
 Which did accomplish their desire, 
 Bore and forebore, and did not tire, 
 Like Stephen, an unquenched fire.' 
 
 TENNYSON. 
 
 WHEN I went up to Balliol in 1856, 1 became a pupil 
 of Jowett. The class which I obtained in 1860 was 
 in the main due to his assiduous and discerning 
 care. He helped me both directly and indirectly. 
 ' Little time is lost through ill-health,' he once said 
 to me, 'though much is lost through idleness.' 
 Doubtless this was an exaggeration, but it was the 
 sort of friendly exaggeration which stimulated me to 
 
 1
 
 2 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 struggle against physical disadvantages. Nor did 
 the stimulus which he thus applied bring with it a 
 sense of irritation. The despotic side of his char- 
 acter, of which some of his pupils complained, 
 seldom or never showed itself hi my presence at 
 any rate, in relation to myself. On the contrary, 
 when beset by trials and difficulties, I found him 
 generally a wise and always a sympathetic coun- 
 sellor. And thus it was that, though I am not 
 given to the expression of strong emotion, yet, when 
 in 1893 the news reached me of the sad event which 
 deprived me of my oldest and truest friend and 
 Oxford of her brightest ornament, the words rose 
 unbidden to my lips, ' I feel that there has gone 
 a glory from the earth/ 
 
 I will begin with a few of my early recollections of 
 Jowett, reserving to a later stage those of his early 
 sayings which have a special bearing on my estimate 
 of his character. It is necessary, however, to note 
 one circumstance which renders every written 
 account of him incomplete. The voice was the man. 
 To say this of Jowett is a pardonable exaggeration, 
 and is at once felt to be so if we observe how in- 
 evitably his friends, when repeating his sayings, fall 
 into his peculiar accent. Would that his cherubic 
 chirp (so to call it), when he was at his ease and at 
 his best, had been embalmed in a phonograph 
 embalmed so as to be a vox verisimilis, though, alas, 
 a vox et prceterea nihil ! Let me add that his 
 peculiar charm, a charm springing in great part
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 3 
 
 from incongruity, was brought home to one when- 
 ever one saw him (' qualis facies et quali digna 
 tabella'), with his commanding forehead and his 
 infantine smile ; but especially was it brought home 
 to one when one heard him giving utterance to 
 genially cynical sentiments in his pleasantly falsetto 
 voice. 
 
 In consequence of my evangelical training, I fell 
 under his influence with extreme reluctance; for I 
 firmly believed that his pupils ran great risk of 
 becoming strangers to the household of faith, and of 
 denying the Lord that bought them. Yet I could 
 not help cross- questioning him. One remark, in 
 particular, which I drew from him gave me a great 
 shock. He was in favour of the right of divorce, 
 and I asked him how he reconciled that right with 
 certain passages in the Gospels. He turned sud- 
 denly round, and asked : * What do you make of the 
 text, " Swear not at all " ?' ' Does not this text 
 apply to profane swearing?' 'No,' was his short 
 answer. His point obviously was that, as we 
 habitually disregard one plain utterance of Christ, 
 why may we not disregard another? I was not 
 prepared for this reasoning, and its immediate effect 
 on me was to make me feel scruples about taking 
 judicial oaths. 
 
 Jowett perceived that a belief in eternal torment, 
 as taught by my early pastors and masters, had 
 made a great impression on me. He remarked that 
 this belief, when fully realized, becomes insupport- 
 able ; and he added that Dr. Pusey had once
 
 4 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 preached on the subject with so much energy that 
 some of the congregation had to leave the church. 
 
 I asked him whether, when John the Baptist said, 
 ' He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that 
 hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do 
 likewise,' the command was not meant to be taken 
 literally ; if the Baptist had merely been giving 
 utterance to an Oriental hyperbole, he would hardly 
 have gone out of his way to add the clause about 
 the meat. Wishing to allay my scrupulousness, 
 Jowett laughingly exclaimed: ' This is just the sort 
 of remark that I should have expected to find in an 
 Alexandrian commentator.' But in saying this he 
 was, perhaps unconsciously, veiling his real opinion ; 
 for long afterwards, when I had been weaned from 
 my early Bibliolatry, he said to me : ' There seems 
 to me to be much more in the New Testament in 
 praise of poverty than we like to acknowledge.' 
 
 "When I had become thoroughly his disciple, !I 
 once called his attention to the strange shifts to 
 which moral progress reduced some of the prophets 
 in their dealings with the barbarous portions of the 
 Mosaic law; insomuch that one of them declared 
 that God had given to His people statutes that were 
 not good. Jowett replied that the strongest passage 
 of the sort was that in which Jeremiah (vii. 22) 
 represents God as disclaiming the authorship of the 
 entire Ceremonial Law : ' I spake not unto your 
 fathers nor commanded them in the day that I 
 brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning 
 burnt offerings or sacrifices.'
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 5 
 
 I asked Jowett whether too much importance is 
 not attached to the rule of criticism, that, where 
 there are two readings, the worse, or at any rate the 
 less obvious of them, is to be preferred; may not 
 textual errors have arisen as often from the negli- 
 gence of copyists as from their misplaced zeal ? He 
 replied that he agreed with me ; but it seemed to him 
 to be a safe rule that, where there are various read- 
 ings in the New Testament, the least orthodox of 
 them ought to be preferred. He doubtless thought 
 that the early Christian copyists did not often err 
 through lack of care; while, on the other hand, 
 familiar examples tend to show that the besetting 
 sin of those copyists was pious disingenuousness. 
 
 I inquired what sort of efficacy he attributed to 
 Baptism. ' Surely,' he replied, ' you and I are the 
 better for having been born and brought up in the 
 Christian fellowship; and Baptism is the sign of 
 that fellowship.' 
 
 T. * But suppose the case of an infant dying 
 before Baptism, or of a person who, through some 
 negligence of the priest, has not been duly baptized, 
 but who passes through life believing that he has 
 been duly baptized. Surely the Catholic doctrine 
 is, or used to be, that such a person is in peril of 
 being damned.' 
 
 J. ' That is a revolting doctrine. The Fathers 
 thought it, though.' 
 
 George Sand has declared the practice of praying 
 for temporal blessings to be ' sheer idolatry.' Jowett 
 went so far in this direction as to affirm the practice
 
 6 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 to be a superstition. But he thought that prayers 
 for spiritual blessings may have an objective as 
 well as a subjective effect may have, that is, an 
 effect which is not dependent on the nervous con- 
 dition of him who prays and who expects his prayers 
 to be answered. 
 
 I asked him whether he did not think that St. 
 Paul was referring to the entire Israelite nation 
 when he said : ' My heart's desire and prayer to 
 God for Israel is that they might be saved.' If so, 
 it seems to follow that, when he goes on to say that 
 all Israel shall be saved, he means to affirm that 
 all persons of Hebrew descent will go to heaven. 
 Jowett agreed with me in thinking that St. Paul 
 was speaking of the Hebrew nation ; but it seemed 
 to him that the words ' shall be saved ' may mean 
 ' shall be restored to Palestine.' 
 
 It must (I may note in passing) have been after 
 pondering on this embarrassing text that the youthful 
 Bunyan began to scrutinize his own pedigree in the 
 manner (somewhat unsympathetically) mentioned 
 by Macaulay : ' At one time he took it into his head 
 that all persons of Israelite blood would be saved, 
 and tried to make out that he partook of that blood ; 
 but his hopes were speedily destroyed by his father, 
 who seems to have had no ambition to be regarded 
 as a Jew.' 
 
 Jowett went on to say that St. Paul inclined to 
 Universalism in the text, ' God hath concluded them 
 all in unbelief that he might have mercy upon them 
 all.' ' But would he,' I asked, ' have extended this
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 7 
 
 hope to Elymas the sorcerer and Alexander the 
 coppersmith ?' Jowett intimated that the Apostle's 
 verdict on such men would have depended on the 
 frame of mind in which he happened to be, and he 
 characteristically added : ' I doubt whether, when 
 the Jews sought to slay him, he would have said : 
 " All Israel shall be saved." ' This was certainly 
 a view of inspiration very different from that in 
 which I had been brought up. 
 
 I asked him whether it was not certain that the 
 Scarlet Woman in the Apocalypse was meant to 
 designate Pagan Eome. He surprised me by 
 answering that the city represented was a mystical 
 compound of Babylon, Eome, and Jerusalem ('where 
 also our Lord was crucified ' Eev. xi. 8). 
 
 On my inquiring whether he attached great 
 historical value to the fourth Gospel, he replied that 
 it was incredible that Christ should, during long 
 conversations occurring at different dates, have 
 habitually spoken in the style attributed to him by 
 the Synoptists, and should also have habitually 
 spoken in the very different style attributed to him 
 by the fourth Evangelist. 
 
 In my undergraduate days I drew from him the 
 admission that he disbelieved in the story of Jonah 
 and the Whale, but that he kept his judgment in 
 suspense as to whether the Law had or had not been 
 given from Sinai. He told me at the same time 
 that, even when he had felt most sceptical, his 
 belief in immortality had never wavered. It may 
 serve to mark the difference between a Platonist's
 
 8 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 and an Aristotelian's point of view if I mention that, 
 on my speaking of this unfaltering conviction of his 
 to Charles Austin, the latter dryly remarked : ' If I 
 had that conviction, I could believe all the rest.' 
 
 It will be gathered from the foregoing examples 
 that I was in the habit of cross-examining Jowett 
 freely, and that he bore the cross-examination with 
 admirable patience. Once, however, when towards 
 the end of a walk I proposed launching out on a 
 new topic of discussion, he laughingly protested : * I 
 must make a bargain with you that, when we take 
 a walk together, you don't put more than one of 
 your stodgy questions !' 
 
 From these theological utterances of his I pass on 
 to his views on matters connected, in some instances, 
 with University studies. 
 
 He complained to me long ago that greater 
 academical results had not been obtained from the 
 ablest of the wealthy undergraduates of Christ 
 Church. On those favourites of Nature and Fortune 
 the stimulus of ambition might, he thought, be 
 made to act powerfully, if only it were skilfully 
 applied. This recalls what he once said to a pupil : 
 'Young men want ambition. You want ambition. 
 This sounds like devil's advice, but I give it !' 
 
 He told me that undergraduates fresh from public 
 schools often write better essays than when they 
 have passed a term or two at Oxford. I am re- 
 minded of this when golf -players say that a person 
 playing at golf for the first time often succeeds better 
 than in his (or her) second attempt. Is it whimsical
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 9 
 
 to suggest that, in the two instances, the explanation 
 may be the same ? In the one case, as in the other, 
 a novice who has just ceased to be a beginner is, 
 as it were, dazzled by the increasing light. He 
 seeks prematurely to attain hard and complicated 
 results : copia inopem facit. 
 
 My father, who thoroughly disliked Froude's 
 championship of Henry VIII., complained especially 
 that the historian sets so much value on the pre- 
 ambles of Acts of Parliament ; and he added that 
 the most iniquitous Act of Parliament is sure to 
 have a plausible preamble. I asked Jowett whether 
 he, too, did not think that the stress laid by Froude 
 on those preambles is unwarrantable. ' It's a craze,' 
 was the characteristic answer. 
 
 On my praising Shelley to Jowett at Byron's 
 expense, he answered : ' I think that Byron was 
 altogether a finer man than Shelley.' 
 
 I drew his attention to a passage in which Voltaire 
 foreshadowed the principle of free trade. He ob- 
 served, in reply, that a similar anticipation is to be 
 found in Plato's ' Laws ' : in the ideal State no duty 
 was to be levied either on exports or on imports. 
 Plato, however, was, I think, for imposing restric- 
 tions on the exportation of arms. 
 
 In the hope of improving my Latin style, I at one 
 time studied Muretus ; and I asked Jowett what 
 he thought of him. 'The best thing in him,' he 
 replied, ' is where he praises the massacre of St. 
 Bartholomew '0 praeclarum ilium diem!' Of 
 course, he was not quite serious in what he then
 
 10 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 said, any more than in what he implied when, on 
 my asking him long ago whether he wished to give 
 the franchise to women, he merely answered, with 
 a radiant smile : ' I have a friend who says that he 
 would rather see England governed by her five most 
 incapable men than by her five ablest women.' The 
 view indicated in this last utterance of Jowett 
 a view which he seems to have modified in later 
 life may be well illustrated by a remark of 
 Amiel : 
 
 Peut-etre n'est-il pas bon qu'une femme ait 1'esprit libre ; 
 elle en abuserait tout de suite. Elle n'entre pas en philosophic 
 sans perdre son don special qui est le culte de 1'individuel, la 
 defense des usages, des mceurs, des croyances, des traditions. 
 Son role est de ralentir la combustion de la pense"e. II est 
 analogue a celui de 1'azote dans 1'air vital. . . . Capable de 
 tous les devouements et de toutes les trahisons, ' monstre in- 
 comprehensible ' a la seconde puissance, la femme fait les 
 delices de 1'homme et son effroL . . . 
 
 Jowett once said in his odd way : ' I thought once 
 of giving myself up to political economy, but I 
 happened to become Professor of Greek.' But, 
 though he spoke thus jestingly, he of course took 
 the professorial duties most seriously. It may be 
 instructive to contrast the way in which he regarded 
 those duties with the way in which they were some- 
 times regarded in the last century. The delicious 
 suggestion which was made by Lord Chesterfield to 
 his son, then a lad in his sixteenth year, may illus- 
 trate this : ' What do you think of being Greek 
 professor at one of our universities? It is a very 
 pretty sinecure, and requires very little knowledge
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 11 
 
 (much less than, I hope, you have already) of that 
 language.' 
 
 He is well known to have been an economist of the 
 old school, and an unwavering disciple of Eicardo. 
 How thoroughly this was the case may be shown by 
 some remarks addressed by him to a friend, who has 
 reported the conversation to me, and who is himself 
 at once a man of business and a man of letters. 
 My friend told Jowett that, during the American 
 Civil War, 100 dollars in gold sometimes equalled 
 240 in greenbacks, and sometimes 280. Once, on 
 the occasion of a Northern victory, the change was 
 from 280 to 255 in one day. ' I think you must be 
 mistaken,' said Jowett; 'this doesn't square with 
 Eicardo.' The friend explained that Eicardo's 
 principles would be strictly applicable to practice if 
 man were a mere automaton, unaffected by sudden 
 impulses of hope or fear. Jowett at first seemed a 
 little provoked, but at last exclaimed with his 
 beaming smile, ' I am certainly right in theory, but 
 perhaps you are right as to the facts.' And then he 
 added, ' But read Eicardo.' 
 
 The same friend tells me that, on his speaking to 
 Jowett of Eousseau as a great intellectual force, a 
 momentary flash of asperity shot forth from his 
 placid eye, and he exclaimed, ' No ; he was a mere 
 sentimentalist !' It was certainly strange that the 
 Master was not attracted to Eousseau by the charm 
 of his diction ; for in general he had a keen sense 
 for style. He once read to me Bacon's famous 
 sentence, Men fear death, as children fear to go in
 
 12 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 the dark ; and then he added, ' Men can't write like 
 that now.' 
 
 Two pieces of advice given me by Jowett, with a 
 view to the formation of my style, may be worth 
 recording. First, he wished me to take great pains 
 about the right use of connecting particles; and, 
 in general, to be careful about the orderly and 
 ' logical ' arrangement, and, as it were, dovetailing 
 of sentences. Secondly, he told me to try to write 
 with * feeling.' This latter advice he himself put 
 into practice. Indeed, the practice of it came 
 naturally to him. It is sometimes possible to pick 
 holes in the construction of his sentences, but in 
 feeling his style is seldom or never deficient. Let 
 me add that the word ' feeling ' seems to denote the 
 quality which especially marks the passages of 
 poetry which he used to quote the quality, more- 
 over, which, when he quoted them, he brought out 
 by the peculiar music of his voice. I seem at this 
 moment to hear that very peculiar music just as I 
 heard it more than thirty years ago, when he re- 
 peated to me the grim consolation which Achilles 
 offered to a son of Priam, whom he had known and 
 liked in days gone by, and for whom he seems to 
 have still retained as much affection as was com- 
 patible with his determination to kill him : 
 
 'Xoy, Bave na.1 
 'K6.Tda.ve Kal ndrpcwcXos, 6-irep ato Tro\\i>v 
 
 * ' Die, my friend though thou art ; why dost thou vainly 
 lament ? Patroclus also died, who was a far better man than 
 thou.'
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 18 
 
 He warned me against mistaking what he called 
 ' feeling ' for the frequent use of metaphor. Indeed, 
 he cautioned his pupils against over-indulgence in 
 metaphor. To a pupil, who had been reading him 
 an essay, he remarked : * Your style is too flowery. 
 The Chinese like a flowery style, we don't ; but,' he 
 added, ' it is not a bad fault.' 
 
 'You are accustomed,' he said to me (in effect) 
 after I had taken my degree, ' to write college essays. 
 You will, of course, have to alter your style if you 
 begin writing for the Saturday Review. One thing 
 especially should be noted. You must, above all 
 things, try to be clear when you are writing for the 
 general reader. Don't be too subtle for him.' It is 
 remarkable that he spoke so patiently of the possi- 
 bility of my becoming a journalist ; for he seems to 
 have felt a somewhat unaccountable horror of jour- 
 nalism, and particularly of writing for the daily 
 papers. I am told that G. H. Lewes once extolled 
 the daily press in his presence, and dilated in glow- 
 ing terms on the mighty and beneficent weapon 
 which is wielded by journalists. Jowett listened 
 with an attention which at first seemed like acquies- 
 cence, but he presently rejoined : ' Why, yes ; but, 
 for my part, I'd rather break stones on the road /' He 
 is reported to have made use of this extravagant 
 comparison in the same connection more than once. 
 
 Some of Jowett's literary and other judgments may 
 be gathered from the folio whig conversation with a 
 friend, which occurred towards the close of the 
 Master's life :
 
 14 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 Friend. Have you read Mrs. Grote's " Life of Grote"?' 
 
 7. ' Yes [laughing] a curious book. It is really a history 
 of Mr. and Mrs. Grote. . . . Mr. Grote was a great Eadical in 
 his youth ; she told me that at first he did not like her asking 
 her great relations to Threadneedle Street, but afterwards he 
 said that rich men were very like others, except that they did 
 not want to get anything out of you. Later he began to 
 go out more, and once, when he asked a peer to dinner, she 
 said: "Oh, George, who runs after the Lords now?" Does 
 she speak of her friendship with Sydney Smith in the book ?' 
 
 F. ' I think not. Did you know him ?' 
 
 J. ' I never spoke to him ; he was a Fellow of New 
 College.' 
 
 F. ' Did you ever hear him preach ?' 
 
 J, 'Yes, once, in St. Paul's; I don't remember what he 
 preached about.' 
 
 F. ' Was it amusing ?' 
 
 J. ' I think it was ; he is the wittiest Englishman that ever 
 lived, except Swift.' 
 
 ***** 
 
 F. ' Did you ever meet Mill at Mrs. Grote's house ?' 
 J. ' No ; he died soon after I knew Mrs. Grote.' 
 ***** 
 
 F. ' I suppose you never read any modern novels now ?' 
 J. ' Yes, I do. I've read a good many this summer. I've 
 read "David Grieve." 
 F. ' I'm sure you did not like it.' 
 J. ' Yes, I did. I think it is a very good book.' 
 F. '"What else did you read ?' 
 
 J. ' I read " Tess " a very powerful book and " Esther 
 Van Homrigh." I think it's a mistake to write historical 
 novels. But Mrs. Woods has collected a great deal about 
 Swift ; she's done it very well. . . . The longer a man puts off 
 his profession the better; but he musn't put off after his 
 memory has reached its strongest after thirty, I should say. 1
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 15 
 
 F. ' Have you any objection to women speaking on plat- 
 forms ?' 
 
 J". ' Not if they do it well. and [two noted 
 
 female orators] do a great deal of good. . . . The law is a good 
 study. Every man who deserves to can succeed at the Bar. 
 I say what Mr. Senior said, viz., four things are necessary : 
 (i.) ability; (ii.) industry; (iii.) knowledge of the world; (iv.) 
 health. Every man who has them will get on at the Bar. . . . 
 Literature plays such a great part in society and daily life that 
 a man must have some knowledge of it.' 
 
 F. ' You don't think a knowledge of science can take its 
 place ?' 
 
 /. ' No.' 
 
 The distrust of historical novelists which Jowett 
 indicated was probably connected with the fact that 
 they are apt, as it were, to dip the past in the 
 present, and that the result of such inopportune 
 dipping must needs be something of a daub. An 
 extreme example of this confusion is furnished by 
 Ebers, who represents the Egyptian doctors, in the 
 time of Moses, as exercising their minds over 
 the morality of vivisection. I shall have occasion to 
 recur to this mode of playing tricks with history 
 further on. At present I will illustrate my meaning 
 by saying that I called Jowett's attention to Walter 
 Scott's statement, in ' Kenilworth,' that Varney lulled 
 himself through Atheism into complete moral in- 
 sensibility. Scott seems to imply that the use of 
 this moral narcotic was not uncommon in those days. 
 On the other hand, it seemed to me that, in 
 Elizabethan times, Atheism must, to say the least, 
 have been extremely rare ; and that, even in our own 
 day, villains nearly always find it easier to disregard
 
 16 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 religious sanctions than to disbelieve in them. 
 Jowett in the main agreed with me ; but he thought 
 that to the general rule there have been exceptions. 
 One such exception he believed to have been Philippe 
 le Bel. 
 
 Of Scott's novels his favourite was ' The Bride of 
 Lammermoor.' This preference was shared by 
 Matthew Arnold, who says that Falkland 'has for 
 the imagination the indefinable, the irresistible charm 
 of one who is and must be, in spite of the choicest 
 gifts and graces, unfortunate of a man in the grasp 
 of fatality. Like the Master of Eavenswood, that 
 most interesting by far of all Scott's heroes, he is 
 surely and visibly touched by the finger of doom.' 
 Jowett would, in the main, have sympathized with 
 this striking passage, though he would doubtless 
 have felt that Falkland's death at Newbury was a 
 mere accident, and that it can therefore give no 
 colour to the belief that men of his temperament are 
 generally fated to die young. 
 
 It is sometimes said that Jowett, though Professor 
 of Greek, was an indifferent scholar. Two facts 
 bearing on this question may be worth mentioning. 
 In my Oxford days I met a great Cambridge scholar 
 who, shortly afterwards, was made a Bishop. On 
 hearing that I was a pupil of Jowett, he talked to 
 me about him, and declared, half in jest, that at 
 Cambridge they could more easily forgive his heresy 
 than his bad scholarship. When next I saw Jowett, 
 I told him of my meeting with the distinguished 
 Cantab, and asked his opinion of his scholarship.
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 17 
 
 ' It seems presumptuous in me,' replied Jowett (in 
 effect), ' to criticise his scholarship. But he does 
 not seem to me to understand St. Paul. St. Paul's 
 style is so peculiar that the ordinary rule of scholar- 
 ship seemed to me to be not quite applicable to him.' 
 According to this view, the Apostle's words are to 
 be interpreted by reference to his modes of thought, 
 and not merely his modes of thought by reference to 
 his words. I speak subject to correction, but I think 
 that Jowett, in the words just quoted, laid his finger 
 on a line of demarcation which divides Oxford 
 scholars as a class from Cambridge scholars as a 
 class. My impression that this is so is confirmed by 
 a letter which I have just received from a Cambridge 
 scholar who is even more distinguished than the one 
 already referred to, and who writes to me of Jowett : 
 ' I always was grieved by the indefiniteness of his 
 scholarship. He seemed to think that words and 
 phrases had no particular meaning, while I was 
 taught, and with all my heart believe, that " there 
 is a mystery in every syllable " of St. Paul (say) or 
 St. John.' 
 
 The other fact bearing on the question is this : 
 That admirable scholar, Professor Conington, once 
 said that Arthur Stanley came to him in sore dis- 
 comfiture at the severity with which the critics had 
 handled his edition of the Epistles to the Corinthians. 
 "With the frankness due from one old Rugbeian to 
 another, he told Stanley that in some cases he had 
 not a leg to stand upon, and must not think of reply- 
 ing to his critics. Of Jowett's scholarship Conington 
 
 2
 
 18 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 took a more favourable view. Personally, he might 
 differ from some of Jowett's translations ; but he 
 thought that in every instance Jowett could make 
 out a good case for himself. 
 
 A lady asked why it is that boys are so much 
 slower in learning Latin and Greek than girls are in 
 learning French and German; is it because Latin 
 and Greek cannot be picked up in conversation? 
 Jowett replied that the chief cause of the anomaly 
 seems to be that the classical languages are so 
 ' difficult ' difficult, that is, by reason of their un- 
 likeness to English. One odd classical judgment of 
 his may be worth mentioning. He did not care 
 much for Demosthenes, though he admitted that 
 Demosthenes had more of the ars celare artem than 
 Thucydides had. But he seemingly thought that 
 the great orator did not possess this art of conceal- 
 ment in its completest form. The art with which 
 he concealed his art was not so perfect as to conceal 
 itself. At any rate, Jowett preferred the rugged 
 simplicity of the speeches reported or composed by 
 Thucydides. 
 
 Shortly after I went up to Oxford, Jowett spoke 
 to me slightingly of the usefulness of memory. He 
 quoted Rochefoucauld's saying : ' Tout le monde se 
 plaint de sa memoire, personne ne se plaint de son 
 jugement ;' and he went on to say that nearly every- 
 one has a memory good enough for the ordinary 
 purposes of life, while in judgment nearly everyone 
 is deficient. Afterwards he seemed to modify this 
 view. I asked him whether Arthur Stanley's versa-
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 19 
 
 tile and, as it were, ubiquitous memory was not 
 unrivalled. ' No,' he replied ; ' Conington has a 
 better memory than Stanley, but Stanley has a more 
 useful memory.' He said that the memory of the 
 man who could repeat a book of 'Paradise Lost,' 
 after once reading it over, was simply a disease; 
 but he thought that a memory powerful within 
 reasonable limits such a memory as Macaulay's 
 was of great value. A lady once asked him whether 
 he thought that a good memory can be acquired. 
 Pointing to a former pupil, who had and still has an 
 abnormally retentive memory, he answered : ' A 
 good memory may be often acquired, but not such a 
 memory as he has.' It may be worth adding that a 
 memory which is thus slow in losing, is sometimes 
 also slow in acquiring. For example, the former 
 pupil indicated by Jowett has no whist-memory. By 
 taking pains, he could contrive to remember the 
 trump-card of the first deal and his own cards, and 
 he would remember them for a long tune. But 
 these fourteen cards would in a manner crowd out 
 the cards of the subsequent deals, and, long before 
 they had worked their way into his memory, his 
 friends would be impatient for him to play. 
 
 In a trifling matter Jowett once showed a want of 
 moral courage most unusual with him. When I 
 was young I shared Kingsley's liking for a bracing 
 air ; and I perturbed my friends by telling them 
 that I should beseech Jupiter to let east winds blow 
 unceasingly over the Elysian fields ! On my saying 
 something of the sort to Jowett, he replied, with a
 
 20 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 laugh : ' I also like east winds ; but I am afraid to 
 confess it, for no one would believe me.' Having 
 thus trespassed into the hygienic province, I am 
 tempted to do so again. When I stayed with Jowett 
 at Freshwater, one of the party, recovering from an 
 illness, had the appetite of a convalescent. 'You 
 eat more/ said Jowett, ' than anyone I ever knew, 
 except a young lady who was told that if she didn't 
 eat eight mutton-chops a day she would die. So 
 she was brave, ate the eight mutton-chops, and 
 lived !' Many years later, when Jowett himself was 
 ailing and depressed, the friend to whom he made 
 this remark tried to cheer him by expressing a hope 
 that he would live to emulate the green and sprightly 
 old age of Dr. Lee, the Master of Balliol, about 
 whom Mrs. Thrale wrote to Dr. Johnson : ' Are you 
 not delighted with his gaiety of manners and youthful 
 vivacity now that he is eighty-six years old ? I never 
 heard a more excellent or perfect pun than his, when 
 someone told him how, in a late dispute among the 
 Privy Councillors, the Lord Chancellor struck the 
 table with such violence that he split it. "No, no, 
 no," replied the Master dryly; "I can hardly per- 
 suade myself that he split the table, though I 
 believe he divided the board /" 
 
 On the occasion of my visit to Jowett at Fresh- 
 water, I heard him pass judgment on Browning. 
 He came across a statement in the Saturday Review 
 that we had one poet of the first order, but that we 
 had scarcely another] who could be ranked even in 
 the second class. He stopped, looked straight before
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 21 
 
 him for a second, and then said : ' I think that 
 Browning deserves a shady first.' To another friend 
 Jowett admitted Browning's power, but said that he 
 thought his style needlessly cumbrous and distorted. 
 In truth, the relation between the two men seems 
 to have been peculiar. Browning expressed great 
 affection for Jowett, but complained that Jowett 
 would never let him hear him preach. When he 
 was staying with Jowett one Sunday, Jowett slipped 
 away after breakfast and preached to the college 
 servants, but gave Browning no hint. Browning 
 said : ' He will let me talk to him and dine with 
 him, but he will not let me pray with him.' 
 
