BALLIOL AND LINCOLN
When the Oxford historian of the future comes across the name and
influence of Benjamin Jowett, the famous Master of Balliol, and Greek
professor, in the mid-current of the nineteenth century, he will not be
without full means of finding out what made that slight figure (whereof
he will be able to study the outward and visible presence in some
excellent portraits, and in many caricatures) so significant and so
representative. The _Life_ of the Master, by Evelyn Abbott and Lewis
Campbell, is to me one of the most interesting biographies of our
generation. It is long--for those who have no Oxford ties, no doubt, too
long; and it is cumbered with the echoes of old controversies,
theological and academic, which have mostly, though by no means wholly,
passed into a dusty limbo. But it is one of the rare attempts that
English biography has seen to paint a man as he really was; and to paint
him not with the sub-malicious strokes of a Purcell, but in love,
although in truth.
[Illustration: BENJAMIN JOWETT]
The Master, as he fought his many fights, with his abnormally strong
will and his dominating personality; the Master, as he appeared, on the
one hand, to the upholders of "research," of learning, that is, as an
end in itself apart from teaching, and, on the other, to the High-
Churchmen encamped in Christ Church, to Pusey, Liddon, and all their
clan--pugnacious, formidable, and generally successful--here he is to
the life. This is the Master whose personality could never be forgotten
in any room he chose to enter; who brought restraint rather than ease to
the gatherings of his friends, mainly because, according to his own
account, of a shyness he could never overcome; whose company on a walk
was too often more of a torture than an honor to the undergraduate
selected for it; whose lightest words were feared, quoted, chuckled
over, or resented, like those of no one else.
Of this Master I have many remembrances. I see, for instance, a drawing-
room full of rather tongue-tied, embarrassed guests, some Oxford
residents, some Londoners; and the Master among them, as a stimulating--
but disintegrating!--force, of whom every one was uneasily conscious.
The circle was wide, the room bare, and the Balliol arm-chairs were not
placed for conversation. On a high chair against the wall sat a small
boy of ten--we will call him Arthur--oppressed by his surroundings. The
talk languished and dropped. From one side of the large room, the
Master, raising his voice, addressed the small boy on the other side.
"Well, Arthur, so I hear you've begun Greek. How are you getting on?"
To the small boy looking round the room it seemed as though twenty awful
grownups were waiting in a dead silence to eat him up. He rushed upon
his answer.
"I--I'm reading the Anabasis," he said, desperately.
The false quantity sent a shock through the room. Nobody laughed, out of
sympathy with the boy, who already knew that something dreadful had
happened. The boy's miserable parents, Londoners, who were among the
twenty, wished themselves under the floor. The Master smiled.
"The Anábasis, Arthur," he said, cheerfully. "You'll get it right next
time."
And he went across to the boy, evidently feeling for him and wishing to
put him at ease. But after thirty years the boy and his parents still
remember the incident with a shiver. It could not have produced such an
effect except in an atmosphere of tension; and that, alas! too often,
was the atmosphere which surrounded the Master.
I can remember, too, many proud yet anxious half-hours in the Master's
study--such a privilege, yet such an ordeal!--when, after our migration
to London, we became, at regular intervals, the Master's week-end
visitors. "Come and talk to me a little in my study," the Master would
say, pleasantly. And there in the room where he worked for so many
years, as the interpreter of Greek thought to the English world, one
would take a chair beside the fire, with the Master opposite. I have
described my fireside tête-à-têtes, as a girl, with another head of a
College--the Rector of Lincoln, Mark Pattison. But the Master was a far
more strenuous companion. With him, there were no diversions, none!--no
relief from the breathless adventure of trying to please him and doing
one's best. The Rector once, being a little invalidish, allowed me to
make up the fire, and, after watching the process sharply, said: "Good!
Does it drive _you_ distracted, too, when people put on coals the wrong
way?" An interruption which made for human sympathy! The Master, as far
as I can remember, had no "nerves"; and "nerves" are a bond between
many. But he occasionally had sudden returns upon himself. I remember
once after we had been discussing a religious book which had interested
us both, he abruptly drew himself up, in the full tide of talk, and
said, with a curious impatience, "But one can't be always thinking of
these things!" and changed the subject.
