Chapter III: Part 3

Keble, Newman, Pusey, Richard Hurrell Froude—those are the great Oriel names in this connection, though Pusey, at the time when he joined the alliance, had left Oriel and become a Canon of Christ Church. Keble, if one may draw invidious distinctions, was the saintliest of them, Newman the most eloquent, Pusey the most learned, Richard Hurrell Froude the most energetic. But for Pusey’s learning, the Movement might never have taken seriously; but for Froude’s activity, it might never have been started.

Whether Froude had any firm intellectual grip on religious problems may be questioned; but there can be no disputing that he was a very strong man, and a very practical man, and a man who descended into the fray, filled with the joy of battle. He reminds one, a little, _mutatis mutandis_, of the “boss” in American politics, directing and controlling the “machine.” “Here,” one seems to hear him saying, “is something movable—let us have a Movement. Here is a ball—let us set it rolling.” And he did set the ball rolling, and it continued to roll, long after his premature death, at the age of thirty-three, had saddened his fellow-workers.

The Church, as it seemed to this little company, was being assailed by dangers, alike from without and from within. It was neither sufficiently respected nor sufficiently worthy of respect. Erastianism and Indifferentism were in the air. There was a tendency, among Churchmen as well as laymen, to regard the Church, not as a Catholic Apostolic institution of Divine origin, but as “a branch of the Civil Service.” Bishops had been mobbed in the riots which attended the passing of the Great Reform Bill. A Liberal Statesman had presumed to warn bishops to “set their house in order.” Superfluous bishoprics in Ireland—bishoprics supported at the expense of a conquered people who did not want them—were being suppressed; and that act of justice and common sense was the “last straw.” Keble thundered at justice and common sense as “national apostasy.” His thunder was the signal for the Movement, and its first overt act.

What, then, did the Tractarians want? The complete definition of their aims must be left to theological controversialists, and a layman can only presume to sketch the roughest outline of their objects.

They insisted, in a general way, that the Church of England was the creation, not of Parliament, but of God—that it was the duty of the State to recognise the Church, and do it homage, and back it up, but that these obligations carried with them no corresponding right to dictate to the Church, or to interfere with it in any way. In doubtful matters of doctrine the Church must decide and the State must accept its decisions. The Church was the repository of truth, guaranteed by apostolic succession, the sole interpreter of the teaching of the Bible, and of its own traditions and formulæ; and the true interpretation of those traditions and formulæ was—the interpretation which John Keble, John Henry Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey, and Richard Hurrell Froude chose to give them.

The logical weakness of the position was obvious. The Tractarians were not the Church, but only members, more or less worthy, of the rank and file of the Church. Oriel College had no more right than Exeter Hall to define the doctrines of the Church. The doctrines of the Church had been defined, once for all, by Act of Parliament; and there was no authority within the Church empowered, even by ecclesiastical law, to define the definitions. It needed a secular tribunal to “dismiss hell with costs,” as other English Churchmen were presently to discover; and a Church possessing the authority which the Tractarians thought that a Church ought to have was only to be found at Rome.

In due course the most logical of them realised that fact and ’verted. They only worked their way slowly, however, to their conclusion; and, in the meantime, remaining within the Church of England, they engaged in vigorous propagandism. Their views were spread partly by the famous Tracts from which they derived their name, partly by means of Newman’s sermons in St. Mary’s Church, partly by their personal influence over their juniors—partly also by their readiness to take the lead in the persecution of the “unsound.” They were in the thick of the fight over Hampden’s preferment, by Lord Melbourne, to the Regius Professorship of Divinity; and it was one of them who denounced Hampden in a sermon as “this atrocious professor” because he had proposed the opening of the University to Nonconformists. Evidently they were too conscious of meaning well to care to mince their words.

Space forbids us to follow all the vicissitudes of their fortunes. Enough to say that they made rapid progress at first, but presently ran upon the rocks. There was a beauty in their holiness which aroused widespread and sympathetic interest; it was generally recognised that they were making religion poetical; but points were discovered in their doctrines, as they developed them, which a Protestant people could not accept even from the saintliest of men. When they came to recommending “reserve” in the communication of religious knowledge, and argued, in the notorious Tract 90, that the language of the Thirty-nine Articles was compatible with Roman tenets, there was an outcry through the length and breadth of England. Arnold of Rugby called them “Malignants,” and other theologians called them other names, not less offensive. Shouts of “No Popery!” assailed them; and, in the midst of the din, the more clear-sighted of them discerned how hopelessly impossible was the position which they had occupied.

There was no way of escape for them from the Erastian net. Whatever the Church of England ought to be, it actually was, among other things, a branch of the Civil Service. The Tractarians were merely junior members of the Civil Service, trying to ride rough-shod over the senior members; and the heads of departments—which is to say the bishops—had no intention of allowing their subordinates to dictate to them. They would neither follow the Tractarians, nor allow the Tractarians to push them along in front. On the contrary, they snubbed the Tractarians, called them to order, exhorted them to sit down and hold their tongues, and practically stopped the publication of the Tracts.

Nor is it easy to see what else they could have done. The Church of England, by the very nature of its constitution, lacked a spiritual head exercising jurisdiction in matters of faith. It could not, even in theory, obtain such a spiritual head without the sanction of King, Lords, and Commons; it could not hope, in practice, to obtain such a spiritual head by any means whatsoever. If individual members of the Church of England tried to recognise, or set up, such a head on their own responsibility, they would cease to be members of the Church of England, and would become Dissenters—just as much Dissenters as those Congregationalists and Methodists and Baptists for whose exclusion from the Universities they had fought with such bigoted bitterness. The only Church so constituted that it could legislate for itself in spiritual matters, binding its own members, and expelling them if they refused to be bound, was the Church of Rome.