 Another incident which occurred during my stay 
 at Freshwater may be worth mentioning. Jowett 
 took me to dine with the famous amateur photo- 
 grapher, Mrs. Cameron. He was in a taciturn 
 mood ; and it fell to my lot to do my full share of 
 the talking and to draw out our hostess. As Jowett 
 and I were walking home, he suddenly exclaimed : 
 * You asked too many questions.' As I was of full 
 age, and thought myself capable of discerning 
 between ' a tune to keep silence and a time to speak,' 
 I inquired : 'Did I ask too many questions ?' ' Far 
 too many,' was the laconic answer. I forbore to 
 press the matter further ; but his censure wrought 
 in me a mood similar to that which prompted 
 Benjamin Franklin to say : 'As we must account 
 for every idle word, so we must for every idle 
 silence.' 
 
 It is well known that, in his old age, Jowett came
 
 22 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 round to something like Franklin's opinion came, 
 in fact, to think that if silence is silver, good dis- 
 course is golden. He exhorted some of his pupils 
 to keep commonplace books, and especially to jot 
 down in them the best anecdotes that they heard ; 
 and he is said to have himself put these rules into 
 practice. He had a yet quainter method of showing 
 how completely he had faced round. With the zeal 
 of a proselyte, this late convert from silence to 
 sociability wrote a sermon on the art of conversa- 
 tion. The sermon was preached in "Westminster 
 Abbey and, less appropriately, in the wilds of 
 Scotland. More strangely still, he took for his 
 text : ' Man shall not live by bread alone, but by 
 every word that proceedeth out of the mouth.' Ear- 
 witnesses tell me that he sometimes gave the text 
 in this form, and sometimes added the concluding 
 words, ' of God.' In all cases, however, those words, 
 so full of significance in the original text, were 
 practically dropped out of the sermon. In fact, the 
 * ingenious Frenchman ' who, according to Fitz- 
 james Stephen, described that text as cette belle et 
 touchante parole de Chateaubriand, can scarcely have 
 done greater violence to its true meaning and mani- 
 fold associations unconsciously than Jowett did con- 
 sciously and deliberately. 
 
 A French writer has said that, ' On ne fait bienque ce 
 qu'on fait habituellement.' It was not to be expected 
 that Jowett would ever excel in conversation as some 
 men excel in it who have made it the business of 
 their lives. But undoubtedly he infused into it an
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 23 
 
 ingredient which the most highly trained of mere 
 talkers has not at his command ; he seasoned it 
 with his potent and penetrating personality. Hence 
 arose the influence and the fascination which he 
 exercised over the best women. Of the incidents 
 that are reported in reference to his friendships 
 with good women, only one need be here mentioned. 
 The sister of an undergraduate who was ill at Balliol 
 went to stay with the Master, and received from him 
 the utmost kindness and attention. When she was 
 taking leave, she first hesitated, and then said that 
 before parting she would venture to ask a very 
 particular favour. As she again hesitated, the 
 Master grew uneasy and looked interrogative. At 
 last, out came the request : ' Will you marry me ?' 
 He paced up and down, and blushed deeply as he 
 replied : * That would not be good either for you or 
 for me.' It was now the young lady's turn to blush. 
 * Oh oh I meant to say I am going to be married, 
 and would you perform the service ?' Poor girl ! 
 she had been refused by Jowett without having pro- 
 posed to him ! 
 
 To some of my readers the foregoing anecdote 
 may be familiar, but I repeat it, not merely because 
 I find that it is less widely known than I imagined 
 it to be or than it deserves to be, but also because it 
 is in its main outlines authentic, and I wish to 
 rescue it from the rising flood of scepticism which 
 threatens to submerge all the good stories about 
 Jowett. Nearly all the Jowett-tradition, so dear to 
 undergraduates and gossips, is discovered to be little
 
 24 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 better than a Jowett-legend, and, in Sir Thomas 
 More's phrase, ' many well counterfeit jewels make 
 the true mistrusted.' 'Well counterfeit' some 
 apocryphal stories about Jowett certainly are : so 
 much BO that, if judged of merely by internal 
 evidence, the best of them would be pronounced 
 genuine. For instance : there is an old anecdote 
 that an examiner put the question, ' Why did the 
 Athenians condemn Socrates ?' Some such answer 
 was given as that he was believed to be corrupting 
 the youth and undermining the national religion. 
 ' No. He was put to death for being a bore.' The 
 terse irony of this saying has a Jowettian flavour 
 about it, but Jowett himself told me of the saying, 
 and it was to a Cambridge don that he ascribed it. 
 
 In 1891, after an absence of twenty years, I 
 revisited Oxford. It was hard for me to realize that 
 many of the undergraduates whom I saw around me 
 had not been born when I was last in the place, and 
 that none of them had been born when I took my 
 degree thirty-one years before. I learnt by degrees 
 how completely I was looking at the University 
 system from the outside, and, at last, it was only by 
 a strong effort that I could feel myself to be in any 
 sense an Oxford man. And thus it was with a 
 mingled pride and sadness that I found myself 
 exclaiming : ' Stantes erant pedes nostri in atriis 
 tuis, Oxonia.'* 
 
 Such reflections as these were brought home to 
 
 * Ps. cxxii. 2 (adapted). The Vulgate, I believe correctly, 
 here employs the past tense instead of the future (stood instead 
 of shall stand).
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 25 
 
 me by renewing my intercourse with Jowett. I took 
 some notes of a conversation which I had with him 
 that year, but those notes have been mislaid, and I 
 must therefore confine myself to giving one or two 
 points from memory. It was in that conversation 
 that, as I mention further on, he surprised me by 
 remembering some particulars of the visit that I had 
 paid him twenty years before. 
 
 We talked about Mr. Francis Newman's recently 
 published work concerning John Henry Newman 
 a work so well intended, and yet (as it were) so 
 fratricidal, that, if Lady Byron could be called the 
 moral Clytemnestra of her lord, Mr. Francis Newman 
 might, at least, as justly be entitled the moral 
 Timoleon of his brother. Jowett seemed to me not 
 wholly to disagree with the view taken by Mr. F. 
 Newman. 
 
 The two brothers appeared to Jowett to present a 
 striking contrast. He regarded Mr. F. Newman as 
 almost ' pedantic ' in his strictness about literal 
 truth. On the other hand, he described the 
 Cardinal as comparatively ' indifferent to truth and 
 morality ' in the province of religion. At first this 
 accusation startled me ; but presently he so manipu- 
 lated it that it lost much of its sting. The accusa- 
 tion, as I understood it, amounted merely to this : 
 When he represented Newman as more or less 
 indifferent to truth in theology, he merely meant 
 that the Cardinal did not apply to the sacred history 
 and literature of Palestine, and to the history and 
 literature of the Church, the same canons of criticism
 
 26 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 which he would have applied to any other history or 
 literature. But what shall we say of the charge of 
 indifference to morality in religious matters ? An 
 extreme instance will best show what that charge 
 really meant. To the respectable burghers of 
 Jericho it would have seemed incredible that their 
 disesteemed countrywoman, who, besides corrupting 
 their private morals, gave treacherous aid to the 
 public enemy, should have been singled out among 
 all the inhabitants as the recipient of Divine favour. 
 To Jowett, too, it was evidently incredible that so 
 anomalous a selection could have been made. And 
 what he complained of in Newman was that con- 
 siderations of this sort, considerations involving a 
 charge of injustice against God, produced less effect 
 on him : not, indeed, than they have produced on the 
 vast majority of Christians in all ages, but than they 
 ought to have produced on a man of his ability in 
 the nineteenth century. 
 
 On the whole, I gathered that Jowett had little 
 sympathy with the Cardinal. Let me add that my 
 general impression is confirmed by a friend who has 
 told me that he heard Jowett complain of the large 
 space which, in the ' Apologia,' is taken up with the 
 motives which induced Newman to quit the Church 
 of England for that of Rome ; and that Jowett 
 characteristically added : ' Not, I should have 
 thought, a very important question.' 
 
 I expressed regret that Catholicism seemed unable, 
 at present, at any rate, to shake off the belief 
 in eternal punishment. Jowett replied that the
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 27 
 
 Catholics have a safety-valve in their doctrine of 
 Purgatory.* I reminded him that, according to 
 their belief, Hell lies below Purgatory, and that the 
 poor wretches who are consigned to this nether 
 region will not be suffered to rise vid Purgatory to 
 Heaven, t Enlightened Catholics, he rejoined, would 
 reserve Hell ' for a few very wicked people ' ; all 
 persons whom they or we care about would be 
 started on the upward track. I asked whether he 
 did not think that all Anglicans and other Pro- 
 testants would shortly rid themselves of that 
 spiritual anachronism, that interesting but repulsive 
 survival of devil-worship. ' Voltaire,' he answered, 
 ' declared that anyone who openly spoke or wrote 
 against morality would be pelted. And one might 
 almost say the same of any clergyman who should 
 now preach in favour of eternal punishment.' 
 
 The reference to Voltaire tempts me, by way of 
 digression, to mention that a friend tells me that he 
 heard Jowett say that civilization owes more to 
 
 * Jowett seemed to me to be not wholly destitute of sym- 
 pathy with Catholicism. I once expressed to him strong 
 indignation at the Catholic practice of withholding the Bible 
 from the people. Jowett replied that he regarded that practice 
 as a mistake, but not as an unmixed evil ; he added : ' It 
 prevents the people from perplexing their minds with the 
 Colenso difficulties.' 
 
 f A Catholic priest, after reading the passage in the text, 
 writes to me : ' Did I ever tell you of a saying of Cardinal 
 Manning on the hell question? A friend suggesting that it 
 was a place of eternal suffering eternally un tenanted, he 
 answered: "If one did not hope that it was so, who could 
 endure life ?" ' If ever Professor Mivart should relapse into 
 his amiable heresy, let us hope that the spirit of the defunct 
 Cardinal will be present among his judges !
 
 28 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 Voltaire than to all the Fathers of the Church put 
 together. 
 
 In my orthodox days I was struck by the glaring 
 contrast between the asceticism of the early Christians 
 and the luxurious living of our upper classes ; and, 
 in my intercourse with Jowett, I gave expression to 
 the compunctions which the contrast aroused in me. 
 Eegarding me as habitually over-scrupulous, he 
 replied : ' The life of the early Christians was not 
 very like your life at Peckforton, but it was not 
 therefore better.' 
 
 On my once reminding him of the zeal with which 
 Voltaire took up the cause of such victims of in- 
 justice as Lally Tollendal and Admiral Byng, he 
 observed with a smile : ' That quite makes up for 
 his being an infidel.' I remember telling him that I 
 had been assured that Miss Martineau, who was 
 then living, not merely disbelieved in immortality, 
 but gloried in the disbelief. ' It seems to me,' he 
 said, ' very strange and unnatural, but she may be a 
 good woman for all that.' 
 
 In 1892 and 1893 I again called on Jowett. My 
 notes of what passed between us on these two 
 latter occasions have been preserved, and I now 
 publish them, premising that, as I am naturally 
 anxious to ascribe nothing to him which he did not 
 say, I have probably omitted much that he did say, 
 and the result has been that I have not assigned to 
 him his due share in the conversations. 
 
 May 30, 1892. In reference to one of the most 
 distinguished of living men, the remark was made
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 29 
 
 that he could see only one side of a question, and 
 that this limitation implies much self-deception. 
 Adverting to the danger of self-deception, I quoted 
 from Bacon's ' Essay on Truth ' : ' 'Tis not the lie 
 that passeth through the mind, but the lie that 
 sinketh in and settleth in it, that doth the hurt.' 
 Jowett replied that he would rather make a friend of 
 a man who practised self-deception than of one who 
 consciously deceived others. I spoke of different 
 forms of deception. Jowett objected to deception 
 for a man's own interest. I replied that it was hard 
 to define what would be directly or indirectly for a 
 man's own interest. He explained that he did not 
 mean 'for a man's highest interest.' I spoke of 
 self-deception as being especially a feminine quality, 
 and illustrated my meaning by a jocular example. 
 If a man looked at a negro (or morally black man) 
 who wished to be thought white, he, knowing all the 
 time that he was speaking falsely, might tell him 
 that he was not so very black. A woman would 
 scruple to do this, but, after putting on a white 
 veil, would first persuade herself, and then tell the 
 negro, that he was not black at all. Jowett doubted 
 whether there was much difference between an 
 average man and an average woman in this respect. 
 
 ToUemache. ' Many of my best friends are women ; 
 but I am bound to add that women seem to me less 
 accurate than men, and they are said to be less 
 trustworthy witnesses in a court of justice.' He 
 seemed doubtful whether this is so. 
 
 At this moment the Vice-Master came in, and
 
 30 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 asked Jowett to propose a subject for the weekly 
 essays. The Master suggested ' Authority in Matters 
 of Science and Opinion,' and said to me : 'I think it 
 good that the undergraduate should get clear ideas 
 on this question.' 
 
 T. ' Will one essay do this for them ?' 
 J. ' At any rate it will set them thinking about 
 it. Didn't you write on this ?' 
 
 T. ' Indeed I did. It reminds me of old times.' 
 He said, with his Platonic irony : ' You have risen a 
 great deal above this ; but I am still trudging on in 
 the old path.' 
 
 When the Vice-Master had left the room, a new 
 subject was opened. 
 
 T. 'Why is it that many happy men are 
 pessimists? Men often declare that they would 
 not live their lives over again, and yet almost any 
 man of thirty would prefer living another thirty 
 years to being extinguished at once.' 
 
 J. ' Would he not find it rather monotonous ?' 
 T. ' I assume the second period of thirty years 
 to be equally happy with the first period, but not to 
 be identical with it. If you put the case of a man 
 living his life exactly over again, you must suppose 
 him to be dipped in Lethe before he runs the course 
 a second time. Is it not because most people do not 
 realize this that so many declare that they would 
 at once refuse such an offer? A day which has 
 one moment of acute pain, but is in all other 
 respects to one's liking, would, if unforeseen, be 
 justly counted a happy day. But if such a day
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 81 
 
 were foreseen, the prospect of the moment of acute 
 pain would cast its shadow over the fair prospect of 
 the rest of the day. In like manner, if a man tries 
 to conceive what it would be to live his life over 
 again, his imagination insensibly turns to the painful 
 or blameworthy episodes in that life.' Jowett showed 
 some impatience at this mode of reasoning ; indeed, 
 he generally set his face against discussions not 
 bearing on practice. 
 
 Wishing, however, to draw from him his real 
 opinion on the saddening and deadening philosophy 
 of Schopenhauer, I went on to defend optimism by 
 giving such examples as the following : If life is not 
 worth living, ought not the present inhabitants of 
 Smyrna to set up a statue to Tamerlane, in recollec- 
 tion of the wholesale and somewhat picturesque 
 beneficence wherewith he relieved eighty thousand 
 of their predecessors of the burden of existence, and 
 made a pyramid of their skulls? Nay, further, we 
 are justly incensed at the brutal Eoman who caused 
 his infirm slaves to be eaten by his lampreys. But 
 the mode of death to which these poor wretches 
 were subjected was probably not more painful than 
 that which Nature would otherwise have had in 
 store for them. All, therefore, that the tyrant did 
 for them was to shorten their span of life. So that, 
 when we execrate him and pity his victims, we 
 virtually imply that even the decrepit old age of a 
 Koman slave contained a plus quantity of happiness 
 that it was a boon rather than the reverse. Hence 
 I concluded that, 'unless a man is meditating
 
 32 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 suicide, he implies in every act of his life that he 
 thinks his life worth living.' 
 
 J. (with deliberation and earnestness). 'Why 
 yes, yes, we imply this always. In brief, we may 
 say that a disciple of Schopenhauer is a sort of 
 should-le suicide, or, rather, that the whole question 
 solvitur vivendo.' 
 
 He urged me to go on writing, and advised me to 
 write on ' Popular Fallacies.' I asked him whether 
 he meant something in the style of Charles Lamb. 
 
 J. 'No, I mean something more serious than 
 that.* Something in the style of Sydney Smith's 
 paper on " The Fallacies of Bentham." ' The 
 mention of Sydney Smith suggested a question on 
 the difference between wit and humour. I quoted the 
 view of a living writer, that wit consists in seeing 
 analogies, and humour in seeing contrasts. 
 
 J. ' I do not think this will hold. The difference 
 seems to be that wit consists hi a number of points, 
 while humour is continuous.' 
 
 T. ' Might not your view of wit and humour be 
 otherwise expressed by saying that wit is humour 
 crystallized, and humour is wit in solution ?' 
 
 J. ' Possibly.' 
 
 T. ' Would you not say that Sydney Smith has 
 wit, and not humour ?' 
 
 J. ' He has both.' 
 
 A phrase which Sydney Smith himself used 
 
 * Jowett once intimated to me, and he seems to have said 
 plainly to at least one other pupil, that he had no great 
 admiration for the writings of Lamb.
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 83 
 
 virtually ascribed to Maria Edgeworth humour in 
 Jowett's sense of that word : * She does not say witty 
 things, but there is such a perfume of wit runs 
 through all her conversation as makes it very 
 brilliant.' 
 
 In consideration of my bad eyesight, he accom- 
 panied me downstairs. In doing so he leant on my 
 arm, and quoted the couplet from the ' Anthology ' : 
 
 Av^pa TIS \iir6yvtov fiirfp vtlrroio 
 
 * No,' he added, with a smile, ' we are not quite 
 the lame man riding on the blind man, for you can 
 see a little and I can walk a little.' 
 
 May 7, 1893. Jowett said that England seemed 
 to him to run great risk of an invasion in the next 
 fifty years; he thought there might be peril from 
 Russia. 
 
 T. ' Is not Russia weakened by Nihilism ?' 
 
 J. ' Not so much by Nihilism as by corruption. 
 But even so, the mass would obey the Czar. He 
 will in a few years be able to put five million in the 
 field.' 
 
 T. ' That is like Xerxes.' 
 
 J. ' Yes, but they will be very different men from 
 the Persians.' 
 
 T. 4 Shall not we be supported by Germany, 
 Austria, and Italy?' He seemed doubtful about 
 
 * Once did a strong blind man set a man that was lame on. 
 
 his shoulders ; 
 Feet to the cripple he lent, borrowing eyes in return. 
 
 3
 
 34 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 Austria and Italy. He spoke of China as another 
 source of danger to Western civilization, adding 
 that, with its vast numbers and indifference to life, 
 it has the making of a great military power. 
 
 We spoke of the recently-published ' Life of Lord 
 Sherbrooke' (Lowe), to which both he and I had 
 contributed reminiscences. 
 
 J. 'Lowe was in reality a thorough Liberal to 
 the last.' 
 
 T. * Not, surely, a democratic Liberal !' 
 
 J. ' No, but a philosophical Liberal. He had 
 been on bad terms with the clergy, and was to the 
 last anti-ecclesiastical.' He went on to intimate that 
 Lowe was not wholly in the wrong ; all history shows 
 that religions become corrupt if they cease to keep 
 terms with morality ; if we are to tolerate the Church, 
 she must be tolerant. 
 
 T. 'Have not Evolution and Biblical Criticism 
 thrown the Church on the defensive, and made her 
 more tolerant than she ever was before ?' 
 
 J. ' Look at the damnatory clauses in the 
 Athanasian Creed. If the clergyman who repeats 
 them regards them as a mere dead letter, his con- 
 duct is not favourable to a high morality. If 
 he believes in them, he imputes to God a very low 
 morality.' 
 
 T. ' I tell my American friends that when they 
 discard the damnatory clauses they imply that the 
 rest of the Creed is to be taken literally ; and that 
 thus, in the true sense of the saying, they make the 
 exception prove the rule.'
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 85 
 
 J. ' I would give up the Creed altogether.' 
 T. ' Then would you not imply that the Apostles' 
 and the Nicene Creeds are to be taken literally ?' 
 
 J. ' Every Church or Dissenting body must use 
 compromise a little.' 
 
 T. 'People call the Broad Church clergy dis- 
 honest. But they praise Marcus Aurelius up to the 
 skies. And yet did not he, the Pontifex Maximus, 
 the Pope of paganism, practise conformity as com- 
 pletely as any Broad Church clergyman does now ?' 
 Jowett assented, but pointed out that, on the other 
 hand, some philosophers tried to spiritualize pagan- 
 ism ; and this he considered the nobler course. He 
 quoted the example of Socrates. I remarked that 
 Socrates poured a libation to the Sun, and vowed a 
 cock to uEsculapius. Not only did he thus cause the 
 death of the poor little cock, but he implied that 
 ^Esculapius took pleasure in its sacrifice. This was 
 giving countenance to vulgar superstition. 
 
 J. ' Yes, I suppose this might be called an 
 eccentricity. Perhaps he would not have much 
 liked to be cross-questioned as to why he did it.' I 
 hinted that he might have thought, as many Broad 
 Churchmen now think, that a certain alloy of super- 
 naturalism is the only way in which spiritual truths 
 can be made to pass as current coin among the 
 masses ; or (to vary the metaphor) spiritual food 
 should be not raw, but cooked for the infirm digestions 
 of the multitude. 
 
 J. ' I think that in the present day a religion 
 without miracles would suit many people better than
 
 36 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 a religion with miracles.' I hinted that he was falling 
 back on the theology of James Martineau, and that 
 this stronghold is commonly thought to be not im- 
 pregnable. It is open to attack from the disciples of 
 Butler. If there is so much evil in the scheme of 
 Nature, why not in that of Revelation ? If in this 
 life, why not hi the next ? 
 
 J. ' This seems to me to be taking the question 
 entirely at the wrong end.' I wished to cross- 
 question hhii, but I was not sure whether he was 
 not thinking of himself when he said that Socrates 
 would not have liked to be cross-questioned. I 
 therefore restrained the impulse ; and especially I 
 avoided expressing surprise that a severe criticism 
 on the practice of economy of truth should have pro- 
 ceeded from an ultra Broad Church clergyman 
 from one, that is, who in his official character had 
 to be practising economy of truth continually. 
 
 I asked him how he explained the word ' but ' in 
 the last line of the stanza wherein Tennyson ex- 
 presses his trust : 
 
 ' That not a worm is cloven in vain ; 
 That not a moth with vain desire 
 Is shrivelled hi a fruitless fire, 
 Or but subserves another's gain. 1 
 
 He regarded ' or but subserves ' as equivalent to 
 ' without subserving.' I, on the other hand, insisted 
 that the word ' but ' must mean ' only,' and that the 
 whole passage implies a hope that there will be a 
 heaven even for the moths and worms. 
 J. ' Would not that be an extravagant view to
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 37 
 
 take ?' Extravagant it may be, but it is hardly unin- 
 telligible, especially in a poet. Whenever a poet or 
 a sentimentalist argues from the Divine Love that 
 all human suffering must be designed for the good 
 of the sufferer, he is apt to be met with the objection : 
 * If this argument is worth anything, it must be 
 applicable to the lower animals. Are you prepared 
 to contend that all animal suffering makes for the 
 good of the sufferer ?' To which objection the heart 
 rather than the head is fain to make answer : ' Is 
 such an aspiration wholly inadmissible ? Is it quite 
 impossible that the involuntary suicide of a shrivelled 
 moth may have been ordained for the ultimate good 
 of that moth, which must mean for its posthumous 
 good ?' It seems to me that some such vague hope 
 as this may have been present to the poet's mind 
 when he wrote the line in question.* 
 
 Jowett, as we have seen, thought otherwise. He 
 however, seemed to modify his opinion, for he said 
 
 * I sometimes think that the lower animals bear the same 
 sort of relation to Man that the Apocrypha bears to the Bible. 
 Theologians are apt to regard the human soul and the Bible as 
 having a right (so to speak), each hi its own way, to say ' Noli 
 me tangere ' to science. The lower animals and (though in a 
 very different manner) the Apocrypha bar such exorbitant 
 claims. They serve as intermediate links, and thus tend to 
 evolutionize Religion. In other words, the lower animals are 
 half human, just as the Apocrypha is half Biblical. The diffi- 
 culty connected with the lower animals is noted in the text. 
 As regards the Apocryphal writings, it is enough to remark 
 that the very late Book of Enoch is quoted as authentic by 
 St. Jude. In my youth I asked Jowett whether the Book of 
 Enoch is not believed to have been discovered. ' There is no 
 doubt whatever that it has been discovered,' he replied, with a 
 certain heterodox zest.
 
 38 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 that Tennyson probably wrote that under the influ- 
 ence of some of the writers of the last century. 
 T. ' Do you mean the Cambridge Platonists ?' 
 J. ' No ; I am chiefly thinking of Butler ; but it 
 will never do to apply such logic as yours to the 
 words of the poet.' 
 
 As I rose to take my leave, he said : ' I believe 
 that a great deal more is to be done to improve the 
 condition of mankind, and that the great comfort for 
 each of us is to feel that he has done, and is doing, 
 something towards it.' Of course I assented, but I 
 recalled Tennyson's counsel to beware lest 
 
 ' In seeking to undo 
 One riddle and to find the true 
 I knit a hundred others new,' 
 
 and hinted that a somewhat similar warning should 
 be addressed to enthusiastic reformers and world- 
 betterers of all sorts. 
 
 J. ' Well, well, perhaps you're right. Good-bye.' 
 These are the last words I heard him utter.
 
 II. 
 
 ' Equidem, ex omnibus rebus, quas mihi aut Fortuna aut 
 Natura tribuit, nihil habco quod cum amicitia Scipionis possum 
 comparare.' CICERO. 
 
 (Of all the benefits which Nature or Fortune has conferred 
 on me, none can I compare with the friendship of Scipio.) 
 
 IN my Oxford days I was struck by a comment on 
 Jowett which was made to me by one who had long 
 been in close relations with him, and whose praise 
 carries with it all the more weight because he him- 
 self was of the opposite party. After the lapse of 
 more than thirty years, I feel confident that I can 
 give the exact sense of what was said to me, though 
 not in general the exact words ; the few expressions 
 that I can quote verbatim shall be printed in italics. 
 
 * There are two things in Jowett,' said my friend, 
 
 * besides the beautiful purity of his moral character, 
 which I especially admire : first, his power of seeing 
 through and through a philosophical question, and, 
 secondly, his power of stimulating men to work. In 
 these two qualities he is facile princeps of all men that 
 I ever knew. But I distrust his judgment of men. 
 Some men, when writing for him their weekly
 
 40 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 essays, manage to bring into them some of his 
 opinions expressed in his own peculiar way. These 
 men he overrates ; and, by comparison, he under- 
 rates others. His geese are sometimes swans, and his 
 swans are sometimes great geese.' This candid, and, 
 at the same time, kindly, criticism may serve as a 
 sort of text for the following remarks. 
 
 I will provide myself likewise with another help 
 towards my attempted explanation of Jowett's 
 character and opinions. A friend tells me that, 
 when examined viva voce by Jowett, he sought to 
 embellish one of his answers with some curious 
 information. Jowett stared at him for a few 
 moments, and then chirped : ' That's very true, but 
 I don't see what it has to say to my question.' At 
 the risk of incurring a like charge, the charge of 
 irrelevance, I will seek to illustrate Jowett's modes 
 of thought and feeling by comparing and contrasting 
 the ground taken by him with the ground taken by 
 Pattison the standpoint of a modern Zwingli with 
 the standpoint of a modern Erasmus. 
 
 The most obvious point of contrast between the 
 two men is one which, being an admirer of Pattison, 
 I approach with uneasiness, and, indeed, by a 
 circuitous path. Mr. Mill, in 1864, told me that he 
 did not know Jowett personally, but added with 
 emphasis that he felt the greatest admiration for 
 him. He went on to say that he had come to take 
 a hopeful view of the method of teaching which then 
 prevailed at Oxford ; but that he had regarded the 
 method which formerly prevailed there with strong
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 41 
 
 dislike ; nay, I think he said, with ' abhorrence.' In 
 saying this, he seemed to me to be implying that 
 the improvement was in great measure due to 
 Jowett, partly, that is, to his direct action, and 
 partly to his example. It must be candidly 
 admitted that this praise could not have been 
 bestowed on Pattison, who, his enemies declared, 
 threw his Rectorial duties to the winds. I once 
 spoke on this unpleasant subject to Matthew 
 Arnold, who thereupon reminded me that in Patti- 
 son's youth public opinion expected far less from 
 the Head of a college than it now does. I am only 
 too glad to plead this apology for him, but I must 
 take leave to remark that Pattison's excuse is 
 Jowett's praise. The two men were contemporaries, 
 and if the standard recognised in their youth was 
 such that Pattison did not fall below it, what shall 
 we say of Jowett, who rose so enormously above it ? 
 In justice to Pattison, it should be added that this 
 difference between his standard and Jowett's is con- 
 nected with their conceptions of what a University 
 should be. Jowett held that a University should be, 
 above all things, a place of tuition. On the other 
 hand, Pattison wished to model Oxford after the 
 fashion of a German University to make it a sort of 
 nursery-garden, a pdpiniere, of research. Did not 
 Pattison, both directly and indirectly, help on this 
 ideal of research ? What he achieved in that direc- 
 tion should count for much in his favour ; what he 
 would have achieved, if his life had been prolonged, 
 should count for more. If he had written a work
 
 42 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 likely to endure, it would, at the not over-moral bar 
 of posterity, have atoned for his educational sins 
 not less fully and far more reasonably than ' Go, 
 lovely Eose,' has atoned for the sins of Waller.* 
 But this was not to be. He was to die, as he wrote 
 to a friend, 'leaving " Scaliger" unfinished.' Yet, 
 even as it is, even in spite of those educational sins 
 of his, and in spite also of literary incompleteness, 
 he stands forth conspicuous as the great Eector of 
 Lincoln scarcely less conspicuous, indeed, than 
 Jowett stands forth the great Master of Balliol. 
 