So much for the Master, the stimulus of whose mere presence was,
according to his biographers, "often painful." But there were at least
two other Masters in the "Mr. Jowett" we reverenced. And they, too, are
fully shown in this biography. The Master who loved his friends and
thought no pains too great to take for them, including the very rare
pains of trying to mend their characters by faithfulness and plain
speaking, whenever he thought they wanted it. The Master, again, whose
sympathies were always with social reform and with the poor, whose
hidden life was full of deeds of kindness and charity, who, in spite of
his difficulties of manner, was loved by all sorts and conditions of
men--and women--in all circles of life, by politicians and great ladies,
by diplomats and scholars and poets, by his secretary and his servants--
there are many traits of this good man and useful citizen recorded by
his biographers.
And, finally, there was the Master who reminded his most intimate
friends of a sentence of his about Greek literature, which occurs in the
Introduction to the _Phoedrus_: "Under the marble exterior of Greek
literature was concealed a soul thrilling with spiritual emotion," says
the Master. His own was not exactly a marble exterior; but the placid
and yet shrewd cheerfulness of his delicately rounded face, with its
small mouth and chin, its great brow and frame of snowy hair, gave but
little clue to the sensitive and mystical soul within. If ever a man was
_Gottbetrunken_, it was the Master, many of whose meditations and
passing thoughts, withdrawn, while he lived, from all human ken, yet
written down--in thirty or forty volumes!--for his own discipline and
remembrance, can now be read, thanks to his biographers, in the pages of
the _Life_, They are extraordinarily frank and simple; startling, often,
in their bareness and truth. But they are, above all, the thoughts of a
mystic, moving in a Divine presence. An old and intimate friend of the
Master's once said to me that he believed "Jowett's inner mind,
especially toward the end of his life, was always in an attitude of
Prayer. One would go and talk to him on University or College business
in his study, and suddenly see his lips moving, slightly and silently,
and know what it meant." The records of him which his death revealed--
and his closest friends realized it in life--show a man perpetually
conscious of a mysterious and blessed companionship; which is the mark
of the religious man, in all faiths and all churches. Yet this was the
man who, for the High Church party at Oxford, with its headquarters at
Christ Church, under the flag of Doctor Pusey and Canon Liddon, was the
symbol and embodiment of all heresy; whose University salary as Greek
professor, which depended on a Christ Church subsidy, was withheld for
years by the same High-Churchmen, because of their inextinguishable
wrath against the Liberal leader who had contributed so largely to the
test-abolishing legislation of 1870--legislation by which Oxford, in
Liddon's words, was "logically lost to the Church of England."
Yet no doubt they had their excuses! For this, too, was the man who, in
a city haunted by Tractarian shades, once said to his chief biographer
that "Voltaire had done more good than all the Fathers of the Church put
together!"--who scornfully asks himself in his diary, _à propos_ of the
Bishops' condemnation of _Essays and Reviews_, "What is Truth against an
_esprit de corps_?"--and drops out the quiet dictum, "Half the books
that are published are religious books, and what trash this religious
literature is!" Nor did the Evangelicals escape. The Master's dislike
for many well-known hymns specially dear to that persuasion was never
concealed. "How cocky they are!" he would say, contemptuously. "'When
upward I fly--Quite justified I'--who can repeat a thing like that?"
How the old war-cries ring again in one's ears as one looks back! Those
who have only known the Oxford of the last twenty years can never, I
think, feel toward that "august place" as we did, in the seventies of
the last century; we who were still within sight and hearing of the
great fighting years of an earlier generation, and still scorched by
their dying fires. Balliol, Christ Church, Lincoln--the Liberal and
utilitarian camp, the Church camp, the researching and pure scholarship
camp--with Science and the Museum hovering in the background, as the
growing aggressive powers of the future seeking whom they might devour--
they were the signs and symbols of mighty hosts, of great forces still
visibly incarnate, and in marching array. Balliol _versus_ Christ
Church--Jowett _versus_ Pusey and Liddon--while Lincoln despised both,
and the new scientific forces watched and waited--that was how we saw
the field of battle, and the various alarms and excursions it was always
providing.