That discovery was the rock on which the Tractarian Movement split. Its more logical adherents, scorning compromise, and “damning consequences,” pursued the road to Rome. Others, like Pusey and Keble, held back in the Church of England by the chain of old associations, either made the best of things, or gravely pretended that the Church was something which it was not. Others, like Mark Pattison, who had found his Tractarian opinions an obstacle to his election to a fellowship, relapsed into Indifferentism, and rejoiced that preoccupation with religion had ceased to stand in the way of that sound learning which it was the main business of a University to promote.

So that, so far as Oxford in general and Oriel in particular were concerned, the Movement came to an end. It was, indeed, still to exercise a certain æsthetic influence throughout the country, and it was to colour the churchmanship of such bishops as Samuel Wilberforce, of such statesmen as Gladstone, of such lawyers as Lord Selborne, of such newspaper proprietors as Beresford Hope of the _Saturday Review_. It was also to stimulate the ritualistic innovations which brought about the Public Worship Regulation Act, and the persecution, and passive resistance, of the Rev. Arthur Tooth. But Oxford—the intellectual Oxford which counted—had done with it, and was to give itself over to Liberalism and Honest Doubt instead.

* * * * *

The most notable of the Honest Doubters, Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough, have already been mentioned. They were Arnold of Rugby’s most brilliant pupils, and the pick of the Balliol scholars of their period. Jowett once told John Addington Symonds that Clough was the only man of his acquaintance whom he knew for certain to be a man of genius. On Matthew Arnold’s remarkable talents and originality, no Oxford man, writing for Oxford men, feels it in the least necessary to insist. Yet both Arnold and Clough missed their firsts; and the blame for their failure is commonly, and not altogether unjustly, attributed to the Tractarians.

They came into residence in the midst of the Movement, and spent too much of their time in considering whether they could move with it or not. Clough, in particular, was, for a time, conscious of the attraction, and felt himself, as he put it, “like a straw drawn up the draught of a chimney.” He was not, indeed, drawn very far—a pupil of Arnold’s hardly could be. His mind was so constituted that “religion which has grown incongruous with intelligence” appealed to his credulity in vain. He shrugged his shoulders and withdrew—but not before he had devoted to the doctrine of the apostolical succession many precious hours which were due to the Ethics of Aristotle. The result was the painful surprise which the class list had in store for him—a surprise which seems to warrant the saying that the great Tractarian leader was not only a second-class man himself, but was the cause of second classes in others.

The winning of an Oriel fellowship redeemed Clough’s failure as it had redeemed Newman’s. Like Newman, he became a tutor of the College; and his connection with it, like Newman’s, was severed by the development of his theological opinions. Newman had believed too much for Oriel, and Clough believed too little. “I have given our Provost notice,” he presently wrote to Arnold, “of my intention to leave his service at Easter. I feel greatly rejoiced to think that this is my last term of bondage in Egypt.” And he went on, speculating as to his prospects: “One may do worse than hire oneself out as a common labourer; ’tis at any rate honester than being a teacher of Thirty-nine Articles.”

So he went his way—another of the prophets, though by no means the last of them, whom Oxford has first cast out with unimpeachable solemnity, and then regretted and made an idol of. No one needs to be told that he is the “Thyrsis” of Matthew Arnold’s famous poem; but a passage from “Thyrsis”—a passage which conjures up the picture of the Honest Doubter taking his honest doubts very seriously, eating his heart out, unable, as yet, to attain to that “Stoic-Epicurean acceptance of life” which was the ultimate philosophy of his friend—may fittingly conclude this section:

“It irk’d him to be here, he could not rest.
He loved each simple joy the country yields,
He loved his mates; but yet he could not keep,
For that a shadow lour’d on the fields,
Here with the shepherds and the silly sheep.
Some life of men unblest
He knew, which made him droop, and fill’d his head.
He went, his piping took a troubled sound
Of storms that rage outside our happy ground;
He could not wait their passing; he is dead.”

And so we leave him, and come to Cecil Rhodes; and it seems as though we had taken a very long journey indeed.

* * * * *

Rhodes went up to Oriel, with some South African experience behind him, in 1873. He rowed for Oriel, in 1873, spent his long vacations at the Cape, and ultimately took a pass degree. To the Dean who warned him that he might be ploughed if he persisted in cutting his lectures, he replied, “Oh, I promise you I’ll manage it. Leave me alone, and I shall pull through.” And the Dean left him alone, and in due course he did pull through. It is also recorded of him that he looked so little like an Oxonian that he was able to deceive even the Proctor. This is the story as he told it:

“The Proctor,” he said, “took off his cap to me with the utmost politeness, and I did the same to him. ‘Well, sir,’ said the Proctor to me, ‘your name and college?’ ‘My name is Rhodes,’ I replied, ‘and I have just come here from the Cape of Good Hope, and am making a short stay in Oxford; and now, sir, may I ask your name and college?’”

Whereupon the Proctor apologised for what he supposed to be his mistake, and Cecil Rhodes escaped unfined.