 It need hardly be said that Jowett's supreme 
 success as a teacher was in great part due to the 
 strong personal interest which he felt in his pupils 
 and which he made them feel that he felt. That 
 interest extended even to their games. Of course he 
 would never have allowed the Balliol eleven to seek 
 delights and shun laborious days, nor, indeed, would 
 he have let cricket or any other game interfere with 
 the discipline of the college. Still, he was in a 
 
 * Macaulay, it is true, denies that Waller, by writing a few 
 flowing lines, has given a sufficient bribe to induce posterity to 
 condone the delinquencies of his public life. But, in truth, 
 has not the bribe been effectual ? Would not a Waller of the 
 present day prefer having the picture or autograph of Edmund 
 Waller to having the pictures or autographs of any number of 
 Wallers who lived and died in respectable insignificance ? 
 Nay, further ; Burke, writing to a friend, remarked, with 
 evident satisfaction, that his residence at Beaconsfield ' was 
 formerly the seat of Waller the poet, whose house, or part of 
 it, makes at present the farmhouse within an hundred yards of 
 me.' There were probably not a dozen of Waller's contem- 
 poraries in regard to whom that most high-minded of politicians 
 would have felt a like satisfaction. Truly, the irony of fate, 
 or, as we may say, the irony of fame, is a queer thing.
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 43 
 
 certain sense a philathlete, which was all the more 
 creditable to him because he was himself the very 
 reverse of athletic. Once I walked with him near 
 where some men were practising cricket, and a ball 
 fell near his feet. He tried to throw it back to the 
 bowler, but he threw it with very little force and 
 considerably above an angle of forty-five degrees. I 
 hope he did not hear the ill-repressed titter which 
 arose from the ground, or the exclamation, ' Do look 
 at Jowler shying !' to which some rude man gave 
 utterance. Incidents of this sort make us wonder 
 what Jowett can have been like as a young man. 
 Our first impression is that he must have been a 
 mere recluse. But this impression is erroneous. 
 One who knew him as an undergraduate says that 
 he was generally popular, and was a genial, if not 
 jovial, companion. 
 
 It appears that he was in the quadrangle when he 
 heard of his election to his Fellowship. He at once 
 testified his joy by leaping as high as he could, and 
 he was carried round the quadrangle on the shoulders 
 of his friends. It is well known that, as Master, he 
 subscribed a large sum (I think 3,000) to the 
 purchase of the Balliol cricket ground, which, as he 
 told me, he wished to save from the builder ; and 
 during his last summer, when he could take very 
 little exercise, he would often go and look on at 
 the cricket matches. In matters of this sort Patti- 
 son was the very antipodes of Jowett. If any 
 student whom he thought worth anything devoted 
 himself to games beyond what was absolutely neces-
 
 44 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 sary, he would probably have said that such 
 devotion was, in fact, to misconceive or disregard 
 the true end of recreation was propter ludum 
 ludendi perdere causas. At any rate, he would not 
 have shared the sympathetic glow with which 
 Jowett saw his pupils make the best of the spring- 
 time of life ; nor could he, if he would, have given 
 the same hearty response to the wise man's exhorta- 
 tion, * Kejoice, young man, in thy youth.' 
 
 A letter which I have received from an able pupil 
 of Jowett's contains some suggestive remarks bear- 
 ing on this subject : ' I was always struck with his 
 desire to bring (as Disraeli would have said) the peer 
 and the peasant together. When he sent me his 
 appeal for " Balliol Field," the new college cricket 
 ground, the bringing of all classes of undergraduates 
 together was one of the avowed motives. As a host 
 he used to mingle his guests on this principle, and 
 I do not think it proved successful. The social 
 extremes, so marked under him at Balliol, led to its 
 sets and cliques being strongly marked.' 
 
 But assuredly it was not only or chiefly by en- 
 couraging the college games that Jowett showed the 
 deep interest which he felt in his pupils. His in- 
 terest in them was manifold, and often took unex- 
 pected forms. Sometimes he surprised them by his 
 memory of small particulars concerning them. A 
 trifling instance of this came early under my notice. 
 When I got the Balliol scholarship in 1856, the 
 subject given us for Latin verses was a singular 
 one : ' The Britannia Tubular Bridge.' On this
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 45 
 
 spirit- stirring theme I wrote some rhapsodical non- 
 sense about a Cambrian nymph bewailing the un- 
 sightly desecration of her solitude, and I was foolish 
 enough to expect Jowett to admire what I had written, 
 and I even fished for a compliment from him. He 
 cut me short by exclaiming, with a provoking smile : 
 ' You had one good line : " Atque suum pontinomen 
 posuere Britanni." ' At the time I felt crestfallen, 
 but afterwards I became crest-risen as I wondered 
 how Jowett's well-stored memory had found room 
 for this commonplace hexameter. Another and far 
 more striking instance of Jowett's friendly memory, 
 as I may call it, fell under my observation much later, 
 when, in 1891, I revisited Oxford after an absence 
 of twenty years. On seeing me, Jowett remarked 
 how long it was since I had last paid him a visit, 
 and then said : ' I think it is about twenty years,' 
 and went on to mention some of those whom I had 
 met at his house. A memory of this sort is occa- 
 sionally found among men of leisure, though even 
 among them it seems to be unusual ; but that a busy 
 man like Jowett should accomplish such a feat is as 
 amazing as, to me certainly, it was flattering. The 
 cultivation of this power of recalling minute details 
 about friends was recommended by Lord Chester- 
 field to his son as an important factor in what he 
 considered the art of arts the art to please. 
 
 This personal memory, therefore, of Jowett was at 
 once an effect and a symptom of the devoted interest 
 which he took in his pupils, and may have helped to 
 produce that unrivalled power of stimulating men to
 
 46 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 work which was noted by his friendly critic. Can 
 that devoted interest have been connected with the 
 propensity to confound geese and swans which was 
 ascribed to him by the same critic? For myself, 
 I should have placed more reliance on Pattison's 
 judgment than on Jowett's in determining whether 
 this or that able youth was ever destined to do great 
 things. Pattison was a more dispassionate observer. 
 In reply to a question of mine about a man who had 
 not fulfilled the promise of his early days, he said, 
 not over kindly : ' He coached with me. He didn't 
 want my help, and I was ashamed to take his money. 
 I saw at once that he was a dead first. But he has 
 never made an original remark, or said anything worth 
 listening to.' And he gave me to understand that he 
 had foreseen his pupil's life-long sterility of ideas as 
 soon and as surely as he had foreseen his first class. 
 In fact, an able undergraduate was to Pattison a sort 
 of intellectual silkworm a slow, narrow, unattractive 
 creature which must be tended for what may some 
 day be drawn from it. A silkworm fancier, let me 
 add, in forming an opinion as to what sort of silk- 
 worm will yield the best cocoon, is not likely to have 
 his judgment warped by personal predilection in 
 favour of any individual silkworm or class of silk- 
 worms. This may serve to illustrate the impartial 
 discernment of Pattison. In seeking to find a hidden 
 intellectual treasure he could wield the divining rod 
 more skilfully than Jowett. Also, he was more 
 concentrated on the quest. The professors at 
 Leipsic or Vienna owe some of their success in
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 47 
 
 casting the musical horoscope of their pupils to the 
 fact that they limit their attention to the best pupils, 
 and consider, in regard to each pupil, not whether 
 he will play well enough to give pleasure in a draw- 
 ing-room, but whether he has a chance of rising to 
 high rank as a professional. In like spirit, Pattison 
 desired that some of his pupils should become highly 
 distinguished. Jowett, on the other hand, was more 
 anxious that as many pupils as possible should stand 
 on the second or third plane of culture than that the 
 very few should stand on the first plane. Com- 
 paratively few, however, were the pupils who en- 
 grossed his interest, for, in truth, he was in his way 
 an intellectual aristocrat. As Sydney Smith suc- 
 ceeded in naturalizing the mongrel and ungracious 
 word foolometer, I hope I may express my meaning 
 by saying that Jowett was anything but a foolophilist. 
 I remember being somewhat shocked when Henry 
 Smith told me that Jowett, speaking of a very 
 amiable young man who at first showed small signs 
 of ability, observed : ' That man ought never to have 
 been let into the college.' In justice to the Master, and 
 also in confirmation of what was said of the untrust- 
 worthiness of his judgments upon men, I will 
 mention that he afterwards found that he had been 
 mistaken, and frankly acknowledged his error. Still, 
 the severity of his original remark shows wherein, 
 as an educator, he differed from Dr. Arnold. Dr. 
 Arnold was able to cast a spell over a large number 
 of morally earnest pupils who were willing to resign 
 themselves to his ascendancy, and who were what
 
 48 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 Montaigne would have called instruisables, and what 
 Sydney Smith would have called philomaths. Jowett, 
 on the other hand, could exert an influence only 
 through sympathy ; and between him and unin- 
 tellectual persons (at least of the male sex), sympathy, 
 as a rule, there was none. I heard him say in one 
 of his lectures that Plato sometimes seems to have 
 been not far from the kingdom of heaven ; but that 
 Plato's heaven was not a spiritual, but an intellectual 
 one. This remark of Jowett's might, in some degree, 
 be taken as a parable applicable to himself. But I 
 hasten to add that, though his influence could hardly 
 ever be brought to bear except on a nature with which 
 he was in sympathy, yet, when once called into activity, 
 it penetrated and leavened the disciple's whole being, 
 moral as well as intellectual. 
 
 I have insisted at length on the limitations of 
 Jowett's direct influence, because those limitations 
 serve to explain one special turn which that influence 
 took. He is reproached with having unduly courted 
 the society of the great. Is there any ground for 
 this reproach? Well, let us at once acknowledge 
 that he saw more of a few pupils who united great 
 ability with high rank, than of many other pupils 
 who had the ability without the rank. But those 
 who urge this preference against him as a reproach 
 would do well to add that, if he sought the company 
 of the great men of this world, he did innumerable 
 acts of kindness to the small men of this world ; he 
 helped needy students by gratuitous tuition as well 
 as in more direct ways. It would seem, moreover.
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 49 
 
 that the stress laid on this charge of tuft-hunting is 
 indirectly a compliment to Jowett, for it shows that 
 he is judged by an ideal standard. George Eliot, 
 after referring to the single shortcoming of Rufus 
 Lyon's life, remarks that a specially severe ' penalty 
 will remain for those who sink from the ranks of 
 the heroes into the crowd for whom the heroes fight 
 and die.' In fact, no man who has once stood on 
 the heroic pedestal can step down from it with 
 impunity ; to the sinning saint a double portion of 
 blame is meted out. This may explain what has 
 befallen Jowett. So bright and radiant is the 
 surface which his whole character presents to view, 
 that the smallest speck on it, nay, the merest 
 shadow cast on it from without, at once attracts 
 notice. The great men of this world are generally 
 the best able to help one in tune of need ; they are 
 also able to talk at first hand of truly great men and 
 great actions ; and in their company truly great and 
 wise men will sometimes be met. So manifest is all 
 this, that the courting of such profitable acquaint- 
 ances is generally thought to be, at worst, venial. 
 Of all the men who lived and died many centuries 
 ago, there is perhaps none whom we regard with a 
 feeling so akin to personal friendship as Horace. 
 And yet he frankly proclaims that to have given 
 pleasure to princes is no small credit to a man ; and 
 he adds that he himself, though poor and the son of 
 a freedman, had found favour with generals and 
 statesmen, and indeed that, upborne on mighty 
 wings, he had risen high above the nest in which 
 
 4
 
 50 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 he first saw the light.* We are none of us disposed 
 to judge Horace severely, because he was unflinch- 
 ingly loyal to his republican friends, and also because, 
 if he tuft-hunted, he carried on the embarrassing 
 chase, not through a dark and tortuous alley, but 
 along the highroad and in broad daylight. Still, he 
 pursued the quarry for its own sake ; he had not, 
 and never pretended to have, any ulterior motive of 
 philanthropy. In this respect his case was wholly 
 unlike that of Jowett. If Jowett made friends with 
 men of station, he did so with a very distinct ulterior 
 object with the object of doing them good, and 
 doing others good through them. We have seen 
 that he had no power to act directly on the masses ; 
 but he thought it his duty to act on them somehow, 
 and therefore he acted on them indirectly. He made 
 it his aim to guide the leaders of the people and to 
 train their teachers custodire 'custodes et docere 
 doctores. With this view he brought his strong 
 personality to bear on men of intellectual eminence, 
 and especially on men who combined intellectual 
 with social eminence ; for he held that social 
 eminence is an instrument wherewith, even at the 
 present day, the masses may be moved. The 
 decrepit and dying hand of the old aristocracy still 
 rests on the political lever ; and he probably feared 
 
 * ' Principibus placuisse viris non ultima laus est. 
 ***** 
 
 Me libertino natum patre, et in tenui re 
 Majorca pennas nido extendisse loqueris. 
 ***** 
 
 Me primis urbis belli placuisse domique.'
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 51 
 
 that, as soon as that hand falls from it, then, instead 
 of ceasing to act, the irrepressible lever will be 
 manipulated by demagogues, and the last state of 
 the community will be worse than the first. I say 
 that he probably feared this, because, on the issue in 
 question, which is practically the issue between 
 modern Conservatism and modern Liberalism, he 
 seems to have wavered in judgment ; but, as will 
 appear further on, in his later years he inclined to 
 Conservatism. At present, it is enough to repeat 
 that, if he ever did anything which even malice 
 could misconstrue into tuft -hunting, he did it with a 
 good object. He seems also to have done it with a 
 good effect. One who ought to be well informed 
 tells me that he believes that, when the private 
 Memoirs of our time are brought to light, it will 
 appear that Jowett, through his friends, compassed 
 results in which he is now thought to have had no 
 share; and, in particular, that he may thus have 
 touched secret springs which carried his wishes to 
 dispensers of patronage in high places, without, per- 
 adventure, those dispensers suspecting from what 
 quarters the original impulse came. A Basque 
 proverb reminds us that ' The needle, itself naked, 
 clothes others.' It is possible that Jowett's career 
 was a practical commentary on this. Can the irony 
 of his situation have been such that he, to whom no 
 Government gave, or, probably, dared to give, even a 
 Canonry, may yet have been able with unseen hand 
 to give a lift to the fortunes of others ? 
 I have thus attempted to show that what is some-
 
 52 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 times represented as a defect in Jowett's character 
 may have arisen from his moral earnestness. Can 
 he have drawn any intellectual defect from the same 
 source ? This question was to some extent answered 
 when it was contended above that his opinion of his 
 pupils and friends was warped by his ardent sym- 
 pathy; and that, in respect of such judgments, 
 Pattison, with his impartiality, born of comparative 
 indifference, may have had an advantage over 
 him. Other considerations point to the same con- 
 clusion. In my ' Eecollections of Pattison,' I sug- 
 gested that the Eector's moral apathy may have 
 been partly due to his resolution to see things 
 exactly as they are. One passage, illustrative of 
 my argument, I will venture to quote : 
 
 ' When a man labours to avert or to postpone a change which 
 he regards as hurtful or premature, it is hardly possible for 
 him to avoid exaggerating the evils of that change, and thus 
 becoming an alarmist. When another or the same man seeks 
 to evolve the energy needful for carrying out some great reform 
 or establishing a scientific truth, it is perhaps impossible for 
 him to avoid greatly exaggerating the importance of his under- 
 aking, and thus becoming a strong optimist.' 
 
 The view here expressed marks the difference 
 between the sage's and the saint's way of looking 
 at things. The sage may be said to see the moral 
 world represented in an ordinary map, hi which the 
 mountains and valleys are merely indicated. The 
 saint, on the other hand, has before him a relief-map, 
 in which the mountains and valleys the ups and 
 downs, that is, of human life and of human conduct 
 are represented so that they can be felt, and are
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 53 
 
 represented also on a disproportionate scale. Vol- 
 taire, in one of his romances, tells how a gigantic 
 native of Sirius chanced to stray on to our earth and 
 with difficulty descried the puny race of men, whose 
 tiny voices he managed to hear by means of an ear- 
 trumpet, made of the paring of one of his own nails, 
 and whose language he somehow understood. He 
 deigned to interrogate one of those miserable beings, 
 as he called them, whom God in His inscrutable 
 wisdom had made so near to nothingness. In reply 
 to his questions, one of the pigmies explained that it 
 was for his own sake and that of his fellow-pigmies 
 that the universe and all that therein is, including 
 the people of Sirius, had been called into being. 
 Whereupon the giant laughed so immoderately that 
 the priggish little company who were assembled on 
 his hand fell off and disappeared in the recesses of 
 his clothes.* Has Voltaire, in concocting this tale, 
 transgressed the bounds of legitimate caricature? 
 Is it not the case that all saints, unconsciously or 
 half unconsciously, conceive human weal to be the 
 pivot round which all things turn? A hard blow 
 was dealt to the old order of beliefs when our little 
 planet was dislodged from the centre of the universe ; 
 and it is hardly too much to affirm that every saint, 
 nay, every ardent moralist, is a would-be disciple of 
 
 * In a like spirit Renan has more than once compared man- 
 kind to an ants' nest. The following passage is characteristic : 
 ' Soyons tranquilles : si nous sommes de ceux qui se tronipent, 
 qui travaillent a rebrousse-poil de la volonte 1 supreme, cela n'a 
 pas grande consequence. L'humanite est une des innombrables 
 founnilieres ou se fait dans 1'espace I'exp^rience de la raison ; 
 si nous manquons notre partie, d'autres la gagneront.'
 
 54 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 Ptolemy.* Now, not only was Jowett an ardent 
 moralist : he was a devoted teacher of the young. 
 And, like other teachers of the young, he had to 
 keep his eye fixed on those small faults to which the 
 young are specially liable, and which, if not rooted 
 out, threaten to become serious. Persons who 
 through long years dwell on those small faults are 
 in danger of becoming living illustrations of the 
 truth of that weighty and suggestive saying of 
 Goethe, that the continuous use of the microscope 
 interferes with the normal use of the eye. They 
 are apt to become morally penny -wise, if not 
 farthing- wise. Thus, to the Epicurean philosopher 
 who regards the Stoical moralist as transforming 
 molehills into real hills, the pedagogue must seem 
 to exalt them into mountains of the Himalayan 
 range. Jowett was far too much of a philosopher 
 to be a pedagogue of this sort. But herein lay his 
 weakness as well as his strength. He tried to be a 
 philosopher, moralist, and preceptor all at once. 
 As a philosopher, he looked at the world from the 
 outside ; and, so looking, he dimly perceived or 
 (what is much the same thing) he was conscious of 
 trying not to perceive that all is vanity. As a 
 moralist, he looked at the world from the inside, and 
 almost convinced himself that all is an intense 
 
 * Some confirmation of this view is contained in the in- 
 genious work which Dr. Whewell oddly entitled ' The Plurality 
 of Worlds.' In seeking to batter down the belief in that 
 plurality, the author was evidently, nay, avowedly, anxious to 
 show that man is the head of the universe, and the climax of 
 the creation of God.
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 55 
 
 reality. I hope it is not an over-strained meta- 
 phor to add that, if he looked at the world with 
 one eye, as it were, from the outside, and with 
 the other eye from the inside, the result could 
 hardly fail to be an occasional obliquity of mental 
 vision. 
 
 After bringing this somewhat paradoxical charge 
 against Jowett, the least I can do is to try to sub- 
 stantiate it at once. The means of substantiating it 
 would seem to be afforded by his unfriendly attitude 
 towards Evolution. The future fame of Darwin, 
 indeed, he foresaw at a time when the Newton of 
 biology was thought ridiculous, or worse, by the 
 religious world.* I had heard the concluding speech 
 which Cockburn, as Attorney-General, made at the 
 trial of William Palmer for poisoning. The speech 
 so impressed me that, with youthful impetuosity, I 
 thought that so great an orator could do anything ; 
 and I naively expressed regret to Jowett (in or about 
 1860) that Cockburn had not devoted himself to 
 science ; would he not, as a lawyer, leave behind 
 him a posthumous reputation less enduring than 
 Darwin's ? ' A great deal less/ replied Jowett ; 
 ' but you cannot expect a man, in choosing his line 
 of success hi life, to think only of his reputation 
 after death.' The remark was obvious enough ; but 
 I quote it partly because, seasoned as it was with his 
 
 * An example of this may be worth mentioning. A guest of 
 my father's reminded me in his presence that I had promised 
 
 to lend her the ' Origin of Species.' ' If I were Lady ,' he 
 
 said, ' I should first borrow it and then burn it. It seems to 
 me so unscriptural.'
 
 56 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 peculiar mode of utterance, it had a slight flavour of 
 the worldly wisdom which was sometimes discernible 
 in what he said to his pupils, and partly because it 
 showed that, when first the ' Origin of Species ' ap- 
 peared, he foresaw its great vogue. But his belief 
 in Evolution did not grow as the belief of others 
 in it grew. Perhaps the ' Descent of Man ' gave 
 him a shock. Shortly after that volume appeared 
 I talked to him about Evolution. He at once ad- 
 mitted that he believed the origin of all species to 
 have been due to natural causes. But in regard to 
 Darwinism he added : ' I own that I feel rebellious. 
 How did the monkeys get rid of their hairs? It 
 would be absurd to suppose that they pulled them 
 out one by one.'* Whether, or how far, Jowett was 
 serious when he talked thus extravagantly, I no 
 more know than I know whether the Platonic 
 Socrates was serious when he talked no less ex- 
 travagantly about the properties of the perfect 
 number, or whether Plato's conscience was at ease 
 when he ascribed to his revered master opinions 
 which, he well knew, were not his master's, but his 
 own. But, at all events, Jowett was serious when, in 
 1889, he wrote me the letter from which I give the 
 
 * Since writing the above, I have learnt that Jowett told 
 Dean Fremantle that he considered the ' Origin of Species ' one 
 of the greatest and most far-reaching books that had appeared 
 in this century ; but that, when the ' Descent of Man ' came 
 out, he said : ' I don't believe a word of it,' without giving any 
 reason for the opinion thus confidently expressed. It sounds 
 as if he had taken for a motto : ' Sic volo, sic credo.' How 
 strange that such a man should have thought to oppose his 
 non possumus or non volumus to the plain evidence of science !
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 57 
 
 following strange extract. I omit the name of the 
 distinguished evolutionist to whom he refers : 
 
 ' I have read some part of 's writings, and do not think 
 
 much of them. That which I read seemed to me only to say 
 that the brain, as seen through the microscope, is infinitely 
 complex ; and the mind, of which we are conscious, is also 
 infinite in complexity. This is not much to tell us. I think that 
 physiologists, instead of boasting about Darwinism, which pre- 
 tends so much and adds so little to our knowledge, have reason 
 to feel rather humiliated at the faint light which they are able 
 to throw on the relation of mind and body ; nothing to explain 
 the memory, which seems most allied to sense, nothing to assist 
 in regulating the passions.' 
 
 In reply, I suggested to him that the evolutionist in 
 question probably meant to point out how completely 
 that complex thing the mind seems dependent on 
 that complex thing the brain ; if part of the brain is 
 removed, the mind is liable to be impaired in a more 
 or less ascertained way. Whence follows the obvious 
 question : How is it possible that consciousness can 
 survive the decomposition of the brain ? But of 
 this difficulty, which I was and am most anxious to 
 see removed, he never at any time offered a solution. 
 Pattison, on the other hand, accepted Evolution, 
 and mastered its principles as completely as an un- 
 scientific man can hope to master them. Probably 
 he regarded Evolution as a convenient stone to throw 
 at his orthodox antagonists and would-be persecutors. 
 I had almost said that he would have liked to throw 
 the stone at Stoical moralists. At any rate, I feel 
 convinced that it was as a Stoical moralist that 
 Jowett was so repelled by Darwinism. How is this
 
 58 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 repulsion to be explained ? Was it merely that to 
 the ear of the Stoical moralist, as well as to that of 
 the devout Christian, the evolutionary beatitude, 
 ' Blessed are the strong, for they shall prey on the 
 weak,' rings with a jarring note ? Probably this 
 was one cause of Jowett's repulsion ; but it was not, 
 I think, the only cause. The word ' religion ' was 
 meant to include the higher morality as well as 
 theology when I said not long ago that religion 
 widens, while science narrows, the gulf between man 
 and brute. The theological aspect of this question 
 has already been touched on, for it has been con- 
 tended that the view of the Divine goodness, on 
 which alone can rest the 'trust that good will be 
 the final goal of ill' to each individual man, will 
 equally support the trust that good will be the final 
 goal of ill to each individual moth or worm ; and it 
 has been mentioned that Jowett held, as most Theists 
 would doubtless hold, this pressing home of logic to 
 be extravagant. To the higher morality a somewhat 
 similar mode of reasoning may be applied. The 
 higher morality enjoins us to feel tender compassion 
 for human suffering, and burning indignation against 
 human wrong. But our sympathy is a limited 
 quantity ; and in order to be spread over all sentient 
 beings it has to be beaten out very thin. The pity 
 which a philanthropic cab-taker on a wet day feels 
 for the drenched cabman is at once weakened if 
 diluted with the thought of the lifelong toil and the 
 frequent whippings of the cab-horse. And thus, if, 
 with the melancholy Jaques, one for a moment
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 59 
 
 regards the deer as the lawful owners of their native 
 forests, or if, like a modern Xenophanes, one tries 
 to look on morality and religion from the point of 
 view of the lower animals, human progress will seem 
 to one a sorry achievement. It will appear that 
 philanthropists and reformers have indirectly stimu- 
 lated the increase of population, and have thus 
 riveted the chains on the necks of the lower animals ; 
 that more and more species that cannot, either living 
 or dead, minister to man's needs, are exterminated 
 as his rivals for food ; and that, to speak roughly, 
 we are nearing the point at which he will feel with 
 regard to his mute fellow-creatures that 
 
 1 They cannot live but to his shame, unless 
 It be to do him service.' 
 
 So, again, indignation at the wrongs inflicted by 
 man on man tends to be lessened if weighed in the 
 balance with the habitual treatment of the brutes by 
 man and by each other. Compared with their treat- 
 ment of each other, the worst offences of man come 
 to be considered as a sort of animal survival, as 
 unsightly traces of the past priscte vestigia fraudis 
 which development has not been able wholly to 
 obliterate. Thus, to put an extreme case, the in- 
 gratitude of Joash in slaying the son of Jehoiada 
 will appear, not perhaps less horrible, but certainly 
 less unnatural, if viewed side by side with the 
 undutiful requital which, through an instinct im- 
 planted by Nature herself, the young cuckoo accords 
 to the hospitality of its foster-parents. Hence, to a 
 cynical naturalist human ingratitude might appear
 
 60 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 a regrettable but instructive example of atavism. 
 Such a reversion to a primitive type (like the 
 admonitory excrescence which, as if expressly de- 
 signed to be a memento originis, so often plants itself 
 on the human ear) may serve as proof that our 
 paltry tenement of clay and nerves has not been 
 adequately swept and garnished by natural selection 
 not wholly cleared of the leavings of our pre- 
 human ancestors.* 
 
 Such are the stumbling-blocks with which the 
 contemplation of the mutual relations of the lower 
 animals may impede the pilgrim's progress towards 
 an ethical paradise. I have called attention to those 
 stumbling-blocks because they are not obvious. 
 More obvious by far, but at the same time more 
 important, are the difficulties connected with the 
 treatment of the lower animals by man. Those 
 difficulties are now exercising, and are likely more 
 and more to exercise, an increasingly disturbing 
 influence on ethical speculation ; and, what is more 
 to the point, I can record at first hand their disturb- 
 ing influence on Jowett. A Greek sage has re- 
 marked that a man can say his say once, but not 
 twice (819 Se OVK eVSexerai). So I will venture, 
 instead of recasting, to quote with additions some 
 
 * The hero of ' Maud,' after resolving to leave the world to 
 its own devices, applies the queer goings on of the lower 
 animals as a salve to his uneasy conscience : 
 
 ' For Nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal ; 
 The mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow spear'd by 
 
 the shrike, 
 And the whole little world where I sit is a world of plunder 
 
 and prey.'
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 61 
 
 sentences of my own which appeared in former 
 articles, and which substantially represent the argu- 
 ment which I stated both to Pattison and to Jowett. 
 In justice to myself, I should explain that I laid it 
 before those distinguished men in no captious spirit, 
 but because in my youth I was seriously troubled by 
 Mill's astounding proposition that morality is bound 
 to seek the greatest happiness of the greatest number 
 of sentient beings. My contention was and is as 
 follows : 
 
 ' Mill insists that the Utilitarian principle should be applied 
 not to man only, but to the entire sentient universe ; and cer- 
 tainly it is less easy to show that the principle ought not to be 
 so extended than that, if so extended, it might involve a 
 reductio ad euthanasiam. May it not be argued that, from 
 the philozoic point of view, the existence of the human race is 
 altogether a mishap ?* Does the unconstitutional monarchy 
 of man minister to "the greatest happiness of the greatest 
 number " of sentient beings, including earwigs and animalcules 
 including, let me add, hunted foxes, skinned eels, and 
 vivisected guinea-pigs? We rightly condemn slavery, and 
 we rightly think vegetarianism ridiculous ; but a pitiless logician 
 
 * An ingenious poet has represented the squinancywort as 
 lamenting that, after she had flourished for ages in peace, her 
 otium cum dignitate was torn from her by the human op- 
 pressor. She is now liable to be plucked, and, worse still, she 
 is called by a name which she regards as an insult 1 She 
 concludes in a more cheerful tone : 
 
 1 Yet there is hope : 
 I have seen 
 
 Many changes since life began ; 
 Web-footed beasts have been 
 (Dear beasts !) and gone, 
 Being part of some wider plan : 
 Perhaps in His infinite mercy God will remove this Man !'
 
