MENTOR-IN-CHIEF OF VICTORIAN ENGLAND

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28530, 8 March 1958, Page 3

MENTOR-IN-CHIEF OF VICTORIAN ENGLAND

(Reviewed by H.L.G.)

Jowett. A Portrait with Background. By Geoffrey Faber Fellow of All Souls College. Faber and Faber. 456 pp.

Most people know little more of Jowett than the famous undergraduate jingle:

jWy name is Benjamin Jowett Wnat there is to know, I know it 1 am the Master of Balliol Colleqe And what I don’t know isn’t knowledge.

And he is also perhaps remembered by some for his great translation and accompanying interpretations of Plato. But outside such scanty information he is astonishingly little known in the twentieth century, considering his celebrity in the nineteenth. The only existing biography, “The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett,” by Abbott and Campbell, was published in 1897. It never took rank as a coherent and cohesive biography because it was a collaboration —the first volume by Campbell and the second by Abbott —between two men of differing age and outlook, and (as Sir Geoffrey Faber demonstrates) with slightly different conceptions of Jowett. It also suffers from omissions and suppressions which the authors were forced to make, in particular the omission of all mention of the name of Florence Nightingale, whose friendship with Jowett—prolonged, intimate, and demanding to the point of exhaustion—was extremely important in his middle later years. Yet, until now, noone has wanted to fill the gap and resurrect Jowett. “The awakening tide of twentieth-cen-tury interest in the Victorian age,” says Faber, “passed him by. almost as if he were an awkwardly large specimen of a fossil better studied from smaller and more amusing examples.” Whatever the reasons for th’is neglect, it can only be said that it is amply compensated for by the fact that now, at last, in Sir Geoffrey Faber, Jowett has found a biographer to match his own stature. He combines scholarship with common sense and good judgment, mature perception and sympathy with scrupulous fairness. And, as readers of his study of the Oxford Movement, “Oxford Apostles,” will know, he is an expert in the two most important spheres of Jowett’s life: Oxford University, and the theological controversies which rent the nineteenth century more bitterly and fundamentally than it is easy for us in the twentieth to realise.

Jowett was, in Faber’s opinion, not only one of the Greater Victorians. He was a key-figure, the “mentor-in-chief” of the golden age of Victorian England, a personality comparable to Dr. Johnson in the eighteenth century. Yet. like Dr. Johnson. Jowett started life with many disadvantages: his family was “in trade”; his religious background was a narrow evangelicalism; he was small in stature, with a high piping voice; as a youth he looked like a girl and as an old man. like a eunuch. He suffered, too, from blows and disappointments that would have crippled the career of a lesser man. When he was 11. his father failed in business through pitiable incompetence—an event that gave Jowett a life-long contempt for worldly failure—and the family was forced to separate, the mother taking the younger children to live with relatives in Bristol, and Jowett, w T ho won a scholarship to St. Paul’s School, living a lonely and studious life in lodgings in London. When he was 37. in spite of the distinction and influence he had won as scholar, Fellow and Tutor at Balliol, he was disappointed in the election for the Mastership, which he lost by one vote. It was not until 1870, when he was 53, that he finally became Master of the College. Moreover, in the intervening years his bitterness and frustration had been increased by the religious persecution—culminating in a synodical condemnation and even an attempt at prosecution for heresy by the University—which he suffered as a result of his article in “Essays and Reviews.” the notorious symposium that raised the greatest religious storm of the century. His religious opinions, too, had much to do with the fact that for many years he held the Chair of Greek in the University at the salary of only £5O a year, until the scandal assumed almost

national proportions and it was raised overnight to £5OO. But Jowett surmounted these and other frustrations triumphantly. His influence as guide and teacher was such that in his time Balliol sent put into the world an evergrowing stream of distinguished statesmen, diplomats, lawyers, and administrators. ‘Jowett “made Balliol count’’ in fact. And it is certainly possible to argue, as Sir Geoffrey Faber does, that it was the religious attitude of Jowett and his fellow liberal “Broad Churchmen” that saved the Church of England in the nineteenth (and consequently in the twentieth) century from degenerating into an unrepresentative and overprivileged sect.”

In the twentieth century we have come to take for granted •? e „ kind of “rational Christianity that Jowett supported. We find no terrible dangers to belief in reading the Gospels with some attention to the* character of the writers and the historical environment in which they wrote—whicn is all that (in essence) Jowett advocated in “Essays and Reviews.” Nor do we find an absolutely unqualified belief in the literal truth of either the Old or the New Testaments essential for a professing Christian. Yet such fundamentalism was common to both the low church and such high churchmen as Pusey and Keble in the nineteenth century. Faced with the onslaughts of science, they rightly foresaw terrifying dangers for humanity should the great mass of people forsake Christianity altogether. Yet it was not the obscurantism of the fundamentalists but the courageous thinking of such men as Jowett and Bishop Colenso, who were •convinced that the Church could not afford to silence truth, that gradually brought the Church back into touch with the modern world.

