BENJAMIN JOWETT.
THOSE who wish to know what the late Master of Balliol really was, should not content themselves with reading Mr. Lionel Tollemache's very interesting sketch of him, which has just been republished for us with additions by Edward Arnold, but should study also the " College Sermons," which the Dean of Ripon has just edited and Mr. Murray published. Mr: Tollemache, who himself evidently agrees more with the sceptical side of Jowett, than with his spiritual side, more with his head than with his heart, tells us very justly that the secret of his friend's unique fascination lay in this, that while his head was the head of a sceptic, his heart was the heart of a saint; but he does not add what we think is the truth, and was almost equally of his essence, that while those who felt fascinated by the saint were sure to hear from him reproofs that came from the sceptic, those who were fascinated by the sceptic were sure to hear from him reproofs that came from the, saint. In the present state of English religion nothing is more remarkable than the almost equal balance in many minds between Tennyson's "Two Voices." Mr. Tollemache has happily prefixed to his sketch three verses from that beautiful poem, the most characteristic of which tells us of men— "Who, rowing hard against the stream,
Saw distant gates of Eden gleam,
And did not dream it was a dream."
Jowett can hardly be described as "rowing hard against the 3tream," for he alternately drifted with it and rowed against
; but to those who drifted with it he seemed to be rowing against it, and to those who rowed against it he seemed to be drifting with it. Mr. Tollemakhe tells us that Jowett once said of one of the apologists for Christianity, "He is trying to pitch the standard of belief too high for the present age." That exactly describes what Jowett endeavoured, with his whole strength, to avoid. He tried, on the contrary, to pitch the standard of belief just as high as he thought the present age would bear, but no higher. He endeavoured to hit the present age between wind and water, between the incredulity of scientific doubt with its higher criticism, and the faith of the believing heart. He was a Platonist who could not endure the naked and negative school of incredulous criticism, but who was equally unable to endure the devout paradoxes of the saintly believer. He encouraged his pupils to seek success in the worldly sense, success in their professions, success in their ambitions, success in their intellectual endeavours; But he had no sooner persuaded them to aim at such success than he added, in the true spirit of the saint, " But what is success P not in the mere vulgar sense of the term, as when we speak of men succeeding in life who obtain riches, honours, great offices or preferments; but what is success in the higher sense, the success of the mind, if I may use such a term; in which man is raised not only above other men, but above himself ; in which he becomes more and more his own master and is not overpowered by circumstances, but is lord over them." (" College Sermons," p. 250.) The two voices are heard even in this attempt to raise the standard of young men's ambitions, for Jowett goes on to say that his hearers should not fix their minds too exclusively on the higher kind of success :— "Not excluding, then, this humble care of making a livelihood, I will ask once more, What is success ; and -what idea of it shall we propose to ourselves ? To have carried out some one purpose or design during twenty or thirty years, to have contributed sensibly to the happiness of others, or to have kept a family together ; to have obtained a fair share of this world's goods ; to have added something real, if not very great, to the stock of human knowledge ; to have been a good teacher, to have suc- ceeded in a profession and yet to have risen above it ;—whoever seeks or obtains any of these aims cannot be said to have lived in vain : as the world goes, he may fairly claim to be called a suc- cessful man. There may be success of a still higher kind, of which I will hereafter say a few words. But speaking generally, the above may be regarded as a tolerably accurate description of what men call success in life such as we should desire for our- selves or our friends."
There the Master of Balliol was very careful not "to pitch his standard too high for the present age." But he recurs to the higher strain before he concludes :-
" The considerations which have been placed before you in this sermon relate chiefly to our earthly life, and yet they may receive correction and enlargement from the thought of another. For there is an eternal element even in worldly success, when, amid all the rivalries of this world, a man has sought to live according to the will of God, and not according to the opinion of men. Whatever there was of justice, or purity, or disinterestedness in him, or Christlike virtue, or resignation, or love of the truth, shall never pass away. When a man feels that earthly rewards are but for a moment, and that his true self and true life have yet to appear : when he recognises that the education of the individual beginning here is continued hereafter, and, like the education of the human race, is ever going on : when he is conscious that he is part of a whole, and himself and all other creatures are in the hands of God; then his mind may be at rest : he has nothing more to fear : he has attained to peace and is equally fit to live or die."
Yet no one would, we think, gather from Mr. Tollemache's little book that he often pressed the more saintly view of life upon his pupils with as much earnestness as passages of this last kind embody. The difference between Tennyson's "Two Voices " and Jowett's Two Voices was this, that while Tennyson intended to make the higher voice silence the lower, Jowett intended to reconcile them so far as "the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world " would admit of their reconciliation.
