Chapter IV: Part 4

Such was the scene on which Wesley entered. He came from a country parsonage where, in spite of the general trend of theological thought, the lamp of piety had been kept burning. It was more natural to him to work than to be idle, and he was keenly conscious that he had a soul to be saved. He did not quite know how to save it; but he had picked up hints from the writings of Thomas à Kempis, Jeremy Taylor, and John Law. On the whole he was inclined to think that the way of salvation lay in doing as the Churchmen did, only more so, in redeeming the time by industry, and in sedulously observing the ritual prescriptions of the Book of Common Prayer.

He made the acquaintance of a small group of like-minded men. He, and his brother Charles, and George Whitefield (of Pembroke), and James Hervey (of his own College), who was to win fame by meditating among the tombs, and one or two others, formed a Club. The rules of the Club, which was called, in derision, the Holy Club, were merely to the effect that the members must order their lives regularly, discharge all their duties punctually, and receive the Sacrament at appointed intervals. Because they were thus men of method, they were nicknamed Methodists. The name had no more recondite origin than that. The actual thing—the spiritual point of view distinctive of Methodism—was of later date. The young Fellow of Lincoln and “those about” him were only feeling their way to it. Far from being Dissenters, they were better Churchmen than their neighbours; their purpose was not to rouse the country but to rouse the Church.

Wesley, moreover, was, at this date, an Oxonian of the type that clings to Oxford. He could not bear the thought of “going down,” even for the purpose of taking a cure of souls. It was put to him that he ought, for family reasons, to take over his father’s country living; but he raised objections—just the sort of objections which it is natural for an Oxford man to raise. He knew, he said, of “no other place under heaven, save Oxford, where I can always have at hand half a dozen persons of my own judgment and engaged in the same studies.” The sociability, that is to say, of Oxford appealed to him. He enjoyed his position as the sovereign ruler of a small coterie, even though that coterie was unpopular with the rest of the University.

The University, in truth, had no case against the Methodists. If they were zealots, they were not, as yet, schismatics. There was nothing to be said against them except that they rose early, kept regular hours, received the Sacrament as often as possible, visited the prisoners and the sick, and lived economically in order that they might be able to afford to be charitable—proceedings which it must have been exceedingly difficult for other Churchmen to indict. Yet the University did, as a matter of fact, dislike them; and its displeasure was justified by Dr. Johnson, and was manifested in a variety of ways. “They were not fit,” said Johnson, in his robust and ponderous way, “to be in the University of Oxford. A cow is a very good animal in the field, but we turn her out of a garden.” And there were others who said that the conduct of the Methodists was only excusable if it could be assumed that they were mad; others, again, who pelted them with mud when they were on their way to church. It is worth while to remember that it was in the days when Oxford was entirely in the hands of the orthodox that communicants were pelted with mud near the porch of Saint Mary’s Church as a protest against the strictness of their religious observances.

And there we may leave them, for the story of Methodism is much too long a story to be repeated. How Wesley presently ceased to make broad his phylacteries, and suddenly awoke to a sense of the supreme importance of the “inward witness” to the Christian propositions, and founded the vast organisation which numbered 12,000,000 adherents before his death—all this is written in innumerable biographies and need not be re-written here. Here it is enough to indicate the personality of the man: to point out that he was no ranter, but a don on whom Oxford had set its mark—a scholar, quiet, reserved, and dignified, though with an immense fund of strength and energy in reserve. And perhaps one may conclude with a story of his passage of arms with another Oxford man of a very different type—a passage of arms in which his quick wit and dignified demeanour easily won him the victory.

The place was Bath, and the time was near the beginning of Wesley’s missionary journeys. A certain Nash of Jesus was there—the Nash of Jesus whom the world knows as Beau Nash, the King of Bath. The two men met on a narrow pavement, and one of them had to make way for the other.

“I never make way for a fool,” said Nash of Jesus, insolently holding his ground.

“Don’t you? I always do,” replied Wesley of Lincoln, quietly stepping on one side; and the world is agreed that it was Wesley of Lincoln who got the best of that encounter.