 62 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 might ask : Why ia it worse to domesticate our thousandth 
 cousin than to kill and eat our millionth ? The argument, 
 commonly employed by uncompromising utilitarians, that, as 
 a matter of fact, we should never dream of keeping sheep and 
 oxen alive except for our own ends, is practically identical 
 with the argument which used to be employed in defence of 
 slavery. If we loved all sentient beings as ourselves, should 
 we not wish all alike to partake of our gratuitous beneficence ? 
 Moreover, the argument in question cannot be applied to the 
 case of wild sentient beings, great or small. Mill's view of 
 utilitarianism is hardly reconcilable with the use of insecticide 
 powder. In brief, might not a cynic, weighing human joys 
 and sorrows in the balance against the joys and sorrows of the 
 entire animal kingdom, satirize our morality as a mere dgoisme 
 d, I'Jiumanite? * 
 
 In my ' Kecollections of Pattison ' I have men- 
 tioned that, when confronted with arguments of this 
 sort, the Eector took refuge in good-humoured 
 scepticism. He even relished the arguments, for 
 they seemed to him to afford one among many proofs 
 that the principle of rigid Stoicism may be pressed 
 to absurd conclusions, and that the logic of martyr- 
 dom has a flaw in it. He doubtless thought that 
 high ethical ideals have, for practical purposes, a 
 positive and definite value, but that, when pressed 
 by analysis, they disappear. Very different was the 
 view taken by Jowett. On my asking him whether 
 Mill's view, as expounded by me, did not seem 
 logical, he answered, with some warmth, that it 
 seemed to him very irrational. His excited voice 
 and manner showed that the whole subject was dis- 
 
 * See ' Stones of Stumbling ' (W. Eice), pp. 164-167, and 
 ' Safe Studies ' (W. Eice), pp. 231, 232.
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 68 
 
 tasteful to him. The region was evidently one 
 which lay outside the range of his ordinary mental 
 processes and appliances ; and he was as bewildered 
 as an ant shorn of its antennae. To me, he showed 
 the greatest sympathy and concern the more so, 
 perhaps, because he seemed to be afraid that I was 
 taking leave of my senses. He hinted at a fear that 
 I might turn vegetarian. Then, on my stating my 
 views more clearly, he exclaimed, with evident relief : 
 * Oh ! I understand it now it merely is that you 
 are under the dominion of logic.' Of course, Jowett 
 was too righteous a man not to be merciful to beasts. 
 A quaint example of his tenderness to them has been 
 mentioned to me by a kinswoman of Pattison. The 
 Eector thinking, perhaps, with Charles I., that 
 cats and parliaments grow curst with age had 
 doomed a mother cat, which had long been domesti- 
 cated in his house, to be supplanted by one of her 
 daughters. But the decree was communicated to 
 Jowett, who seems to have thought that the principle 
 of the Fifth Commandment should govern our deal- 
 ings even with cats. Might not so seductive a 
 maxim as juniores priores spread its infection from 
 feline to human relations ? At the Master's entreaty 
 the claims of age and intimacy were preferred to the 
 playful attractiveness of youth. 
 
 The warning not to fall under the dominion of 
 logic was one frequently given by Jowett to his 
 pupils. What did he exactly mean by the phrase, 
 and under what circumstances did he wish them, as 
 it were, to spike logic ? Probably he never formu-
 
 64 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 lated a distinct answer to such questions ; but his 
 general view is tolerably clear. Professor Henry 
 Smith, who, outside the domain of physical science, 
 cherished the same voluntary vagueness* that 
 characterized Jowett, once told me that Guizot, after 
 saying that St. Augustine forbore to press his 
 principles to their conclusions, praised this forbear- 
 ance, and Smith praised Guizot for praising it.t 
 I have not verified the passage in St. Augustine, 
 but I should doubt whether his spiking of logic was 
 of the same kind as Jowett's. The saint probably 
 meant to warn human reason to stick to its own 
 province, and not to trespass on the kingdom of God. 
 Jowett had, sometimes at any rate, an idea quite 
 different from this. At such times his idea probably 
 was that most ethical assumptions are not strictly 
 correct, and that, therefore, the more logically we 
 reason from these assumptions, the more certainly 
 will the initial error (like a stitch dropped in knitting) 
 vitiate the whole process. Such a view necessarily 
 implies something of what the French call scepticisms 
 a quality which consists rather in ethical and 
 philosophical than religious scepticism, and which, 
 
 * Freeman, who took an extreme line with regard to the 
 Bulgarian atrocities, appears to have thought Henry Smith 
 somewhat lukewarm on this subject, and, when asked to sup- 
 port him in his election for Parliament, he replied that Smith 
 ought rather to sit in the Turkish Parliament as member for 
 Laodicsea. 
 
 f Guizot's words are curious. Speaking of the Pelagian 
 controversy, he says : ' La superiorite d'esprit de St. Augustin 
 le sauva en cette occasion des erreurs ou 1'eut precipite la 
 logique, et il fut inconsequent precisement a cause de sa haute
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 65 
 
 moreover, serious French writers do not disavow. 
 For example, even so earnest a moralist as Scherer 
 ascribes this sort of scepticism to his friend Sainte- 
 Beuve, and also, by implication, to himself. Thus, 
 when he says, ' La vie exige des managements, 
 j'allais dire des ruses,' his meaning must be inter- 
 preted by the light of the following sceptical utter- 
 ance of his : ' L'humoriste n'en veut pas autrement 
 a la nature humaine de repondre si peu a un id6al 
 arbitraire peut-etre apres tout.' 
 
 Jowett's defiance of logic is hi part due to a similar 
 scepticism. But the word scepticism has an evil 
 sound to English ears, and Jowett shared in the 
 national repugnance to it. More than thirty years 
 ago an article appeared in the Saturday Review, 
 bitterly condemning the bigots who refused to in- 
 crease his salary, but containing some such sentence 
 as, ' Mr. Jowett seems to us to revel hi doubt and 
 scepticism.' Jowett spoke to me about the article, 
 and, accustomed as I was to hear him described as 
 the most sceptical of men, I was surprised to find 
 how much annoyed he was by the charge being 
 brought against him. To Pattison, on the other 
 hand, such a charge would have caused no uneasi- 
 ness whatever. It is probable, therefore, that in 
 this respect the standpoints of the two men were less 
 far asunder in reality than in appearance. Pattison 
 was consciously not very unlike what Jowett was 
 half consciously. Each of them dealt summarily 
 with inconvenient ethical knots, while Jowett tried 
 to persuade himself that he was untying them. 
 
 5
 
 66 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 I am reminded of a famous controversy in Queen 
 Anne's reign, wherein Addison and Steele took up 
 opposite sides. 'It seems to us,' says Macaulay, 
 ' that the premises of both the controversialists were 
 unsound, that, on those premises, Addison reasoned 
 well and Steele ill, and that consequently Addison 
 brought out a false conclusion, while Steele blundered 
 on the truth.' If, on the principle here indicated, 
 ethical disputants could roughly be divided into 
 Addisons and Steeles, Jowett's sympathy would have 
 been on the side of the Steeles. Pattison's sym- 
 pathy would have been on the side neither of the 
 Addisons nor of the Steeles. He would have wished 
 philosophers to follow the rule which has been laid 
 down by Pascal, and which is especially noteworthy 
 as coming from that anti-Jesuitical moralist : ' II 
 faut avoir une pensee de derriere et juger de tout 
 par la, en parlant cependant comme le peuple.' 
 
 It was, indeed, unfortunate for Jowett that his 
 sallies against logic often reached the ears of persons 
 who had no notion of the source whence his severity 
 had arisen. He was, in reality, combating that 
 grim spectre of narrow logic whose haunt is in the 
 abode of pedants. But to those pedants themselves, 
 and to all whose eyes were holden that they could 
 not see the ungainly apparition, the exorcist's gaze 
 must have seemed idly bent on the air, 
 
 ' And his vain words malicious mockery.' 
 
 Such vain words were attributed to him when he 
 was reported to have said that he wished to see ' a 
 desolating scepticism spread over the logic schools.'
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 67 
 
 And the report had at least verisimilitude, as some 
 of his authentic sayings will show. Dean Fremantle 
 tells me that, the question being discussed whether 
 logic is a science or an art, he heard Jowett say : ' It 
 is neither a science nor an art, but a dodge.' I 
 acquired the knack, when I had to read essays to 
 Jowett, of bringing into them now and then a 
 reference to his favourite theories. Accordingly, in 
 an essay on the province of logic, I said that the use 
 of logic is ' less for the discovery of truth than for 
 the detection of error, and less for the detection of 
 error than for its exposure '; and from Jowett's 
 strong expression of approval I saw that I had hit 
 off his view exactly. 
 
 He once spoke to me about Buckle's assertion 
 that the English mind is, in the main, inductive, 
 and the German mind deductive. He said, on the 
 authority of a scientific friend, that this statement 
 is absurd ; if Buckle had been accustomed to per- 
 form scientific experiments, he would have known 
 that the inductive and deductive processes are com- 
 monly combined. To me this reasoning seems in- 
 conclusive. If induction and deduction are mutually 
 dependent, so also are thought and language. And 
 yet an able thinker is often a clumsy and obscure 
 writer, and a clear and attractive writer is often a 
 shallow thinker. And, in like manner, though induc- 
 tion and deduction are commonly intertwined, this 
 is no reason why one mind, and, indeed, one science, 
 should not be in the main inductive, and another 
 mind and another science in the main deductive.
 
 68 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 While praising Mill's ' Logic,' he told me that he 
 wished that the author had broken off completely 
 from formal logic. He seems to have cared less for 
 Mill's later works. The peculiarities of some of 
 those works he explained as most of us explain them. 
 Most of us have long since come to the conclusion 
 that to Mill might be applied the quaint remark 
 which Herodotus made about Candaules of Lydia : 
 he was madly ' in love with his own wife ' (rjpda-drj 
 7779 ecovrov vvvaucos). Yet, however strongly Jowett 
 may have shared this judgment and regretted the 
 philosopher's uxoriousness, he yet regarded with 
 grave disquietude the intellectual revolution which 
 occurred some thirty years ago, the revolution by 
 which Mill was dethroned at Oxford, and Hegel the 
 German reigned in his stead.* Concerning Jowett's 
 peculiar attitude towards German thought in general, 
 and Hegelianism in particular, a few words must 
 suffice. 
 
 When I went up to Oxford, it was reported that a 
 former Rector of Lincoln had expressed a wish, in 
 a University sermon, that ' German theology and 
 German literature were at the bottom of the German 
 Ocean.' It can hardly be doubted that, if the good 
 
 * A singular criticism on Mill's ' Logic ' was made in my 
 hearing by the late Rev. W. E. Jelf. That famous Censor of 
 Christ Church complained that Mill, in his classification of 
 modes of existence, did not refer to the change wrought in 
 infants by Baptism. Mr. Jelf might plausibly and consistently 
 have maintained that Baptism introduces the most important of 
 all factors into human life. And yet I suspect that Jowett 
 would have regarded him as ' under the dominion of logic,' 
 with a vengeance 1 So hard it is for the two hostile parties to 
 find any common ground.
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 69 
 
 Rector's real wish (or that of his spiritual descendants) 
 could have taken effect, Jowett's writings, if not 
 their author, would have been included in the 
 general submersion. For, in my Oxford days, 
 Jowett was considered as the representative of 
 German heresy at Oxford. I certainly entertained 
 this view ; and especially I should have thought 
 that the voluntary vagueness of which I have spoken 
 would have placed him in sympathy with Hegel.* 
 What he said to me about Hegel confirmed me in 
 this opinion. At the time of our conversation my 
 own knowledge on the subject was chiefly derived 
 from the lines (written by Mansel) which satirize 
 Germany as t 
 
 ' The land which produced one Kant with a K 
 And many Cants with a C ; 
 Where Hegel taught to his profit and fame 
 That something and nothing are one and the same, 
 The absolute difference never a jot being 
 'Twixt having and not having, being and not being ; 
 But wisely declined to extend his notion 
 To the finite relations of thalers and groschen.' 
 
 Jowett tried to explain to me what amount of truth 
 is contained in this satire. He made me under- 
 
 * It has always seemed to me a happy thought of a recent 
 romancist, when introducing a character which was clearly 
 meant for Jowett, to represent that character as wishing that 
 an obscure utterance ascribed to our Lord by both the Clements 
 had made its way into the canon of Scripture. The passage 
 referred to is as follows : ' The Lord, being asked when His 
 kingdom should come, said: "When two shall be one, and 
 that which is without as that which is within, and the male 
 with the female neither male nor female." ' Would not this 
 passage have obtained admission if there had been a Gospel 
 according to Jowett ?
 
 70 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 stand what Hegel did not mean. Borrowing, I think, 
 Hegel's own illustration, he said that Hegel did not 
 mean that having a horse is the same thing as not 
 having a horse. But what Hegel actually did mean 
 Jowett himself perhaps understood, but certainly did 
 not make me understand. The point, however, is, 
 that he seemed to speak with sympathy of Hegel. 
 Why, then, was he afterwards averse to Hegelianism ? 
 To this question I reply with diffidence. They say 
 at Oxford that both Jowett and T. H. Green plunged 
 into the whirlpool of German metaphysics, that 
 Green was permanently engulfed, but that Jowett 
 at last made his escape. I therefore conjecture 
 that, if Jowett seemed to me in some sort to cling 
 to Hegel, the reason may have been that at that 
 time he had not reached terra firma. Likewise, when 
 I was at Oxford, the Newmanite movement had 
 not quite passed away. Jowett probably regarded 
 Hegelianism as a less evil than Newmanism indeed, 
 as an antidote to Newmanism. He also probably 
 regarded it as a less evil than Positivism, and he 
 knew that towards Positivism I myself was inclined. 
 I think it was in the conversation just referred to 
 that I praised Comte's hierarchy of the sciences ; 
 whereto he rejoined that Hegel had also done good 
 service to science. I doubt, however, whether he 
 really rated Hegel more highly than Comte. A 
 friend writes to me : ' Once when I came back from 
 a holiday and told him [Jowett] I had been reading 
 Hegel, he said, "It's a good thing to have read 
 Hegel, but now that you've read him, I advise you
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 71 
 
 to forget him again." ' In fact, he had no great liking 
 for science, or, indeed, any toleration of the truly 
 catholic I had almost spelt the word with a capital 
 letter claims which science has begun to put 
 forward. He seemed to think that the men of 
 science are now as likely to take too much upon 
 them as the sons of Levi or their modern counter- 
 parts ever were. ' Depend upon it,' he once said, 
 ' scientific men have prejudices of their own quite as 
 much as other people.' One cause of his strong 
 opposition to the Positivists may have been the way 
 in which they make science their prop. Another 
 cause may have been his dissent from them as to 
 the primitive form of religion. In an essay that I 
 read to him, I referred to the controversy as to 
 whether the first men ' were cannibals and bar- 
 barians, or whether they lived in a golden age of 
 primaeval simplicity.' 'I don't believe that either 
 view is right,' interrupted Jowett. In another essay 
 I spoke of fetichism as the earliest form of religion. 
 Jowett cut me short by declaring that comparative 
 philology made against that view. Surely he must 
 afterwards have learnt that the point of time to 
 which comparative philology reaches back is far 
 later than the beginning of human society, while, on 
 the other hand, the Stone Age bears emphatic testi- 
 mony to the ascent of man. Altogether, it is not 
 easy to see why, as he liked Mill's logic, he so 
 disliked Positivism.* Perhaps, however, he let the 
 
 * I will remark in passing that, on my asking him what he 
 thought of the discussion between Mill and Hansel as to the
 
 72 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 cat out of the bag when he once said to me, 
 * Positivism seems to me to lead to Atheism.' 
 Obviously, a philosopher, pure and simple, would 
 have concluded that, if Comte's principles are sound, 
 and if they lead to Atheism, then So much the worse 
 for Theism ! In other words, when Jowett spoke as 
 he did, the philosopher in him was overmastered 
 by the divine, or (let us say) by the moralist. 
 
 But whatever may have been Jowett's dislike of 
 the Positive philosophy, no Positivist could have 
 surpassed him in the scorn with which he sometimes 
 spoke of Metaphysics. He quoted to me Voltaire's 
 definition of Metaphysics as ' beaucoup de grand 
 noms qu'on ne peut pas expliquer pour ce qu'on ne 
 comprend pas,' a definition which cannot but recall 
 the praise which its author bestowed on Zadig : ' II 
 savait de la metaphysique ce qu'on a su pendant 
 tous les ages c'est a dire, fort peu de chose.' 
 Meeting me in the street after one of Mansel's 
 Bampton Lectures, he turned upon me and said: 
 'How much have you learnt about the uncondi- 
 tional?' and passed on, laughing, without waiting 
 for a reply. But the quaintest thing that he said 
 was to a pupil who had been reading him an essay 
 with a strong metaphysical flavour : ' It is remark- 
 able what a fascination metaphysics seems to possess 
 for the human mind. It is like falling in love. But 
 
 origin of the peculiar certainty which we ascribe to mathe- 
 matical truths, he answered (not very relevantly) : ' Isn't there 
 another way of explaining the origin of our belief in mathe- 
 matical truths ? We believed them in the first instance be- 
 cause we were taught them /'
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 73 
 
 you get over it after a time.'* Was it not Bishop 
 Berkeley, himself our greatest metaphysician, who 
 said of metaphysicians in general that they first 
 kick up the dust and then complain that they cannot 
 see? So thoroughly did Jowett concur with this 
 weighty and unexpected admission, that he some- 
 times spoke slightingly even of Berkeley himself. 
 
 From metaphysics proper, the science of Abso- 
 lute Being, I pass on to psychology, which is often 
 confounded with metaphysics, but which rests on 
 far surer foundations. Can Jowett hi any sense be 
 called a psychologist ?t 
 
 We must remember that psychology is now closely 
 connected with physiology; and that of the pro- 
 cesses of physiology Jowett knew little or nothing ; 
 nay, even of the results of physiology and of its 
 general aspects he knew far less than is known by 
 many unscientific students. He, therefore, could 
 not deal with psychology through the physiological 
 method. But psychology has another method the 
 interrogation of consciousness. Buckle has argued 
 (not perhaps very conclusively) that such interroga- 
 tion has little value, for an object cannot be scienti- 
 fically examined unless it remains passive ; but the 
 act of examination implies activity ; therefore con- 
 
 * This reminds me of what Jowett is reported to have said 
 in a sermon : ' The choice of a profession is like the choice of 
 a wife. It does not so much matter what you choose, so long 
 as you stick to it.' 
 
 f When I wrote this I did not know that the last edition of 
 Jowett's ' Plato ' contains an essay on psychology. I have 
 thought it better to leave this paragraph in its original form, as 
 containing my independent impression.
 
 74 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 sciousness cannot properly examine itself ; for how 
 can it at the same moment be active as examiner 
 and passive as examinee ? I introduced this argu- 
 ment into an essay which I read to Jowett ; and he, 
 though scrupulously vigilant to point out every- 
 thing that needed correction, left this statement 
 unchallenged. Without pretending to attach any 
 importance to this silence of his, I may say con- 
 fidently that he took mental philosophy not very 
 seriously in my younger days, and at the close of 
 his life not seriously at all. And yet he was a 
 student of philosophy. He thought at one time of 
 writing a book on the early Greek philosophers. 
 Talking to me on the subject, he said that some of 
 those philosophers seemed to him ' not very inter- 
 esting.' But he greatly admired Heraclitus, some 
 of whose sayings certainly have a Hegelian flavour. 
 Of Socrates and Plato he was, we all know, a wor- 
 shipper. And, in a word, the maintenance of Greek 
 philosophy in the position which it now holds in the 
 schools of Oxford seemed to him essential to a high 
 standard of University education. ' I don't often 
 agree with Dr. Pusey,' he once said, 'but I agree 
 with him in thinking that University training should 
 be only in the best books. It is curious to compare 
 this with the advice which he gave to Mr. (after- 
 wards Lord) Bowen when the latter was going to the 
 Bar : ' Eead nothing but good books, and never any- 
 thing that you don't like.' He knew that Bowen's 
 professional duties would limit his time for desultory 
 reading. It was, moreover, certain that Bowen
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 75 
 
 would like only good books, while at the same thne 
 he, with his strong individuality, might have pecu- 
 liar tastes ; there were likely to be good books which 
 he would not care for. I may illustrate this by 
 mentioning that I heard Bowen say many years 
 ago, ' I like " Transformation " better than all the 
 "Adam Bedes" that come out in one's life. There 
 is so much Idealism in it.' Doubtless he lived to 
 take a juster view of George Eliot ; but I think the 
 remark worth quoting because the distinguishing 
 note of Jowett and his disciples is thought to have 
 been, not Idealism, but Scepticism. Plato and 
 Aristotle he would clearly have included among the 
 best books ; and he was no less clearly desirous to 
 guard the young against specializing their studies as 
 early as studies are specialized in Germany to 
 guard them against taking, with beardless im- 
 petuosity, a vow of self-dedication to Accadian 
 archaeology or the examination of microbes! He 
 was thus drawn into conflict with Brodie, who, as 
 professor of chemistry, naturally wished to place 
 men who had a turn for physical science under a 
 scientific drill as soon as possible. But why did 
 Jowett oppose himself to this wish ? If, on his own 
 showing, the study of metaphysics is unproductive, 
 while that of science is so highly productive, why 
 did he wish men to forsake the productive for the 
 unproductive domain ? Why should anyone 
 
 ' on this fair mountain leave to feed, 
 And batten on this moor V 
 
 To answer this question is not easy. Jowett
 
 76 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 regarded as superficial the view expressed in 
 Macaulay's ' Essay on Bacon,' the view that Philo- 
 sophy should be thrust aside to make way for 
 Science. Jowett probably thought that Macaulay, 
 if he had not felt such an airy disdain for meta- 
 physics, might have been saved from some of his 
 metaphysical and theological errors. 
 
 Thus Macaulay in the ' Essay on Eanke ' main- 
 tains that theology is not progressive. He admits, 
 indeed, the progress of science may disintegrate a 
 false theological system ; but he does not at all see 
 how much this admission involves. ' Every young 
 Brahmin,' he says, 'who learns geography in our 
 colleges, learns to smile at the Hindoo mythology. 
 If Catholicism has not suffered to an equal degree 
 from the Papal decision that the sun goes round the 
 earth, this is because all intelligent Catholics now 
 hold, with Pascal, that, in deciding the point at all, 
 the Church exceeded her powers, and was, therefore, 
 justly left destitute of that supernatural assistance 
 which, in the exercise of her legitimate functions, the 
 promise of her Founder authorized her to expect.' 
 As a matter of fact, every argument that can be 
 used to show that either the Bible or the Church 
 had to accommodate its language to the scientific 
 errors of its time could be equally used to show that 
 the sacred books of the Hindoos were under the 
 necessity of practising a similar accommodation. 
 In particular, Macaulay asserts that Sir Thomas 
 More ' had all the information on the subject [tran- 
 substantiation] that we have, or that, while the
 
 A PEKSONAL MEMOIR 77 
 
 world lasts, any human being will have.' I asked 
 Jowett whether he agreed with this statement. He 
 replied in the negative. * The belief in transub- 
 stantiation,' he said, ' is closely connected with the 
 mediaeval distinction between essence and accidents ; 
 the accidents of the consecrated bread and wine were 
 held to be bread and wine, their essence was held to 
 be the body and blood of Christ ; but we now hold 
 that substances which have all the sensible properties 
 of bread and wine are bread and wine ; thus, with 
 the decline of mediaeval metaphysics, the founda- 
 tions of transubstantiation were undermined.' 
 
 Here, then, is one reason why Jowett wished the 
 young to be trained in the use of metaphysical 
 weapons ; he thought that it was only by means of 
 such weapons that the domain of metaphysics could 
 be curtailed. Buckle used to maintain that the 
 chief work of governments should now be to undo 
 the work which former governments have done ; 
 and, with a like vehemence, Jowett once protested 
 that the chief use of metaphysics is to get rid of 
 metaphysics altogether. But this paradox did not 
 represent his deliberate opinion. I lately talked on 
 the subject to an intimate friend of Jowett, who 
 generally agreed with him, and who has had great 
 educational experience ; and I asked him what he 
 thought Jowett's deliberate opinion on the matter 
 was. 'Personally,' he replied, 'I should say that 
 the young ought to be disciplined in abstract 
 thought, because through such discipline they 
 acquire qualities which they could not acquire
 
 78 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 otherwise.' Though my friend spoke only for him- 
 self, he was clearly expressing the opinion held by 
 Jowett and by some of his disciples. More or less 
 persistently Jowefrt and some of his disciples have 
 thought that, in this and other lines of study, the 
 activity (evepyeia) which the study involves is more 
 important than any result (epyov) which the activity 
 is likely to achieve. If we carry this line of thought 
 a little further, we are led to the scepticism of Eenan 
 or of the late Mr. Pearson. The answer to the 
 Great Eiddle never is but always to be guessed ; but 
 it is only through thinking it guessable and trying 
 to guess it that we can keep our sympathies from 
 being narrowed and the wings of our imagination 
 from being clipped. And this is surely an un- 
 exhilarating and unstimulating conclusion. Man- 
 kind, it seems, is like a squirrel in a rotatory cage, 
 vainly hoping to rise, but enticed by that vain hope, 
 as it could not be enticed otherwise, to take the 
 exercise needful for its health. So indissolubly, 
 indeed, is our highest life bound up with limitless 
 longings, if not with illusions, that we are tempted 
 to exclaim : ' E vanitate sanitas ; e sanitate 
 vanitas !'* 
 
 * Clough, who was the poet of devout scepticism, as Matthew 
 Arnold was the poet of devout unbelief, has thrown this 
 peculiar mode of feeling into the short poem called ' Life is 
 Struggle,' in which he laments that human effort is often 
 
 ' absurd and vain ! 
 O, 'tis not joy, and 'tis not bliss, 
 Only it is precisely this 
 
 That keeps us still alive. 1 
 
 In a somewhat similar spirit Scherer speaks of the ' agitation 
 sans but qui constitue la coinedie humaine.'
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 79 
 
 In this and some other matters I am on my guard 
 against confidently ascribing opinions to Jowett, for 
 his mind seemed often to be in a state of flux. 
 Some of his opinions varied, not merely from decade 
 to decade or from year to year, but from conversa- 
 tion to conversation. Thus, when I went to Oxford 
 fresh from my Tory home, I understood Jowett to 
 advocate Universal Suffrage and the Ballot, which 
 latter was then thought a frightful heresy. My 
 impression was confirmed by one of our Balliol 
 Scholars, who told me that on one occasion, having 
 said in Jowett's presence that he thought secret 
 voting un-English, he was cut short by the question, 
 ' Do you think bribery and intimidation English ?' 
 On the other hand, one of Jowett's Eadical friends 
 told me that he believed him to be far more Con- 
 servative than I supposed. On further inquiry, I 
 found that Jowett sometimes spoke differently to 
 different persons, but in doing this he was, not only 
 not an assentator, but rather what may be called dis- 
 sentator. Goethe has remarked that, whenever we 
 hear an opinion strongly expressed in conversation, 
 our impulse is to take the opposite side. A man of 
 the world tries to control this impulse, but Jowett 
 was not a man of the world ; and also perhaps the 
 habit of correcting, if not of contradicting, which he 
 acquired as a college tutor, had become with him a 
 second nature. This aggressive sincerity of his 
 assuredly does not lessen our esteem for him ; but 
 does it not militate against his claim to be regarded 
 as an ideal philosopher ? What shall we say of his
 
 80 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 inconsistency ? That somewhat misleading word 
 has, even when applied to purely speculative 
 matters, at least two significations. It denotes 
 sometimes inconsecutiveness in reasoning, and 
 sometimes inconstancy in opinion. I have already 
 remarked that a consecutive reasoner Jowett was 
 not. Much as he admired Plato, he neither pos- 
 sessed nor coveted that 'wonderful hardihood in 
 speculation ' which Macaulay ascribes to Plato, 
 ' who shrank from nothing to which his principles 
 led.' And we now see that Jowett was not con- 
 sistent in the other sense. He did not always stick 
 to his guns, or, rather, he did not always point 
 them in the same direction. It is true that Sir 
 Henry Maine speaks of consistency as a much 
 overrated virtue. But in saying this he is speaking 
 of steadfastness of opinion from youth to age, and 
 not from conversation to conversation.* Thus, 
 then, Jowett was inconsistent in a twofold sense ; 
 and on that account he hardly seems to me to 
 deserve the praise accorded to him by his friendly 
 critic whom I have cited, the praise of being un- 
 rivalled in the art of seeing through and through an 
 abstract question. But I think we may perceive 
 what the merit of Jowett was which his critic had in 
 
 * Kenan, like Jowett, made a virtue of inconsistency. He 
 even declared, in his odd way, that he liked to express a great 
 variety of opinions, because one of his opinions so expressed 
 had a good chance of being correct. This is like saying that a 
 watch which stops is better than a watch which goes perfectly 
 well but is a second wrong, because the watch which stops will 
 be exactly right for one moment in every twelve hours, whereas 
 the watch which is a second wrong will never be exactly right.
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 81 
 
 his mind. The Master, as the French would say, 
 had the good qualities belonging to his defects. 
 Through his habit of taking a link of a chain of 
 reasoning by itself and detaching it from the link 
 before and the link after, he could both examine that 
 link better and describe it better. Hence it was that 
 his aperqus were often brilliant and brilliantly ex- 
 pressed. One of his ablest friends, referring to him 
 as a sort of prose-poet, once remarked to me that 
 'poetry may solve the riddle of the universe, but 
 philosophy and science never will.' This paradox is 
 open to very obvious objections, and, at best, it 
 recalls what, I think, Muretus says of Plato : ' Non 
 absurde dicunt qui ilium dicant poetice philosophari.' 
 Such a poetical philosophizer was Jowett ; and the 
 habit of mind thus acquired gave, as many persons 
 would think, to his mystical utterances a spon- 
 taneous and lifelike vigour which the clearly-defined 
 utterances of Pattison and Freeman generally lack, 
 just as it is to many persons not merely pleasanter, 
 but more helpful, more healthily educative, to see a 
 butterfly flitting from flower to flower than to see the 
 same butterfly named and pinned in an entomo- 
 logical collection. 
 
