Margot Asquith, an Autobiography Part 31

In 1852 the death of Dr. Jenkyns caused the Masters.h.i.+p at Balliol to become vacant. Jowett's fame as a tutor was great, but with it there had spread a suspicion of "rationalism." Persons whispered that the great tutor was tainted with German views. This reacted unduly upon his colleagues; and, when the election came, he was rejected by a single vote. His disappointment was deep, but he threw himself more than ever into his work. He told me that a favourite pa.s.sage of his in Marcus Aurelius--"Be always doing something serviceable to mankind and let this constant generosity be your only pleasure, not forgetting a due regard to G.o.d"--had been of great help to him at that time.

The lectures which his pupils cared most about were those on Plato and St. Paul; both as tutor and examiner he may be said to have stimulated the study of Plato in Oxford: he made it a rival to that of Aristotle.

"Aristotle is dead," he would say, "but Plato is alive."

Hitherto he had published little--an anonymous essay on Pascal and a few literary articles--but under the stimulus of disappointment he finished his share of the edition of St. Paul's Epistles, which had been undertaken in conjunction with Arthur Stanley. Both produced their books in 1855; but while Stanley's Corinthians evoked languid interest, Jowett's Galatians, Thessalonians and Romans provoked a clamour among his friends and enemies. About that time he was appointed to the Oxford Greek Chair, which pleased him much; but his delight was rather dashed by a hostile article in the Quarterly Review, abusing him and his religious writings. The Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Cotton, required from him a fresh signature of the Articles of the Church of England. At the interview, when addressed by two men--one pompously explaining that it was a necessary act if he was to retain his cloth and the other apologising for inflicting a humiliation upon him--he merely said:

"Give me the pen."

His essay on The Interpretation of Scripture, which came out in 1860 in the famous volume, Essays and Reviews, increased the cry of heterodoxy against him; and the Canons of Christ Church, including Dr. Pusey, persisted in withholding from him an extra salary, without which the endowment of the Greek Chair was worth L40. This scandal was not removed till 1864, after he had been excluded from the university pulpit. He continued working hard at his translation of the whole of Plato; he had already published notes on the Republic and a.n.a.lyses of the dialogue. This took up all his time till 1878, when he became Master of Balliol.

The worst of the Essays and Reviews controversy was that it did an injustice to Jowett's reputation. For years people thought that he was a great heresiarch presiding over a college of infidels and heretics. His impeached article on The Interpretation of Scripture might to-day be published by any clergyman. His crime lay in saying that the Bible should be criticised like other books.

In his introduction to the Republic of Plato he expresses the same thought:

A Greek in the age of Plato attached no importance to the question whether his religion was an historical fact. ...Men only began to suspect that the narratives of Homer and Hesiod were fictions when they recognised them to be immoral. And so in all religions: the consideration of their morality comes first, afterwards the truth of the doc.u.ments in which they are recorded, or of the events, natural or supernatural, which are told of them. But in modern times, and in Protestant countries perhaps more than Catholic, we have been too much inclined to identify the historical with the moral; and some have refused to believe in religion at all, unless a superhuman accuracy was discerned in every part of the record.

The facts of an ancient or religious history are amongst the most important of all facts, but they are frequently uncertain, and we only learn the true lesson which is to be gathered from them when we place ourselves above them.

Some one writes in the Literary Supplement of the Times to-day, 11th December, 1919:

"An almost animal indifference to mental refinement characterises our great public."

This is quite true, and presumably was true in Jowett's day, not only of the great public but of the Established Church.

Catherine Marsh, the author of The Life of Hedley Vicars, wrote to Jowett a.s.suring him of her complete belief in the sincerity of his religious views and expressing indignation that he should have had to sign the thirty-nine Articles again. I give his reply. The postscript is characteristic of his kindliness, gentle temper and practical wisdom.

MARCH 16TH, 1864. DEAR MADAM,

Accept my best thanks for your kind letter, and for the books you have been so good as to send me.

I certainly hope (though conscious of how little I am able to do) that I shall devote my life to the service of G.o.d, and of the youths of Oxford, whom I desire to regard as a trust which He has given me. But I am afraid, if I may judge from the tenour of your letter, that I should not express myself altogether as you do on religious subjects. Perhaps the difference may be more than one of words. I will not, therefore, enter further into the grave question suggested by you, except to say that I am sure I shall be the better for your kind wishes and reading your books.

The recent matter of Oxford is of no real consequence, and is not worth speaking about, though I am very grately to you and others for feeling "indignant" at the refusal.