And now leaving Wesley, we will evoke the memory of another notable Lincoln man, Mark Pattison, so long the Rector of the College.

* * * * *

Mark Pattison won his Lincoln fellowship from Oriel; and he resembled Wesley in beginning life as a High Churchman. He was Newman’s curate, and, being much attached to Newman, very nearly accompanied, or followed, him into the Church of Rome. He only failed to do so, according to the commonly accepted story, because he missed the train, or the omnibus, or whatever conveyance it was by which he had arranged to travel to the place appointed for his “reception.” While waiting for the next train or omnibus, it is said, he changed his mind and decided to remain, provisionally at all events, a member of the Church of England. Nominally he remained a member of the Church of England until the end; but it was an open secret, confirmed by statements in his “Memoirs,” that he believed in nothing in particular and did not believe very profoundly even in that. He is one of the many men who have been credited with the pregnant saying: “Nothing is new, and nothing is true, but it doesn’t matter much.”

His reasons for not formally quitting the Church in which he had ceased to believe need not detain us. He is said to have said that, as he had taken Orders in good faith, he felt entitled to retain them through all beliefs and none instead of facing an unpleasant alternative; but it shall be left to casuists to estimate the value of that casuistry. The really interesting thing to note is that, in later life, he looked upon the years in which he had been religious in almost exactly the same light as that in which the Methodists of whom we have been speaking looked upon the years prior to their assurance of salvation. He came to think that as a Christian—and more particularly as a Puseyite—he had lived in outer darkness; and he despised, and almost hated, himself for having done so.

“Fanaticism,” he says, “was laying its deadly grip around me.” He speaks of his “fury of zeal” and his “abject prostration of mind” and his “degrading superstition,” and of the “time-wasting and mind-drowning occupation” in which he was involved by his too close attention to his devotional exercises. He adds that he once “got so low by fostering a morbid state of conscience as to go to confession to Dr. Pusey”; and he continues:

“Years afterwards it came to my knowledge that Pusey had told a fact about myself, which he got from me on that occasion, to a friend of his, who employed it to annoy me.”

Presently, however, he began to discover that the Puseyites were “not intellectually equal companions,” and that Newman himself was a man of limited philosophical acquirements—a man to whom “all the grand development of human reason from Aristotle down to Hegel was a sealed book.” So, though there was a struggle—due to “that profound pietistic impression which lay like lead upon my understanding”—reason got its way, and Pattison’s intelligence evolved. There was a day when he called on James Anthony Froude, desiring “to sympathise with his scepticism for the purpose of helping him through it”; but presently he travelled on the same road that Froude had taken, and travelled farther on it. The Tractarian became an Essayist and Reviewer. The Essayist and Reviewer came to regard all religions as vain guesses at the answer of an unanswerable riddle.

He enjoyed, in his later years, one of those great University reputations which, recognised by instinct, and admitted by universal assent, do not require to be based on visible or tangible achievement. It was commonly assumed that he knew everything, not only on his own subject, but on all subjects; also that he had thought out all problems and was only restrained from throwing light on them because he despised his fellow-creatures and resented their impertinent curiosity. He was too much absorbed, in fact, in his thoughts to pay much attention to his duties; and he ended his pilgrimage as a somewhat weird figure—somewhat of an enigma to the old and a formidable terror to the young.

Undergraduates, in particular, were too often the objects of a scorn which he was at no pains to hide. The undergraduates of his own College lived in an agony of apprehension lest he should ask them to go for walks with him; and it cannot be said that their fears were altogether without warrant. He did not speak when walking, but waited to be spoken to; and the consequences of speaking to him were incalculable—not unlike the consequences of trying to make friends with some strange and dangerous wild beast.

There is a stock story of an undergraduate who ventured to break the embarrassing silence by contrasting the irony of Sophocles with the irony of Euripides; but he only discovered that the irony of the Rector of Lincoln was greater than either. “Quote, sir, quote,” was the Rector’s only rejoinder; and as the timorous youth was not prepared with a quotation, nothing further was said, on either side, on any subject, for the remainder of the afternoon. But the undergraduate who confined himself to simple topics which he did understand—the state of the weather, for example—was handled still more roughly. “If that is all you have to say, you are not a very intelligent young man,” was the retort with which the Rector closured him.