That is practically the only story that there is to be told of Cecil Rhodes’s undergraduate days; and it would, of course, be superfluous to relate how Oriel benefited by his will. One of the statements in that will, however, was to the effect that he regarded the Oriel dons as “children” in matters of finance; and if a man’s will were the proper place for pleasant anecdotage, he might have illustrated and supported that allegation by an Oriel story.

Once upon a time, it is recorded, the Bursar discovered an inexplicable deficiency in his accounts of something between £1,800 and £1,900. He knew that he had not embezzled the money, but he did not see how his balance-sheet was to be explained to the auditors except on the hypothesis that he had done so. In his distress he took his accounts to the Common-room, and asked his colleagues to check the figures. They did so, pored over them, and could find nothing wrong in them, until, at last, the Provost solved the mystery.

“Good gracious!” he exclaimed. “Don’t you see what you’ve done?”

“No, Mr. Provost, I don’t see any mistake.”

“Why, on the liability side you’ve added the date of the year to the pounds, shillings, and pence!”

QUEEN’S COLLEGE

What little Mr. Bouncer said of Queen’s—The inwardness of his
criticism—The boar’s head and the canticle—Another song on
the same subject—The Provost and the alarm of fire—The Black
Prince at Queen’s—Wiclif at Queen’s—The first of the Oxford
Movements inaugurated by his poor preachers—Later times—Jeremy
Bentham—Walter Pater.

A Queen’s man observed lounging in the portico of his own College is spoken of by Little Mr. Bouncer in “Verdant Green” as thus “openly confessing his shame”; and the playful criticism doubtless mirrors the public opinion of a period when social distinctions were marked by more outward signs than at present.

There were, and indeed there still are, at Queen’s a considerable number of scholarships and exhibitions tenable only by youths educated at certain specified North Country grammar schools. Religion and sound learning may or may not have flourished in these remote educational establishments, but they certainly were not, in past times, schools of polished manners. Civilisation, as it were, filtered through to them, leaving a good many of its graces in the filter. The undeniable virtues of their _alumni_ were of the rugged order. They asserted themselves in the broad accents of the fells and dales, and, in the matter of dress, they supported the home industries of provinces in which the art of tailoring was in its infancy. Such is the inwardness of Little Mr. Bouncer’s comment, set forth as expressing the view of the “very gentlemanly set of men” of the early Victorian Brasenose.

[To face page 106.]

All that, however, is ancient history. _Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis_, is doubtless the well-warranted reflection of the Queen’s men of to-day. The old traditions which they still keep alive fall under the head, not of manners, but of customs. There is the custom, for instance, of blowing a trumpet to signify that dinner is ready; there is the custom of using the founder’s horn as a loving-cup on gaudy days; there is the Bursar’s custom of presenting every guest, on New Year’s Day, with a needle threaded with silk, and wishing him prosperity in the formula, “Take this and be thrifty.” Finally there is the Christmas Day custom, which never fails to get a paragraph in the papers, of bringing in the boar’s head to the accompaniment of music.

* * * * *

To this last custom, of course, a story is attached, which may or may not be true. A scholar of Queen’s, we are told, went, in the remote past, for a walk on Shotover, and there met a wild boar, which charged him. Instead of running away, he thrust the Aristotle which he was reading down the beast’s throat and choked it; and then he cut off its head and brought it home for supper—an heroic act, emblematical of the triumph of scholarship over brute force, which was duly celebrated in a canticle, still sung every Christmas night in the College hall while the butler is bringing in the delicacy, and running thus:

“The boar’s head in hand bear I,
Bedecked with bays and rosemary.
And I pray you, my masters, merry be yee,
_Quot estis in convivio_.

_Caput apri defero,_
_Reddens laudes Domino._

The boar’s head, as I understand,
Is the bravest dish in all the land,
And thus bedecked with a gay garland
Let us _servire cantico_.

_Caput apri defero,_
_Reddens laudes Domino._

In memory of ye King of Bliss
Which on this day to be served is
_In Reginensi atrio_.

_Caput apri defero,_
_Reddens laudes Domino._”

Such is the carol which, at Queen’s, links the present with the past; and if any reader desires a more modern song on the same subject, he may find one in “The Oxford Sausage.” It may suffice to quote the last three stanzas:

“So dreadful this bristle-backed foe did appear,
You’d have sworn he had got the wrong pig by the ear,
But instead of avoiding the mouth of the beast,
He rammed in a volume and cried—_Græcum est_.

In this gallant action such fortitude shewn is,
As proves him no coward, or tender Adonis,
No armour but logic, by which we may find,
That logic’s the bulwark of body and mind.

Ye squires, that fear neither hills nor rough rocks,
And think you’re full wise when you outwit a fox,
Enrich your poor brains and expose them no more,
Learn Greek and seek glory from hunting the boar.
Derry down, down, down, derry down.”

This boar’s head story is, beyond question, the most picturesque item in the Queen’s annals. In more recent times the College has twice been seriously damaged by fire, and each of the two outbursts invites a marginal comment. One of them originated in the bursary, and was attributed by the wits to the action of the Bursar in cooking the accounts. On the occasion of the other, the Provost nearly perished in the flames as a concession to dignity and decorum. The Fellows and scholars, who had fled into the quadrangle, missed him, and wondered what had become of him. He had, in fact, lingered in the blazing building to complete his toilet. He did not emerge from it, like the others, in his night-gear, but in his wig, and cap and gowns, and bands, and complete ecclesiastical trappings. A magnificent spectacle truly! Having conjured it up, we may turn back and call the roll of the names of which Queen’s is most justly proud.

