Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Bywater, Ingram
BYWATER, INGRAM (1840-1914), Greek scholar, the only son of John Ingram Bywater, a clerk in the Customs, was born in London 27 June 1840. He was educated at University College School and King’s College School, London, and at Queen’s College, Oxford, where he matriculated as a scholar in 1858. In 1863 he was elected to an open fellowship at Exeter College.
As an undergraduate Bywater was the pupil of Jowett and Robinson Ellis, and the friend of Pater and Swinburne. As a young Fellow he became intimate with Mark Pattison and his accomplished wife; and this intimacy was influential in forming his tastes. The Pattisons were fond of foreign travel, and Bywater visited in their company many of the libraries and museums of Europe. Pattison was a collector of early printed books; and Bywater’s regular Sunday visits to his lodgings were doubtless devoted to bibliography as well as to tobacco and desultory conversation. Pattison was also an uncompromising advocate of the claims of learning, who expressed with more truth than moderation the view that the atmosphere of Oxford was inimical to study: ‘a Fellowship is the grave of learning’. Bywater’s opinions were more moderate, and the expression of them more conciliatory; but he did not conceal his view that recognition and support were too grudgingly accorded to research at Oxford, and that the college tutorial system in particular left too little leisure, and too little initiative, either to the student or to his teachers.
During the twenty years of Bywater’s life as a tutor most of his time was given to teaching and to the studies for which he became famous. The publication in 1877 of his edition of the Fragments of Heraclitus won for him an assured position in the world of European scholarship, and he was invited by the Prussian Academy of Sciences to edit the works of Priscianus Lydus (published 1886). His relations with continental scholars, notably with Professor Jacob Bernays, of Bonn, were cordial and fruitful.
Charles Cannan [q.v.] used to say that though Bywater was doubtless an eminent Aristotelian, it was to be deplored that he had not become a bookseller, in which profession he must have been pre-eminent. Actually, he might well have become librarian of the Bodleian. The curators, of whom Pattison was one, and Coxe, the veteran librarian, were anxious to secure him; and he accepted, experimentally, the post of sub-librarian. He found, however, that the duties were too irksome. He was expected to read manuscripts as a matter of routine, and shrank from the prospect: ‘those who care for MSS. per se are usually dull dogs’. He therefore resigned. Pattison deplored the decision; but Pattison had himself declared that ‘the librarian who reads is lost’; Bywater was not prepared to be merely the cause of learning in others. He declined also the headship of Exeter College, offered to him in 1887.
In 1884 Bywater was appointed to a newly created readership in Greek. In 1885 he married. His wife was a member of the well-known Devonshire family of Cornish, and the widow of Hans William Sotheby, formerly fellow of Exeter College. She was a lady of ample means and varied accomplishments, both literary and artistic. The Bywaters lived in term-time at a house on the edge of the University Parks, and in vacation at Mrs. Bywater’s London house, 93 Onslow Square. This was Bywater’s real home until his death; and here, with his wife’s help, he gradually increased his remarkable collection of early classical books.
In 1893 Benjamin Jowett died, and Mr. Gladstone nominated Bywater, whose claims were supported by the powerful testimony of German scholars, to be regius professor of Greek in his place. The great popularizer and translator was thus succeeded by a scholar more purely scientific. Bywater occupied the chair until 1908. He continued to lecture, especially upon the Republic of Plato and the Poetics of Aristotle. Those who believe that the particularism of colleges, or the exigencies of examinations, prevent the University from making the most of its professors, have noted that a mere handful of undergraduates attended in the Schools the lectures which formerly had crowded the hall of Exeter College.
Mrs. Bywater died in 1908, and Bywater in the same year resigned his professorship and retired to his house in London. In 1909 he published the crowning labour of his Aristotelian studies, the monumental edition of the Poetics. Thereafter he undertook no large work of his own; but he continued to contribute occasional articles to the Journal of Philology (of which he had been an editor since 1879), and to help scholars in many fields by reading the proofs of their work. He died in London 17 December 1914. He had no children. His portrait by J. S. Sargent is in the National Portrait Gallery.
