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.’
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