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

1836-1840] Lord Hobhouse's Reminiscences 55
accustomed to hear, to fancy that what they see in print must
be true, and to accept for gospel what comes to them accredited
by the authorities of their little world. Certainly that was
the case with me. And then I came into contact with one
who, not flippant nor irreverent nor specially fond of paradox,
nor specially desirous of victory in a discussion, yet insisted
on seeing everything with his own eyes, and refused to utter
a proposition until his own judgement was sufficiently in accord
with it. I looked upon Jowett as the freshest and most
original mind I had come across; and I still think that I have
never held converse with any one who was more thoroughly
original, or more careful to say only what he made his own.
Among the living influences which compelled me to think and
tended to invigorate my thoughts in the plastic age between
eighteen and twenty, I put as chiefest the lectures of Archbishop Tait and my intercourse with Jowett. Of course there
were many others playing on a ripening mind, not then realized
in any distinct way, and now impossible to disentangle; but
in looking back and trying to take stock of my earlier life,
I have always attributed the most powerful effect to the hardheaded rationalism of these two, combined with their steady
love of truth and their sympathetic natures. Probably the
parts they played in after life will go far to justify my estimate.
Jowett's fearless, and apparently passionless, tenacity under
the storms which, at least during the first half of his working
life, blew with great violence round the heads of the few
who dared to think for themselves and to say so; his abstinence from anything like triumph when he made his position
good-all these things seem to me the natural healthy outgrowth of the twenty-year-old boy, whose resolute questionings
startled, posed, interested, and attracted me.
'I have just called his tenacity passionless, and his victory
one without triumph. Of course in the immature time with
which I deal, qualities of this sort are not brought out or
tested by circumstances. But one of his characteristics which
impressed me even then was his calmness when opinions
differed; that he did not, as other men are wont, get heated
or argue for victory in a wordy war, but contended only when
he had something to say which he believed to be true.