Asquith Read Free Page B

” m And he went on to explain that he meant by this that Balliol had anticipated of its own free will most of the reforms which were imposed upon the rest of the University, first by the Royal Commission of 1854, and then by that of 1877. By its attitude to religious tests, to married tutors, to open scholarships, and above all, perhaps, by its eagerness to pull down its old buildings, the college showed its resolute modernity. Its intellectual climate was eclectic, humanist, and a little worldly. It held that men were greater than theories and that action was of more value than contemplation. This approach, as a prelude to the great position which Balliol men were to occupy in the world in the latter part of the century, began to produce outstanding academic results from the ’thirties onwards. Between 1837 and 1896, when there were approximately twenty colleges in the University, Balliol won thirty-four of the sixty Ireland Scholarships—the most coveted classical award.
    The pre-eminence of Balliol therefore began well before Jo wett had made his mark. Furthermore, his elevation to the Mastership reduced rather than increased the influence which he might have had upon Asquith. Asquith read his freshman’s essays to him, received his weekly battels in his presence, and met him also at occasional breakfast parties or even upon that great nineteenth century Oxford institution —an intellectual walk. But he was never his pupil. And even if he had been, it is doubtful if Jowett’s influence upon Asquith would have been as great as upon many other young men. In the first place Asquith was never open to wide masculine intellectual influence. His mind and his ambitions, from a very early age, were too firmly and securely set for that. And partly for this reason there was probably never great natural sympathy between the two men. Jowett, perhaps with a touch of snobbery, preferred those whose natural talent was in danger of being obscured by a frivolous or faineant overlayer, which he could strip off or at least render innocuous. At a later stage he was more interested in Margot Tennant, Asquith’s second wife, than he ever was in Asquith himself; and he got more satisfaction out of his relations with Lord Lansdowne, who told Miss Tennant, “ had it not been for him, I would have done little with my life,” n than out of those with Asquith. For Asquith needed no one to make him do a great deal with his life. And he expressed his own feelings towards Jowett, at a time when the latter was thought to be dying, 1 with a notable detachment and coolness :

“ I am afraid poor old Jowett is dying,” he wrote in a private letter of October 26th, 1891. “ It seems but the other day that my wife and I were staying with him. We had a very pleasant party: not too large and well assorted. ... It is already difficult to conceive of the Oxford in which, partly by sympathy and partly by antagonism, he was formed. . . . Jowett, in his day, did probably more than any other single man to let some fresh air into the exhausted atmosphere of the common rooms, and to widen the intellectual horizon of the place. In my time he was already looked upon, by the more advanced spirits, as an extinct volcano, and even a bit of a reactionary. . . . He never at any time (I should think) had anything definite to teach.... o

1 In fact he survived for another two years.

    The Balliol volcano of Asquith’s day who was in no danger of extinction was T. H. Green. This austere, reserved philosopher had come up to Balliol as a Commoner from Rugby in 1858. He had no great gift either of classical scholarship or of lucidity of expression, but after his First in Greats and his election to a fellowship in 1862, and then to a tutorship in 1866, he made his own brand of neo-Hegelian thought the dominant intellectual influence, certainly in Balliol and perhaps in the University as a whole. He had great personal influence and gathered a strong band of disciples