But Balliol meant more to me than the Master. Professor Thomas Hill
Green--"Green of Balliol"--was no less representative in our days of the
spiritual and liberating forces of the great college; and the time which
has now elapsed since his death has clearly shown that his philosophic
work and influence hold a lasting and conspicuous place in the history
of nineteenth-century thought. He and his wife became our intimate
friends, and in the Grey of _Robert Elsmere_ I tried to reproduce a few
of those traits--traits of a great thinker and teacher, who was also one
of the simplest, sincerest, and most practical of men--which Oxford will
never forget, so long as high culture and noble character are dear to
her. His wife--so his friend and biographer, Lewis Nettleship, tells
us--once compared him to Sir Bors in "The Holy Grail":
A square-set man and honest; and his eyes, An outdoor sign of all the
wealth within, Smiled with his lips--a smile beneath a cloud, But
Heaven had meant it for a sunny one!
A quotation in which the mingling of a cheerful, practical, humorous
temper, the temper of the active citizen and politician, with the heavy
tasks of philosophic thought, is very happily suggested. As we knew him,
indeed, and before the publication of the _Prolegomena to Ethics_ and
the Introduction to the Clarendon Press edition of Hume had led to his
appointment as Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy, Mr. Green was not
only a leading Balliol tutor, but an energetic Liberal, a member both of
the Oxford Town Council and of various University bodies; a helper in
all the great steps taken for the higher education of women at Oxford,
and keenly attracted by the project of a High School for the town boys
of Oxford--a man, in other words, preoccupied, just as the Master was,
and, for all his philosophic genius, with the need of leading "a useful
life."
Let me pause to think how much that phrase meant in the mouths of the
best men whom Balliol produced, in the days when I knew Oxford. The
Master, Green, Toynbee--their minds were full, half a century ago, of
the "condition of the people" question, of temperance, housing, wages,
electoral reform; and within the University, and by the help of the
weapons of thought and teaching, they regarded themselves as the natural
allies of the Liberal party which was striving for these things through
politics and Parliament. "Usefulness," "social reform," the bettering of
daily life for the many--these ideas are stamped on all their work and
on all the biographies of them that remain to us.
And the significance of it is only to be realized when we turn to the
rival group, to Christ Church, and the religious party which that name
stood for. Read the lives of Liddon, of Pusey, or--to go farther back--
of the great Newman himself. Nobody will question the personal goodness
and charity of any of the three. But how little the leading ideas of
that seething time of social and industrial reform, from the appearance
of _Sybil_ in 1843 to the Education Bill of 1870, mattered either to
Pusey or to Liddon, compared with the date of the Book of Daniel or the
retention of the Athanasian Creed? Newman, at a time when national
drunkenness was an overshadowing terror in the minds of all reformers,
confesses with a pathetic frankness that he had never considered
"whether there were too many public-houses in England or no"; and in all
his religious controversies of the 'thirties and the 'forties, you will
look in vain for any word of industrial or political reform. So also in
the _Life_ of that great rhetorician and beautiful personality, Canon
Liddon, you will scarcely find a single letter that touches on any
question of social betterment. How to safeguard the "principle of
authority," how to uphold the traditional authorship of the Pentateuch,
and of the Book of Daniel, against "infidel" criticism; how to stifle
among the younger High-Churchmen like Mr. (now Bishop) Gore, then head
of the Pusey House, the first advances toward a reasonable freedom of
thought; how to maintain the doctrine of Eternal Punishment against the
protest of the religious consciousness itself--it is on these matters
that Canon Liddon's correspondence turns, it was to them his life was
devoted.
How vainly! Who can doubt now which type of life and thought had in it
the seeds of growth and permanence--the Balliol type, or the Christ
Church type? There are many High-Churchmen, it is true, at the present
day, and many Ritualist Churches. But they are alive to-day, just in so
far as they have learned the lesson of social pity, and the lesson of a
reasonable criticism, from the men whom Pusey and Liddon and half the
bishops condemned and persecuted in the middle years of the nineteenth
century.