 The natures of Freeman and Jowett could hardly 
 fail to jar one another. A good story is told 
 at Oxford that, when Jowett was Vice-Chancellor, 
 some question of University politics arose, involv- 
 ing a historical difficulty. It was thought ex- 
 pedient to consult Freeman. Whereupon Jowett, 
 instead of sending a note, told his servant to 
 
 6
 
 82 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 ask Professor Freeman to come to see him. The 
 historian, forecasting from his irregular summons 
 some grave and immediate disaster, straightway 
 forsook his studies and made haste to call on the 
 Vice-Chancellor. But in the meantime the difficulty 
 had been solved ; and Jowett bowed out his visitor 
 with the brief explanation : ' Thank you, Freeman, 
 I've found out what I wanted, good-bye.' They say 
 that Freeman was sore displeased, and that his dis- 
 pleasure was not hidden olxora \fyovres (' saying 
 what is likely,') as Herodotus would have phrased it. 
 Whether this story is true or false, it should be re- 
 membered that Jowett at the close of his life had, 
 not the trials of a monarch, but the worst trials of 
 what I will venture to call a donarch. He must, in 
 fact, unless he was more than human, have com- 
 bined the occasional inconsiderateness of the absorbed 
 scholar with something of the autocratic pedantry 
 which is the besetting weakness of a chief among dons. 
 In illustration of the antagonism between Jowett 
 and Freeman, I will instance a criticism of Jowett's, 
 which, though not picturesque, is characteristic of 
 the author, and is, moreover, curious because Free- 
 man either could not or would not understand it. 
 In an article on Jowett's ' Thucydides,' he remarks : 
 'Mr. Jowett gets beyond me when he says that 
 in moral and philosophical speculations "we have 
 not so completely got rid of the 'subjective' element 
 as we are sometimes inclined to imagine." ' This 
 utterance, I say, is especially characteristic of 
 Jowett. One reason of this is that it has a flavour
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 88 
 
 of the half-scepticism, half acknowledged, which 
 leavened his whole character. It also has Jowett'e 
 peculiar indefiniteness, which, indeed, is what 
 repelled Freeman. But it is through this very in- 
 definiteness that the utterance is many-sided ; and 
 that the more it is turned over, the more aspects it 
 seems to present. When it is considered in refer- 
 ence to history, it seems to be pitched in the same 
 key as a passage in ' Faust ' : 
 
 ' Die Zeiten der Vergangenheit 
 Sind uns ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln ; 
 Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heisst, 
 Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist, 
 In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln.' 
 
 The picture presented to us by the irrevocable past is 
 faded. We try to restore it ; but the restoration is 
 never quite complete : 
 
 ' Neque amissos colores 
 
 Lana refert mendicata fuco.' 
 
 In other words, ' the subjective element ' which we 
 supply never quite replaces the objective element 
 which is lost. 
 
 Especially is this subjective element apparent hi 
 the moral judgments that we pass on bygone days. 
 I think it was Tennyson who once said that ' every 
 man imputes himself.' It is at least equally true 
 that every age, every state of society, imputes itself 
 judges, that is, every other age and state of society 
 by its own standard. When we pour out the vials of 
 our wrath on ancient misdoings on slavery, for 
 example, or persecution, or assassination we are
 
 84 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 not, to be sure, quite as indignant as we should be if 
 such iniquities occurred among ourselves ; but still, 
 we do not let ourselves freely breathe the intellectual 
 and moral atmosphere in which the iniquities throve ; 
 we impute our own age to some extent.* Why this 
 is and must be so may be shown by an example, 
 which will also show that the light thrown by 
 morality on the past is not always what Bacon would 
 have called a dry light. The giving and taking of 
 bribes was perhaps thought as excusable in the time 
 of Elizabeth as nepotism was thought in the days 
 of my youth. But if a historian were to speak of 
 Elizabethan bribery as indulgently as men of the 
 world used to speak of Victorian nepotism, he 
 would justly be censured as immoral. For history- 
 must never overlook the present needs of morality ; 
 and ordinary readers will not make full allowance 
 for the difference of standards. If they are taught 
 to condone Elizabethan and Jacobean bribery, they 
 will be in danger of condoning Victorian bribery also. 
 Charles Austin told me that at the beginning of this 
 century a judge, passing sentence of death on a 
 horse- stealer, said to the prisoner: 'You are sentenced 
 to be hanged, not because you stole the horse, but in 
 
 * A well-known writer has lately ' imputed himself ' by 
 speaking with disdainful pity of Brutus for being so blind as 
 not to see that assassination cannot permanently succeed. Are 
 we sure that it never permanently succeeds? If we are, the 
 lesson is a very unobvious one, and has been learnt only through 
 a long historical experience. And to blame Brutus for not 
 having had this experience is about as reasonable as it would be 
 to blame him for not having won a great victory at Philippi by 
 forestalling (as the Miltonic devils forestalled) the invention of 
 gunpowder.
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIB 85 
 
 order that horses may not be stolen.' And, in like 
 manner, it may be affirmed that Bacon, as Chan- 
 cellor, is gibbeted by posterity, not because he took 
 bribes, but in order that bribes may not be taken. 
 
 One or two more examples may be given, examples 
 which will throw light on some other of Jowett's 
 opinions. The convenient gift, so to say, of meto- 
 phesying of prophesying after the event has been 
 unstintingly bestowed on the human race ; and with 
 this gift has arisen the desire to convert metaphecy 
 into prophecy, and to attribute such prophecy to the 
 worthies of the past. We thus impute ourselves, 
 often unconsciously. Our estimate, for instance, of 
 Charles I. and his followers should clearly be 
 unaffected by events which they could not possibly 
 foresee. The present reaction against Puritanism 
 among the educated classes, and the dread of 
 democracy which is growing up among large sections 
 of those classes, these are events which the Cavaliers 
 certainly could not have foreseen. Yet these changes 
 dispose some of us to take the line of Matthew 
 Arnold rather than the line of Macaulay, and to see 
 good in the party of Falkland as well as in the party 
 of Hampden. 
 
 Jowett had no love for Puritanism ;* and his 
 sympathy with democracy was perhaps, at bottom, 
 as questionable as his sympathy with the Athanasian 
 Creed. With this cast of mind did he never feel the 
 
 * I may mention that Jowett once read to me with impres- 
 sive emphasis Wesley's famous diatribe against the fundamental 
 doctrine of Calvinism.
 
 86 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 cold shudder which many of us have felt at the 
 thought of England dominated by the Koundheads ? 
 At all events he had a weakness for Charles I. I 
 once told him that Charles Austin had said that, if 
 the unfortunate King had been born in a private 
 station, he would have been conspicuous as an 
 accomplished and high-bred gentleman, ' something 
 between Lord Derby and Lord Lansdowne.'* ' He 
 would have been a great deal more religious than 
 either,' rejoined Jowett, with a laugh. Did he mean 
 to imply that to take theology quite seriously is a 
 defect in a politician and may be a source of danger? 
 Especially were some of Jowett' s friends startled 
 by his sympathetic attitude towards Louis Napoleon 
 and the Second Empire. The fear of democracy is 
 now inducing some superannuated Liberals, and other 
 Liberals by courtesy, to think that popular govern- 
 ment is a kind of watch which sometimes goes 
 wrong or even comes to a standstill, and that then a 
 cunning craftsman is needed to alter the regulator 
 or to put in new works altogether. Thus it is that 
 hints are beginning to be dropped in unexpected 
 quarters as to the occasional opportuneness of 
 ' saviours of society.' But the indulgence felt by 
 Jowett for one such saviour of society dated as far 
 back as the coup d'dtat. An eminent friend of his 
 tells me that, shortly after that audacious act had 
 been carried out, he heard Jowett contend that there 
 
 * ' Safe Studies,' p. 216. He was speaking of Lord Derby, 
 the Prime Minister, and of Lord Lansdowne, the Maecenas of 
 half a century.
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 87 
 
 had been a struggle for life and death between the 
 popular leaders and the Prince-President : and the 
 triumph of the popular leaders might, Jowett thought, 
 have meant anarchy. Many years later, Jowett 
 quite agreed with Arthur Stanley in wishing that a 
 monument to the Prince Imperial could be put up in 
 Westminster Abbey. That the heir of the great 
 Napoleon should have died fighting on the English 
 side was a piece of irony worthy of a Greek tragedy. 
 Jowett thought that a memorial of so extraordinary 
 a catastrophe would have an interest for posterity ; 
 and that in our great national collection of monu- 
 ments our petrified history, as I may call it such a 
 memorial would not be out of place. 
 
 Jowett' s views may sometimes be illustrated by 
 those of his ablest disciples. So I will mention that 
 Bowen (about 1859) praised France as being then a 
 great apostle of liberty, in that she helped to give 
 the Italians the boon which she herself lacked. 
 Reversing the praise bestowed by Byron on Venice, 
 he might have described France as at that time 
 
 1 Herself a slave, yet making many free.' 
 
 "We have thus caught a glimpse of Jowett's view of 
 democracy, and therefore indirectly of his view of 
 progress. For democracy and progress are in a 
 manner unequally joined together. So strongly has 
 the current set in towards democracy that a con- 
 sistent thinker, unless he expects the tide to turn, 
 can hardly be distrustful about democracy without 
 being uneasy about progress ; while, on the other
 
 88 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 hand, as progress is beset by other dangers besides 
 the danger from democracy, a man may be uneasy 
 about progress even though he is a stanch democrat. 
 We have seen that Jowett was distrustful of 
 democracy, and therefore we should expect him to 
 have been more than sceptical about progress. But 
 we have also seen that he was not a consistent 
 thinker : and he may, moreover, have thought that 
 a change will come over the fortunes of democracy ; 
 so much so, indeed, that peradventure, after a 
 periodic or continually accelerated recurrence of 
 Reigns of Terror, democracy will at last be con- 
 demned by natural selection.* Is there, then, any 
 reason to suppose that Jowett anticipated that ' ideal 
 future of society ' which Matthew Arnold declared to 
 be the reality underlying the belief in the kingdom 
 of heaven, and which, in the face of the forlorn 
 prophecy of science, that our planet will be gradually 
 frozen up, that too poetical critic so confidently 
 foretold, t To the question whether Jowett did or 
 
 * Is there any likelihood that democracy will be thus con- 
 demned ? A reply to this question is suggested by a remark 
 of De Tocquevfile. That great conservateur malgre lui has 
 maintained that Europe, if parcelled out into federal republics 
 after the American model, would probably support a larger 
 population than at present, and in greater comfort ; but that, 
 if a single feudal monarchy were left among them, that 
 monarchy might be able to impose its own will on the entire 
 continent. In like manner, Eenan, after the experience of the 
 Franco-German War, prognosticated that, if (as he feared) the 
 aristocratic organization of the army is impracticable ha France, 
 France exposes herself to the risk of being again conquered by 
 the Germans, and that, sooner or later, again conquered she 
 will be. 
 
 f Is it strange that Matthew Arnold should have felt, nay, 
 have caressed, this unreasoning confidence ? What can be
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 89 
 
 did not think such a millennium possible I am 
 tempted to apply a passage of Tennyson : 
 
 1 " Is there any hope ?" 
 
 To which an answer pealed from that high land, 
 But in a tongue no man could understand.' 
 
 Dean Fremantle assures me that Jowett seemed to 
 him to be in general sanguine about progress, but 
 that, towards the end of his Vice-Chancellorship, his 
 physical exhaustion inclined him to political de- 
 spondency. Jowett also sometimes spoke sanguinely 
 to me. A statement made by Lord John Kussell 
 (about 1857), that he saw no reason why a nation 
 should not remain great for ever, led to my asking 
 Jowett whether he thought that the analogy of the 
 decadence of the nations of antiquity obliged us to 
 expect that modern nations will also decline. He 
 answered that the analogy does not quite hold ; the 
 great industrial development of some modern nations 
 places them on a different footing from the ancient 
 nations, whose population consisted chiefly of slaves. 
 I spoke of the decline of some modern nations, such 
 as Spain. He said that their decline seemed to him 
 
 more disheartening for an idealist whose hope of heaven has 
 grown dim than to lose also the foretaste of an earthly paradise, 
 and to become convinced that, not men only, but planets, have 
 then* maturity and decay, and are even as the grass of the 
 field ? 
 
 <t>v\\uv yevtijt roi^Se Kal d tr r p u v. 
 
 Is the time ever to come when a degenerating and dwindling 
 humanity will feel a mingled pride and self-loathing as it looks 
 back on its past, and as it exclaims, with the ghost of Remus : 
 ' Cernite qualis sim qui modo talis eram ' (To have been what 
 I have been, being what I am) ?
 
 90 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 rather relative than absolute ; they have been out- 
 stripped by other nations in the race. He disliked 
 the pessimism of Carlyle. But he seems to have 
 admired Carlyle's ' Heroes,' with the exception of 
 Goethe. Shortly after Carlyle's death reference was 
 made to Proctor's statement that it was not im- 
 possible that, about the year 1897, a comet might 
 strike the sun, and for a few days raise the sun's 
 temperature just so much as to cause the destruction 
 of all animal life on the earth. ' How pleased,' said 
 Jowett, ' would Mr. Carlyle have been to hear this if 
 he had been alive !' Jowett asked more than once 
 what lasting effect Carlyle had produced on the 
 world. Some one quoted Carlyle's injunction, ' Do 
 the work that lies nearest to thee.' ' That had been 
 said before,' rejoined Jowett. Charles Austin told 
 me that he doubted whether the French had really 
 gained anything by the Eevolution. Jowett, on my 
 repeating this remark to him, declared that Austin 
 was simply wrong, as statistics proved the French 
 peasant to be better off now than in the last century. 
 It is, however, probable that what Austin meant to 
 affirm was that France is politically weaker now 
 than she was under the old regime, and that she is, 
 therefore, exposed to the perils to which political 
 weakness is liable. Jowett spoke to me about the 
 conservative tendency of old age (that tendency 
 which Goethe has affirmed to be universal), and he 
 said that he was doing his utmost to struggle against 
 it. He attributed this propensity to the fact that old 
 men feel that they occupy a less prominent place
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 91 
 
 than they used to do. Surely a more obvious, and 
 also a more creditable, explanation may be drawn 
 from the nervous enfeeblement of old men, from the 
 fact that they are ' afraid of that which is high, and 
 fears are in the way,'* and that they continually feel 
 more and more that their old modes of thought and 
 conduct, as well as their old friends, are sinking into 
 oblivion. Such a view of the unsanguine and let- 
 alone quality of old age seems to be indicated in the 
 famous lines : 
 
 ' The clouds that gather round the setting sun 
 Do take a sober colouring from an eye 
 That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality.' 
 
 Jowett went on to say that, if human life were ten 
 years longer, the world would come to a standstill. 
 He doubtless meant that this evil result would ensue 
 if life were thus lengthened without youth being 
 correspondingly lengthened. Unhappily, such a 
 result is that which medical improvement is bringing 
 about. And, indeed, this is one of the reasons 
 assigned by that Cassandra of Cassandras, Mr. 
 Pearson, for his foreboding that the human race 
 collectively, as well as an undue proportion of the 
 individuals of which it will hereafter be composed, is 
 fated to count among dotards * senes in vivaria 
 missos,' and to waste away in lethargic decrepitude. 
 
 In the instance just given, Jowett's optimism 
 
 verges on pessimism, or, let us say, his bonism 
 
 verges on malism. Other and more distinct malistic 
 
 utterances of his will be subjoined; but, before 
 
 * Eccles. xii. 5.
 
 92 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 entering on these, it may be well to show how his 
 self-contradiction may be explained. I mentioned 
 that he spoke of the decline of nations as being often 
 more relative than absolute. May not a like remark 
 be in some measure applied to human progress? 
 Scherer, hi speaking of Mr. Gladstone, says that he 
 inclines more and more to Eadicalism, and that 
 Eadicalism 
 
 1 n'est autre chose que 1'application de 1'absolu a la politique. 
 Le malheur veut que la politique soit pre'cis^ment ce qu'il y a 
 de plus relatif au monde, de sorte que le radicalisme n'est bon 
 qu'a faire des revolutions et, en temps ordinaire, risque per- 
 petuellement de mettre les institutions en avance sur les 
 mceurs.' 
 
 He doubtless means that, in seeking to carry 
 popular measures, it is hardly possible to avoid 
 enunciating principles, as universally applicable, 
 which are in reality applicable, at most, only to 
 advanced states of society ; and thence arises the habit 
 of ascribing an absolute and a scientific character to 
 mere working hypotheses, and even to what may be 
 called working fictions. An instance of such working 
 fictions is shown in the broad assertions that are 
 sometimes made as to the extreme happiness of some 
 states of society and the extreme misery of others. 
 A view which draws so broad a contrast between 
 different states of society can hardly be maintained. 
 Kather should we maintain that what Eochefou- 
 cauld has affirmed of individuals may be at least as 
 truly applied to states of society : they are seldom or 
 never either as happy or as unhappy as they are
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 98 
 
 commonly thought to be. Whence has arisen the 
 exaggeration in what is commonly thought about 
 them ? One cause of that exaggeration seems to be 
 that men are apt to ignore the extreme adaptiveness 
 of human nature, and in doing so they also ignore 
 the extent to which they judge of all things by 
 comparison. A daughter of Methuselah who had 
 been snatched away hi beauty's bloom ere completing 
 her second century would have stirred the deepest 
 compassion ; but we should now rather say that, 
 with so protracted an adolescence, she had not a bad 
 time of it ! A like idea is well expressed by Moses 
 Primrose : ' We are not to judge of the feelings of 
 others by what we might feel hi their place. How- 
 ever dark the habitation of the mole to our eyes, yet 
 the animal itself finds the apartments sufficiently 
 lightsome.' The above saying of the ingenious son 
 of the Vicar of Wakefield amounts to this : the 
 savage is not, any more than the mole, so much to 
 be pitied as we are apt to think, for not being an 
 Englishman. No one is truly infortunatus sua si 
 mala nescit. 
 
 The point may be stated in another way. The 
 fact that, the more men get, the more they want, 
 has enabled them to get more and more, and is 
 therefore a blessing ; but the blessing is not without 
 drawbacks, for a chronic state of wanting means 
 chronic uneasiness. In fact, the progressive desires 
 to which civilization owes so much are only another 
 name for retrogressive satisfaction. This may furnish 
 a clue to what seems a very mysterious anomaly.
 
 94 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 Since the time of the early Caesars at least a score 
 of results have been achieved by civilization 
 achievements ranging from the triumphs of Catho- 
 licism to the invention of railways and the higher 
 education of women each of which is referred to 
 as an unspeakable boon. Now really, if we try to 
 add up the presumable effects of even a few of these 
 unspeakable boons, we begin to think that the Eoman 
 Empire must have been worse than a purgatory, and 
 that, on the other hand, during the last few centuries 
 our regenerated planet must have been blossoming 
 into an earthly paradise. Great, therefore, is our 
 disappointment when we learn that Gibbon, and, I 
 believe, Curtius, have favoured the opinion that 
 under some of the Csesars the civilized world was 
 at least as happy as it has ever been since. Tenny- 
 son, too, was clearly balancing the ancient against 
 the modern world when he put the saddening query : 
 
 ' Rome of Csesar, Borne of Peter, which is crueller, which is 
 worse ?' 
 
 Jowett would, I suspect, have preferred have felt 
 bound to prefer the Eome of Peter to the Eome of 
 Caesar, and the Home of King Humbert to either. 
 But would he have expected the improvement to go 
 on? In 1860 he repeated to me approvingly a 
 saying of Tennyson that ' things are going quite fast 
 enough.' Things have not stood still since 1860, 
 and it may be surmised that he ultimately came to 
 think, as Tennyson certainly did, that things have 
 lately been going much too fast. So again, I once, 
 with the self-confidence of youth, quoted to him the
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 95 
 
 Homeric saying that 'We boast that we are much 
 better than our fathers ' 
 
 "H/teii rot Ta.ripuv (iy &fixlvoves evx6fu6' ttvcu, 
 
 He replied that, whenever he heard that line, he felt 
 a wish to oppose to it another passage from Homer, 
 the passage in which Diomed is reproached with 
 being inferior to his father in deeds, though superior 
 to hun in words : 
 
 Totoj (i)v fvSffa AfrwXtos dXXA rbv {/ibv 
 Tflvo.ro flo X^P et 
 
 On the whole, then, after putting side by side the 
 bonistic and the malistic sayings of Jowett, and 
 weighing them against one another by the light of 
 our general impression of him, we may roughly con- 
 sider the question : What did he think of the value 
 of civilization and of its future ? I will not again 
 employ the metaphor of the rotating squirrel; for 
 that metaphor, while it seems to express Jowett's 
 view of the course of metaphysical inquiry, does not 
 fully express his view of the course of civilization. 
 Goethe, we all know, said that civilization moves, 
 not in a circle, but hi a spiral. To complete this 
 metaphor, let us suppose the spiral to be horizontal 
 like a corkscrew laid flat on a table. Human society, 
 travelling along the line of such a spiral, has its 
 ups and downs, but is continually going forward in 
 a definite direction. This metaphor, I think, fairly 
 expresses Jowett's view. At all events, in times of 
 depression (or of candour) he would have admitted 
 that the harvest reaped by civilized men bears no
 
 96 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 sort of proportion to the labour which their fore- 
 fathers bestowed on sowing the seed. This will 
 appear more plainly when some other of Jowett's 
 sayings, especially his sayings about democracy, 
 have been recorded. 
 
 I was referring to Jowett, and referring to him 
 advisedly, when I said many years ago : 
 
 ' We have known very able men who, in their feelings, were 
 tenacious of the past, and who, hi small matters, gave way to 
 those feelings who, for example, were made quite uncom- 
 fortable if their seat was changed at the dinner-table ; while 
 yet, when any important question arose, they reasoned them- 
 selves into being reformers.'* 
 
 This Conservatism of feeling must be borne in 
 mind even when we are considering the Liberalism 
 which marked Jowett in the earlier days of my 
 acquaintance with him. It was then that I asked 
 him about a strike in which the workmen seemed to 
 me to make unreasonable demands. He replied 
 rather paradoxically : ' Those demands are so utterly 
 unreasonable that they remind me of the inarticulate 
 cry of intelligent animals. Let us hope that when 
 the men get the franchise they will speak and act 
 more wisely.' Long after this Dean Fremantle 
 asked him what he thought of arbitration between 
 employers and workmen. 'Depend upon it,' he 
 replied, ' the working man knows best where the 
 shoe pinches.' In a more Conservative mood, he 
 said to another pupil : ' The working men have had 
 
 * ' Safe Studies,' p. 174.
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 97 
 
 a hard time of it hitherto. I am afraid that some 
 day they may get more than their due ' more, he 
 of course meant to say, than will be conducive to 
 the strength and stability of the country. 
 
 When I was an undergraduate, I heard a young 
 man, who belonged to the ruling classes, express, in 
 Jowett's presence, strong disgust at the way in which 
 the sceptre was departing from those classes. Jowett 
 replied that it was simply impossible that the govern- 
 ment of the country should continue in the hands of 
 a small number of families, and added : ' A man 
 who lives, as you do, in the first society in the 
 country, should remember that there is as much 
 vulgarity in thinking too much of social advantages 
 as in affecting to despise them.' Nevertheless, he 
 once said to me that he hoped that, in spite of 
 democratic changes, some remains of the old feudal 
 feeling will still survive. He wished to keep up the 
 House of Lords, and even wished the Bishops to 
 retain their seats in it. 'It keeps them out of 
 mischief,' he said with a laugh.* He remarked that 
 the landed gentry are generally kind to the poor, 
 and he liked the agricultural labourer as a class. 
 He astonished me by saying that, on the other hand, 
 the young coxcomb whom one sometimes sees behind 
 the counter of a shop ' makes one's whole soul 
 
 * Jowett told a story of a parishioner who, when his new 
 vicar brought politics into his sermons, exclaimed : ' Let him 
 stick to doctrine. That can do no harm.' This recalls the 
 rejoinder made by the Catholic Eadicals in Ireland when they 
 were commanded by the Pope to submit loyally to England : 
 ' As much theology from Rome as you please, but no politics 1' 
 
 7
 
 98 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 nauseate.'* He was doubtless provoked into speak- 
 ing thus by some remembered experience of that 
 objectionable sort of person ; but he would hardly 
 have used the expression at all if he had wished to 
 see the old-fashioned rustic educated out of exist- 
 ence. 
 
 The late Professor of Chemistry, Sir B. Brodie, 
 himself as unorthodox as might be, said of the 
 aggressive anti-orthodoxy of the late Eev. Baden 
 Powell : ' I don't like to see a man throwing stones 
 at the house in which he lives.' My father had the 
 same sort of feeling about aristocratic Eadicals. So 
 strongly did he at one time distrust Lord Stanley 
 (the late Lord Derby) in particular, that he might 
 have applied to him the remark which George Eliot 
 made about Harold Transome : ' The utmost enjoy- 
 ment of his own advantages was the solvent that 
 blended pride in his family and position with the 
 adhesion to changes that were to obliterate tradition, 
 and melt down enchased gold heirlooms into plating 
 for the egg-spoons of " the people." ' I asked Jowett 
 how he regarded men of this stamp. ' At all times,' 
 he answered, ' there have been born aristocrats who 
 
 * ' A tradesman behind his counter must have no flesh and 
 blood about him, no passions, no resentment ; he must be all 
 soft and smooth ; he must be a perfect, complete hypocrite, if 
 he will be a complete tradesman.' DEFOE. Charles Lamb 
 says of this soulless animal ' that his customers are to be his 
 idols ; so far as he may worship idols, by allowance, he is to 
 bow down to them, and worship them.' Contrast with this 
 unflattering view of our middle classes the view taken by 
 Voltaire. The English people he wittily compared to English 
 beer. The highest stratum seemed to him mere froth ; the 
 lowest mere dregs ; but all the rest he thought excellent.
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 99 
 
 have taken the popular side, partly, no doubt, from 
 motives of ambition, but partly also from a sense oj 
 right.' Not, indeed, that his admiration for Lord 
 Stanley was unqualified. I told him that Lord 
 Stanley was reported to have said : ' My father 
 would be a very clever man if he was not so fright- 
 fully ignorant.' Jowett returned sharply : ' If he 
 ever becomes the equal of Lord Derby, he may think 
 himself fortunate.' He was distinctly attracted by 
 Lord Derby, and was amused by the good sayings 
 ascribed to him. Some of these were repeated before 
 him and by him, including, I think, the one about 
 Lord Stanley coming in unusually good spirits into 
 his father's presence. ' What's the news ?' said his 
 father, looking up from his game of billiards. ' Are 
 you going to be married, or is Dizzy dead?' I 
 mention this familiar story with its reference to 
 Disraeli, because of the spell which seems at one 
 time to have been cast over Jowett by that impressive 
 and inscrutable personality. According to my father, 
 and, as I understood, in his presence, Disraeli said 
 that he was himself regarded by Lord Derby with a 
 dislike ' worse than hate.' Though this assertion of 
 Disraeli was doubtless a jocular hyperbole, he at 
 any rate implied that he was not a favourite with his 
 chief. And I may add that, at that time, he was by 
 no means a favourite with my father or with the 
 bulk of the country gentlemen. 
 
 Having thus early imbibed a prejudice against 
 Disraeli, I was purposing to make a speech dis- 
 paraging to him in the Oxford Union. On my
 
 100 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 mentioning the fact to Jowett, he said : ' I won't 
 have you throw stones at Dizzy.' Afterwards he 
 saw something of Disraeli, who, indeed, had a 
 fascination for him not wholly unlike that which, 
 up to a certain point, Louis Napoleon had the 
 fascination whereby a sensitive and imaginative 
 nature is drawn to a man of enigmatical character 
 who has achieved an extraordinary success. But 
 either Disraeli's influence over him waned, or else 
 the fascination of which I speak had in it an element 
 of repulsion. So I at least infer from a fragment 
 of a conversation with Jowett, the notes of which a 
 friend has shown me : 
 
 Friend. ' Do you like Dizzy's novels ?' 
 