ALL SOULS

Peculiarities of the Constitution—A College without
undergraduates—Court favourites jobbed into
fellowships—Fellowships bought and sold—All Souls Fellows
a link between Oxford and the outside world—Sir William
Blackstone—Edward Young—The song of the All Souls mallard and
the scandal connected therewith.

The founder of All Souls was Archbishop Chichele, who had been educated on the foundations of William of Wykeham at Winchester and New College. The souls which the name commemorates are those of the soldiers who fell in Henry V.’s French wars—wars for which the Archbishop’s pugnacious patriotism was very largely responsible. The distinctive feature of the College is that it neither supports scholars nor harbours commoners, its only undergraduate members being a sprinkling of Bible clerks. The purpose of the founder, that is to say, was to endow study—not to endow teaching; and the fact that the College was small prevented undergraduates from creeping into it. There was no provision for their instruction, and there was no room for them. A few commoners did, at one time, obtain admission, but they were soon eliminated.

[To face p. 145.]

Various consequences have followed from this state of things—some of them good, and others not so good. The All Souls fellowships did not, in practice, in the early days at all events, become the rewards of studious virtue. They were regarded, on the contrary, as sinecures to be scrambled for, to be jobbed into, to be bought and sold. No definite obligations, unless it were of residence, attached to them; they were merely positions in which a man might draw a living wage for doing nothing. Royal favourites were pushed into fellowships, in the Stuart times, as a cheap proof of royal favour, and fellowships could be purchased in the open market, just like commissions in the Army—an abuse which was brought about in this way:

When a resignation created a vacancy, the College co-opted a successor to it; but the retiring Fellow shared with the other Fellows the right to nominate a candidate. On the principle of “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours,” the tacit understanding was established that the retiring Fellow’s candidate should always be elected. This was an opportunity for any Fellow to offer to retire in favour of a particular candidate in consideration of a money payment; and many Fellows availed themselves of the opportunity. Hence the scandal of “corrupt resignations,” not unknown, indeed, at other colleges, but specially gross and glaring at All Souls, where it flourished long, and was not suppressed without great difficulty.

Jobbery and corrupt resignations, in fact, combined to fill All Souls with Fellows of a different stamp from the Fellows of the other colleges; and the difference was, in some respects, for the better, and in other respects for the worse. The Fellows, having no academic duties, were idle; and Satan provided mischief for their idle hands. The Punishment Book, and other official records, show them comporting themselves more like junior than senior members of the University. We hear of several of them being dropped upon for “noctivagation.” We find the Visitor calling upon the Warden to “punish such of your Society as do spend their time in taverns and ale-houses to the scandal of the House.” We discover a representation that the College ale is too strong for students, and that only small beer ought to be brewed there. We read that one of the Fellows was reprimanded for “beating the Under-Butler.” Proof is abundant, in short, that the College was by no means such a quiet resort of industrious men as the founder had intended it to be.

Such were the drawbacks of the system; but it also, incidentally, produced advantages. While many of the Fellows were worthless and indolent persons, the loose mode of election and the total absence of academic duties resulted in the introduction of a type of Fellow who served as a link, just as we have noted that some of the Merton Fellows did, between the University and the external world—the type of Fellow whom the College porter appears to have had in mind when he replied to the visitor who inquired whether the Fellows read the books in the College library: “Lord bless you, sir! They don’t need to read books. They’re gentlemen!”

“Well-born, well-dressed, and moderately educated,” is the hackneyed description of a Fellow of All Souls. The candidates for fellowships, it used to be said, instead of being put through an examination were invited to dinner and given cherry-tart to eat; their fate depending upon the manner in which they disposed of the cherry-stones. The story is told of a Fellow who was elected as a reward for his delicacy in swallowing the cherry-stones. It is not to be supposed that the story is literally true; but no doubt a certain symbolical truth is enshrined in it. The unmannerly bookworm has never been wanted at All Souls. The scholar who is also a gentleman has always been preferred to him; and from the time of Sir Christopher Wren to the time of Lord Curzon of Kedleston, the College has generally been able to boast of some Fellow of wide fame, not of a rigidly academic character.