Jowett’s part in this important struggle is described by Faber with the scrupulous honesty and superb command both of detail and of general background that mark the whole biography. He admits that it is sometimes difficult not to think, with Leslie Stephen, that Jowett’s treatment of Christianity “emptied out the baby with the bath.” But he succeeds in demonstrating his fundamentally deep and simple piety, the essential consistency of his attempt to reconcile faith and reason, and his power as a theological thinker. Theology was Jowett’s first and perhaps his greatest love. Yet his real claim on the attention of posterity, in Faber’s view, does not lie in his theological work. Nor does it lie in the work on Plato, or in his introduction of the philosophy of Hegel to England. It does not even lie in his main life-work at Balliol, with pupils and friends, the College and the University, important as this was and legendary as was the reputation he left behind him. It lies rather in Jowett’s quality as a man. He had charm, generosity, serenity, strength and—to a supreme degree—that gift for “deliberate self-improvement,” so characteristic of the Victorians, combined with a high degree of self-knowledge, not so common among his contemporaries. The perpetual effort that he put into achieving ever greater selfmastery and ever greater intellectual and moral perfection, is revealed in the series of private, confessional notes he left behind at his death. From these, and his own sympathetic and astute perceptions, Faber makes a magnificent and fully rounded portrait of Jowett the man. building up the picture from all sides until the reader is able to feel something like the full force of the character of the great old man who, as Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University in old age, could still be found confessing to himself: Nothing makes me more conscious of poverty and shallowness of character than the difficulty in praying or attending to prayer. or:

If I ask myself what takes place in my own mind, I am at a loss. 1 can only reply: “A good deal of semi-conscious dreamy fancy, in which I go capriciously from one notion to another.”

It is a portrait for a very literally “self-made” man, whose “superb worldliness” and belief in hard work (which he made his pupils share by example) were

! the quite natural accompaniment • of an abiding faith in an unseen world. Thpre was a lighter side of Jowett, too,, a sparkling • wit and gaiety that charmed generations of undergraduates as much as his occasional “brusqueries” terrified them; this comes out in ! his letters to friends, who were 1 legion, and it is not neglected 1 by Faber. He reveals a character that could hold the affection and deeply influence the lives and ideas of men as far ajiart as Swinburne the poet and Milner the man with a new philosophy of Empire, yet a character that was nothing if not coherent. And yet Faber goes much further than most biographers in discussing the , weaknesses and faults and the less amiable side of his subject. He is at pains to quote fully a number of testimonies hostile to Jowett: in particular those of W. H. Mallock who, in his witty satire, “The New Republic,” parodied Jowett’s “undogmatic belief”; and of Sir Arthur Evans, the archaeologist, and A. C. Benson, who give disagreeable impressions of Jowett as a University “politician” and opportunist. These accusations he has little difficulty in countering. But he stresses himself the great lacks in Jowett’s private emotional life—his strange lack of feeling toward his family, and his failure to marry. “There is one great happiness I have never known,’ the old man acknowledged to himself. He came near marriage before he met Florence Nightingale. But intimacy ' with her extraordinary mind, so akin to his own. and her overwhelmingly forceful character drove all thoughts of all lesser, if more feminine, women from his mind. It is perhaps in his treatment of the delicate matter of the friendship between Jowett and Miss Nightingale that Faber can be seen at his best. It is easy to mock, as Lytton Strachey did i n “Eminent Victorians”— with brilliant malice and innuendo and clever but quite irresponsible distortions—at the spectacle of these two Great Victorians passionately absorbed in each other, exchanging enormous letters. It is far harder to put the friendship between these two titans in its proper perspective, treating it with the sympathetic insight and understanding and the scholarly sense of responsibility that Faber does He does it, too. without losing sight of the slightly ridiculous side of the episode. “It was a whole-time job in itself,” he comments, with truth but without Strachey’s malice, “to be a pen-friend of Miss Nightingale”; and, summing up, he remarks that there was no marrying or giving in marriage on the ideal plane where Miss Nightingale and Jowett were “Strenuously inti- ' mate.”

Faber regrets that Strachey did not include Jowett among his “Eminent Victorians,” for then, though there would have been much distortion to be corrected, the memory of Jowett would at least have been kept alive in the public mind. But it is hard to believe that this remarkable biography will not resurrect Jowett unaided. Its style, if not as striking as Strachey’s, is very distinguished. >And its matter will surely be recognised by the reading public as providing both a fascinating portrait of a great man and an admirable study of the Victorian current of ideas.