 Jowett. ' Yea ; very good novels. But I have not read 
 them all.' 
 
 F. ' Did you know Dizzy ?' 
 
 J. ' Yes. I did not like him much ; he flattered a great 
 deal, and always talked for the sake of talking.' 
 
 JF*. ' He was very Jewish in many ways.' 
 
 J. ' He loved magnificence. 1 
 
 In reading Eenan's account of St. John the Divine, 
 
 I was reminded of Disraeli by a passage which runs, 
 if I remember rightly, as follows : ' II entasse 1'or. 
 
 II a, comme tous les Orientaux, un gout immodere 
 pour les pierres precieuses.' Another distinguished 
 man who, long hated by the Conservatives, won 
 then* favour at the end of his life, was Brougham. 
 Jowett gave proof of his own Liberalism when he 
 said to me long ago : ' Brougham might have been 
 the first man in the country if he had not let him-
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 101 
 
 self be overcome by the blandishments of the 
 aristocracy.'* 
 
 In thus recording some sayings of Jowett which 
 more or less illustrate his view of democracy and 
 progress, I have kept in reserve one saying of his 
 which has a distinctive malistic flavour. He either 
 originated or approvingly quoted the remark that 
 ' Art is the bloom of decay.' To a somewhat similar 
 effect, a great historian has said that art, in its rela- 
 tion to religion, is like painted glass in a cathedral : 
 it duns the light, while it beautifies it. Unhappily, 
 as nearly all old nations have had a season of artistic 
 bloom and now have it not, it would seem to follow 
 that in their case the flowering of the aloe is over, 
 and they are themselves nigh to corruption. 
 
 It might have been thought that Jowett, thinking 
 so ill of the social atmosphere in which art thrives, 
 
 * Shortly before the death of Brougham, of whom Mill had 
 written hard things, I was so fortunate as to sit next Mill and 
 the late Lord Lyttelton at breakfast with Mr. Gladstone. Mill 
 playfully remarked what a good thing it would be if the elixir 
 of life could be given to a few of the most eminent men of 
 each generation ; and both he and Lord Lyttelton agreed in 
 naming Lord Brougham as a proper recipient of the potion. I 
 suggested that the draught should be also taken by the old 
 Lord Combermere, who had told my father that, but for the 
 Prince Eegent's opposition, Wellington would have put him in 
 command of the cavalry during the Hundred Days. Both my 
 hearers put me to silence, the one saying and the other imply- 
 ing that the veteran Lord Combermere was little better than a 
 fool. The line thus taken by the scholarly saint and the 
 saintly sage impressed me a good deal ; it made me feel that 
 intellectual men nearly always have more sympathy with 
 intellectual, as opposed to moral, distinction than is commonly 
 supposed, or than they themselves suppose. Was there not a 
 friendship between Johnson and Beauclerc, and at least a semi- 
 friendship between Jowett and Lord Westbury ?
 
 102 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 must himself have set a low value on art. But such 
 was far from being the case. A former pupil, before 
 he had taken the irrevocable step into the impe- 
 cunious blessedness of matrimony, consulted Jowett 
 as to what he should do with his superfluous cash. 
 ' He told me,' the pupil writes, ' to get some first- 
 rate Eembrandt and other etchings, and I have 
 always been grateful to him for his advice.' Jowett 
 had also a taste for a certain kind of music. A lady 
 tells me that he often asked her for old-fashioned 
 music, especially for three songs : Haydn's ' My 
 mother bids me bind my hair,' Bishop's ' Should he 
 upbraid,' and ' She never told her love.' He also 
 often begged her for Corelli, and, on her asking the 
 reason, answered : ' I can't say, unless it is because 
 my mother liked it.' The same lady tells me that 
 the Master, when his sister died, said mournfully : 
 ' The college must be my family now.' I am assured 
 that he once declared that, if some benignant fairy 
 had promised him the highest distinction in any 
 single line that he liked to name, he would have 
 chosen to excel, not as a scholar, a statesman, or 
 philosopher, but as a musical composer. Poetry 
 must also be regarded as a form of art ; and Jowett 
 was a great admirer of some poets, and was, indeed, 
 more than enthusiastic about Shakespeare. In illus- 
 tration of what may fairly be called his Shakespear- 
 olatry, I may mention that, before I took my degree, 
 he wished to know what books I was reading with a 
 view to it. On my mentioning the names of a few 
 books indirectly bearing on the examination, he cut
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 103 
 
 me short with the paradoxical advice : ' You had 
 better read Shakespeare instead !' On another occa- 
 sion he quoted to me a remark of the late Poet 
 Laureate, tending to show that that high authority 
 considered Shakespeare to be a writer wholly sui 
 generis. ' Tennyson,' he said in effect, ' once told 
 me that he could form an idea of the intellectual 
 efforts of such poets as Byron and Shelley ; he did 
 not say that he could have written as well as they 
 did, but their state of mind and feeling was compre- 
 hensible to him. But of the state of mind and 
 feeling which found expression in Shakespeare's 
 plays he could form no conception whatever.'* 
 
 Being, therefore, an appreciator of art, Jowett 
 must have weighed his words before alleging that 
 ' Art is the bloom of decay.' Is the allegation wholly 
 or partially correct ? It cannot be wholly correct ; 
 for the poetry of Homer must have been the ' bloom ' 
 of early spring. I am tempted to add that the 
 manifold and unrivalled achievements of the age of 
 Pericles were the bloom of midsummer. But I 
 express this opinion with some hesitation, for Pro- 
 fessor Hort seems to have been quoting the view of 
 some high authorities when he once said to me that 
 Greece was declining at the close of the Persian War, 
 
 * As Tennyson regarded the inspiration of Shakespeare as 
 incomprehensible even to himself, so he regarded the inspira- 
 tion of poets in general as incomprehensible, except to poets. 
 At Jowett's table I met the late Professor Lushington, Tenny- 
 son's brother-in-law, whose marriage has been immortalized 
 in ' In Memoriam.' He told me that Tennyson used to say : 
 ' People in general have no notion of the way in which we 
 poets go to work.'
 
 104 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 and that the glory of Athens was merely a superb 
 ' autumnal glow.' Mill, perhaps, owing to his political 
 bias, took an opposite view. He abhorred the fatal- 
 istic dilettantism which loves to affirm or imply that 
 the sound and vigorous part of national life must be 
 over before the artistic part can begin ; insomuch 
 that a nation, after the manner of a caterpillar, has 
 to lay up a store of energy during a period of long 
 and sordid obscurity, merely that it may have a 
 brief space of ineffectual beauty at the close. In 
 short, Mill, with his zeal for Liberty, regarded her 
 as the mother of all excellence, artistic excellence 
 included. The masterpieces of the Augustan age 
 present an obvious objection to such a view, and it 
 may be worth while to quote the passage in which he 
 deals with that objection : 
 
 1 The despotism of the Caesars fostered many of the graces of 
 life, and intellectual cultivation in all departments not political ; 
 it produced monuments of literary genius dazzling to the 
 imaginations of shallow readers of history, who do not reflect 
 that the men to whom the despotism of Augustus (as well as of 
 Lorenzo de Medici and of Louis XIV.) owes its brilliancy were 
 all formed in the generation preceding. The accumulated 
 riches, and the mental energy and activity, produced by 
 centuries of freedom, remained for the benefit of the first 
 generation of slaves.' 
 
 The last sentence would be intelligible enough if 
 Mill had merely meant that the first generation of 
 slaves could enjoy what the generations of freedom 
 had produced ; but the odd thing is that the genera- 
 tion of slaves produced what the generation of free- 
 men could not produce. So, again, Mill would have
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 105 
 
 triumphed over the ' shallow readers of history ' if 
 the political and the literary history of Rome had 
 been like the bars of a parallel ruler when those bars 
 are a little apart, so that the one bar is somewhat in 
 advance of the other; that is to say, if the birth, 
 maturity and decay of Roman freedom had respec- 
 tively preceded by a quarter of a century the birth, 
 maturity and decay of the great Roman literature. 
 But this was notoriously not the case. The republic 
 was in a far sounder condition during the Second 
 Punic War than during the Civil War between 
 Marius and Sylla. Why, then, did Roman literature 
 burst into ' bloom ' shortly after the Civil War and 
 the proscriptions, and not shortly after the defeat of 
 Hannibal ? 
 
 It is, therefore, hard to doubt that, as there is 
 what may be called a literature of maturity, so there 
 is also a kind of literature which seldom springs up 
 save in times of decadence. Also, this literature 
 of decadence is gaining in popularity. Sometimes, 
 no doubt, we are fascinated by the buoyant and 
 combative vigour which animates such early poems 
 as those of Homer, and as the song of Deborah 
 and Barak. This fascination springs from a sense 
 of extreme contrast. But a fascination of this 
 sort operates by fits and starts, and belongs ex- 
 clusively to poetry of the highest order. In general, 
 the contrast, to be lastingly effectual, must be less 
 extreme. We like to be able, without any trouble- 
 some effort, to enter into the spirit of what we read. 
 Therefore, poetry modern in spirit has a special
 
 106 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 fitness for us. And, as poetry (like population) 
 multiplies, the great principle of the survival of the 
 fittest, and of the elimination of the less fit, must or 
 should be brought to bear upon it. Thus it is that 
 when we have to make our choice from the poems of 
 a nation alien to us in language, in social institutions 
 and religion, we naturally give the preference to the 
 poems which were written in an advanced state of 
 civilization, which remind us (though with a differ- 
 ence) of our own introspective and melancholy 
 musings, and which emphatically are the bloom of 
 decay. I am often quoting Scherer in this Memoir, 
 because he had something in common both with 
 Pattison and with Jowett ; for he had combined the 
 former's philosophical scepticism with the latter's 
 unwavering adhesion to high ethical ideals. In the 
 present instance I will quote a passage in which he is 
 himself repeating with assent an opinion of Eenan : 
 
 1 On a calomni^, selon lui [Benan] lespeViodes de decadence ; 
 les civilisations vieillies sont les civilisations exquises, et les 
 litteratures doivent leurs flours les plus brillantes a la fer- 
 mentation des socieies qui se decomposent.' 
 
 It may be worth while to refer to another specula- 
 tion of Eenan a speculation which indirectly throws 
 light on Jowett's half-unconscious doubts about pro- 
 gress. Eenan expected that the day will come when 
 French ideas will overflow all the world ; but with 
 this expectation he coupled the foreboding that, when 
 the mission of France is thus fulfilled, France her- 
 self may be no more. But can we be quite sure, he 
 might also have asked, that the world, when thus
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 107 
 
 fertilized by French thought, will always continue to 
 bear fruit ? Will not the summer be succeeded by 
 winter ? Or will not the world- wide soil at last be 
 exhausted ? Speculations like those of Jowett may 
 lead some of his disciples as Pearson was led to 
 entertain, at least in moments of depression, such 
 doubts as are here indicated. Delemur morti nos 
 nostraque. Civilization may, after all, be nought but 
 a colossal soap-bubble. When it seems to have 
 reached perfection in volume and in symmetry, in 
 beauty and hi mobility, it may be on the point of 
 bursting. 
 
 Before concluding my estimate of Jowett's atti- 
 tude towards the cause of Liberalism and progress, 
 I will quote two random remarks of his which make 
 for Liberalism. First, he said that Italy seemed to 
 him to owe more to the party of Mazzini than is 
 generally acknowledged. And, secondly, on its being 
 hinted that Conservatives complain of being assailed 
 with the weapons of rhetoric and ridicule, he insisted 
 that, from the time of Aristophanes to that of the 
 Anti-Jacobin, quite as much satirical wit has been 
 employed on the Conservative side as on the side of 
 Revolution. 
 
 I spoke of Jowett's doubts about progress as ' half 
 unconscious.' It may be well to offer a few examples 
 of his propensity to envelop himself in an intel- 
 lectual haze, and, in a word, of his dislike to being 
 catechized, and even to catechize himself. He 
 objected to lying even in extreme cases. He told 
 me that he had a friend of the highest sense of
 
 108 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 honour who was often entrusted with important 
 secrets. Questions in regard to those secrets were 
 sometimes put to him which were of such a nature 
 that, if he refused to answer them, he would have 
 revealed the secrets. In those circumstances he did 
 what most of us would have done he kept faith by 
 lying. 'I will not say that this was wrong/ said 
 Jowett, ' but I don't think that it was quite right.' 
 On another occasion, a friend surely a descendant of 
 Boswell put a case to him : * Imagine that you saw 
 a weak man running away in terror of his life, and 
 that presently a strong man came with a drawn 
 sword, and asked if you had seen the weak man, 
 would you not answer " No " ?' 
 
 J. ' No doubt anyone would in such a case. But 
 I don't see any use in imagining such cases before 
 they arise.' 
 
 It seems to have been a set principle with Jowett 
 that persons who have recourse to what he once 
 called 'exceptional morality' ought to keep the 
 matter to themselves. In * Safe Studies,' p. 265, 
 I speak of an Oxford don who was nicknamed 
 ' Presence of Mind,' in consequence of a story told 
 by himself. ' A friend,' he used to relate, ' invited 
 me to go out with him on the water. The sky was 
 threatening, and I declined. At length he succeeded 
 in persuading me, and we embarked. A squall came 
 on, the boat lurched, and my friend fell overboard. 
 Twice he sank, and twice he rose to the surface. He 
 placed his hands on the prow and endeavoured to 
 climb in. There was great apprehension lest he
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 109 
 
 should upset the boat. Providentially I had brought 
 my umbrella with me. I had the presence of mind 
 to strike him two or three hard blows over the 
 knuckles. He let go his hold and sank. The boat 
 righted itself, and we were saved.' On hearing of 
 this incident, Jowett said : ' I don't say that he was 
 wrong ; but he deserved to be called " Presence of 
 Mind " for talking about it as he did.' In taking 
 this apologetic tone, Jowett doubtless meant to imply 
 that the not over-zealous friend might have con- 
 tended that it was expedient that one man rather 
 than that the whole party should perish. When 
 thus stated, the principle is not easily impugned ; 
 but, if it is once admitted, it has an obvious applica- 
 tion to the terrible remedy to which sailors have 
 sometimes had recourse under pressure of famine. 
 
 I heard him, in a lecture on the ' Kepublic,' refer 
 to the famous question raised by Glaucon : Suppose 
 that a man, by committing enormous crimes, ob- 
 tained great power and prosperity, and that he was 
 secure of impunity in the next world as well as in 
 this. Why should we not prefer his lot to that of a 
 just man who fares ill ? 
 
 J. ' He might have gone a step further, and sup- 
 posed that the unjust man had a good conscience 
 and the just man a bad one. The fact is that 
 nobody has any business to put such cases. We 
 cannot conceive of virtue and vice apart from their 
 natural accompaniments.'* 
 
 * Ethical puzzles repeat themselves. In the schoolboy's 
 query : ' Would you rather be a bigger fool than you look, or
 
 110 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 Two short sayings of Jowett's may show how he 
 skirted the labyrinth of life's problems, or, rather, 
 how he turned some of those problems (as Goethe 
 recommended) into postulates. I repeated to him 
 the old commonplace that wealth does not bring 
 happiness. Jowett replied that this was nonsense : 
 ' All men seek wealth, and in doing so they assume 
 it to be a good.' On another occasion, I contended 
 that increase of knowledge is increase of sorrow. 
 
 J. ' No ; you should take Aristotle's view that 
 the acquisition of knowledge is in itself an aim.' 
 
 The following curious passage from Gibbon's 
 * Memoirs ' would have obtained Jowett's warm ap- 
 proval: *M. d'Alembert relates that, as he was 
 walking in the gardens of Sans Souci with the King 
 of Prussia, Frederick said to him : " Do you see that 
 old woman, a poor weeder, asleep on that sunny 
 bank? She is probably a more happy being than 
 either of us." The King and the philosopher may 
 speak for themselves ; for my part, I do not envy 
 the old woman.' 
 
 The remark made by Jowett about humour, which 
 I quoted above, reminds me that the question is 
 sometimes asked: Had Jowett much sense of 
 humour? In the hope of throwing light on this 
 subject, I will quote from a letter written to me 
 
 look a bigger fool than you are?" for 'fool' read 'rogue,' and 
 understand ' look ' to mean ' permanently look '; and you have 
 before you a moral riddle almost, if not quite, identical with 
 that which the Greek sophists put, and which Glaucon failed 
 to answer.
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 111 
 
 by a friend. ' Jowett mentioned that Hawkins, in 
 his " Life," described Dr. Johnson as the most 
 humorous man he had ever known. The Master 
 went on to say that one could hardly gather that 
 impression from Boswell, adding that he thought 
 Boswell, being a Scotchman, had missed the humour 
 of Johnson.'* Is it possible that Jowett, in passing 
 this judgment, failed to observe hi what diverse 
 senses the word humour is employed ? He himself 
 undoubtedly relished a kind of humour ; he enjoyed 
 the humour of Plato. I was staying with him at 
 Freshwater when he read ' Silas Marner ' for the 
 first time, and I noticed how he enjoyed the 
 humouristic touches that it contains. On the 
 whole, his humour seems to have resembled the 
 humour of Addison; it had little in common with 
 the humour of Montaigne, of Swift, or of Sterne, t 
 
 * Jowett, however, was a great admirer and a constant 
 reader of the ' Life of Johnson.' I once heard him exclaim : 
 
 1 L C says that if he were thrown on a desert island 
 
 he would like to have the Bible, Plato, and Shakespeare. I 
 should be disposed to add Boswell.' 
 
 f It is remarkable that such a serious writer as Edinond 
 Scherer felt sympathy with the typical humorist after the 
 fashion of Sterne, who well knows that the human lot is mean 
 and pitiful, but who ' prend doucement son parti, ot s'en amuse 
 plutot qu'il s'en scandalise.' Elsewhere he says : ' Le monde 
 est surtout un spectacle, un spectacle dans lequel les agitations 
 de 1'esprit, les obscuritds des problemes, les conceptions idoales, 
 dans lequel les vains efforts de I'humamte, dans lequel la vertu 
 meme am prises avec le mal, font partie du programme, et 
 contribuent a 1'interet de la representation." Pattison would 
 have echoed this sentiment, Jowett would not. Still less 
 would the two men have agreed with Jules Lemaftre, who 
 somewhere says : ' Si Dieu a fait le songe de tous et sait ce 
 qu'il a fait, il doit se divertir prodigieusement.'
 
 112 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 He would not have liked Montaigne's statement that 
 our human nature deserves all the ridicule that can 
 be cast upon it (' est autant ridicule que risible ') I 
 once quoted to him Horace Walpole's famous saying 
 that ' This world is a comedy to those who think, a 
 tragedy to those who feel '; and he surprised me by 
 not being familiar with the aphorism, and seemingly 
 not being struck by it. Still less would he have 
 sympathized with Lord Houghton, who writes some- 
 what broadly : 
 
 1 The contrasts, the inconsistencies, the incongruities, which 
 provoke and exercise the faculty of humour are really invisible 
 to most persons, or, when perceived, arouse a totally distinct 
 order of ideas and associations. It must seem to them at best 
 a mischievous inclination to find a source of mirth in the 
 sufferings and struggles, and troubles of others ; and when the 
 humorist extends this practice to himself, and discovers a 
 certain satisfaction in his own weaknesses and miseries, intro- 
 verting the very sensations of pleasure and pain, he not only 
 checks the sympathy he might otherwise have won, but his 
 very courage is interpreted into an unnatural audacity, alike 
 defiant of the will of Heaven and of the aid of man. The deep 
 consolations of this faculty in the trials and extremities of life 
 are altogether unknown to them.' 
 
 In fact, he might have said of history in general 
 what Fitzgerald, the poet, said of the great work of 
 Tacitus it is 'full of pleasant atrocities' quibus 
 ipse malis careas quia cernere suave est. 
 
 On the whole, therefore, Jowett had little or no 
 world-humour. He took things too seriously to 
 derive entertainment from the all - pervading dis- 
 crepancy between the ideal and the actual between
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 113 
 
 the world of aspiration and the world of fact. He 
 could play with the small anomalies, but not with 
 the great anomaly, of life. Not, indeed, that he was 
 wholly insensible to the humorous side of tragic 
 events. When the Chinese put down the Taeping 
 rebellion with Oriental ferocity, it was said that a 
 number of captive rebels were made to stand in a 
 row with their necks on the same level, so that the 
 executioner could behead them with a single sweep 
 of his sword. Jowett mentioned this singular 
 economy of time, as we may call it, to a party of 
 us who were dining with him at Balliol; and, by 
 way of giving effect to the narration, he ran down 
 the Common Room with outstretched arm in jocular 
 imitation of the headsman. If it be thought that in 
 so doing he laid aside his wonted gravity, it should 
 be remembered that a Chinaman was then (if he is 
 not still) regarded as a sort of joke, and that his 
 exclusive and disdainful country lay, as it were, 
 beyond the confines of the philanthropist's map. 
 The foregoing incident, therefore, seems to me less 
 surprising than that which I am about to relate, 
 though it may prepare the way for it. A shy 
 student, chancing to sit next Jowett at dinner, and 
 being at a loss for a topic of conversation, stumbled 
 on the unpromising one of murder. To his surprise, 
 the Master rose to the bait, mentioned some causes 
 cdlebres, and dropped all formality. The young 
 Oxonian afterwards asked a friend who knew Jowett 
 better than he himself did whether he had ever had 
 a similar experience with the Master. ' If you can 
 
 8
 
 114 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 get Jowett to talk about murders,' replied the 
 friend (in effect), ' he will go off like a house on 
 fire.' This singular predilection can hardly have 
 been due to a mere love of sensational excite- 
 ment ;* the true explanation probably is that, as 
 a psychologist, he wished to explore the darkest 
 abysses of human nature; and perhaps, too, he 
 could better afford to take an outside and dis- 
 passionate view of that most heinous of crimes than 
 of some more venial sins, because the crime was one 
 which it was morally impossible that he, or those 
 with whom he discussed it, would ever be tempted 
 to commit. He would have forborne to enlarge on 
 that diverting topic if he had been speaking to a 
 criminal under capital sentence. 
 
 Jowett told a story that a young Oriental (I think 
 a prince), after studying at Oxford, was so unfortu- 
 nate when he returned to his native land as to have 
 contracted the habit of intoxication ; that the elders 
 of his country, pointing at him the finger of scorn, 
 used significantly to exclaim, ' Oxford !' and that in 
 consequence the national wits came to employ some- 
 times the name of Oxford and sometimes its initial 
 
 * Macaulay was told by a Killarney boatman that the 
 pleasure which he had derived twenty years before from rowing 
 Sir Walter Scott and Miss Edgeworth on the lake, had made 
 amends to him for having missed seeing a man hanged on that 
 day. Might not a modern Rochefoucauld contend that the 
 gratification which this boatman derived from witnessing 
 executions, and which not a few educated men derive from 
 hearing and talking of murders, is in each instance largely 
 composed of the half -consciousness of being so much better off 
 than the murdered man, and so much better off and better than 
 the murderer ?
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 115 
 
 letter to denote the eminently European vice over 
 which that seat of learning, falsely so called, was 
 thought to have cast the spell of her mysterious and 
 meretricious fascination !* The Master once told me 
 of an orthodox divine who maintained that unbaptized 
 persons have no souls. Hence it would follow that 
 Baptists who die in early youth will have no future 
 life. ' But this,' continued Jowett, ' would be letting 
 Dissenters off too cheap. So he added that God 
 miraculously implants souls in them, in order to 
 damn them eternally.' 
 
 Of course Jowett had the strongest objection to 
 the coarse humour which is too often found in such 
 writers as Kabelais. His aversion to everything 
 approaching to coarseness is indicated in the often- 
 quoted story that he asked an undergraduate what 
 motto is written over the gate of hell. The under- 
 graduate suggested some motto to the effect that 
 there is no escape (perhaps the motto Vestigia nulla 
 retrorsum). 'No,' replied the Master, 'the inscrip- 
 tion is, let on parle franqais.' I am bound, however, 
 to add that, when he spoke to me of the French, his 
 language was more or less sympathetic. He admitted, 
 indeed, that the relations between husbands and 
 wives in France were often most unsatisfactory, and 
 
 * As a set- off against this tragic result of the somewhat 
 explosive contact of Eastern with Western civilization, I will 
 subjoin a comic result of that contact. Sir James Fitzjames 
 Stephen used to say that he bought some curious little idols at 
 Benares, and ordered them to be sent to his address at Cal 
 cutta. On their arrival he found that the box con taming them 
 was labelled with the delicious inscription, ' Gods with care.' 
 This anecdote, with all that it suggests, would have delighted 
 Jowett, as it evidently delighted Sir James.
 
 116 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 he added that they had been so even in the time of 
 Shakespeare; but he thought, on the other hand, 
 that the relation between fathers and sons was 
 pleasanter in that country than in England. 
 
 A characteristic incident, related to me by two 
 eye-witnesses, shows how strongly Jowett felt that 
 a decorous reticence should be observed in the 
 presence, not merely of boys, but of young men 
 (debetur juveni reverentia). A distinguished man 
 who had spent some time in the East, and had 
 become in a manner denaturalized, dined with 
 Jowett ; and a party of Oxonians, including some 
 undergraduates, was asked to meet him. The 
 Orientalized veteran, after the ladies had left the 
 room, told some anecdotes about Eastern customs, 
 the narration of which in the presence of young 
 men was far from edifying. One anecdote, in parti- 
 cular, threatened to be more startling than its 
 predecessors. There was a general wish to check 
 the unconscious transgressor, but there was a no 
 less general unwillingness to say anything which 
 might hurt his feelings. At last Jowett, after giving 
 the signal to rise from the table, said to him : ' Shall 
 we continue the conversation when we have joined 
 the ladies?' Could any better example be given 
 either of Jowett's peculiar irony or of his tact ? 
 
 One or two examples may be subjoined of the sort 
 of advice which Jowett sometimes gave, and which 
 obtained for him the credit or discredit of worldly 
 wisdom. I once received from him the following 
 counsel : ' Never listen to a man when he abuses his
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 117 
 
 relations. He will make it up with them, and then 
 he will hate you for knowing that he abused them.' 
 On another occasion he said to me : 'A friend of mine 
 of great practical ability told me that he has laid 
 down for himself three rules of conduct. Never 
 retract. Never explain.* Get it done and let them 
 howl.' Jowett repeated these paradoxical maxims 
 with a characteristic laugh, which seemed at any 
 rate not to mark disapproval. 
 
 The following example may be given in illustra- 
 tion, not so much of Jowett's humour, as of his 
 ready wit. I asked him (hi 1861) what he thought 
 of the conduct of the then Bishop of Durham, who 
 had appointed a highly creditable son-in-law to one 
 of the best livings in the diocese. * He is not worse 
 than an infidel,' was the prompt reply. t 
 
 In illustration of Jowett's appreciation of wit, I 
 may mention that Jowett told a friend that he 
 ranked Sydney Smith next to Swift among English 
 wits, and added : ' I think Voltaire was more witty 
 than Swift, and after Voltaire among French writers 
 possibly Talleyrand.' 
 
 After touching on the nature and limitations of 
 Jowett's humour, and, above all, on his deficiency in 
 world-humour, we are brought to the question : Had 
 he always a deep sense of sin? or, Was he ever 
 afflicted with that relaxation of the moral fibre, 
 that affaiblissement de tiddal, which Scherer declares 
 
 * Goethe says, as nearly as I can remember : ' I hate all 
 explanations. They often deceive those to whom they are 
 addressed, and often also those who give them.' 
 
 t See 1 Tim. v. 8.
 