* * * * *

Those great physicians Linacre and Sydenham were Fellows of All Souls; and Linacre, in an age in which men could afford to specialise in more than one subject, excelled in Greek as well as medicine. Sir Christopher Wren has just been mentioned. The College owes to him its famous sun-dial, with the motto: _Pereunt et imputantur_. It cost him £32 11s. 6d.; and its exactitude was such that Oxford watchmakers used to set their clocks by it. General Codrington, to whom the College owes the Codrington Library, went from All Souls to be Governor of Barbadoes, at the time when Admiral Benbow was beating the French there; and other Fellows whose names are known to all the world were Blackstone, of the Commentaries, Edward Young, the author of “Night Thoughts,” and Bishop Heber.

Blackstone was Bursar of All Souls. The Vinerian professorship was expressly founded for him. His “Commentaries on the Laws of England” were first delivered as a course of professorial lectures. He took his position so seriously that he declined to read his lectures to the Prince of Wales on the ground that he could not quit his duties at Oxford. Campbell says of him that he was, after Bacon, “the first practising lawyer at the English bar who, in writing, paid the slightest attention to the selection or collocation of words.” He served his College by compelling the executors of the Duke of Wharton to pay over to it a donation promised by him at the instance of Edward Young.

Wharton was a rake; and Young, in his youth, was fond of consorting with rakes. In later life, however, he repented and cancelled the dedications of poems which he had addressed to his more disreputable associates. The College books describe him as _poeta celeberrimus_; and he certainly had for a time a vogue as great as that of Tennyson, or even Martin Farquhar Tupper, though nowadays he is only remembered for the single sentiment: “Procrastination is the thief of time.” A passage in Johnson shows that, though he combined worldliness with his other-worldliness, he could be effective as a Christian controversialist.

“The other boys,” said the atheist, “I can always answer,
because I always know whence they have their arguments, which I
have read a hundred times; but that fellow Young is continually
pestering me with something of his own.”

Heber remains; but what there is to be said about Heber may be better said when we come to Brasenose. Here he is mentioned principally because, in one of his letters home, he describes how, looking out from Brasenose, he saw the All Souls Fellows searching for the All Souls mallard, and so introduces us to the interesting legend of that bird.

The story is that, when the foundations of the College was being dug, a mallard flew out of a drain. Thereupon, or it may be at a later date, a College poet wrote a song about the mallard, of which the first and last verses and the chorus may be given here:

“The griffin, bustard, turkey, capon,
Let other hungry mortals gape on,
And on their bones with stomach fall hard,
But let All Souls men have their mallard.

CHORUS.

Oh, by the blood of King Edward,
Oh, by the blood of King Edward,
It was a swapping, swapping mallard.

Then let us drink and dance a galliard
In the remembrance of the mallard,
And as the mallard doth in poole,
Let’s dabble, dive, and duck in bowl.

CHORUS.

Oh, by the blood of King Edward,
Oh, by the blood of King Edward,
It was a swapping, swapping mallard.”

The song is still sung at College gaudies. In the old days the Fellows, after singing it, used to make a solemn pilgrimage round the College to look for the mallard; but though the pilgrimage began solemnly, it was apt to end uproariously. Bonfires were lighted; furniture was smashed; the oaks of the unpopular were forced—all on pretence of discovering the undiscoverable bird. The Fellows, in short, made their rounds “not on the viewless wings of poesy, but charioted by Bacchus and his pards”; and their proceedings attracted the attention of their Visitor, Archbishop Abbot, who wrote to them:

“The feast of Christmas drawing now to an end both put me in
mind of the great outrage which, as I am informed, was the last
year committed in your College, where, although matters had
formerly been conducted with some distemper, yet men did never
before break forth into such intolerable liberty as to tear
down doors and gates, and disquiet their neighbours, as if it
had been a camp or a town in war. Civil men should never so far
forget themselves under pretence of a foolish mallard as to do
things barbarously unbecoming.”