When we were living in Oxford, however, this was not exactly the point
of view from which the great figure of Liddon presented itself, to us of
the Liberal camp. We were constantly aware of him, no doubt, as the
rival figure to the Master of Balliol, as the arch wire-puller and
ecclesiastical intriguer in University affairs, leading the Church
forces with a more than Roman astuteness. But his great mark was made,
of course, by his preaching, and that not so much by the things said as
by the man saying them. Who now would go to Liddon's famous Bamptons,
for all their learning, for a still valid defense of the orthodox
doctrine of the Incarnation? Those wonderful paragraphs of subtle
argumentation from which the great preacher emerged, as triumphantly as
Mr. Gladstone from a Gladstonian sentence in a House of Commons debate--
what remains of them? Liddon wrote of Stanley that he--Stanley--was
"more entirely destitute of the logical faculty" than any educated man
he knew. In a sense it was true. But Stanley, if he had been aware of
the criticism, might have replied that, if he lacked logic, Liddon
lacked something much more vital--i.e., the sense of history--and of the
relative value of testimony!
Newman, Pusey, Liddon--all three, great schoolmen, arguing from an
accepted brief; the man of genius, the man of a vast industry, intense
but futile, the man of captivating presence and a perfect rhetoric--
history, with its patient burrowings, has surely undermined the work of
all three, sparing only that element in the work of one of them--
Newman--which is the preserving salt of all literature--i.e., the magic
of personality. And some of the most efficacious burrowers have been
their own spiritual children. As was fitting! For the Tractarian
movement, with its appeal to the primitive Church, was in truth, and
quite unconsciously, one of the agencies in a great process of
historical inquiry which is still going on, and of which the end is not
yet.
But to me, in my twenties, these great names were not merely names or
symbols, as they are to the men and women of the present generation.
Newman I had seen in my childhood, walking about the streets of
Edgbaston, and had shrunk from him in a dumb, childish resentment as
from some one whom I understood to be the author of our family
misfortunes. In those days, as I have already recalled in an earlier
chapter, the daughters of a "mixed marriage" were brought up in the
mother's faith, and the sons in the father's. I, therefore, as a
schoolgirl under Evangelical influence, was not allowed to make friends
with any of my father's Catholic colleagues. Then, in 1880, twenty years
later, Newman came to Oxford, and on Trinity Monday there was a great
gathering at Trinity College, where the Cardinal in his red, a blanched
and spiritual presence, received the homage of a new generation who saw
in him a great soul and a great master of English, and cared little or
nothing for the controversies in which he had spent his prime. As my
turn came to shake hands, I recalled my father to him and the Edgbaston
days. His face lit up--almost mischievously. "Are you the little girl I
remember seeing sometimes--in the distance?" he said to me, with a smile
and a look that only he and I understood.
On the Sunday preceding that gathering I went to hear his last sermon in
the city he had loved so well, preached at the new Jesuit church in the
suburbs; while little more than a mile away, Bidding Prayer and sermon
were going on as usual in the University Church where in his youth, week
by week, he had so deeply stirred the hearts and consciences of men. The
sermon in St. Aloysius's was preached with great difficulty, and was
almost incoherent from the physical weakness of the speaker. Yet who
that was present on that Sunday will ever forget the great ghost that
fronted them, the faltering accents, the words from which the life-blood
had departed, yet not the charm?
Then--Pusey! There comes back to me a bowed and uncouth figure, whom one
used to see both in the Cathedral procession on a Sunday, and--rarely--
in the University pulpit. One sermon on Darwinism, which was preached,
if I remember right, in the early 'seventies, remains with me, as the
appearance of some modern Elijah, returning after long silence and exile
to protest against an unbelieving world. Sara Coleridge had years before
described Pusey in the pulpit with a few vivid strokes.
He has not one of the graces of oratory [she says]. His discourse is
generally a rhapsody describing with infinite repetition the
wickedness of sin, the worthlessness of earth, and the blessedness
of Heaven. He is as still as a statue all the time he is uttering
it, looks as white as a sheet, and is as monotonous in delivery as
possible.