As an editor of Greek texts Bywater was certainly the first of the English scholars of his generation. He had a wide familiarity with manuscripts, an unrivalled knowledge of the history of classical learning and the editorial art, and a fine sense of what he liked to call the Sprachgebrauch. To these he added untiring industry, and a keen insight into the logical sequence of his author's thought. It has been objected to his interpretations of Aristotle, that he was too much a grammarian and too little a philosopher; but this apparent limitation was due not to narrowness but to a considered scepticism. In the preface to the Poetics he reminds us ‘that the very idea of a Theory of Art is modern, and that our present use of this term “Art” does not go further back than the age of Winckelmann and Goethe’. This was with oblique reference to the work on the Poetics of Samuel Henry Butcher [q.v.], much of which Bywater regarded as irrelevant. In private he was more outspoken: ‘You must not expect from me anything about Fine Art, for I don’t think Aristotle said anything about it.’
The best judges, in estimating the value of Bywater’s published work, have rightly laid stress on the perfection of its form. They have pointed to the laborious accuracy of his indexes, and to the fine judgement which by a silent change in the punctuation made an obscure passage plain. But his editions of Heraclitus and Aristotle, and even the ampler commentary on the Poetics, reflect one side only of his vast learning and his catholic humanism. His profound veneration for the genius of Aristotle was untinged by superstition. His statement to a newspaper interviewer was characteristic: ‘My chief work has been on Aristotle, a philosopher who influences people to this day without their knowing it.... It is astonishing how profound in many ways was Aristotle’s knowledge of science.... In everything that relates to animal life he is extremely good.’ And he was heard to quote with approval a saying of H. W. Chandler, that ‘the first half-dozen chapters of any book of Aristotle are really very well done’.
Much of his best work was anonymous, and hardly known except to those who benefited by it. He was a delegate of the University Press from 1879 until his death, and few publishers can have been so assiduous in reading the manuscript, or the proofs, of solid books. His immense bibliographical knowledge and his great practical wisdom were enough in themselves to assure him power and usefulness as a learned publisher; but on very many enterprises of scholarship he was not content merely to advise or to decide. He read with care the proofs of the long series of Oxford Classical Texts, of which he and Charles Cannan were the promoters, and his influence and example guided the critical methods of the editors. To the Oxford English Dictionary he contributed much that would otherwise hardly have been found. ‘Murray,’ he said, ‘asked me for an early instance of poetria (‘poetry’), and when I tell you that I found it at last in a seventh-century scholium to the Epistles of Horace, you may imagine that it took me some time; but I am sometimes lucky on Sundays.’
Bywater was president of the Oxford Aristotelian Society from its inception in the early ’eighties until his leaving Oxford in 1908. The society met in his rooms weekly during term, and it is stated that in twenty-five years he did not miss half a dozen meetings. The procedure was to construe and discuss, chapter by chapter, one of the more important writings of the Philosopher. The knowledge and the methods which the society inculcated in its members had a far-reaching influence upon philosophical studies in Oxford.
In University politics Bywater was a ‘liberal’ and a reformer. To national and international affairs his attitude was sceptical; his prejudices were conservative—‘the vulgar radicalism of my youth’ was his own phrase—but he had no illusions. He had learned much from the Germans, and had done much to introduce German scientific methods into English scholarship; but in later years he recognized and deplored the growing chauvinism which prevented even the best of the Germans from admitting that they could learn anything from an English book.
Bywater was a prince of bibliophiles; for there was nothing about a book that he did not know, and no kind of value that he did not appraise. For this reason the collection which he bequeathed to the Bodleian Library, and which there bears his name, is much more than a collection of rare and beautiful books. It is, as he himself wrote, ‘a conspectus in its limited way of the literature of learning from the age of Bessarion to that of the 'Επίγονοι of Sealiger and Casaubon’; and it is also a real part of the work of a great humanist. In his London home, surrounded by these books, Bywater was most himself. ‘It was there,’ writes one of the most devoted of his younger friends, ‘that he was a great teacher. It was not merely that he was a master of his subject—and of one’s own; but one felt powerfully the stimulus of a temperament from which what may be called the casual impurities of intellectual life—pedantry, hurry, irrelevance, pretentiousness, cleverness—had been purged away.’
[Memoir by W. W. Jackson, 1917, reissued with addenda, 1919 (to the bibliography add the inaugural lecture of 1894, published 1919); personal knowledge.]