Jowett was no reformer. In the early fifties he had been one of the few to applaud Gladstone for supporting university reform, though sad that Gladstone (wisely) appointed commissioners to see that the colleges gave effect to the reforms proposed by the Royal Commission instead of trusting the dons to reform themselves. At one time he advocated creating more professorships, but when Mark Pattison put forward a scheme for endowing research, Jowett opposed it. His remark that study for its own sake was a waste of time drew from Pattison the comment that Oxford resembled a lively municipal borough.
Pattison was a singularly unattractive figure. When he became a theist he spurned his sisters, who adored him, and married his wife not for love but to look after him. She was twenty-seven years his junior. Her selfishness took the form of self-righteousness; his, self-pity. Both were hypochondriacs – as John Sparrow noted – she the more resourceful and experienced of the two. Pattison blamed her frigidity for the estrangement, but when she later married Charles Dilke* (at a time when the scandal that was to drive him from public life was beginning) Dilke never complained that she was sexually inadequate. Pattison had learnt in exile to admire German universities and their outstanding contributions to learning. Having been a champion of the tutorial system and an opponent in the fifties of increasing the professoriate, he now wanted, when at last he became Rector of Lincoln, to abolish colleges, religious tests and pass degrees. He hated the new Oxford of prizes and firsts in the schools. He was the ally of the medieval historian Freeman, who as a guest at a tutors’ dinner exclaimed, ‘I have come to see the crammers cram.’ He considered a don should devote himself to learning. Oxford should become a centre for advanced studies and colleges should become specialised departments as in civic universities.
Jowett stood for the college and the tutorial system. He made enemies. No one of his character could fail to do so. The conservatives among the dons were as jealous of his success as the liberals indignant at his hostility to research. The historian and fellow of All Souls Charles Oman called him ‘a noted and much detested figure’ representing ‘modernism, advertisement and an autocratic pose, a tendency to push the importance of the college beyond the limits of its undoubted merit’. Trollope characterised him as Mr Jobbles in The Three Clerks, and W. H. Mallock mocked him as Dr Jenkinson in The New Republic. Oman, Freeman and Pattison considered a don’s first duty was to research. On the other hand, the then Dean of Christ Church, while accepting that tutors as well as professors should write books, considered the tutor’s first duty was ‘to look after his men’. The result too often was that tutors didn’t write books.
Jowett was to be remembered for ever as a character. Undergraduates appeared before him – he saw two or three every day – and the idle were slain by his sarcasm. By now he had learnt to sympathise with their pleasures. As early as 1879 Balliol held a ball and as Vice-Chancellor he defended the Oxford University Dramatic Society against the sourpuss dons like Freeman who spoke of the ‘portentous rage for play acting’. At the end of his life Jowett said, ‘At one time I was against the boat, and cared little for its success, but now I think very differently.’ He became known as ‘The Jowler’. The terrible silences disappeared so that even Pattison could say, ‘There’s affability for you.’ He was now positively genial towards the young. One of them said he tried never to quarrel: if a man insulted him he asked him to dinner. ‘You’ll do, dear boy,’ laughed Jowett. ‘You’ll do.’ It was said that if you were a peer, a profligate or a pauper, the Master would be sure to take you up. Jowett was not the first don to institute reading parties in the vacation, but he was the first head of house to know something about all his men, and a great deal about some of them. The list of Balliol graduates in 1873–8 included Asquith, Curzon, Gell, Milner, Baden-Powell, Leveson-Gower and W. P. Ker. As undergraduates they would have been invited to meet the Master’s guests – among them Turgenev, George Eliot and G. H. Lewes, Bishop Colenso, Archbishop Tait, Lord Sherbrooke and Tyndall. He made a point of mixing the different types of undergraduates at his parties – ‘Jowett’s Jumbles’, they were called – yet Balliol was judged to be the most cliquey of all colleges.
Swinburne as well as George Eliot stayed in the Lodgings. Jowett asked Swinburne to look at his translation of Plato’s Symposium and when the poet suggested a sentence could be construed differently Jowett’s eyes widened: ‘Of course that is the meaning. You would be a good scholar if you were to study.’ Swinburne was set down in an adjoining room to continue the good work, and a friend talking to Jowett was interrupted by a cackle from next door. ‘Another howler, Master.’ ‘Thank you, dear Algernon,’ said Jowett as he shut the door. Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Republic was his most lasting contribution to learning. For years it was the most popular translation, much read in schools.
He liked the well-born and the famous. When the Crown-Princess of Prussia (‘little Vicky’) called on him to talk philosophy he thought her ‘quite a genius’ – and certainly she would have made a better showing than most of her women contemporaries, other than George Eliot. But he also encouraged poor men to come to Balliol and did nothing to impede the concern with working-class education and poverty that T. H. Green and Arnold Toynbee initiated and for which Balliol became so well known under the mastership of A. L. Smith and Alexander (‘Sandy’) Lindsay.
He continued to hold sharp opinions. ‘No writer,’ he said of Carlyle, ‘had done or was doing so much harm to young men as the preacher of tyranny or apologist of cruelty.’ ‘Comtism destroys the minds of men, Carlyle their morals.’ He was outraged that Governor Eyre’s* expenses should have been paid by the State. ‘A generation ago we should have hanged him.’ He hated Euripides: ‘he is immoral when he is irreligious and when he is religious, he is more immoral still.’ Staying in Scotland to deliver two lectures on Socrates he was accosted after dinner by Professor Blackie of Glasgow University, who said, ‘I hope you in Oxford don’t think we hate you.’ ‘We don’t think of you at all,’ was the reply. The snub was deserved; the professor had sung a song, unasked, called ‘The Burning of the Heretic’, which Jowett may have considered was a dig at him.
In 1882 Jowett became Vice-Chancellor for four years. Charles Fortnum again offered his collection of antique and Renaissance works of art to the Ashmolean Museum, and Arthur Evans, the prime excavator of Minoan civilisation in Crete, maintained that Jowett did his best to refuse the gift by masterly inactivity and much dissembling. In his biography Geoffrey Faber defended Jowett against this charge and pointed out that no Vice-Chancellor can accept a gift without considering what it will cost the university to accept it. Evans was young and high-handed: Fortnum, like other benefactors, hinted that his bequest could go elsewhere unless Oxford fell in with his wishes. Furthermore Jowett had always recognised that something had to be done for archaeology and for the old Ashmolean collections. Nevertheless, he acquired a reputation as one who was determined to have his way. It was said of him, ‘Parnell is not in it with him for obstruction.’ When supporters of a scheme he opposed got it put first on the agenda at the last meeting of Council, Jowett declared that no one could discuss so important a matter so late in the term and left the chair. His mode of governance lived on. Years later Lindsay, when Master of Balliol, found himself in a minority of one at a college meeting and remarked, ‘I see, we are deadlocked.’
And love? He was devoted to a giant Scotsman, Robert Morier, one of his earliest pupils who later became ambassador in St Petersburg. In the sixties he was tempted to marry the daughter of the Dean of Bristol; but when another fellow was appointed to the only fellowship in the college open to a married man, Jowett’s interest flagged. No wonder: he had fallen for Florence Nightingale. The friendship grew: he annotated three vast volumes she had written entitled Suggestions for Thought. He was impressed