MAGDALEN COLLEGE

The College which withstood James II.—President Routh—His great
age and eccentricities—Slackness of the College—The careers of
Addison—Of Gibbon—Of Charles Reade—Oscar Wilde and the Æsthetic
Movement at Magdalen—Persecution of Wilde and suppression of
the movement.

“Little is known,” say the works of reference, of William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, the founder of Magdalen; and the little that does happen to be known is of no absorbing interest.

The event in its history of which the College is officially proudest is its battle with James II. The King, for purposes of his own, proposed to nominate a President. The College demonstrated that the royal nominee was an unsuitable person to fill the office, and, “having first received the blessed Eucharist,” proceeded to elect a man of their own choice, and successfully upheld their election in the face of the royal displeasure. “Is that Magdalen Tower?” asked the Prince Regent when he visited Oxford with the allied sovereigns in 1814. “Yes, your Royal Highness,” replied his travelling companion, “that’s the tower against which James II. broke his head.”

[To face p. 153.]

A second object of the pride of Magdalen is the long presidency of Dr. Routh, whose long life was a link between historical and modern times.

There must be many men still living in Oxford who remember him, for he only died (at the age of ninety-nine) in 1854. He, on his part, remembered, and talked of, Dr. Johnson’s visits to Oxford, had attained his majority before the American Declaration of Independence, was old enough to be at a dame’s school when Wolfe was storming the Heights of Abraham, and had an aunt who had known a lady who had seen Charles I.

That he was either a great man or a great college ruler it would be an exaggeration to affirm. He was famous rather for wearing a wig, defying University Commissions, and favouring traditional abuses. His wig was sent, after his death, to the Knaresborough well to be petrified, and he himself was reverenced chiefly as an interesting relic of that remote past which his conversation could recall. A crowd used to assemble daily to see him shuffle from his lodgings to the chapel. He recollected Gownsman’s Gallows, on which he had seen undergraduate members of the University hanged for highway robbery. His politics, it is said, were those of Strafford, and his religion was that of Laud. He spoke currently of the Jacobite faction as a still living force; and his favourite joke was to inquire after people who had long been dead, and express astonishment when informed of their decease.

Among a mass of stories told about him the best are perhaps those related by the biographers of Charles Reade, who had been elected to a demyship under his presidency. In one of those anecdotes we see an undergraduate hauled before him by the tutors. The young man having delayed in town to amuse himself, and not having arrived in Oxford until three days after the commencement of the term, the tutors represented to the President that he ought to be rusticated.

“‘Three days late, is he?’ whimpered the old fellow in his
childish treble. ‘Well, sirs, there has been an heavy fall of
snow, and as the gentleman resides in Norfolk, no doubt the
coaches have been detained along the road.’

“‘But,’ urged the tutors, ‘he could have reached Oxford in a
few hours by railway.’

“‘Railway?’ quoth Dr. Routh incredulously. ‘Ah, well, I don’t
know anything about that’; and so, with the typical flea in its
ear, minor authority was dismissed.”

Another story relates to the case of an undergraduate who, after being in residence for three years and three-quarters, had not yet succeeded in passing “Smalls.” The junior tutor called to propose that the young man in question should be invited to remove his name from the College books.

“The venerable President at once assumed an expression of
extreme astonishment. ‘I don’t know anything about your
examinations,’ he replied to the complaining don. ‘Have you
anything to say as regards the gentleman’s moral character or
conduct?’ The tutor responded in the negative. ‘Then,’ cried
the President in an outburst of righteous indignation, ‘how
dare you come here, sir, to attack a respectable member of the
College? His father, sir, is a friend of my friend, the Bishop
of Bath and Wells; and I will not listen, sir, to any such
frivolous allegations.’”