With sincere respect for your labours, Believe me, dear Madam,

Most truly yours,

B. JOWETT.

P.S.--I have read your letter again! I think that I ought to tell you that, unless you had been a complete stranger, you would not have had so good an opinion of me. I feel the kindness of your letter, but at the same time, if I believed what you say of me, I should soon become a "very complete rascal." Any letter like yours, which is written with such earnestness, and in a time of illness, is a serious call to think about religion. I do not intend to neglect this because I am not inclined to use the same language.

When Jowett became Master, his pupils and friends gathered round him and overcame the Church chatter. He was the hardest-working tutor, Vice-Chancellor and Master that Oxford ever had. Balliol, under his regime, grew in numbers and produced more scholars, more thinkers and more political men of note than any other college in the university. He had authority and a unique prestige. It was said of Dr. Whewell of Trinity that "knowledge was his forte and omniscience his foible"; the same might have been said of the Master and was expressed in a college epigram, written by an undergraduate. After Jowett's death I cut the following from an Oxford magazine:

The author of a famous and often misquoted verse upon Professor Jowett has written me a note upon his lines which may be appropriately inserted here. "Several versions," he writes, "have appeared lately, and my vanity does not consider them improvements. The lines were written:

'First come I, my name is Jowett, There's no knowledge but I know it.

I am Master of this College, What I don't know--is not knowledge.'

"The 'First come I' referred to its being a masque of the College in which fellows, scholars, etc., appeared in order. The short, disconnected sentences were intentional, as being characteristic.

Such a line as 'All that can be known I know it' (which some newspapers subst.i.tuted for line 2) would express a rather vulgar, Whewellian foible of omniscience, which was quite foreign to the Master's nature; the line as originally written was intended to express the rather sad, brooding manner the Master had of giving his oracles, as though he were a spectator of all time and existence, and had penetrated into the mystery of things. Of course, the last line expressed, with necessary exaggeration, what, as a fact, was his att.i.tude to certain subjects in which he refused to be interested, such as modern German metaphysics, philology, and Greek inscriptions."

When I met the Master in 1887, I was young and he was old; but, whether from insolence or insight, I never felt this difference. I do not think I was a good judge of age, as I have always liked older people than myself; and I imagine it was because of this unconsciousness that we became such wonderful friends. Jowett was younger than half the young people I know now and we understood each other perfectly. If I am hasty in making friends and skip the preface, I always read it afterwards.

A good deal of controversy has arisen over the Master's claim to greatness by some of the younger generation. It is not denied that Jowett was a man of influence. Men as different as Huxley, Symonds, Lord Lansdowne, Lord Bowen, Lord Milner, Sir Robert Morier and others have told me in reverent and affectionate terms how much they owed to him and to his influence. It is not denied that he was a kind man; infinitely generous, considerate and good about money. It may be denied that he was a fine scholar of the first rank, such as Munro or Jebb, although no one denies his contributions to scholars.h.i.+p; but the real question remains: was he a great man? There are big men, men of intellect, intellectual men, men of talent and men of action; but the great man is difficult to find, and it needs--apart from discernment--a certain greatness to find him. The Almighty is a wonderful handicapper: He will not give us everything. I have never met a woman of supreme beauty with more than a mediocre intellect, by which I do not mean intelligence. There may be some, but I am only writing my own life, and I have not met them. A person of magnetism, temperament and quick intelligence may have neither intellect nor character. I have known one man whose genius lay in his rapid and sensitive understanding, real wit, amazing charm and apparent candour, But whose meanness, ingrat.i.tude and instability injured everything he touched. You can only discover ingrat.i.tude or instability after years of experience, and few of us, I am glad to think, ever suspect meanness in our fellow-creatures; the discovery is as painful when you find it as the discovery of a worm in the heart of a rose. A man may have a fine character and be taciturn, stubborn and stupid. Another may be brilliant, sunny and generous, but self-indulgent, heartless and a liar. There is no contradiction I have not met with in men and women: the rarest combination is to find fundamental humbleness, freedom from self, intrepid courage and the power to love; when you come upon these, you may be quite sure that you are in the presence of greatness.

Human beings are made up of a good many pieces. Nature, character, intellect and temperament: roughly speaking, these headings cover every one. The men and women whom I have loved best have been those whose natures were rich and sweet; but, alas, with a few exceptions, all of them have had gimcrack characters; and the qualities which I have loved in them have been ultimately submerged by self-indulgence.

