Newman breathed a new spirit into a university that had become complacent and becalmed. But ‘the voice that breathed o’er Eden’ was not the gentle Keble’s voice. It was the voice of a doctrinaire – indubitable, incontestable; and the reverberations were disagreeable. Accusations of heterodoxy flew about and the atmosphere of the university became sour and embittered. The tempest-tossed seas that charismatic dons leave behind them take some time to subside, and Newman’s career was to trouble the man who, more than any other, gave meaning to the word don: Benjamin Jowett, tutor and Master of Balliol College.
* Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), fellow of Trinity Hall (1854–64), mountaineer, rowing coach, literary critic and first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography.
* Anthony, Lord Quinton, life peer 1982, fellow of All Souls (1949–55), New College (1955–78), President of Trinity College, Oxford (1978–87); philosopher.
† G. M. Young (1882–1959) fellow of All Souls, civil servant in the Board of Education, scholar of the Victorian era and author of Portrait of an Age (1936).
* Sheldon Rothblatt, professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley since 1963 and some time Director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education.
* Harold Laski (1893–1950), professor and teacher on politics at LSE for thirty years; prominent Fabian Society member and publicist for socialism.
* Owen Chadwick, OM, Regius professor of modern history (1968–83), Master of Selwyn College (1956–83).
CHAPTER FOUR Benjamin Jowett and the Balliol Tradition
For a century and a half Balliol has been one of the most splendid colleges at Oxford or Cambridge. It sent a host of distinguished graduates into all walks of life; its successes in the schools were proverbial; its junior common room provided a scene of animated intellectual life which few other undergraduate societies could rival. It was a society with a history of academic distinction and the nursery of statesmen, pro-consuls, scholars, lawyers and men of letters. When Harrovians sang, ‘the Balliol comes to us now and then’, they acknowledged that a Balliol scholarship was prized higher by headmasters than that of any other college – because the winner would have had to have faced the stiffest competition. How did this come about? The answer is that it was the work of Benjamin Jowett.
No famous institution owes its quality merely to one man. The foundations of Balliol’s success were laid by two former masters, Parsons and Jenkyns. Their reforms made possible the election of fellows on their merits: Jowett was elected while he was still an undergraduate. When Hawkins got rid of Newman, Froude and Robert Wilberforce as tutors, Balliol supplanted Oriel. But whereas Oriel had offered fellowships to men from other colleges, and by this means overcame the insularity of the past, Balliol found a less spectacular method of finding scholarly candidates for fellowships. Less spectacular but simple – the method was to teach the undergraduates well and train them in the traditions of the college. This was Jowett’s doing. No doubt he was helped by historical accidents – by his senior, Tait, a Balliol tutor, going to Rugby as headmaster in succession to Arnold, and sending the new breed of high-minded public schoolboy to his own college. No doubt he was helped by Balliol’s Scottish connections, so that hard-working, hard-headed Scots came there to irritate the gentlemanly idlers. But it was Jowett who directed the energies of both breeds – and those of the idlers. His own parents had been spendthrift failures; his family, once rich, had fallen on evil days. As a result he was haunted by the spectre of wasted lives and determined that his pupils should not waste theirs. ‘Usefulness in life’ was his yardstick, and he observed how often men of great ability failed because they were shy, awkward or ill mannered. His enemies declared that his only criterion was worldly success – that he felt that a pupil who had failed in life had somehow personally insulted him – that Balliol had been let down. The Warden of Merton put it differently: ‘He never affected or specifically admired an “unworldly” character … he was always disposed to regard worldly success as a test of merit … he hoped that his pupils would not like those of another great teacher “make a mess of life”.’ (The other ‘great teacher’ was, of course, Newman; and Jowett considered that those who went over with him to Rome or were bewildered and deserted, as Arthur Hugh Clough found himself, had ‘made a mess of life’.)
Jowett taught his men the secret and the delight of hard work. ‘The object of reading for the Schools,’ he said, ‘is not primarily to obtain a first class, but to elevate and strengthen the character for life.’ ‘You are a fool,’ he said to one. ‘You must be sick of idling. It is too late for you to do much. But the class [in examination] matters nothing. What does matter is the sense of power which comes from steady working.’ By power, Jowett meant the power over oneself, the ‘power in a man to control and direct his own life instead of drifting on the currents of fortune and self-indulgence’.
He used this power over himself. He was small, shy, and in his youth looked like a cherub; but he turned his shyness into an educative weapon by maintaining devastating silences followed by still more devastating remarks. After walking for three hours in silence his undergraduate companion, as they passed by a bridge, ventured to say, ‘That is a fine view.’ The silence continued until Jowett said, ‘That was a very foolish remark you made an hour ago.’ When a man showed up with an indifferent copy of Greek iambics, Jowett asked him, ‘Have you any taste for mathematics?’ He would dictate a passage from English literature and expect, poker in hand in front of his fire, his pupils to extemporise viva voce into Latin or Greek. To be able to do so ‘gave more promise than knowing the whole of Tennyson and Wordsworth’. At all times of day and night his door was open – but for study, not talk. He was not popular as a tutor. He once rebuked a fellow for being too familiar with the undergraduates. He hated slang and insisted on giving a little girl a shilling every time she said ‘awfully’ until she was ashamed. Newman had been the first to regard his duties as a tutor to be pastoral. But, as his one-time disciple and later Rector of Lincoln Mark Pattison said, Newman would have turned Oriel into a priestly seminary whereas Jowett never imposed his own beliefs on anyone.
There are few occasions more likely to produce bad blood in a college than the death or retirement of the head and the election of a successor. At Lincoln Mark Pattison had been an outstanding tutor; but outstanding tutors all too often fail to be elected head of the college – they have offended too many colleagues. Pattison was harsh, severe and sardonic; always willing to wound and never afraid to strike. Yet it looked as if he would be Rector until, by a discreditable intrigue, a non-resident fellow was brought in to vote and Pattison was outvoted. To his fury he had to connive in the election of a boorish nonentity. He threw up his tutorship and left for Germany.
At Balliol in 1854 it was different. The younger fellows voted for Jowett, the elderly for the future Archbishop Temple. The votes were equal. Then Temple’s supporters suborned two of Jowett’s party; would not Robert Scott make a suitable Master? He was part author of the standard Greek lexicon ‘Liddell and Scott’. After all, he was known to be on friendly terms with Jowett. So the deal was struck. Jowett was mortified. He did not leave for Germany, nor did he resign his tutorship. But he sulked. He no longer appeared in common room and when a dinner was given to celebrate the consecration of the new chapel, Jowett sat with the undergraduates. Some consider he was rejected on grounds of unorthodoxy. More likely he was thought to be inflexible. He bided his time and