JOWETT AND MAURICE. TT is sometimes very interesting to note
the strong collisions of feeling between substantially good men, men indeed whose main efforts have tended towards many of the same results while approaching them on lines indicating the greatest possible repulsion for the methods by which those results are promoted by other fellow-workers in obtaining them. No one who has looked through the new and very in- teresting life of Jowett by Mr. Evelyn Abbott and Professor Lewis Campbell, just published in two volumes by Mr. Murray, or the volume of College sermons by the late Master of Balliol, published some year and a half ago, can doubt for a moment that in spite of the dominant vein of criticism which made Jowett's mind on religions subjects seem so much more like an eddy or a small whirlpool than a steady current of devotional feeling, there was a deep theistic piety moulded in a Christian type at the bottom of it. Professor Campbell states the truth about this critical vein in the late Master of Balliol very accurately and very ably in his volume on Jowett's career before he became Master. What "Jowett says of Greek literature," he remarks on p. 388, became more "and more applicable to himself,—' Under the marble ex- terior was concealed a soul thrilling with spiritual emotion.' While more than ever convinced that nothing in the world, not even the Christ of the Gospels, should be exempt from criticism, and that no fact of history, not even the miracle of the Resurrection, should be accepted without sufficient evidence, he was also more and more persuaded that mere intellect, however keen, was barren apart from the full and just development of feeling, imagina- tion, and, above all, volition." Still, the note of Jowett, not perhaps to his intimates but to the world at large, was the cold, critical comment which followed close on the heels of any outbreak of devotional feeling, if Jowett thought that such an outbreak tended in any way to the depreciation of intellectual criticism. And in his corre- spondence he is frequently suggesting to his many devoted young ladies that they will probably grow into stout matrons, looking as unlike the earnest and romantic idealists that they are in youth as it is possible for a human being to be, and that after all, however pathetic the contrast may be, they have no right to mourn over the change, which is only characteristic of the law that lovely blossoms must develop into dry unattractive seeds of blossoms yet to come. Row very different was the cast of mind which gained. for Jowett's contem- porary, Frederick Denison Maurice, the great influence which he obtained over the same generation, Sir Edward Strachey's interesting reminiscences of him in the April Cornhill will show. Sir Edward tells us that Maurice was once walking in the street at Leamington, and stopped to remonstrate with a costermonger who was belabouring his donkey with all his might, whereupon the indignant costermonger replied, "Why is he so stupid then F" as if the stupidity of the donkey was the justification, and not rather the condemnation, of the cruelty with which he treated it. Sir Edward treats the story as a parable of Mr. Maurice's own severity in belabouring opponents whom he found insensible to what he held,—no doubt rightly held,—to be the grandest features of the Christian theology, seeing that he, too, virtually expressed his impatience in the midst of the severe discipline be inflicted in something very like the question, "Why is he so stupid then P " "I remember," proceeds Sir Edward, how, when "attempting in a luckless moment to learn more clearly Manrice's explanation of justification by faith, I quoted that of Professor Jowett. Maurice, not perhaps quite apprehend- ing the honesty of the motive, broke into a torrent of indignation, in which his interlocutor never succeeded in interposing more than a 'but' or an if." That is extremely significant of the mutual repulsion between the two men, both of whom, however, were compelled by their own natures to fight for the very cause from which they seemed to be repelled by the pleadings of the other. Maurice, who had written rather in favour of subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles a pamphlet which he called "Subscription No Bondage," came to see that it was a bondage, and heartily approved of the abolition of subscription. And Jowett, who was Bo keen an opponent of the mystic element in faith, and so ardent an advocate of the teaching that nothing even in the Gospels ought to be regarded as exempt from human criticism, came to Bee that in spite of his permanent adhesion to that doctrine, "mere intellect, however keen, was barren apart from the full and just development of feeling, imagination, and, above all, volition."
In truth, Jowett and Maurice were at the opposite poles in temperament, though they often came to the same end from
almost contrary points of the moral compass. Jowett, as we have formerly said in these columns, was remarkable for "the two voices" which were always answering each other in him. Like the two voices in Tennyson's poem, no sooner had one spoken than the other claimed a reply, and it was very difficult to say which of the two was the clearest and loudest.
Looking to his career as a whole, the critical voice may be said to have got the better of the spiritual voice, though there were times and seasons when the spiritual voice asserted its ascendency. In Maurice it was just the other way. To him the critical voice was little but the voice of a tempter. If he
came to acquiesce in what it suggested, it was because the spiritual voice itself pleaded on the same side, because he saw that liberty would tell on the side of faith, and not on the side of unbelief. The biographer of Jowett remarks that though Jowett was always setting his friends enterprises to achieve for themselves, nevertheless when they placed before him the results of their endeavours he often found so much to disagree with that his judgment seemed to incline to the rather discouraging verdict,—burn it and, try again. Maurice was a very different critic indeed. He, too, would frequently lament that some thought which he himself valued greatly had not been equally valued by his protégé. But he would generally find a reason for being thankful that other characteristics of the subject had been taken up with more force and effectiveness than he could have given to them, and he would be quite sure that what he thought a deficiency would from some other point of view come to be seen as a positive advantage. Maurice was always conscious of his own short- comings, indeed he had a singular habit of feeling responsible for the shortcomings of others as if they were due to his own default. In the history of recent English religion there has never been so remarkable an instance of vicarious self- condemnation for the evils which troubled the genera- tion in which he lived. Jowett, on the contrary, though he was at heart a very modest man, could not over- come the disgust he felt at the insincerities, as he regarded them, of the Church to which he belonged, and his high falsetto note was much oftener heard in a kind of cavil at the conventional religion of his fellow- clergymen, than in the passionate acknowledgment of his own deficiencies. Two more different men, with a deep root of religion in both, can hardly be imagined. Jowett's was a truly religions mind, which yet seemed always to be apologising for the world that it had a good deal more right on its side than most religious men were willing to admit. Maurice's was a still more deeply religious mind which identified itself so com- pletely with the divine judgments that it sometimes appeared to accept absolutely what seems to us the very difficult language of the psalmist,—" Against thee, thee only, have I sinned and done evil in thy sight that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest and be clear when thou judgest ; " for he, like the Hebrew singer, almost regarded man as bound to justify, even by his sins, the antecedent vision of God. His eye seemed always fixed on the divine mind, and in spite of the sweetness and the humour which always glimmered in it,—a sweetness and a humour which no one could infer from his writings alone,—his voice was very nearly a monotone, though a rich and noble monotone. Indeed, his eye hardly wandered over the strangely variegated face of the world at all, or wandered over it only with the object of piercing through it, to the purpose of him who had never really manifested his true self to man except in the life and death of Christ. The two men were curious evidences of the fact that those who look like opposites, or even contradictions, of each other, are not unfrequently found to be moving the society in which they live in the same direction after all. Mr. Maurice's was a voice crying in the wilderness, and always crying with the same cry, though those who knew him well could find a con- siderable variety of notes blended in that cry. The Master of Balliol probably feared nothing more than to be accounted a voice crying in the wilderness. He loved to speak as the world spoke, and yet not to think as the world thought ; and if he spoke as the world spoke, he spoke in that light tone greatly in the hope that he might inoculate the world with beliefs and principles which the world, as he knew it, is not prone to honour. Both were unique men, but, in our opinion, Mr. Maurice, though the less easily understood, was the greater of the two.
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