And finally there is the story of the President’s visit to London. He went there seldom, and always by coach, and the day came when competition compelled the reduction of the fares:

“Dr. Routh alighted, as was his wont, in Oxford Street, and
was assisted respectfully by the coachman, to whom he handed
£1 7s. 6d.—twenty-five shillings the fare, and half a crown,
the gratuity to John, who, as the money was being paid to him,
said, ‘The fare, Mr. President, is reduced to a guinea.’ Dr.
Routh paused and reflected. ‘Sir,’ he replied, ‘I always have
paid twenty-five shillings, and I always shall.’”

Such is our picture—a picture of an imperious old gentleman, constitutionally opposed to progress, looking upon his College as a Duke looks upon his estate, regarding a reformer as a Duke regards a Radical Chancellor of the Exchequer, convinced that the general well-being depended upon his being left at liberty to manage, or mismanage, his own affairs.

And the point of view of the President was also, for many generations, the point of view of the Fellows under him. They had a very fine piece of property to cut up, and they carved it to their common satisfaction. The endowment amounted to about £24,000 a year in all. The President took about £4,000 a year, and the Fellows from £500 to £600 a year each; while the Demies, who were nominated by the Fellows in their turn, had a statutory right to succeed to the Fellowships as vacancies occurred—the elections, save in rare instances, being governed by the sacred principles of nepotism. “Your nominee, sir,” the President might occasionally remark with sarcasm, “may be a very excellent young man, but he is no scholar”; but the excellence was almost invariably allowed to compensate for the lack of scholarship.

It could only, in such circumstances, be by accident that the names of good men were entered on the College books; but such happy accidents did, of course, occur from time to time. Addison was the first accident, Gibbon the second, and Charles Reade the third.

* * * * *

Addison, in fact, did get his demyship as the reward of merit. He was originally at Queen’s, but was invited to migrate to Magdalen because his Latin verses were admired. “Addison’s Walk” still keeps his memory alive there. He is even said to have planted some of the trees in the walk, though he was not the sort of man who was likely to spend much of his time in planting trees; but little is recorded of the incidents of his career, except that he “was always very nervous,” and that he “kept late hours.” One pictures him as sleek, correct, precocious, grave, yet with a sound appreciation of good claret.

Of Gibbon there is more to be said; for the historian’s description of the manners and tone of Magdalen society is one of the most pleasant passages in his famous Autobiography. It is well known, but it must nevertheless be quoted:

“The fellows, or monks, of my time” (says Gibbon) “were decent
men who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder: their days
were filled by a series of uniform employments; the chapel and
the hall, the coffee-house, and the common-room, till they
retired, weary and well-satisfied, to a long slumber.... Their
conversation stagnated in a round of college business, Tory
politics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal: their dull
and deep potations excused the brisk intemperance of youth.”

There were few lectures, he continues, and the tutors did not insist upon attendance at such lectures as there were. He gravely tells us with what impunity he “cut” them:

“As they appeared equally devoid of profit and pleasure, I
was once tempted to try the experiment of a formal apology.
The apology was accepted with a smile. I repeated the offence
with less ceremony; the excuse was admitted with the same
indulgence; the slightest motive of laziness or indisposition,
the most trifling avocation at home or abroad, was allowed as
a worthy impediment; nor did my tutor appear conscious of my
absence or neglect.”

Nor does it even appear to have been necessary for Gibbon to apply for an _exeat_, or to plead the necessity of consulting his dentist or attending the funeral of his grandmother, when he wished temporarily to absent himself from Oxford. The tutor who, when granting his pupil a grudging permission to attend such a funeral, added that he “could wish that it had been a nearer relative” belongs to a later generation. Gibbon’s tutor seems never to have known whether his pupil was in residence or not.

“The want of experience, of advice, and of occupation” (he
says) “soon betrayed me into some improprieties of conduct,
ill-chosen company and inconsiderate expense. My growing debts
might be secret; but my frequent absence was visible and
scandalous; and a tour to Bath, a visit into Buckinghamshire,
and four excursions to London in the same winter, were costly
and dangerous frolics.... In all these excursions I eloped from
Oxford; I returned to College; in a few days I eloped again,
as if I had been an independent stranger in a hired lodging,
without once hearing the voice of admonition, without once
feeling the hand of control.”