Nevertheless, Pusey wielded a spell which is worth much oratory--the
spell of a soul dwelling spiritually on the heights; and a prophet,
moreover, may be as monotonous or as incoherent as he pleases, while the
world is still in tune with his message. But in the 'seventies, Oxford,
at least, was no longer in tune with Pusey's message, and the effect of
the veteran leader, trying to come to terms with Darwinism, struggling,
that is, with new and stubborn forces he had no further power to bind,
was tragic, or pathetic, as such things must always be. New Puseys arise
in every century. The "sons of authority" will never perish out of the
earth. But the language changes and the argument changes; and perhaps
there are none more secretly impatient with the old prophet than those
younger spirits of his own kind who are already stepping into his shoes.
Far different was the effect of Liddon, in those days, upon us younger
folk! The grace and charm of Liddon's personal presence were as valuable
to his party in the 'seventies as that of Dean Stanley had been to
Liberalism at an earlier stage. There was indeed much in common between
the aspect and manner of the two men, though no likeness, in the strict
sense, whatever. But the exquisite delicacy of feature, the brightness
of eye, the sensitive play of expression, were alike in both. Saint
Simon says of Fenelon:
He was well made, pale, with eyes that showered intelligence and
fire--and with a physiognomy that no one who had seen it once could
forget. It had both gravity and polish, seriousness and gaiety; it
spoke equally of the scholar, the bishop, and the _grand seigneur_,
and the final impression was one of intelligence, subtlety, grace,
charm; above all, of dignity. One had to tear oneself from looking
at him.
Many of those who knew Liddon best could, I think, have adapted this
language to him; and there is much in it that fitted Arthur Stanley.
But the love and gift for managing men was of course a secondary thing
in the case of our great preacher. The University politics of Liddon and
his followers are dead and gone; and as I have ventured to think, the
intellectual force of Liddon's thoughts and arguments, as they are
presented to us now on the printed page, is also a thing of the past.
But the vision of the preacher in those who saw it is imperishable. The
scene in St. Paul's has been often described, by none better than by
Doctor Liddon's colleague, Canon Scott Holland. But the Oxford scene,
with all its Old World setting, was more touching, more interesting. As
I think of it, I seem to be looking out from those dark seats under the
undergraduates' gallery--where sat the wives of the Masters of Arts--at
the crowded church, as it waited for the preacher. First came the stir
of the procession; the long line of Heads of Houses, in their scarlet
robes as Doctors of Divinity--all but the two heretics, Pattison and
Jowett, who walked in their plain black, and warmed my heart always
thereby! And then the Vice-Chancellor, with the "pokers" and the
preacher. All eyes were fixed on the slender, willowy figure, and the
dark head touched with silver. The bow to the Vice-Chancellor as they
parted at the foot of the pulpit stairs, the mounting of the pulpit, the
quiet look out over the Church, the Bidding Prayer, the voice--it was
all part of an incomparable performance which cannot be paralleled to-
day.
The voice was high and penetrating, without much variety, as I remember
it; but of beautiful quality, and at times wonderfully moving. And what
was still more appealing was the evident strain upon the speaker of his
message. It wore him out visibly as he delivered it. He came down from
the pulpit white and shaken, dripping with perspiration. Virtue had gone
out of him. Yet his effort had never for a moment weakened his perfect
self-control, the flow and finish of the long sentences, or the subtle
interconnection of the whole! One Sunday I remember in particular.
Oxford had been saddened the day before by the somewhat sudden death of
a woman whom everybody loved and respected--Mrs. Acland, the wife of the
well-known doctor and professor. And Liddon, with a wonderfully happy
instinct, had added to his sermon a paragraph dealing with Mrs. Acland's
death, which held us all spellbound till the beautiful words died into
silence. It was done with a fastidious literary taste that is rather
French than English; and yet it came from the very heart of the speaker.
Looking back through my many memories of Doctor Liddon as a preacher,
that tribute to a noble woman in death remains with me as the finest and
most lasting of them all.