Now as a matter of fact, these Two Voices hardly do admit of complete reconciliation. And Jowett's fascination for the more eager spirits of our modern life, consisted in his readiness to talk, and to talk earnestly, in both strains. Even intellectually he spoke with both voices. No question could be more critical for the ethical ideal of our life than the question of Determinism and Free-will, and even there he followed the cue of his great master and sided with Plato, who, while an idealist in all his yearnings, was a determinist in his theory. There is no passage in Mr. Tollemache's little sketch more characteristic, than his account of Jowett's atti- tude on the question of Determinism and Free-will. Mr. Tollemache tells us that Jowett sometimes, as in his essay on Casuistry, seemed, to recommend acquiescence in conven- tional morality, but sometimes "faced about and became a moralist of the first water." (p. 118.) And then he goes on to give us this characteristic story :— " Another question bearing on that of the heinousness of sin is the question of Philosophical Necessity. One of the 'stodgy questions' which, as an undergraduate, I put to Jowett was whether he believed in Necessity or in Free Will. .T. : 'I believe in Necessity in the sense of believing that our actions are deter. mined by motives.'—T.: That admission seems to me to cover the entire ground. But would it do to act on the belief ? J. [laughing] : ' If you begin to act on the belief, we shall have to turn you out of the College. [More seriously] No. Whatever one may think about the abstract question, one does not mean that it is the same thing to be walking along the street of one's free will and to be dragged along it against one's will. Necessity, when rightly understood, remains a sort of theory in the back- ground, and one acts in much the same way whether one believes in it or not.' " Yet if it be true, as Jowett once said in his introduction to
Plato's " Phwdo," that "we are more certain of our ideas of truth and right than we are of the existence of God," it must be evident that the conviction that we are all determined by our motives, and never determine them for ourselves, would override our religious feelings, and the authority of our consciences, instead of submitting itself to the authority of conscience. Jowett was always attempting to reconcile the language of the higher of Tennyson's "Two voices" to the lower, but always failed in the attempt. Mr. Tollemache recognises this somewhat too clearly for a "disciple," unless he really thinks that it is right to acquire a certain "obliquity of vision," for he says in one place that Jowett "tried to be a philosopher, moralist, and preceptor all at once. As a philosopher, he looked at the world from the outside ; and, so looking, he dimly perceived—or (what is much the same thing)—he was conscious of trying not to perceive—that all is vanity. As a moralist he looked at the world from the inside, and almost convinced himself that all is an intense reality. I hope it is not an over-strained meta- phor to add that, if he looked at the world with one eye, as it were, from the outside, and with the other eye from the inside, the result could hardly fail to be an occasional obliquity of mental vision." And in another place he says that Jowett let his two jarring personalities " go careering about in opposite directions," and concludes that " to any logical disciple of Jowett's, as well as to any disciple of Pattison's, the sense of sin has a ghostly "impressiveness, and indeed has much in common with the representation of a ghost on the stage,—he distinctly sees it, but also he sees through it." (p. 125.) Yet Jowett's heart sometimes completely mastered his head. In the singularly touching and much more than pathetic, almost overwhelming, message which he sent to the College from his sick bed in October, 1891, the higher of Tennyson's two voices is heard in lonely supremacy, and there is no attempt at all to reconcile it with the lower voice. He begins with a message, but the message soon passes into a prayer which is all the more overpowering for the perfectly simple and unpretentious accent with which it opens :—
" Most of us have been wanting in the clear desire and wish to serve God and our fellow-men. At the critical times of life we have not done justice to ourselves. We have not tried enough to see ourselves as we are, or to know the world as it truly is. We have drifted with Society, instead of forming independent prin- ciples of our own. We have thought too much of ourselves, and of what is being said about us. We have cared more for the opinion of others than for the truth. We have not loved others in all classes of society as Thou, 0 Lord, hast loved us. We have not thanked Thee sufficiently for the treasures of knowledge, and for the opportunities of doing good which Thou hast given us in this latter day. We have worried ourselves too much about the religious gossip of the age, and have not considered enough the fixed forms of truth. We have been indolent, and have made many excuses for falling short in Thy work. And now, 0 Lord, in these difficult times, when there is a seeming opposition of knowledge and faith, and an accumulation of facts beyond the power of the human mind to conceive ; and good men of all religions, more and more, meet in Thee ; and the strife between classes in society, and between good and evil in our own souls, is not less than of old ; and the love of pleasure and the desires of the flesh are always coming in between us and Thee ; and we cannot rise above these things to see the light of heaven, but are tossed upon a sea of troubles ; we pray Thee he our guide, and strength, and light, that, looking up to Thee always, we may behold the rock on which we stand, and be confident in the word which thou hast spoken."
We hardly know any other passage in the literature of our religious life which is more subduing in the simplicity of its adoration than that. It seems to embody the whole drift of the Apostle John's language,—" The world passeth away and the lust thereof, but he that doeth the will of God, abideth for ever." Sorely that is not only a victory of faith, but a retractation, like one of St. Augustine's retractations, of much that Jowett had said when he earnestly endeavoured
not to pitch " the standard of faith too high for the present age." Here judgment is passed on "the highest criticism of the age," and the decision of what he had sometimes treated as " the Ultimate Court of Appeal" is solemnly reversed.
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