Jowett's Prose

IN two slender volumes ¹ — nowise thick enough unduly to distend the pocket of one’s coat — we have a compendium of wisdom gathered from the writings of the late Master of Balliol. Readers of the great Plato in English already know how Jowett in his Introductions made the interpretation of the Platonic Dialogues a vehicle for the expression of his own deepest thought, — a kind of Plato for the times. The result of bringing together in brief compass the more notable and pregnant passages from all the introductions is even surprisingly successful. For all Jowett’s delicate intuition and sympathetic following of the more Icarian flights of the academic philosophy, one feels here that his genius was in closer alliance with what we are wont to think the Socratic, than with the Platonic strain in the Dialogues. There is, too, a wealth of the lore of humanity and the knowledge of this world which makes one think irresistibly of Bacon. Sometimes, even, the apposite turn of a sentence is Verulam’s own, as when he says, speaking of the materialism of the Spartan ideal: “ Tyrtaeus, or Æsop, or our own Newton, would have been exposed at Sparta, and some of the fairest and strongest men and women have been among the wickedest and worst.”

Jowett’s prose style is always admirable. Sometimes, as has been said, it is terse, Baconian; sometimes it is patched with becoming purple; it is always lively without flippancy, edifying without tediousness, suggestive without vagueness. In the last century perhaps only Newman among English writers came nearer than Jowett to that perfection of style which he himself describes as “variety in unity, freedom, ease, clearness, the power of saying anything, and of striking any note in the scale of human feelings without impropriety.” It would be well were these two little books often in the pockets of our young literary aspirants to “manner.” It is not possible to imagine any reading more exemplary for them, or a better corrective of the current vices of style. A page of Jowett is a touchstone by which the slap-dash impressionism of the “clever ” writer, or the painful travail and artificiality of the pseudo-Paterian, can be seen for what it is.

There is much in the wide-ranging comment of these volumes which tempts to quotation, but nothing is more insistent than a certain loving definition of mysticism. In an age when the dilute mysticism of “ the new thought ” is noisy in the land, yet “ practical mystics ” are too rarely met, these sentences are memorable: —

“By mysticism we mean, not the extravagance of an erring fancy, but the concentration of reason in feeling, the enthusiastic love of the good, the true, the one, the sense of the infinity of knowledge, and of the marvel of the human faculties. When feeding upon such thoughts the ‘ wing of the soul ’ is renewed and gains strength; she is raised above ' the manikins of earth ’ and their opinions, waiting in wonder to know, and working with reverence to find out what God in this or in another life may reveal to her.” F. G.