 118 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 to be the outcome of humour ? To prepare the way 
 for this inquiry, let us first ask, Was he an ethical 
 reformer ? Some of his utterances would suggest a 
 negative answer to this question. Thus, in the 
 essay on * Casuistry,' he writes : 
 
 ' Numberless questions . . . relating to the professions of 
 an advocate, a soldier, or a clergyman, have been pursued into 
 endless consequences. In all these cases there is a point at 
 which necessity comes in and compels us to adopt the rule of 
 the Apostle, which may be paraphrased, " Do as other men do 
 in a Christian country." ' 
 
 I once quoted the foregoing passage to that ardent 
 world-betterer, T. H. Green ; he told me that he was 
 aware that Jowett had laid down this principle, but 
 that he himself thought it most immoral. And, no 
 doubt, he was right in thinking that the principle 
 may be pressed to very odd conclusions. The only 
 question is whether any other ethical principle can 
 be laid down which may not be pressed to equally 
 odd conclusions. Be this as it may, Jowett, when he 
 counselled acquiescence in conventional morality, was 
 adopting the tone which is commonly found in Horace. 
 But he often faced about, as Horace sometimes did, 
 and became a moralist of the first water (' Virtutis 
 verse custos rigidusque satelles'). I think it was 
 in 1861 that I told Jowett the substance of an article 
 in the Saturday Review on ' Prigs.' The ingenious 
 essayist, if I remember rightly, used words to the 
 following effect : ' Suppose an undergraduate who 
 never scamped his work, and was never once late 
 either for lecture or for chapel. Would not his neigh-
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 119 
 
 hours extol his exemplary behaviour ? Far from it. 
 They would set him down as an irretrievable prig.' 
 Jowett listened to me with some impatience, and then 
 said : ' Why does the Saturday Review always laugh at 
 people who try to be a little better than the rest of 
 the world ?' On another occasion he acknowledged 
 that the University Commission had been needlessly 
 vexatious in their dealings with All Souls', where- 
 upon one of his hearers suggested that it seemed 
 ' natural ' that the fellows should take the law into 
 their own hands, and that they should now and then 
 elect (as they were reported to have done) a new 
 member into their gentlemanlike Club in blissful 
 disregard of his place in the examination. ' If this 
 is natural,' said Jowett, with some asperity, 'it 
 means that human nature is very bad.' Pattison 
 would doubtless have been disposed to challenge 
 this severe verdict on the ground that human nature 
 furnishes the only standard by which human nature 
 can be judged ; that, therefore, when Jowett broadly 
 declared that human nature is very bad, he showed 
 that he had been expecting from the human animal 
 a greater degree of perfection than appertains to the 
 constitution of that animal ; and that, in fact, he spoke 
 as unscientifically as if he had said that most men 
 are very shortlived, or that most men are very small. 
 Another question bearing on that of the heinous- 
 ness of sin is the question of Philosophical Necessity. 
 One of the ' stodgy questions ' which, as an under- 
 graduate, I put to Jowett was whether he believed 
 in Necessity or in Free Will.
 
 120 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 J". ' I believe in Necessity in the sense of believing that our 
 actions are determined by motives.' 
 
 T. ' That admission seems to me to cover the entire ground. 
 But would it do to act on the belief ?' 
 
 J. [laughing].' If you begin to act on the belief, we shall 
 have to turn you out of the College. [More seriously] No. 
 Whatever one may think about the abstract question, one does 
 not mean that it is the same thing to be walking along the 
 street of one's free will and to be dragged along it against one's 
 will. Necessity, when rightly understood, remains a sort of 
 theory in the background, and one acts hi much the same way 
 whether one believes hi it or not.' 
 
 Is this exactly so ? Does the belief in Necessity, 
 when held by a thoughtful person, lie dormant in 
 his moral constitution? Mr. John Morley, indeed, 
 seems to think that this theory need have no very 
 great, or at least no very enervating, effect upon 
 conduct. This appears from the whole passage, in 
 which he says of James Mill : 
 
 ' Perhaps even at the last he had glimpses of the mood 
 imputed hi the saying of divers strong men on their death- 
 beds, from the Emperor Augustus to Eabelais : " Draw the 
 curtain, the play is over." We shall never know how much 
 brave and honest work has been done for the world by men in 
 whose minds lurked all the while this thought of the puppet- 
 show, the tragi-comedy of phantoms. 1 
 
 Personally, I should have thought that this mood 
 of mind generally makes men rather tolerant than 
 brave. It seems, as a rule, to clip the wings of 
 aspiration. It almost always blunts the edge of 
 righteous anger. If all the world's a show, and all 
 the men and women merely puppets, how can we be 
 wroth with the clumsy and fragile puppets which
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 121 
 
 * Nature's journeymen ' have made ? The Philistine 
 moralist feels disgust, and nothing but disgust, at 
 the crimes of Caesar Borgia. But an anthropologist 
 finds that his disgust is largely tempered with pity 
 when he considers how evil a disposition would 
 probably, and how evil an education would certainly, 
 have fallen to the lot of any son of Alexander VI. 
 
 0eo?s yap fy otfrw <f>L\ov 
 rdx &v TI jj.rfviovffiv fit yfvos TrdXcu.* 
 
 And, in general, such a philosopher will be con- 
 vinced that those three modern Parcse Heredity, 
 Education, and Afterlot have woven a spell for 
 each one of us and have fashioned us after their 
 liking. "When once he has satisfied himself that 
 L'homme obdit a son temperament aussi fatalement 
 que I'animal obdit a son instinct, he will conclude 
 that Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner; inso- 
 much that perchance, in paradoxical moments, he 
 would be tempted to adapt the familiar couplet, and 
 to exclaim : 
 
 ' If rogues, like earthquakes, come by Fate's design, 
 Why blame a Borgia or a Catiline '?' 
 
 But at this point he will find himself in a difficulty. 
 He soon learns that if he is writing a biography, and 
 above all, if he is delivering a popular lecture, his 
 sense of pity for evil-doers, and, perhaps, of enter- 
 tainment at the oddity of the world 'his thought 
 of the puppet-show ' must be studiously ignored. 
 
 * Thus it pleased the gods, angered perchance by the 
 generations of old.
 
 122 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 He must preach the exceeding sinfulness of sin, even 
 though he be at times haunted by the thought that 
 the head and front of the sinner's offending may be 
 that he did not manage to have better grandfathers ! 
 Perhaps, after all, our philosophical sceptic might 
 sum up his teaching by saying: Human nature is 
 not really bad, but it is only by telling men that it 
 is bad that we can hope to make it better.* 
 
 Such a philosophical sceptic was Pattison. Jowett 
 seems to me to have held tentatively and half con- 
 sciously nearly the same opinion which Pattison held 
 deliberately and thoroughly. It may, therefore, be 
 worth while to illustrate Pattison' s view somewhat 
 further. He was, perhaps, the most paradoxical 
 man I ever met, and, if he had adopted and adapted 
 what Matthew Arnold calls the harsh and unedifying 
 metaphor of St. Paul, he might have applied that 
 
 * Without greater exaggeration than is permissible in an 
 epigram, we may say : ' No man who is not penetrated with 
 the thought of the puppet-show can be a sage ; no man who is 
 so penetrated can be a saint.' This thought of the puppet- 
 show of the subjection of all phenomena, moral as well as 
 physical, to unchanging laws is well expressed in the fine 
 stanza of Omar Khayyam : 
 
 ' With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man knead, 
 And there of the Last Harvest sow'd the Seed : 
 
 And the first Morning of Creation wrote 
 What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.' 
 
 I think it was Wendell Holmes who said that many a man 
 dies of a disease the seeds of which were sown a century 
 before he was born. It is at least equally true that many a 
 crime is the outcome of a hereditary taint which manifested 
 itself before the criminal was born. Might not the fate of 
 Anne Boleyn and of Sir Thomas More have been different if 
 Henry VIII. had not been the grandson of Edward IV. and 
 the great-nephew of Richard III. ?
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 128 
 
 metaphor as follows : ' The Great Potter cannot 
 complain of the defects of the vivacious and loqua- 
 cious pots which He has shapen amiss. But the 
 welfare of the whole pottery requires that the 
 vigorous pots which are made unto honour, instead 
 of pitying the poor pots which are made unto dis- 
 honour, should conspire to chide them for their 
 uncomeliness, and, if need be, to break them in 
 pieces.' That this presentment of his view is not 
 overdrawn may be easily shown. A kinswoman of 
 his informs me that when very young she was 
 perplexed by a saying of his, which seemed to be at 
 variance with the teaching of the Church Catechism. 
 ' There is no such thing,' he told her, ' as sin ; there 
 are only mistakes.' From so astounding a proposi- 
 tion Jowett would certainly have recoiled. And yet 
 I persist in thinking that his standpoint and Patti- 
 son's were in close vicinity. If called upon to 
 explain himself, Pattison might well have contended 
 that he meant no more than Goethe had meant 
 when he said that 'the man of action is always 
 without a conscience.' He might have gone further, 
 and maintained that his disquieting and unpriestly 
 paradox, when furbished up and made presentable, 
 merely signifies that our moral sentiments and 
 traditions will not bear strict analysis. I have not 
 the smallest doubt that he, if pressed by logic, would 
 have expanded his principle after this manner: 
 ' There is no such thing as sin ; there are only 
 mistakes. But the most fatal of all mistakes would be 
 to desist from speaking and acting as if there were such
 
 124 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 a thing as sin.' Thus I am confirmed in the opinion 
 which I expressed ten years ago, namely, that Patti- 
 son's ethical creed was ' Utilitarianism tempered by 
 Pyrrhonism ' (' Stones of Stumbling,' p. 167). 
 
 To return to Jowett. The paradox, if paradox it 
 be, that our moral sentiments become pulverized 
 under logical pressure, was upheld hi my presence by 
 two of his most distinguished disciples, Henry Smith 
 and Bowen. One remark of Bowen's may be worth 
 quoting as illustrating the Jowettian standpoint. 
 When I was coaching with him, he said to me : 
 ' If you had talked to Aristotle about the corruption 
 of human nature, he would have laughed at you.' 
 Indeed, Jowett himself sometimes pitched his note 
 in a key not wholly dissimilar. In one of the essays 
 that I read to him, I spoke of Socrates as having had 
 a deep sense of sin. He cut me short with the 
 remark that the conception of the heinousness of 
 sin is not Greek, but Oriental. In speaking thus, he 
 seemed to endorse the saying of Carlyle that ' Socrates 
 is terribly at ease in Zion.' But he seemed to imply 
 more than this. He seemed to intimate that the 
 belief in the heinousness of sin belongs rather to 
 the theologian than to the philosopher, and that, 
 in the philosopher's opinion, at least, this belief 
 is man-made and not God-made is artificial, if not 
 illusory. Eoughly, then, we may thus distinguish 
 between Jowett's standpoint and Pattison's. As a 
 philosopher, Jowett did not believe in the heinous- 
 ness of sin; but as a moralist, he did believe in it. 
 Pattison, as a philosopher, did not believe hi it ; as
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 125 
 
 a moralist, he pretended to believe in it, or at most 
 he now and then made himself half believe that he 
 believed in it. The philosopher and the moralist 
 in him were in a manner harnessed together by 
 logic ; so that he could not, as Jowett could, let his 
 two selves go careering about hi opposite directions. 
 On the whole, therefore, we may conclude that to a 
 logical disciple of Jowett's, as well as to any disciple 
 of Pattison, the sense of sin has a ghostly impressive- 
 ness, and, indeed, has much hi common with the 
 representation of a ghost on the stage he distinctly 
 sees it, but also he sees through it. Or perhaps a 
 better illustration would be that to such a one this 
 sense of sin, this imperious Postulate of the Practical 
 Reason, is like the black cap of a Judge a something 
 external and repulsive which he has to assume when 
 about to pronounce a sentence of the utmost severity, 
 but which he then promptly lays aside. Might not 
 Pattison, or might not Renan, have said of this 
 belief in the heinousness of sin, as Renan has said 
 of another great theological postulate, that its interest 
 lies in the twofold fact that it involves a physical 
 impossibility, and that it is itself a moral necessity?* 
 
 * It occurs to me that a moralist, or at least a statesman 
 or a judge, considers his fellow-men as somewhat resembling 
 the pieces on a draught-board ; he regards them, for some 
 purposes, as possessing equal capacities, and as therefore giving 
 rise to equal expectations. The philosopher, on the other hand, 
 regards them as resembling chessmen ; for he never forgets 
 that different individuals differ widely in capacity, and that 
 very much more is to be expected from some than from others. 
 So considered, the worst knaves of all, the d/cdXewrot, the 
 morally blind, may be compared to the knights of chess they 
 are continually being moved hi a crooked course, but they are 
 themselves as unaware that the course is crooked as that there 
 is a Power outside themselves that moves them.
 
 126 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 Mill has coupled together Plato and Luther, 
 alleging that each of those great men belonged to 
 the class of intellectual reformers who, having suc- 
 ceeded beyond all reasonable expectation, spend their 
 old age in moderating the ardour of disciples who 
 are eager to outrun their master. In what sense, 
 and on what evidence, this is said of Plato I am 
 curious to learn; but the remark may with much 
 truth be applied to our Oxford Plato. For in his 
 later years, and, indeed, in middle life, Jowett was 
 apprehensive lest some of his pupils should go too 
 far. He was alarmed by the scepticism which he 
 saw spreading among some of the ablest men of my 
 standing at Oxford. He could not imagine, he once 
 said to me, how and where this scepticism was picked 
 up ; he was careful not to instil it, but it seemed 
 somehow to arise of itself. He also expressed regret 
 that so few of the most thoughtful men were willing 
 to take orders; the evil had been more or less 
 apparent for some time, but when he spoke to me 
 (about 1859) it was worse than ever. I once read 
 to him an essay which contained some unguarded 
 expressions. When I had done, he said (after a few 
 friendly comments) that I seemed to him to be 
 ridiculing the belief in a future life. I assured him 
 that he had misunderstood me ; but he went on to 
 say that a lady friend (Dean Stanley's mother) had 
 told him that she had heard that I was becoming 
 wild in my opinions. He added that he trembled 
 for me when he thought how I was separating myself 
 from the beliefs of those around me. Beflecting
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 127 
 
 in later life on this remark of his, I have sometimes 
 thought it very curious. Aristotle, in a quaintly 
 modern passage, has reprobated the notion that the 
 dead are in no way affected by the fortunes of the 
 living, not as being logically untenable, but as being 
 ' too heartless and opposed to current opinions ' 
 (\iav a^tXoy KOI rals Sofat? evavriov). And it seems 
 to me to have been in a spirit not wholly unlike this 
 that Jowett eschewed religious scepticism, not as 
 being unsound, or (to use my father's phrase) ' most 
 displeasing to Almighty God,' but as involving the 
 sense of loneliness and the paralysis of moral effort, 
 which are the common accompaniments of intellectual 
 isolation. In this instance Jowett, like Pattison, 
 though less consciously and completely, 'subordin- 
 ated religion to morality.' 
 
 In recording these instances, I specially wish to 
 call attention to Jowett's gentle and sympathetic 
 handling of honest doubt. They present a strong 
 contrast to at least one harsh saying ascribed to him. 
 My readers may remember the story of the some- 
 what priggish youth who told -Jowett that he could 
 not convince himself of the existence of God : ' I 
 cannot see any signs of Him in Nature, and when I 
 look into my own heart I fail to find Him there.' 
 J. ' You must either find Him by to-morrow morn- 
 ing or leave the College.' Did Jowett really say 
 this ? It is proverbially hard to prove a negative. 
 But I will venture to suggest that, if the story be 
 true, Jowett had made up his mind as to what 
 manner of man he was dealing with, and thought
 
 128 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 (justly or unjustly) that the pretentious apostle of 
 negation should be brought to the test of martyr- 
 dom. 
 
 It should also be borne in mind that Jowett was 
 punctilious in enforcing discipline and in avoiding 
 all cause of offence, when, as Master of Balliol, he 
 was establishing hi the College a Liberal government, 
 or, as we may now say, a Liberal dynasty, to supplant 
 the reactionary government which had so long borne 
 sway. Not only is it true that new brooms sweep 
 clean, but also in the cleansing process they are apt 
 to be stiff, prickly, and rough : 
 
 "ATTOJ 5 rpaxfa, OOTIJ &v viov Kpary. 
 
 And in very truth Jowett was a reformer, success- 
 ful beyond all reasonable expectation. A great 
 statesman once said of Mr. Bright that he was 
 specially fortunate in having, before the close of his 
 life, won the regard of his old enemies. Jowett did 
 less and more than this. He seldom or never won 
 the regard of his old enemies. But he won, not only 
 the regard, but the affection, of their children and 
 grandchildren. He educated the younger generation 
 first to tolerate and then to admire him. And thus 
 it is that now, when some worthy philanthropists 
 
 and landlords 
 
 ' in dust repose, 
 Whose sons shall blush their fathers were his foes,' 
 
 he has taken high rank among the Whigs of Eeligion 
 among those who, Conservatives in the true sense, 
 have averted revolution by making timely con- 
 cessions.
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 129 
 
 How, then, did he maintain himself in this mid- 
 way position ? In answering this, I will endeavour 
 to throw light on his manner of dealing with what 
 may be called the Paley-Butler arguments, which 
 drive men to extremes. The main argument of 
 Butler's ' Analogy,' or something very like it, has 
 been used by the narrowly orthodox party against all 
 its opponents except its extreme ones. The Extreme 
 Right in religion employs the weapon against the 
 Right Centre and the Left Centre, but it fails to 
 touch the Extreme Left. Nay, to the Extreme Left 
 to the atheists this same weapon is not unaccept- 
 able. In a less degree this has now become true of 
 Paley's argument in support of miracles. The argu- 
 ment that, if you accept one miracle, you must bd 
 prepared to accept all the miracles which Paley 
 defends ; and that, if you accept these, you must 
 also be prepared to accept all the miracles whieh 
 Cardinal Newman defends, is assuredly two-edged. 
 In fact, bigots and atheists, though they would, of 
 course, word the argument differently, agree in in- 
 sisting that ' ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute,' 
 and that the beginning of supernaturalism is as when 
 one letteth out water. It was, I understand, either 
 Charles or Arthur Buller who (so to say) christened 
 Mr. Grote a ' rigid Atheist.' At any rate, Mr. Grote 
 showed the appropriateness of the name by saying to 
 me : ' It is of no use striking at the branches so long 
 as you leave the root. The belief in a God seems to 
 me to be the root and germ of every form of super- 
 stition.' And when I praised Jowett to him, he said 
 
 9
 
 180 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 that Mill had in like manner praised the theological 
 liberalism of Sterling.* But he himself seemed to 
 have a sort of timeo Danaos feeling about Jowett and 
 Sterling alike. * Les esprits faibles ne sont jamais 
 sinceres,' says Eochefoucauld, with much exaggera- 
 tion. Grote would, I suspect, have regarded both 
 Jowett and Sterling as speculatively dcs esprits 
 failles; and yet he would have considered them 
 certainly as sincere, and probably as trustworthy, 
 but hardly as in the fullest sense reliable. 
 
 How, then, did Jowett avoid both the horns of the 
 dilemma, one of which transfixed Newman, while the 
 other transfixed Grote ? A biographer, like a critic, 
 must as far as possible keep himself in the back- 
 ground ; so I will seek to trace out Jowett's stand- 
 point without being careful to determine my own. 
 I once called Jowett's attention to Blanco White's 
 extraordinary assertion that no sincere Catholic can 
 be tolerant, and to Buckle's comment on that asser- 
 tion, that a sincere Catholic may be, and often is, 
 tolerant a consistent Catholic, never. Jowett 
 thought that even Buckle's statement is extrava- 
 gant : ' It involves the whole question whether 
 Catholicism can adapt itself to the needs of the 
 present day.' Now, it is plain that, if the doctrines 
 of the Bible or of the Church are absolutely true, 
 and conflict with the so-called needs of the present 
 day, the needs ought to adapt themselves to the 
 
 * Part of this is stated, and more of it is implied, in my 
 Eecollections of Grote (' Safe Studies,' p. 141), but during the 
 lifetime of Mrs. Grote I expressed myself guardedly.
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 181 
 
 doctrines, and not the doctrines to the needs. So, 
 again, I once talked over with him Professor Kawlin- 
 son's Bampton Lectures, in which the truth of the 
 Bible was sought to be confirmed by inscriptions 
 and other recent discoveries. Jowett made the 
 characteristic comment on them : ' Everybody admits 
 that there was a king who was called Solomon, and 
 built a temple. What Kawlinson proves is virtually 
 matter of this sort, matter which nobody doubts. 
 But in much that he tries to prove he must fail. 
 He is trying to pitch the standard of belief too high for 
 the present age.' Here the highest criticism of the 
 age is made the ultimate Court of Appeal. Jowett 
 took hold of the criticism of the age with strong 
 grappling-irons. He had a more working belief 
 Newman would have said a more ' real belief ' in 
 that criticism than in the teaching of tradition ; if 
 criticism and tradition came into collision, tradition 
 must go to the wall. 
 
 And now, in order further to illustrate Jowett's 
 point of view, I will make a last comparison between 
 it and Pattison's. Not long ago, I quoted a sug- 
 gestion of Mr. Francis Galton to the effect that our 
 poor little planet may be no better than a lusus 
 Natures, a sort of cosmic malformation. Carrying 
 out this illustration, a disciple of Pattison might 
 ask : ' If our world is a cripple, may not the cripple 
 have need of a crutch ? In other words, may not 
 illusion, that twin-sister of symbolism, be indis- 
 pensable for morality indispensable temporarily, 
 and perhaps even permanently?' A disciple of
 
 132 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 Jowett would hesitate to take this line ; at all 
 events, he would not be so explicit. Perhaps the 
 difference between Pattison and Jowett may be best 
 indicated by saying that Pattison, as we have seen, 
 practised economy of truth, whereas Jowett rather 
 practised economy of logic.* Jowett did this in an 
 extreme form when he accepted general principles, 
 and refused to follow them out to their conclusions. 
 When he thus conveniently exiled himself from ' the 
 dominion of logic,' he touched the frontier line which 
 divides economy of logic from economy of truth. 
 Sometimes he even seemed to cross that frontier. I 
 remember talking to him about H. N. Oxenham's 
 reputation as a speaker in the Union. Jowett seemed 
 to think his reputation exaggerated, and to regard 
 Oxenham himself as aggressively and tiresomely 
 argumentative. The man who had most impressed 
 Jowett by his power of condensing an argument into 
 
 * A very singular and plain-spoken passage from Amiel's 
 Journal Intime may serve to illustrate my meaning : ' Ce 
 double fait contradictoire, d'une esperance naive renaisaant 
 apres toutes les deceptions et d'une experience presque in- 
 variablement de"favorable, s'explique comme toutes les illusions 
 par une volont6 de la nature, qui veut que nous soyons abuses 
 ou que nous agissions comme si nous Vetions encore. Le 
 scepticisme est plus sage, mais il paralyse la vie, en supprimant 
 1'erreur. La maturite d'esprit consiste a entrer dans le jeu 
 oblig^ en se dormant 1'air d'etre dupe. Cette complaisance 
 debonnaire corrigee par une sourire est encore le parti le plus 
 ing^nieux.' The words I have italicized roughly mark the 
 difference between Jowett and Pattison. In times of intro- 
 spection, Jowett would perhaps have half acknowledged the 
 principle contained in the words ' que nous soyons abuses '; 
 Pattison, at such times, which with him were very frequent, 
 would have quite acknowledged the principle contained in the 
 words ' que nous agissions comme si nous lotions encore.'
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 133 
 
 the fewest possible words was Ward. He gave me 
 an instance of this. He said that Ward, while still 
 an Anglican, had spoken to him of the Evangelicals 
 who failed to find the doctrine of baptismal regenera- 
 tion in the Church Service. ' I do not blame them,' 
 continued Ward, 'for thus using words in a non- 
 natural sense ; but we are all dishonest together, and 
 therefore we are all honest.' Jowett seemed to me to 
 quote this epigram with approval. The words, I 
 submit, must mean that all Anglicans are and must 
 be illogical, but they are illogical more or less 
 consciously according to their greater or less degree 
 of culture. A yet more singular utterance of Jowett's 
 tended in the same direction. A distinguished writer, 
 who had been somewhat persecuted for Eationalism's 
 sake,' had subsequently made profession of such spot- 
 less orthodoxy as to awaken suspicion among his 
 enemies that he was all things to all men, or, rather, 
 to all women. I spoke to Jowett about him, and 
 looked inquiringly. ' The worst of it is that he'll 
 end by believing it all,' replied Jowett, with that 
 enigmatical and (in the Greek sense) ironical smile 
 which sometimes made it hard to tell whether our 
 modern Socrates was speaking half in jest or wholly 
 in earnest. 
 
 The foregoing examples set forth one side of 
 Jowett, the side which he had in common with 
 Pattison. The next example shows a very different 
 side of him. When I was an undergraduate, I once, 
 having caught the spirit of one of his most advanced 
 pupils, tried to embody that spirit in an essay which
 
 134 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 I showed to Jowett himself. In that essay I threw 
 out the suggestion that, if some illusions are indeed 
 beatific and (so to say) bonific, it must be a folly to 
 disillusionize one's self and a crime to disillusionize 
 others, and I concluded with the words : ' Thus 
 scepticism, when carried to the furthest point, 
 destroys itself, and leads us by an indirect path in 
 speculation to orthodoxy, and in practice to a 
 colourless acquiescence in the principles of our own 
 time.' This juvenile outburst, which was meant, I 
 now hope, to draw Jowett out, succeeded in doing so 
 more than I could have expected. I give his com- 
 ment from memory, but it was, I think, as follows : 
 ' Do you really suppose this to be the whole truth ? 
 I cannot believe it. Even if such scepticism prevails 
 for a tune, it must sooner or later pass away.' This 
 reminds me that I once asked him what he thought 
 of that most unbiblical of books, Ecclesiastes, and 
 how he explained the glaring discordance between 
 the concluding section and the rest of it. What 
 view did he take of its author, if, indeed, there was 
 but one author ? 
 
 J. * He was an arrant sceptic, but in the end a 
 better mind came over him.' 
 
 It may not be amiss to sum up in a few words the 
 contrast, which I have so often indicated, between 
 Pattison and Jowett. Pattison knew that social 
 martyrdom is the goal to which the principles of 
 Idealists, if logically pressed, would often lead ; and 
 his own belief in posthumous rewards and punish- 
 ments had faded away. Hence, being such as he
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 135 
 
 was, and not coveting the barren laurels of an un- 
 heaven-reicarded martyrdom, he ended by giving up 
 his Idealism. The antipodes of such a character 
 may be represented by the saint who unquestioningly 
 fights the good fight, who knows that his Vindicator 
 liveth, and who, through all tribulations and mis- 
 constructions, looks forward to a sanction which is 
 not of this world. Such born saints as are thus 
 animated and sustained, whatever may be their 
 limitations, seek and find in their devotion to the 
 Ideal their own exceeding great reward. The Lord 
 is unto them an everlasting light, and their God their 
 glory. But such a born saint Jowett was not; he 
 had not (to speak broadly) the requisite faculty of 
 ready belief. Thus it was that with neither of the 
 two classes of persons whom I have indicated 
 neither with Montaigne nor with Pascal, neither 
 with Pattison nor with Liddon was he completely 
 in accord. His heart was the heart of an Idealist, 
 but his head was the head of a Sceptic. Hence it 
 appears that his unique fascination and his incom- 
 pleteness arose from the same cause : he sought to 
 combine the pococurantism of the sage with the 
 moltocurantizm of the saint. 
 
 It is hoped that these various glimpses of Jowett 
 may be combined into a sort of composite photo- 
 graph, which will give a not wholly incorrect 
 impression of that ever-changing, but ever-fasci- 
 nating, spiritual figure. In my youth I had a ready 
 answer to the riddle which his personality presented.
 
 136 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 I used to say that, half accepting and half rejecting 
 Christianity, he set things right by accepting half 
 Christianity and rejecting the other half. Perhaps, 
 indeed, it may with truth be said that, in his 
 dealings with orthodoxy, he put into action the two 
 French sayings, ' J'en prends et j'en laisse,' and 
 ' J'y suis et j'y reste.' But to say this and no more 
 would be most unjust, as well as most unfriendly. 
 In reality, he was moved by the suggestion that 
 there may|be more things in heaven and earth than 
 are dreamt of in our philosophy. But he may, at 
 the same time, have felt some of his disciples 
 have certainly felt that it is hard to draw much 
 comfort from this suggestion without doing violence 
 to the imperious and generally accepted Law of 
 Parsimony, which forbids us to multiply existences, 
 or modes of existence, beyond what is necessary 
 beyond the point which positive evidence warrants. 
 For example : There is not a particle of evidence to 
 disprove the existence of fairies ; but, as there is no 
 evidence to prove their existence, the case goes 
 against them by default. Our mental attitude 
 towards them is one, not of suspended judgment, 
 but of disbelief. Why should not, one sometimes asks 
 in one's own despite, a similar mode of reasoning be 
 applied to the belief in certain other Invisible 
 Beings? 
 
 The burden of this difficulty weighed on the 
 sensitive Amiel, whose state of mind may illustrate 
 Jowett's. In the ' Journal Intime ' Amiel asks whether
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 137 
 
 illusions may not be indispensable, and, if so, how 
 are we to deal with them ? He replies : ' La 
 methode serait peut-etre de distinguer profondement 
 1'opinion de la croyance et la croyance de la science. 
 Un esprit qui discerne ces divers degres peut 
 s'imaginer et peut croire, sans etre exclus d'un 
 pr ogres ulterieur.' 
 