* * * * *

The eponymous Queen of the College was Philippa of Hainault, the consort of Edward III., whose chaplain and confessor was the founder. It followed, most naturally, that Edward the Black Prince was for a time a student there, though no legends, whether of his studies or his diversions, have been handed down. It was, at any rate, on quite other fields than those of learning that the Black Prince was to win his fame; and the first serious Queen’s man whose reputation really counts is Wiclif.

Queen’s, it is true, has no exclusive claim to him. He was also, for a period, Master of Balliol, and, for another period, Master of Canterbury Hall—an extinct establishment on the site of the present Canterbury Quad, at Christ Church. He is further said, though on doubtful evidence, to have been, for a while, a Fellow of Merton. The brief years, however, during which he occupied rooms at Queen’s were among the most important of his life; for to those years belong the preparation and inauguration of the first of the Oxford Movements.

Personal details are almost entirely lacking—personal details are nearly always to seek in the biographies of the great men of the Middle Ages. It may be that Wiclif was the student who thrust the Aristotle down the throat of the wild boar. It may also be—and, on the whole, it is quite as likely—that he was not. There is no evidence either way, and the probabilities are nicely balanced. But he was, at any rate, the Morning Star of the Reformation. He translated the Bible; he stood up against the Pope; and he called upon the laity to reform the clergy. Nor was that all. He also missed preferment through his zeal, and organised “poor preachers” to spread the light which he had kindled.

Oxford, indeed, was in those days the only available centre for the dissemination of a new idea. The light of Paris had temporarily paled, and the light of Cambridge had hardly yet begun to shine; so that Oxford was the most important of the stages in the pilgrimage of a wandering scholar. Then, if ever, there was reason to hope that what Oxford thought to-day England would think to-morrow. The machinery for bringing this result about existed, and Wiclif set it in motion, “pressing the button,” as we moderns say, in his room at Queen’s. The excesses of disciples who joyously predicted the coming of a day when “priests’ heads would be as cheap as sheeps’” no doubt outran his intentions; but it is worth while, in view of current political conflicts, to note that this first Oxford Movement was the occasion of an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the House of Lords to usurp the privileges of the House of Commons.

The Archbishop of Canterbury proposed, the Lords passed, and the King assented to a law to the effect, broadly speaking, that the “poor preachers” should be arrested wherever found, and locked up in whatever house of detention was most convenient, until they gave such an account of themselves as satisfied Holy Church. The Commons represented that this so-called Statute was not a Statute, since it had not been laid before them. They demanded its withdrawal, and it was withdrawn; the privileges of the Lower House being thus asserted, in the interest of an Oxford Movement, as long ago as 1382.

Already at that date, however, the Movement had had its martyrs. Some Fellows of Queen’s had been expelled as Wicliffites in 1376; and it cannot be said that they had departed in a blaze of glory, for it appears that they had taken with them the common seal, and some jewels and other valuable property belonging not to them, but to the College. That, too, may have been a picturesque proceeding; but the details are obscure, and the subject cannot be discussed with profit.

* * * * *

Wiclif, of course, is eminent not only as a Reformer, but also as a man of letters. His version of the Bible helped, no less than Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” to fix the English language; and so we are led on, by a natural transition, to mention Wycherly, the dramatist, who was also a Queen’s man, and Addison, and William Collins, the poet, who were both tempted by the offer of demyships to migrate from Queen’s to Magdalen, and Tickell, who contributed to Steele’s _Spectator_—Steele himself being a Merton man—and William Mitford, the historian of Greece, and Jeremy Bentham, whose “mark of everlasting light,” being “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” could hardly be said to be “above the howling senses’ ebb and flow,” and Francis Jeffrey, the founder of the _Edinburgh Review_, and Walter Pater, who is more interesting than any of them.

Jeremy Bentham is, perhaps, most memorable as the third of the great trio of Oxonians who have “shown up” the inefficiency of Oxford University teaching in the eighteenth century. The comments of Adam Smith on that branch of the subject have already been quoted; those of Gibbon will have to be quoted presently; those of Bentham, of Queen’s, may as well be quoted now. He learnt at Oxford, he said, nothing except “mendacity and insincerity.” He found his tutor, Joseph Jefferson, morose—“a sort of Protestant monk,” who even forbade him to play the innocent game of battledore and shuttlecock. His lectures, and the lectures of the other tutors also, were “foolish,” teaching only “something of logical jargon”; and Bentham listened even to the law lectures of the great Blackstone, Fellow of All Souls, “with rebel ears.” Moreover, he tells us that he was afraid of encountering ghosts on the solitary staircases of the College.

His own ghost, dreading other ghosts, is indeed one of the gloomiest that one meets at Oxford. The pursuit of the greatest happiness of the greatest number had not, in his college days, begun; and there was but little happiness for “number one.” Bentham went up too young—he was only thirteen; he was kept short of money, and he was badly dressed. “I wish you would let me come home very soon,” he wrote to his father, “for my clothes are dropping off my back”; and happiness is often a shy fugitive when chased by a ragged man in the midst of more fashionably attired companions. Indeed, the one service which Oxford rendered Jeremy Bentham was to cure him of a taste for gambling. “They always,” he says, “forced me to pay when I lost; and, as I could never get the money when I won, I gave up the habit”—a statement which sheds a queerly lurid light upon the conduct of the gamesters of Queen’s in the year 1761. They seem to have bullied this lad of thirteen somewhat in the style of Flashman in “Tom Brown.” We can only pity him, and leave him.

