was one on which his mind had dwelt for many years. The exhausting
labours of the vice-chancellorship were followed by an illness (1887);
and after this he relinquished the hope of producing any great original
writing. His literary industry was thenceforth confined to his
commentary on the _Republic_ of Plato, and some essays on Aristotle
which were to have formed a companion volume to the translation of the
_Politics_. The essays which should have accompanied the translation of
Thucydides were never written. Jowett, who never married, died on the
1st of October 1893. The funeral was one of the most impressive ever
seen in Oxford. The pall-bearers were seven heads of colleges and the
provost of Eton, all old pupils.
Theologian, tutor, university reformer, a great master of a college,
Jowett's best claim to the remembrance of succeeding generations was his
greatness as a moral teacher. Many of the most prominent Englishmen of
the day were his pupils and owed much of what they were to his precept
and example, his penetrative sympathy, his insistent criticism, and his
unwearying friendship. Seldom have ideal aims been so steadily pursued
with so clear a recognition of practical limitations. Jowett's
theological work was transitional, and yet has an element of permanence.
As has been said of another thinker, he was "one of those deeply
religious men who, when crude theological notions are being revised and
called in question seek to put new life into theology by wider and more
humane ideas." In earlier life he had been a zealous student of Kant and
Hegel, and to the end he never ceased to cultivate the philosophic
spirit; but he had little confidence in metaphysical systems, and sought
rather to translate philosophy into the wisdom of life. As a classical
scholar, his scorn of littlenesses sometimes led him into the neglect of
_minutiae_, but he had the higher merit of interpreting ideas. His place
in literature rests really on the essays in his Plato. When their merits
are fully recognized, it will be found that his worth, as a teacher of
his countrymen, extends far beyond his own generation.
See _The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett_, by E. A. Abbott and
Lewis Campbell (1897); _Benjamin Jowett_, by Lionel Tollemache (1895).
(L. C.)
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