This in the case of a boy of fourteen (for Gibbon was no more when he matriculated) and in a College in which religion, discipline, and learning were jointly and severally endowed with £24,000 a year! There could be no clearer proof of the darkness of the dark ages at Oxford; and, in spite of the testimony of Adam Smith, already quoted, as to the state of things at Balliol, it seems that they were really darker at Magdalen than elsewhere.

They were still dark, though not so dark as they had been, when Charles Reade came into residence.

* * * * *

Charles Reade, in a sense, got his demyship by merit; but it was only by accident that his merit was allowed to count. The nominee of a nepotist had broken down so utterly in the qualifying examination that President Routh for once lost his temper and declared that he would not consent to the election of an absolute ignoramus. The examiners then proceeded to look at the papers of the other candidates; and Charles Reade’s English Essay impressed them. “Look here!” one of them was heard to shout into the deaf President’s ear. “Here is a boy who gives us his own ideas instead of other people’s!” The President read the essay, and agreed that it was so; and Charles Reade was duly elected to a demyship, which led, in due course, to a fellowship, tenable for life.

Even so, however, he still needed accident to befriend him, and did not trust to accident in vain. His election to the fellowship hung upon his ability to pass an examination in the Rudiments of Faith and Religion—an examination which has since come to be known, first as “Ruders” and latterly as “Divers.” Candidates for that examination were required to know all the Thirty-nine Articles by heart. Charles Reade had only learnt three of them; but he happened to be asked to recite one of the three, and came off with flying colours, though the odds, as can be shown by the subtle processes of arithmetic, were thirteen to one against him.

A little later he won the Vinerian Law Scholarship; and that success also was a triumph, if not of accident, at least of favour. The election to that scholarship, in those days, did not depend solely on the examiners, but was decided, in the last resort, by the votes of all the Masters of Arts whose names were on the books. Charles Reade and his mother instituted a careful canvass of the country clergy and the country squires, and even supplied conveyances to drive the voters to the polling station. He was returned at the head of the poll, and defended his corrupt practices by an ingenious argument.

“The way,” he said, “in which my canvass was organised and carried out was rather unusual, but it argues a talent of the practical kind superior to that of my competitors. The University in its wisdom has chosen right.”

Thereafter he lived a good deal, from time to time, in his Magdalen rooms, and did a good deal of his work there. “The rooms he occupied in No. 2, New Buildings,” say his biographers, “were scantily furnished. MSS. and books littering in heaps on the floor, the walls being decorated with looking-glasses instead of pictures.” He thought so highly of the College cook that, when in London, he often had his dinner cooked at Magdalen and sent up to town in a set of silver dishes. The cook, in return, thought so highly of him that he spoke of “It is Never Too Late to Mend” as “the fifth Gospel.” Mr. Tuckwell relates that he “would beguile acquaintances into his ill-furnished rooms, and read to them _ad nauseam_ from his latest MS.”

Though he was never a College tutor, he held two College offices—those of Dean of Arts and Vice-President. It is on record that he performed the functions of Dean in a bright green coat with brass buttons—a costume considered objectionable by Professor Goldwin Smith, who was then a Magdalen undergraduate. It was also while Charles Reade was Dean that John Conington, the future Professor of Latin, known to his contemporaries as “the sick vulture,” was put under the College pump as a punishment for starting a College debating society, and migrated in consequence to University.

Whether this last incident is really typical of the attitude of Magdalen Philistinism towards culture may be arguable; but it forms, at any rate, a fitting prelude to the story which remains to be told of the great Magdalen outburst which finally overthrew the Æsthetic Movement.

* * * * *

The source of æstheticism is presumably to be found in pre-Raphaelitism—that interesting revolt against the Philistinism and general ugliness of early and mid-Victorian life. It established a new religion of beauty, albeit on what must have seemed to the Philistines a somewhat doleful basis. It lacked laughter. The enemies of Philistinism who laughed, as Matthew Arnold did, were not pre-Raphaelites. The pre-Raphaelites themselves were perhaps a little too conscious that the overthrow of Philistinism was no laughing matter. Ecstasy was perhaps their substitute for hilarity. It was a disposition to a sort of æsthetic ecstasy which they bequeathed to their Oxford successors, specifically known as Æsthetes, who had first Walter Pater, a Fellow of Brasenose, and then Oscar Wilde, a demy of Magdalen, for their prophets.