* * * * *

Of Pater, of course, there will be more to be said when we come to Brasenose, where he won his fellowship and made his name. Even at Queen’s, however, where his undergraduate days were passed, he did not fail to make some mark. He was conspicuous, among other things, for ugliness—an ugliness so extreme that it excited the sympathetic attention of his friends, who formed themselves into a Committee to Consider what could be Done for the Improvement of Pater’s Personal Appearance. A suggestion that he should buy a new hat was discarded on the ground that he could not be expected to wear his hat in bed. What was wanted, it was agreed, was an irremovable addition to his features; and the Committee, after taking all available evidence, reported in favour of a moustache. The moustache, when ultimately grown, was at least a palliative. It was no longer necessary for Pater, when examining himself in the mirror, to exclaim that he would give ten years of his life to be better looking. He acquired, according to Mr. Edmund Gosse, the aspect of a benevolent dragon.

His intellectual outlook, however, was already beginning, even in those days, to divide attention with his physical features. He combined a sceptical disdain for the doctrines of the Church of England with an æsthetic sympathy for its ritual; and he made no secret of either the sympathetic or the intellectual attitude. His friends were interested, intrigued, and ultimately excited. They watched his spiritual development, much as Lausanne watched the spiritual development of Sainte-Beuve, when he was lecturing there on the Jansenists, and Vinet was expected to convert him to Protestantism. Some of them even ended by quarrelling with him and renouncing him.

The trouble was that, having gone up to Oxford with a view of taking Orders, he still proposed to take them, in spite of his effaced beliefs. Others had done so, he said, so why should not he? And, suiting the action to the argument, he asked the Bishop of London to ordain him.

The Bishop, not being in his confidence, was aware of no reason why he should not do so; but Pater’s friend, McQueen—who is only famous because he was Pater’s friend—resolved to stop the crime. He sought advice on the matter from Canon Liddon, then Principal of St. Edmund Hall; and Liddon’s answer was: “Write to the Bishop of London. You might be able to prevent ordination, and if not you will have delivered your soul.” He did write, and he did prevent ordination; and no doubt it was well, for Pater’s sake no less than for the sake of the Church, that ordination was prevented. Having said that, we will leave Pater until we meet him again at Brasenose.

NEW COLLEGE

William of Wykeham—A self-educated man—His liberality and
his elaborate statutes—The College depressed by too much
Founder’s kin—“Golden Scholars, Silver Bachelors, and Leaden
Masters”—Notable new College men—Sydney Smith—Sir Henry
Wotton—Canon Spooner and “Spoonerisms”—Stories of Warden
Shuttleworth and others.

William of Wykeham, the founder of New College, was perhaps the greatest pluralist in the history of the Church. Ecclesiastical benefices were heaped upon him in unexampled profusion as the reward for services in no sense of an ecclesiastical character. He served his King chiefly as a Clerk of the Works—or perhaps one should say as a Chief Commissioner of the Works—at Windsor and elsewhere; and the King, instead of paying him an adequate salary, bestowed upon him prebends, canonries, deaneries, and archdeaconries. No fewer than nine prebends were given to him in a single year; he received three more prebends a year or two afterwards. While holding them, he also held at least one deanery and two archdeaconries, as well as several livings; and in the end he became Bishop of Winchester. The story that he established himself in the royal esteem by persuading his niece to become the King’s mistress may be the calumnious invention of a later age; but it is evident, at any rate, that he was more a man of the world than a Churchman, and only found that godliness was great gain because he combined it with other qualities.

[To face page 118.]

He was not himself a University man, but had left school early and entered a notary’s office. Perhaps he was the more deeply impressed with the value of “educational advantages” because he had enjoyed so few of them. There are men who admire learning for that reason, just as there are those who despise it on the ground that it unfits a youth for walking in the wily paths of commerce; and William of Wykeham admired it sufficiently to endow it in the grand style and on a great scale, like the Rockefellers and the Johns Hopkinses of a later age and a newer continent. He endowed Winchester School as well as New College—the former to feed the latter, and “Manners makyth man” to be the motto of both; and he gave his foundation both more elaborate buildings and more elaborate Statutes than any previous college had had, with the result that Wiclif sneered at him as a man “wise of building castles or worldly doing, though he cannot read well his psalter.”

While the Warden of Merton lived in a “lodging” and kept only four horses, the Warden of New College was to keep six horses and have a house to himself. That was one of the founder’s splendid provisions. He also provided that there should be no fewer than five Deans and three Bursars; and he made many minor stipulations which have had an enduring influence upon University development. His sense that his soul stood in sore need of the prayers of the faithful impelled him to prescribe that daily attendance at the chapel services—Masses, of course, in those days—should be compulsory. He believed in a simple and serious life, and therefore forbade his scholars to play games. Not only “wrestlings, dances, jigs,” &c., were forbidden by his regulations, but the prohibition extended to games of “ball” and games of chess; while the interests of morality were safeguarded by the direction that the College laundress should be “of such age and condition that no sinister suspicion can, or ought to, fall on her.” Finally, by enacting that there should be special teaching in the College in addition to the teaching provided by the University, he foreshadowed what is known as the “tutorial system.”