The present Archbishop of Canterbury is one of these exceptions: he has a sweet and rich nature, a fine temper and is quite unspoilable. I have only one criticism to make of Randall Davidson: he has too much moderation for his intellect; but I daresay he would not have steered the Church through so many shallows if he had not had this attribute. I have known him since I was ten (he christened, confirmed, married and buried us all); and his faith in such qualities of head and heart as I possess has never wavered. He reminds me of Jowett in the soundness of his nature and his complete absence of vanity, although no two men were ever less alike. The first element of greatness is fundamental humbleness (this should not be confused with servility); the second is freedom from self; the third is intrepid courage, which, taken in its widest interpretation, generally goes with truth; and the fourth, the power to love, although I have put it last, is the rarest. If these go to the makings of a great man, Jowett possessed them all. He might have mocked at the confined comprehension of Oxford and exposed the arrogance, vanity and conventionality of the Church; intellectual scorn and even bitterness might have come to him; but, with infinite patience and imperturbable serenity, he preserved his faith in his fellow- creatures.

"There was in him a simple trust in the word of other men that won for him a devotion and service which discipline could never have evoked." [Footnote:] I read these words in an obituary notice the other day and thought how much I should like to have had them written of me. Whether his criticisms of the Bible fluttered the faith of the flappers in Oxford, or whether his long silences made the undergraduates more stupid than they would otherwise have been, I care little: I only know that he was what I call great and that he had an enn.o.bling influence over my life. He was apprehensive of my social reputation; and in our correspondence, which started directly we parted at Gosford, he constantly gave me wise advice. He was extremely simple-minded and had a pathetic belief in the fine manners, high tone, wide education and lofty example of the British aristocracy. It shocked him that I did not share it; I felt his warnings much as a duck swimming might feel the cluckings of a hen on the bank; nevertheless, I loved his exhortations. In one of his letters he begs me to give up the idea of shooting bears with the Prince of Wales in Russia. It was the first I had heard of it! In another of his letters to me he ended thus:

But I must not bore you with good advice. Child, why don't you make a better use of your n.o.ble gifts? And yet you do not do anything wrong--only what other people do, but with more success.

And you are very faithful to your friends. And so, G.o.d bless you.

He was much shocked by hearing that I smoked. This is what he says:

What are you doing--breaking a young man's heart; not the first time nor the second, nor the third--I believe? Poor fellows! they have paid you the highest compliment that a gentleman can pay a lady, and are deserving of all love. Shall I give you a small piece of counsel? It is better for you and a duty to them that their disappointed pa.s.sions should never be known to a single person, for as you are well aware, one confidante means every body, and the good-natured world, who are of course very jealous of you, will call you cruel and a breaker of hearts, etc. I do not consider this advice, but merely a desire to make you see things as others see them or nearly. The Symonds girls at Davos told me that you smoked!!! at which I am shocked, because it is not the manner of ladies in England. I always imagine you with a long hookah puffing, puffing, since I heard this; give it up, my dear Margaret--it will get you a bad name. Please do observe that I am always serious when I try to make fun. I hope you are enjoying life and friends and the weather: and believe me

Ever yours truly, B. JOWETT.

He asked me once if I ever told any one that he wrote to me, to which I answered:

"I should rather think so! I tell every railway porter!"

This distressed him. I told him that he was evidently ashamed of my love for him, but that I was proud of it.

JOWETT (after a long silence): "Would you like to have your life written, Margaret?"

MARGOT: "Not much, unless it told the whole truth about me and every one and was indiscreet. If I could have a biographer like Froude or Lord Hervey, it would be divine, as no one would be bored by reading it. Who will you choose to write your life, Master?"

JOWETT: "No one will be in a position to write my life, Margaret."

(For some time he called me Margaret; he thought it sounded less familiar than Margot.)

MARGOT: "What nonsense! How can you possibly prevent it? If you are not very good to me, I may even write it myself!"

JOWETT (smiling): "If I could have been sure of that, I need not have burnt all my correspondence! But you are an idle young lady and would certainly never have concentrated on so dull a subject."

MARGOT (indignantly): "Do you mean to say you have burnt all George Eliot's letters, Matthew Arnold's, Swinburne's, Temple's and Tennyson's?"

JOWETT: "I have kept one or two of George Eliot's and Florence Nightingale's; but great men do not write good letters."

MARGOT: "Do you know Florence Nightingale? I wish I did."

JOWETT (evidently surprised that I had never heard the gossip connecting his name with Florence Nightingale): "Why do you want to know her?"

MARGOT: "Because she was in love with my friend George Pembroke's [Footnote: George, Earl of Pembroke, uncle of the present Earl.]

father."