 Amiel here commends the use of a sort of sliding 
 scale of beliefs, the preference being given to the 
 belief in science as opposed to the belief in tradition. 
 A somewhat similar sliding scale is indicated in a 
 very remarkable passage which Jowett has inserted 
 in his introduction to the ' Phsedo ' : 
 
 4 We are more certain of the existence of God than we are of 
 the immortality of the soul, and are led by the belief in the one 
 to a belief in the other. . . . Nor need we shrink from pressing 
 the analogy one step farther : " We are more certain of our 
 ideas of truth and right than we are of the existence of God, 
 and are led on in the order of thought from one to the other." ' 
 
 To the three links in the chain duty, God, 
 immortality which Jowett has here connected with 
 each other and arranged in this order, one is tempted 
 to add two more links, one at each end. He would 
 have admitted, at all events in his later years, that 
 the belief in the Christian Revelation is dependent 
 on, and is in a sense subordinate to, the belief in 
 immortality. On the other hand, he would perhaps 
 have acknowledged Pattison and Fitzjames Stephen 
 would undoubtedly have acknowledged that the 
 belief in mathematical and in some scientific truths
 
 138 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 carries with it greater certainty than the belief hi 
 the grandest postulates of morality ; the equality of 
 the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle is 
 more demonstrable than the obligation of self- 
 sacrifice. On the whole, it may safely be affirmed 
 of such a man as Amiel or Jowett that, in the 
 province of tradition, as the French would say, il 
 glisse ; in the province of science and of criticism, il 
 s'appuie. This is so; but it does not follow that 
 Jowett's affections ran parallel with his convictions. 
 Speaking roughly, we may say that his head was on 
 the side of science ; but it was not on that account 
 true that (so to express it) where his head was there 
 his heart was also. He thought with the Rationalists, 
 but felt with the Christians. Perhaps it is not too 
 fanciful to say that, being tossed on the sea of doubt 
 and scepticism, and drifting further and further 
 from his old moorings, he was yet attached to those 
 moorings by an indefinitely elastic cable, and by a 
 golden anchor the elastic cable of the Imagination, 
 and the golden anchor of Hope. Last summer I 
 was in a Swiss mortuary chapel looking at some 
 human skulls which were arranged in a grotesque 
 pattern on the wall ; and, standing where I did, 
 I caught sight of a crucifix in an obscure place 
 further off. Presently, as I gazed at this twofold 
 spectacle the handiwork of Death close to me, and 
 the dun form in the distance the words seemed to 
 ring in my ears : I am the Resurrection and the Life. 
 The hour cometh when the dead shall hear the voice of
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 189 
 
 the Son of God ; and they that hear shall live. And 
 then, as the unuttered voice died away, I somehow 
 found myself thinking of Jowett. Was he not, in 
 very truth, made perfect through suffering ? At any 
 rate, let us hope that any of his disciples who have 
 gone, or are going, through the like sore trial, may 
 come out of it as scathless as he did : 
 
 ' Tune me biremis prsesidio scaphae 
 Tutum per ^gaeos tumultus 
 Aura feret* 
 
 Will it be said that to cherish the Wider Hope, 
 without alleging any evidence for that hope, is mere 
 unfaithfulness to truth? Jowett would probably 
 have replied that such evidence is not wholly 
 wanting. Pandora's box is called, and perhaps 
 thought, empty, because it is less full than each of 
 us in early youth expected it to be. But some solid 
 contents it assuredly has, or so volatile an ingredient 
 as Hope would have evaporated. In brief, Jowett 
 might have echoed the reply made by Prevost- 
 Paradol to the Scotch busybody who asked him to 
 what Church he belonged : ' J'appartiens a cette 
 grande ^glise sans nom, dont les membres sont 
 partout, et partout se reconnaissent ou ils se ren- 
 contrent.' 
 
 Jowett once praised to me the beauty of the 
 Authorized Version of the New Testament, which 
 he regarded as sometimes, especially in the Apoca- 
 lypse, superior to the Greek original. By way of 
 illustration, he repeated the text: 'And I, John,
 
 140 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down 
 from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned 
 for her husband.' As he quoted those magnificent 
 words, his voice betrayed more of saintly emotion 
 than I ever observed in it before or since. His un- 
 wonted earnestness made me feel that the New Jeru- 
 salem, whatever mystical sense he might put upon 
 it, was in very deed the symbol and goal of his 
 aspirations ; his religion, like Dr. Arnold's, and also 
 like Matthew Arnold's, led 
 
 1 On to the city of God.' 
 
 But was not this religion of his mobile and, as it 
 were, undulating? Unquestionably. But we may, 
 I think, trace out the limits between which it ebbed 
 and flowed. The low-water mark may be shown in 
 words borrowed by him from Socrates : ' There can 
 no evil happen to a good man in life or death.' 
 
 On the other hand, 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 its 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 hi perfect fulness and for ever. 
 Felices ter et amplius ! And yet, alas ! when I think
 
 A PERSONAL MEMOIR 141 
 
 upon this cheering and elevating faith of his this 
 hope of posthumous bliss, untainted by the fear of 
 posthumous ill I cannot but feel how rare such an 
 unadulterated optimism, the only optimism worthy 
 to be so called, has been throughout the ages, and I 
 exclaim with a sigh : Many prophets and many 
 philosophers have desired to see those things ivhich he 
 saw, and have not seen them, and to believe those things 
 that he believed, and have not believed them. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GVILDKOIU).
 
 ESSAYS, RECOLLECTIONS, AND CAUSERIES. 
 
 BY THE HON. LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE. 
 
 {Collected in their original form at MARK PATTISOWS 
 
 request^ 
 
 Demy 8vo., pp. 454, cloth, 55. 
 
 SAFE STUDIES. 
 
 Contents : 
 
 HISTORICAL PREDICTION. SIR G. C. LEWIS AND LONGEVITY. 
 
 LITERARY EGOTISM. CHARLES AUSTIN. 
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF MR. GROTE AND MR. BABBAGE. 
 
 MR. TENNYSON'S SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 PHYSICAL AND MORAL COURAGE. THE UPPER ENGADINE. 
 
 NOTES AND RECOLLECTIONS OF SIR CHARLES WHEATSTONE, 
 
 DEAN STANLEY, AND CANON KINGSLEY. 
 THE EPICURIST'S LAMENT. TRANSLATIONS. 
 
 POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS 
 
 BY 
 
 THE HON. MRS. L. A. TOLLEMACHE. 
 
 Demy 8vo., pp. 238, cloth, 2s. 6d. 
 
 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 Contents : 
 
 THE CURE FOR INCURABLES. THE FEAR OF DEATH. 
 
 FEARLESS DEATHS. DIVINE ECONOMY OF TRUTH. 
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF MARK PATTISON.* MR. ROMANES'S CATECHISM. 
 NEOCHRISTIANITY AND NEOCATHOLICISM : a Sequel. 
 
 * This is also published separately, demy 8vo., cloth, is. 
 
 43T These books are issued at COST PRICE. 
 
 ' The essays are mainly biographical, and are full of wit and humour. They 
 abound in good stories of all kinds. Every page shows the classical humanist, 
 the man of taste and scholarly refinement ; but, like the essays of Montaigne, 
 
 LONDON : WILLIAM RICE, 86, FLEET STREET, E.G.
 
 [2 ] 
 
 of whom Mr. Tollemache is almost an English counterpart, there is a richer 
 vein of thought and of philosophy running through all this lighter matter.' 
 Anglican Church Magasine. 
 
 ' Mr. Tollemache's essays seem to us to possess literary merit of a rare and 
 high order. He is not only pleasantly anecdotic ; he is eminently sympathetic, 
 ingenious, thoughtful, and appreciative, and many of these qualities are also 
 exhibited in his more speculative and less personal papers. His recollections of 
 Grote, Charles Austin, and Pattison are full of interesting anecdote and sugges- 
 tive comment, while those of Babbage, Sir Charles Wheatstone, Dean Stanley, 
 and Canon Kingsley, belong to the same order. We can best enforce our 
 favourable judgment of these remarkable volumes by quoting a passage from a 
 letter received from Pattison, to whom he had sent the privately printed edition, 
 which, of course, did not contain the paper on Pattison himselt : " I should say 
 that the papers on the whole show a union, which is very uncommon, of two 
 opposite qualities, viz., a dominant interest in speculation of a wide and human 
 character, with vast resources, in the memory, of single facts, incidents, or mots 
 of famous men. How, with your eyesight, you ever compassed such a range 
 of reading as is here brought to bear at all points of your argument must be a 
 matter of wonder. It seems as if you could draw at pleasure upon all literature, 
 from the classics down to Robert Montgomery and Swinburne." In this 
 judgment we cordially concur. It should be added that the larger volume, 
 entitled "Safe Studies," contains a series of graceful poems by Mrs. Tolle- 
 mache. . . . The " Recollections of Pattison " are very charming. ' The Times. 
 
 ' These very interesting and, in part, very amusing volumes. . . . Altogether, 
 we can give very hearty praise to the book, and that is something in the case of 
 matter which has not the charm of novelty to the reviewer, and with a good 
 deal of which he disagrees in opinion. Mr. Tollemache can tell an excellent 
 story (such as that of the young lady who, having spoken enthusiastically about 
 a clergyman, and being asked if she referred to any sermon of his, said, " No ; 
 oh no ! But he hates mayonnaise, and so do I."). He manages, though he 
 himself is very frequently in presence, and the subject of discussion, never to be 
 unpleasantly egotistic. His work has the literary flavour throughout, without 
 being merely bookish, and he can argue a thesis like a craftsman and a master 
 of his craft.' Saturday Jfeview. 
 
 'The "Safe Studies" are those to which it is impossible for any human 
 creature to raise the smallest objection on any ground whatever, and they are 
 about four times as long as the " Stones of Stumbling." These stumbling- 
 blocks may possibly at some period or other have given scandal to a part of the 
 population by no means likely to read them ; but in these days the public has 
 swallowed so many camels that we do not think Mr. Tollemache's gnats would 
 even make any considerable portion of them cough. . . . We propose to make 
 some observations on the most important of these charming essays. They are 
 all singularly well worth reading, and may be described as the works of a most 
 ingenious, accomplished, and cultivated man of leisure, who writes in order to 
 fix recollections and systematize speculations which interest him, and not for 
 the purpose of advocating particular views in the spirit of a partisan or propa- 
 gandist. . . . The only likelihood of Charles Austin being remembered at all 
 lies in the chance of the survival of the touching and striking account given of 
 him by his accomplished, grateful, and most appreciative pupil.' The late Mr. 
 Justice Fittjames Stephen in the ST. JAMES'S GAZETTE. 
 
 LONDON : WILLIAM RICE, 86, FLEET STREET, E.G.
 
 Mr. EDWARD ARNOLD'S 
 
 LIST OF 
 
 NEW AND FORTHCOMING WORKS, 
 
 October, 1895. 
 
 NOTICE. Mr. Edward Arnold has now opened an Office at 
 70, Fifth Avenue, New York, from which all his new 
 Books are distributed in America. 
 
 THE LAND OF THE NILE-SPRINGS. 
 
 By COLONEL SIR HENRY COLVILE, K.C.M.G., C.B., 
 recently British Commissioner in Uganda. 
 
 With Photogravure Frontispiece, 16 Full-page Illustrations and 
 2 Maps, demy 8vo., i6s. 
 
 SUMMARY OF CONTENTS. The Road to the Lake Usoga 
 Uganda Kampala Preparations for War Concentration 
 on the Frontier Crossing the Kafu Occupation of the 
 Capital Chasing Kabarega The Investment of the Forest 
 Occupation of Kibiro The Magungu Expedition The 
 Wadelai Expedition The Chain of Forts Return to Uganda 
 Parade and Policy Life at Port Alice Affairs at Unyoro, 
 etc. 
 
 LONDON : 
 EDWARD ARNOLD, 37 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND.
 
 Mr. Edward Arnold's List. 
 
 FIRE AND SWORD IN THE SUDAN. 
 
 A personal Narrative of Fighting and Serving the Dervishes, 
 1879-1895. 
 
 By SLAT IN PASHA, Colonel in the Egyptian Army, formerly 
 Governor and Commandant of the Troops in Darfur. 
 
 Translated and Edited by Major F. R. WINGATE, R.A., D.S.O., 
 
 Author of Mahdiism and the Egyptian Soudan,' etc. 
 
 Fully Illustrated by R. TALBOT KELLY. 
 Demy 8vo., One Guinea net. 
 
 Slatin Pasha was by far the most important of the European 
 prisoners in the Soudan. Before the Mahdi's victories he held 
 the post of Governor of Darfur, and was in command of large 
 military forces. He fought no fewer than twenty-seven pitched 
 battles before he was compelled to surrender, and is the only 
 surviving soldier who has given an eye-witness account of the 
 terrible fighting that occurred during the Mahdist struggle for 
 supremacy. He was present as a prisoner during the siege of 
 Khartoum, and it was to his feet that Gordon's head was 
 brought in revengeful triumph within an hour of the city's fall. 
 
 The narrative is brought up to the present year, when Slatin 
 Pasha's marvellous escape took place, and the incidents of his 
 captivity have been so indelibly graven on his memory that his 
 account of them has all the freshness of a romance. 
 
 From a military and historical standpoint the book is of the 
 highest value. Slatin Pasha's various expeditions penetrated 
 into regions as yet almost unknown to Europeans, but destined 
 apparently to be the subject of serious complications in the 
 near future. The map of these regions is believed to be the 
 first authentic one produced. There is also a careful ground- 
 plan of Khartoum and Omdurman, which might be of immense 
 service in case of military operations. 
 
 The work is furnished with numerous spirited illustrations by 
 Mr. R. Talbot Kelly, who is personally familiar with the Nile 
 Valley, and has worked under the direct supervision of Slatin 
 Pasha and Major Wingate.
 
 Mr. Edward Arnold's List. 
 
 THE ROMANCE OF PRINCE EUGENE. 
 An Idyll under Napoleon the First. 
 
 By ALBERT PULITZER. 
 
 With numerous Photogravure Illustrations, in two volumes, 
 demy 8vo., 2 is. 
 
 EXTRACT FROM THE PREFACE : ' By chance, glancing over the Memoirs 
 and Correspondence of Prince Eugene, published, about forty years ago, by A. 
 du Casse, in ten volumes octavo, I read with real pleasure the letters addressed 
 by the prince to his wife, born Princess-Royal of Bavaria, and considered one 
 of the handsomest women of her time. These letters, written during the stirring 
 transformations of the Napoleonic epoch, reveal, in the exquisite tenderness 
 which they breathe, one of the most charming love stories which history has 
 given us. On the eighth anniversary of their marriage, the Prince thanks 
 Heaven for having given him "the most beautiful, the best, and the most 
 virtuous of wives. " This graceful and romantic side of the Prince's character 
 seemed to me worthy of being shown to the world. If, in presenting this 
 charming idyll to my readers, I can touch some sensitive hearts and inspire 
 them with a little of the sincere admiration which I myself felt for this ideal 
 love story, I shall be fully recompensed for my labour.' 
 
 STUDIES IN EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE, 
 1837-1870. 
 
 By FREDERIC HARRISON, M.A., 
 
 Author of ' The Choice of Books; etc. 
 
 Large crown 8vo., cloth, IDS. 6d. 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. ANTHONY TROLLOPE. 
 
 LORD MACAULAY. CHARLES DICKENS. 
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 
 
 BENJAMIN DISRAELI. CHARLES KINGSLEY. 
 
 CHARLOTTE BRONTE. GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 The essays contained in this volume have already appeared in the Forum, 
 but they were written originally on a definite preconceived plan with a view to 
 subsequent publication, and may be taken as an expression of the author's 
 mature literary estimate of the great Victorian writers.
 
 Mr. Edward Arnold's List. 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. 
 
 By WALTER RALEIGH, Professor of English Literature at 
 Liverpool University College. 
 
 Author of ' The English Novel' etc. 
 Crown 8vo., cloth, 2s. 6d. 
 
 THE SECRET OF THE DESERT. 
 
 By E. D. FAWCETT, 
 
 Author of ' Swallowed by an Earthquake' etc. 
 
 With Full-page Illustrations, crown 8vo., cloth, 35. 6d. 
 
 KLEINES HAUSTHEATER. 
 
 Fifteen Little Plays in German for Children. 
 
 By MRS. HUGH BELL. 
 
 Crown 8vo., cloth, 2s. 
 
 Most of these little plays have been adapted from the author's ' Petit 
 Theatre,' the remainder from a little book of English plays by the same writer 
 entitled ' Nursery Comedies. ' 
 
 NEW STORY BY THE AUTHOR OF ' MISS BLAKE OF 
 MONKSHAL TON.' 
 
 ON THE THRESHOLD. 
 
 By ISABELLA O. FORD, 
 
 A uthor of ' Miss Blake of Alonkshalton. ' 
 
 One vol., crown Svo., 35. 6d.
 
 Mr. Edward Arnold's List. 
 
 NEW STORY BY THE AUTHOR OF ' MERRIE ENGLAND.' 
 
 TOMMY ATKINS. 
 
 A Tale of the Ranks. 
 
 By ROBERT BLATCHFORD, 
 
 Author of '' A Son of the Forge,' ' Merrie England j etc. 
 
 Crown 8vo., cloth, 6s. 
 
 WAGNER'S HEROES. 
 
 TANNHAUSER. PARSIFAL. HANS SACHS. LOHENGRIN. 
 
 By CONSTANCE MAUD. 
 
 Illustrated by H. GRANVILLE FELL. 
 
 Crown 8vo., handsomely bound, 55. 
 
 1 These are just simple tales about men and women who once really lived on 
 the earth, and about whom the greatest of poet-musicians wrote in that wonder- 
 ful music-language of his which speaks straight to the heart. And in this 
 language he told us many things about Parsifal, Lohengrin, Tannhauser, and 
 dear old Hans Sachs, which cannot by any human power be put into words ; 
 but in so far as he did make use of words to explain his marvellous music, I 
 have tried to use the same, and above all never to depart from his idea of the 
 heroes he loved.' From the Preface. 
 
 LIFE'S PRESCRIPTION. 
 
 In Seven Doses. 
 
 By D. MACLAREN MORRISON. 
 Crown 8vo., parchment, is. 6d. 
 
 CONTENTS. i. The Pride of Life. 2. Education. 3. Man. 4. Woman. 
 5. Marriage. 6. Parents. 7. Home. 
 
 A few pages of advice to men and women on the management of their lives ; 
 the reader can hardly fail to be interested in the shrewd and sensible rernaiks, 
 knowledge of life, sound advice and pleasant anecdote with which the book is 
 enlivened.
 
 Mr. Edward Arnold's List. 
 
 CYCLING FOR HEALTH AND PLEASURE. 
 
 By L. H. PORTER, 
 
 Author of Wheels and Wheeling,' etc. 
 
 Revised and edited by 
 F. W. SHORLAND, Amateur Champion 1892-93-94. 
 
 With numerous Illustrations, small 8vo., 2s. 6d. 
 
 STRENGTH ; 
 
 Or, The Development and Use of Muscle. 
 
 By the Champion, C. A. SAMPSON, 
 'The strongest man on earth.' 
 
 With nearly forty illustrations, 8vo., cloth, 2s. 6d. 
 
 TWO NEW COOKERY BOOKS BY COLONEL 
 KENNE Y-HERBERT. 
 
 FIFTY LUNCHES. 
 FIFTY DINNERS. 
 
 By COLONEL A. KENNEY HERBERT, 
 Author of ' Common-Sense Cookery,' 'Fifty Breakfasts,' etc. 
 
 Each vol., crown 8vo., cloth, 2s. 6d. 
 
 POULTRY FATTENING. 
 
 By EDWARD BROWN, 
 
 Author of 'Pleasurable Poultry Keeping,' etc. 
 
 With Illustrations, crown 8vo., cloth, is. 6d.
 
 Mr. Edward Arnold's List. 
 
 NEW BOOKS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE. 
 
 PRICE FIVE SHILLINGS EACH. 
 
 ERIC THE ARCHER. 
 
 By MAURICE HERVEY, 
 
 Author of The Reef of Gold,' etc. 
 
 With numerous Full-page Illustrations, handsomely bound, 
 crown 8vo., 53. 
 
 DR. GILBERT'S DAUGHTERS. 
 
 By MARGARET HARRIET MATHEWS. 
 
 Illustrated by CHRIS. HAMMOND. 
 
 Crown 8vo., cloth, 53. 
 
 THE FUR SEAL'S TOOTH. 
 
 By KIRK MUNROE. 
 Beautifully Illustrated, crown 8vo., cloth, 53. 
 
 HOW DICK AND MOLLY WENT ROUND THE WORLD. 
 
 By M. H. CORNWALL LEGH. 
 With numerous Illustrations, fcap. 4to., cloth, 53. 
 
 PRICE THREE SHILLINGS AND SIXPENCE EACH. 
 
 HUNTERS THREE. 
 
 By THOMAS W. K N O X, 
 
 Author of ' The Boy Travellers,' etc. 
 
 With numerous Illustrations, crown 8vo., cloth, 35. 6d. 
 
 JOEL : A BOY OF GALILEE. 
 
 By ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON. . 
 With/Ten Full-page Illustrations, crown 8vo., cloth, 35. 6d.
 
 Mr. Edward Arnold's List. 
 
 THE MUSHROOM CAVE. 
 
 By EVELYN RAYMOND, 
 
 Author of ' The Little Lady of the Horse.' 
 
 With Illustrations, crown 8vo., cloth, 33. 6d. 
 
 THE CHILDREN'S HOUR SERIES. 
 
 ' A pause in the day's occupations 
 That is known as The Children's Hour.' LONGFELLOW. 
 
 This series will consist of continuous stories for boys and girls from about 
 seven to ten years of age ; great care will be taken by the authors to make the 
 books really interesting to young readers, so that the title of the series may not 
 be misapplied. Large type will be used, and each volume will be illustrated 
 with several full-page pictures specially drawn for it. 
 
 The following volumes are just ready, price Half-a-crown each : 
 
 MASTER MAGNUS. 
 
 By MRS. E. M. FIELD, 
 Author of ' Ethne,' ' Little Count Paul,' ' Mixed Pickles,' etc. 
 
 With Four Full-page Illustrations, small 8vo., 2s. 6d. 
 
 MY DOG PLATO. 
 
 By M. H. CORNWALL LEGH, 
 Author of ' How Dick and Molly -went Round the World j etc. 
 
 With Four Full-page Illustrations, small 8vo., 2s. 6d. 
 Further Volumes are in preparation. 
 
 NEW VOLUMES OF 
 
 THE CHILDREN'S FAVOURITE SERIES. 
 
 PRICE Two SHILLINGS EACH ; SPECIALLY BOUND, GILT EDGES, 2s. 6d. 
 
 MY BOOK OF PERILS. 
 
 Exciting stories of adventure and hairbreadth escapes. 
 
 MY BOOK OF WONDERS. 
 
 An account of some of the most marvellous things in the world described in 
 an interesting way for children. 
 
 LONDON : EDWARD ARNOLD, 37 B^FORD STREET, STRAND, W.C.
 
 noteworthy Publications 
 
 BY EDWARD ARNOLD 
 
 70 FIFTH AVENUE 
 NEW YORK 
 
 Revised and specially arranged by tK fldPCtltlim Of 
 the author. The only authorized edi- ** ptf* 
 
 tion in English. In two volumes, 
 large crown 8vo., $7.50 for the set. g y 
 
 In this work Mr. Henri Rochefort tells the 
 
 HENRI 
 amazing story of his adventurous life. Among 
 
 the more important episodes are the author's 
 personal narrative of the French Commune, 
 his subsequent transportation to the penal settlement of New 
 Caledonia, his marvelous escape, his numerous duels, his resi- 
 dence in England, and his deeply interesting journalistic 
 ventures. 
 
 The work is appearing in five volumes in French, but M. Rochefort has decided 
 to prepare a special and, in many respects, original version in English ("or sale in 
 this country. Apart from the value of the matter, the brilliance of M. Rochefort's 
 style is notorious, and his strong personality penetrates every page of the work. 
 The translation it being undertaken in Paris by Mr. E. W. Smith, editor of the 
 Daily Mtitingtr, in daily communication with the author.
 
 EDWARD ARNOLD, PUBLISHER, NEW YORK 
 
 XplCrfltIOIt Of B 7 DOUGLAS W. FRESHFIELD, 
 .- f. F.R.G.S., President of the Alpine 
 
 IB* KwllWSUS r-i u a u c it ^r i *u 
 
 Club. Author or " Travels in the 
 
 jj y Central Caucasus," "The Italian 
 
 Alps." etc. In two volumes, imperial 8vo., 
 DOUGLAS 
 
 $20.00. Illustrated by over 70 full-page pho- 
 togravures and mountain panoramas, chiefly 
 FRESHFIELD from photographs by Signor Vittorio Sella, and 
 executed under his immediate superintendence, 
 and by more than 100 illustrations in the text, of the scenery, 
 people, and buildings of the mountain region, from photographs 
 by Signor Sella, M. de Dechy, Mr. H. Woolley, and the late 
 Mr. W. F. Donkin. 
 
 The Pall Mall Gaxette says : " His two splendid volumes will be the authority 
 upon the Caucasus for years to come." 
 
 The Saturday Review says : " We have given a poor idea of the richness of 
 these two superb volumes. . . . He has mastered the literature and cartog- 
 raphy of the subject, and that is saying much. The fruits of his own experience 
 and of all this research are given in a series of chapters which raise the work to 
 the position of a monograph of permanent value on one of the most interesting 
 mountain ranges of the world, written in a style that gives it the quality and at- 
 traction of literature. . . . Of the seventy-six large plates and the hundred 
 or more illustrations in the text we cannot speak too highly. We never saw 
 more perfect specimens of work of this class." 
 
 Tht London Daily Chronicle says : "No record of exploration has ever been 
 published in this country in so splendid a material form, and, beyond contradic- 
 tion, no pictures of mountains to illustrate the exploits of climbers have approached 
 these." Of the text this journal thinks that "a more interesting, more vivid, 
 more conscientious, more exhaustive, and in parts, more thrilling account of a 
 region as yet comparatively unknown has never been seen." 
 
 The London Times says: "With scarcely an exception it is safe to say the 
 plates have never been surpassed in execution. . . . They are models of what 
 illustrations of this class ought to be." 
 
 The Bookman says : " There has been a number of interesting and valuable 
 volumes written by explorers and travelers who have visited the great range of 
 mountains known as the Caucasus, but the present stupendous work overtops them 
 all. . . . The result is one of the most beautiful and astonishing set of illus- 
 trations which has ever been presented to the public in a work of this character. 
 Mr. Freshfield has produced a work which will undoubtedly be the classic 
 in its field, and Mr. Arnold, the publisher, deserves his due meed for the triumph 
 of book-making which he has attained."
 
 EDWARD ARNOLD, PUBLISHER, NEW YORK 
 
 A record of a canoe journey CbfOUQl) ttoC 
 
 for 4000 miles, from Fort 
 
 Wrangell to the Pelly Lakes, 
 
 and down the Yukon to the 
 
 Behring Sea. With illustrations by Charles " Y 
 
 Whymper, from photographs taken by the WARBURTON 
 
 author, and a map. Large 8vo., $4.00. PIKE 
 
 Mr. Pike is a modest, careful and interesting writer ; a 
 thorough hunter and sportsman, and his work has every 
 
 evidence both of veracity and modesty. Excellent maps add to the interest of 
 the volume, which is a worthy addition to the important works of travel from 
 the house of Mr. Arnold. Standard- Union. 
 
 The perils incident to such a voyage can hardly be exaggerated, but Mr. Pike 
 is never guilty of the rather common offense of over-celebrating his achievement 
 as an explorer. Indeed, his narrative is consistently modest, and his style none 
 the less persuasive because of its directness and simplicity. Philadtlthia 
 BulUtin. 
 
 Mr. Pike is easily first in point of interest among the regiment of present-day 
 tourists and explorers who set forth their travels in print. He never poses, never 
 draws the long bow, never attempts to thrill us or celebrate his perils ; and, above 
 all, he writes a plain, simple narrative in exceedingly good English. Philadtlfbia 
 Prtn. 
 
 By HENRY N. OKjMaitt-Core ana Garden Craft 
 
 ELLACOMBE, M.A., 
 
 Vicar of Bitton. 
 
 Author of "In a g y 
 
 Gloucestershire Garden." Fully illustrated by 
 
 Major E. B. Ricketts. 8vo., cloth, $3.50. 
 
 This volume, as its name implies, is a com- 
 plete and standard work of reference on the ELLACOMBE 
 plants mentioned by Shakespeare. The author 
 takes each plant separately, and gives interesting particulars of 
 its life history and its place in legend and poetry. The volume 
 will be beautifully illustrated. The artist has made a special 
 visit to Stratford-on-Avon to sketch the scenes of Shakespeare's 
 Garden-Lore, and has also depicted most of the plants named, 
 with great skill.
 
 EDWARD ARNOLD, PUBLISHER, NEW YORK 
 
 Facsimile reprint of the favorite edition 
 LA..IAH MAMAI* f Sir WALTER SCOTT on beautiful light 
 
 Klawley novels paper The ordinary edition will b( f of 
 
 red cloth, paper back title, price, 75 
 
 cents; the set in boxes, $36.00. Editions can also be had in 
 cloth gilt, gilt top, 90 cents; the set in boxes, $43.00; and 
 quarter leather, gilt top, with original illustrations, $1.25 ; the 
 set in boxes, $60.00. 
 
 In projecting a new edition of the Waverley Novels the pub- 
 lishers have felt that they could not follow a better model than 
 that which has so long stood the test of public favor, and they 
 have therefore presented a new edition which is practically a 
 facsimile of the illustrious author's favorite, and which contains 
 all his notes and introductions. The type is practically the same, 
 line for line, and page for page ; the size, small octavo. 
 
 No series of fiction has ever met with such universal accept- 
 ance as the 4 8 -volume edition of the Waver ley Novels, the 
 author's favorite edition, originally published by Cadell & 
 Company in the year 1829. Its handy size and elegant pro- 
 portions have never been surpassed. It has long been out of 
 print, and when copies come into the market they fetch a high 
 price. 
 
 EDWARD ARNOLD 
 
 PUBLISHER 
 
 70 FIFTH AVENUE 
 
 NEW YORK
 
 DC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 A 000 761 452 2