The Statutes, it must be admitted, were, on the whole, in advance of the times in which they were drafted. The founder had clear and, in the main, sound ideas on the subject of educational reform. He understood, for one thing, that classical Latin was better than monkish Latin; and he understood that, in order to shape students as he wished, it was necessary to catch them young. That was the significance of the linked endowment of the College and the School; and no doubt it seemed to William of Wykeham only an act of common justice that, in the selection of recipients of his bounty, a preference should be shown to “founders’ kin.”

But he did not foresee. Or perhaps it would be juster to say that he foresaw, and provided for, too much. The world moved, and New College could not move with it because it was tied up and entangled. The restrictions on the diversions of the students did not, of course, matter much. They could be, and were, ignored, when it was recognised that they were obsolete and unprofitable. The limitation of the choice of students to a narrow field, and the provision of an income for them for life whether they worked or were idle, had more pernicious consequences. It condemned New College, in spite of the magnificence of its buildings, to insignificance in the life of the University; and it now makes the task of the historian in search of interesting _alumni_ an extremely hard one.

Nowadays, let it be ungrudgingly admitted, New College is prosperous and successful. Its scholars, and also its Fellows, have distinguished themselves in many ways, and have won particular distinction in the highest walks of journalism. Mr. Buckle, the editor of the _Times_, was a scholar of New College, and so was Mr. E. T. Cook, who successively edited the _Pall Mall Gazette_, the _Westminster Gazette_, and the _Daily News_. Mr. W. L. Courtney, whose signature is familiar to every reader of the _Daily Telegraph_, was a Fellow; as was also Viscount Milner, a journalist before he became a pro-consul. In literature, too, the College has been represented by Lionel Johnson—one of the most subtle and delicate poets of our generation, though one whose course was brief like that of Young Marcellus.

But all those names are modern names, occurring subsequently to the cutting of the entanglement by the University Commissioners. To plunge into the past is to plunge into a very different state of things. We quickly get back to a time when it was justly said of New College that it had “golden scholars, silver bachelors, and leaden masters”—a time when the College was famous, not for its output of learning, but for its consumption of negus. There was once a dispute as to the comparative merits of the negus of New College and of All Souls; and a jury of Queen’s and Brasenose men who were invited to decide the question gave a unanimous verdict in favour of the New College recipe. Balliol, where Southey drank so much negus, was not in the competition.

The notable New College names in this dark age, and in the ages hardly less dark which preceded it, are names which mean little to the University and less to the community at large. There are the names of some respectable divines among them, and even the names of some more than respectable bishops—two, for instance, of the seven who stood up against James II; but there is hardly a single name which burns like a beacon; as does, say, the name of Shelley at University, or the name of Dr. Johnson at Pembroke.

* * * * *

There is Sydney Smith; but of his Oxford career hardly anything is known except that he had to get through it on an allowance of £100 a year, and consequently could not afford to play his part in the dissipations of the day. He took his degree a year before Southey came into residence at Balliol, “got into debt to buy books,” and formed such a poor opinion of his _alma mater_ that he never, throughout the remainder of his life, ceased to sneer at her. When, for example, the Honours Schools were instituted, he wrote:

“If Oxford is become at last sensible of the miserable state to which it was reduced, as everybody else was out of Oxford, and if it is making serious efforts to recover from the degradation into which it was plunged a few years past, the good wishes of every respectable man must go with it.”

And when he heard that a lady of his acquaintance was sending her son to Oxford, his comment was:

“I feel for her about her son at Oxford, knowing, as I do, that the only consequences of a University education are the growth of vice and the waste of money.”

On which the only reasonable comment is that, if Sydney Smith had been at another college, he might have written less vituperatively.

* * * * *

Another name which arouses some, though only a mild, interest is that of Sir Henry Wotton, the diplomatist, who ended by becoming Provost of Eton. He was not on the foundation, but was a gentleman commoner—though few gentlemen commoners were permitted to enter at New College—and it may be hoped that he behaved better there than he did afterwards, when he lived, for a while, in the house of Isaac Casaubon, at Geneva. He was the great scholar’s “paying guest”; and he not only went away without paying, but pledged his host’s credit for the horse on which he took his departure. Casaubon ultimately got the money, but not until he had written to nearly every classical scholar in Europe to expose Wotton’s outrageous behaviour.

For the rest the stories which centre around New College are mainly about celebrities whose celebrity is purely local. It would be possible, of course, if reverence did not forbid, to speak at some length on the alleged Spoonerisms of Canon Spooner; but most of those stories are probably untrue. It cannot be true, for instance, that Canon Spooner, at a dinner-party inadvertently stuck his fork into the white hand of the lady sitting next to him, murmuring, “Excuse me, I think that is my bread.” It is still less credible that Canon Spooner, when a lady of his family was seeing him off at the railway-station, gave the lady sixpence in mistake for the porter, and kissed the porter in mistake for the lady. And who believes that Canon Spooner, setting out to propose the health of “our dear old Queen,” found himself proposing the health of “our queer old Dean” instead? The trail of the mythmaker is over all these anecdotes; and indeed it is said that the fabrication of “Spoonerisms” is a favourite undergraduate diversion on Sunday afternoons.

An earlier Warden, Dr. Shuttleworth, is famous for a remarkable poem which he composed while a Winchester boy—an Address to Learning, which ends with the often-quoted lines:

“Make me, O Sphere-descended Queen,
A Bishop, or at least a Dean.”

