The life and letters of Benjamin Jowett, M. A., master of Balliol college, Oxford.

112

Life of Benjamin Jowett

[CHAP. IV

you will not mention this (a caution which it seems useless to
give at Giessen ). I cannot quite tell how entire his change
of opinion is; he seemed to take such a very artistical view of
things that his conversation gave me no satisfaction, and, if I
do not do him injustice, a want of the earnestness natural to
a person who feels what an aweful thing it is to disbelieve all
he has formerly held and believe something new. I am told
that he justifies his Lives of the Saints and the mythic view
of the miracles contained in them by saying that he did it
to realize to people the absurdity of their belief. Therefore
what you heard him say at dinner was edpWovda. Newman
has disowned the editorship of the tract2, so that I suppose
he is aware of all this.
This is regular gossip, I fear very uninteresting to you.
It is too bad to make your sublime spirit, soaring with Prospero
in a world of its own creation, descend to the commonplace
of Oxford life. A propos of Prospero, as a lady would say
who did not know how to connect the next sentence of a letter,
I went to see Charles Kemble read the Merchant of Venice,
from which, in comparison with Macready, one did not get much.
It struck me that there was a good deal of difficulty in explaining the character of Shylock-a sort of Italian Jew (the Jew
perfect, and Shakespeare seems to have seized what Newman
hints at in one of his sermons, the ideal of Jewish character
in Jacob), Iago-like malignity and cunning, vulgar simplicity,
and violent passion, and withal something of 'the form
left to pine away amid an altered world' which arouses
one's sympathy for him. There is something very deep in
the idea of strict law as opposed to justice, the only notion
of morality which the Jews appear to have. In the trial scene
this is admirably brought out. I wish theologians understood
the relation of Judaism and Christianity half as well.... Your friend Charles Vaughan is a candidate for Harrowrather late in the field, so that if the Trustees have not great
discernment he will be beaten by Jelf, whom people here
consider the winning man.
Where Brodie was studying.
2 i. e. J. A. Froude's contribution to the Lives of the Saints.