Page:Studies of a Biographer 2.djvu/167

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JOWETT'S LIFE
155

gives smart lectures, lets the pupils pick up what crumbs they can, but aims at winning praise for his eloquence and does not care whether his hearers are really able to follow him or at most catch the art of stringing smart phrases into a leading article. He is, in short, thinking about himself instead of his college, and has lost the old corporate spirit which was so fully imbibed by Jowett. Jowett's conservatism may have been well or ill judged; I am only concerned to say that it was at least characteristic. The old college system which he had worked so efficiently, must, he held, in no case be lowered in efficiency. He looked rather coldly, for example, upon the movement for women's education, because he thought it likely to interfere at various points with the old order, and evidently thought that Pattison's ideas were calculated to hamper the colleges without better result than endowing facile orators and useless investigation of trifles. It would diminish the educational power of the colleges in order to help the accumulation of useless knowledge dear in the eyes of Dryasdust.

The question as to the true theory of universities is a wide one, and I will not venture even to hint at any opinion about it. What is plain is