His prayer was answered, and he became Bishop of Chichester, and, in that capacity, made Manning an Archdeacon. He was, however, an opponent of the Ritualists, and so formidable a one that his death was saluted by Pusey as “a visible token of God’s presence in the Church of England”; whence it appears that Pusey worshipped a God whom he believed to be capable of killing off Broad Churchmen in order that High Churchmen might be spared the embarrassment of meeting them in controversy.

A few stories of Shuttleworth, and a few other stories of other New College notables of the same generation, may be found in Mr. Tuckwell’s entertaining “Reminiscences of Oxford.” There is the story, for instance, of Lancelot Lee, the incumbent of the College living of Wootton, near Woodstock.

“Coming out of church one day, he found two disreputable
vagabonds in the churchyard.

“‘What are you doing here?’

“‘Oh, sir, we are seeking the Lord.’

“‘Seeking the Lord, are you? Do you see those stocks? That is
where the Lord will find you if you stay here another minute.’”

Then there is the story of Christopher Erle, who held a living in Buckinghamshire, in the immediate vicinity of Lord Rothschild’s estate. It seemed to Erle, as it has since seemed to Mr. Lloyd George, that it was possible to have “too much of Lord Rothschild,” and he suppressed him:

“It was Erle’s whim to dress carelessly; and the plutocrat,
walking one day with a large party and meeting his Rector in
the parish, had the bad taste to handle his sleeve and say,
‘Rather a shabby coat, Parson, isn’t it?’ Erle held it up to
him—‘Will you buysh? Will you buysh?’ There ensued an _exitus
Israel_, and Erle walked on, chuckling and victorious.”

But perhaps the most characteristic of the stories is that of the highway robbery:

“Some men were going to the Abingdon ball; and in the
common-room the conversation turned on a highway robbery
recently perpetrated near Wheatley. The ball-goers talked
valiantly of their own courage, contemptuously of brigand
dangers; their fly was announced, and off they drove. Coming
home, they were stopped in a dark part of Bagley Wood by
two masked men, one of whom held the horses’ heads, while
his mate pointed a pistol into the fly with the conventional
highwayman’s demand. Meekly our gallant travellers surrendered
money, watches, jewellery. One pleaded for a ring which had
belonged to his old mother; the deceased lady was consigned
to Tartarus, the ring was taken, and the marauders rode away.
Great commiseration was shown to the victims when they told
their tale, great activity displayed by the police; until on
going into Hall the next afternoon, they saw lying in a heap
on the centre of the high table the abstracted valuables,
including the maternal ring, while mounting guard over them
was a broken candle-stick which had done duty as a pistol. The
two practical jokers had ridden to the wood, tied their horses
to the trees, waited for the travellers, and played the wild
Prince Poins.”

And so forth; for all the best New College stories are stories of that sort—stories of which the heroes are jesters or eccentrics rather than men of light and leading. The future, no doubt, will be much richer in intellectual glory; but the College has had but a short time in which to assert itself since the University Commissioners released it from William of Wykeham’s Statutes.

LINCOLN COLLEGE

A small College with many outstanding names—Mr. D. S.
MacColl and his Newdigate—“Shifter” of the “Sporting
Times”—A reminiscence of “Shifter”—John Wesley and the
Methodists—Wesley’s meeting with Beau Nash of Bath—Mark
Pattison—His early connection with the Tractarians—His
abandonment of superstition—His great learning—His treatment of
undergraduates.

For a small College—and it has always been one of the smallest—Lincoln is associated with a goodly list of outstanding names, notable in very diverse departments of endeavour. Mr. D. S. MacColl, of the National Gallery, is, perhaps, the most distinguished of its recent representatives. He won the Newdigate; and is said to have won it, as Dean Burgon did, by the supreme merit of a single line. Burgon’s striking line was, as all the world remembers:

“A rose-red city—half as old as time.”

To do full justice to Mr. MacColl’s line one must also quote the few lines which precede it:

“But better still, in slumber-slanting ease,
To be beside the falling of the seas,
To listen and to listen till the tune
Of all the life of all the afternoon
Deepens to one note of a long distress—
_The monotone of everlastingness_.”

To quote Mr. MacColl, however, is to begin at the end. There are earlier names which also scintillate with varying degrees of brilliance, and make their appeal to hero-worshippers of various temperaments. The most remarkable are those of John Wesley, “Ideal” Ward, more commonly associated with Balliol, where he held a fellowship until his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Mark Pattison, Lord Morley, Cotter Morrison, and “Shifter.”

* * * * *

It was a question, earnestly considered, whether “Shifter” should be mentioned in these pages. The question was finally put to a representative assemblage of literary men—only a minority of them from Oxford; and the answer was unanimously in the affirmative. The name of “Shifter,” it was agreed, was by no means to be treated as if it had been “writ in water.” If it had ceased to be a household word, at any rate it was remembered. His case was interesting, if only because he had arrived at fame by a road not commonly travelled by modern Oxford men; and there were those, it was felt, who would learn, with a sort of scandalised astonishment, that “Shifter” was once Goldberg of Lincoln.

The present writer once met “Shifter,” and discovered that the vogue of his pseudonym filled him with genuine pride. The meeting-place was a printing office in the purlieus of Fleet Street. A diminutive man of rather drowsy manner was sitting at the end of a long, bare table, engaged in slow and careful literary composition. An impatient boy was carrying off the sheets of his copy as he finished them. He looked up with affability, yet with an air of self-importance, at the new arrival, and introduced himself. “You know who I am, don’t you?” he said. “I’m ‘Shifter.’ I’m writing the Office Boy’s Diary”; and there followed an invitation to partake of refreshment with him, after his task was concluded. The invitation was accepted, and there ensued some talk of Oxford—a place which, in those rather sordid surroundings, seemed very far away.

Oxford, in fact, used to figure, from time to time, in “Shifter’s” contributions to the sporting press. He liked to describe himself as the _enfant terrible_ returning to the respectable bosom of _alma mater_ and creating a sensation there. He spoke, in particular, of a “respectable brother,” in residence at another College, whom he used to visit—and to shock. The stock story was that he stayed out all night, and came back to College with the milk, and threatened to report the milkman to the College authorities for neglecting to mix rum with it.

Probably the story was untrue—such stories generally are. It reads like the humorous invention of a “fanfaron of vice.” Of “Shifter’s” actual career at Lincoln there are few authentic records except that he wore plum-coloured clothes, and slopped about the quad in slippers. He might easily, it is said, have been a good scholar if he had been industrious; he was a very tolerable scholar in spite of his lack of industry, as, indeed, were a good many members of the original team driven by the famous “Master” of the pink _Sporting Times_. But the “Master” showed a good many clever young men how the “fanfaron of vice” could make a living out of the fanfaronade. Goldberg of Lincoln was one of the cleverest of the young men who learnt the “Master’s” cynical lesson. He blossomed into “Shifter,” and his name was more often in the mouths of men than those of many worthier persons.

It is tempting to moralise; but the temptation shall be resisted—or very nearly so. “Shifter” was not, after all, an absolutely unique Oxford product. One can find Oxford parallels and Oxford precedents for his case. There are several precedents in Elizabethan Oxford, among the wits who came to town, and wrote for the stage, and died young as the result of too much tavern life—George Peele of Christ Church, for example. “Shifter” also died young, not, one fears, because the gods loved him, being of the same year as Oscar Wilde, and Mr. A. D. Godley, and Mr. L. R. Farnell, and Dr. Horton, the Hampstead preacher. His appeal, it must be granted, was to the lower elements in our fallen nature; but at least he appealed to them wittily, and not like the vulgarians of the _Winning Post_. _Sit terra levis!_ One may wish that for him, though one would not wish it for them; and then one may pass on, striking a pleasant note of contrast, to the very different case of John Wesley.

* * * * *

Let us be fair to Wesley. Above all, let us avoid the easy error of supposing that we shall be helped to draw the picture of his manner and deportment by visiting the nearest Wesleyan chapel and listening to any Wesleyan minister who may happen to conduct the service there.

The modern Wesleyan organisation is democratic in a sense in which the Church of England is not. Its ministers are mostly men of the people, fluent but shallow, good biblical scholars but not otherwise highly educated, and lacking in social polish. Their accents are often broad; their gesticulations are often violent; they are skilled in exhorting the lower orders in language which the lower orders understand.

Perhaps that is as it should be; perhaps their limitations are included among the sources of their strength. Their congregations often think so, and say so. One may sometimes hear Wesleyan Church members accounting for their preference for Wesleyan places of worship on the express ground that Wesleyan ministers are not, as they themselves choose to put it, “gentlemen.” The priest of the Church of England, they aver, patronises the artisan and small shopkeeper and keeps them at a distance. The Wesleyan minister treats them as his brothers and sisters, and takes tea with them, in a friendly way, in their back parlours. As the arrangement pleases him, and pleases them, no one else is called upon to criticise it. The matter is only mentioned here for the purpose of removing a possible misapprehension and pointing out that Wesley of Lincoln was not that sort of Wesleyan.

Wesley of Lincoln, who had been at Charterhouse and Christ Church before his election to a Lincoln Fellowship, was a gentleman and a scholar, in the fullest sense of the words. He had as much of the Oxford manner as had been invented in his time, and he was rather a reserved than an effervescent man. One must picture him, to picture him rightly, as a kind of High Church don, of studious habits and ascetic inclinations, a little more anxious than the other dons to enroll undergraduates as his disciples. One finds his closest counterpart in modern times, not in any of the tub-thumpers of any of the denominational tabernacles, but in some of the Canons of Christ Church—say Canon Pusey, or Canon King, or Canon Liddon. He was the kind of man, in short, who, in slightly different circumstances, might have inaugurated, not an evangelical revival, but a Tractarian Movement.

In order to understand him, one has to understand, not only the England, but also the Oxford of the eighteenth century. It is not necessary to enter into the alleged “aridity” of that century; but it is important to remember that it was a century in which spiritual problems were very generally waved aside. And the tendencies of the country as a whole were reflected in an exaggerated shape at Oxford.

Oxford was comfortable, and was taking no thought for the morrow. The dons, being well provided for, liked to sit in coffee-houses and read the papers, indolently jeering at the House of Hanover. It did not occur to them to concern themselves with the salvation of their souls or of the souls of their pupils. It hardly even occurred to them to concern themselves with the education of their pupils. Gibbon’s tutor, remembering that he had a salary to receive but forgetting that he had a duty to perform, was, in spite of the exceptions which can be adduced, a typical don of the date. Indifferentism, in short, was the note; and enthusiasm, at Oxford, was regarded as the abomination of desolation standing where it ought not.