A number of Oxford men not yet middle-aged can well remember that Æsthetic Movement and the strange jargon, initiated by Oscar Wilde, and talked by the _illuminés_. They were “utter,” they said; they were “too too”; they were “all but.” And no doubt the boast that they were “all but” was the best founded, and received the most ironical justification. They had not, that is to say, the sincerity of conviction which could enable them to stand firm in the day of persecution; and that day of persecution came upon them with the suddenness of a thunder-clap.

What happened, to be precise, was this: Towards the end of a certain summer term, and in the midst of the season of bump suppers, a certain æsthete of some notoriety brought forward a resolution at the Oxford Union proposing that the Society should discontinue its subscription to _Punch_, because that journal was ridiculing the “New Renaissance.” The proposal was rejected; but the end of the matter was not in the Debating Hall, but at the æsthete’s own College, which happened to be Magdalen, where a party of boating men were convivially celebrating their success upon the river. The harmony of the evening ended in an attack upon the æsthete. His collection of blue china was thrown out of his window, and he himself, like John Conington, was put under the College pump. It was threatened that the same measures would be taken with other æsthetes in other colleges, and in the panic which ensued, the Æsthetic Movement perished. The leading æsthetes hurried as one man to the barber’s to get their hair cut, and to the haberdasher’s to buy high collars. Men who, on the previous day, had resembled owls staring out of ivy-bushes now cultivated the appearance of timid cows shyly peeping over white walls; and all the available enthusiasm—since Oxford must always have an enthusiasm of some sort—was transferred to Canon Barnett’s scheme for conveying the higher life to the lower orders through the medium of University Settlements in the slums of London.

Such is the history of the Æsthetic Movement, compressed into a nutshell, and related with the irreducible minimum of reference to Oscar Wilde; but there is not really, at this time of day, any reason for leaving him out. Magdalen, of course, is not proud of him, though he took two firsts and won the Newdigate; but visitors to Magdalen are generally inquisitive about him. He was a feature—an institution; and he belongs to literary history.

Probably no undergraduate ever attracted more attention while still an undergraduate, or left a more enduring trail of legend behind him when he went down. He understood, as the pre-Raphaelites whom he succeeded had not understood it, the great art of posing—the art of challenging attention, not for what he had done but for what he was. He was the first to expound the art of life as the art of “existing beautifully.” The conception appealed to the _âmes sensibles_ and the vain—especially, no doubt, to the vain whose vanity had no _raison d’être_ in the way of visible achievement. It supplied them with passwords and shibboleths; and it filled Oxford with a long, limp, languishing procession of mild-eyed enthusiasts, who preferred the easy morals of Greece to the stern code of Palestine, and took their leader far more seriously than he took himself.

His sayings were quoted, and anecdotes of his strange doings were passed round. One heard, and talked, of the blue china which he “lived up to” in the most æsthetically furnished rooms in Oxford, and of his discovery of the “utter” loveliness of sunflowers. One was particularly proud of the stories of his contemptuous treatment of the Professor of Poetry. Principal Shairp, it was said, had read over his prize poem with him and suggested alterations. He had listened with the politeness of a potentate negotiating with a rival potentate, and had then printed his poem without adopting a single one of the proposed amendments.

There was a time when he was “ragged” on account of his eccentricities, but he was ragged in vain. On one occasion eight stalwart Philistines bound him with ropes and trailed him along the ground to the top of a hill. Instead of losing his temper, he expressed himself as lost in admiration of the view. After that, it seems to have been felt that he had earned his right to be eccentric. At all events, the Philistines troubled him no more. He had founded his school. It continued to flourish for some years after his departure, and to feed itself upon stories of his sayings and doings in the wider world.

There were the stories, for instance, of his lecturing tour in America. He had gone “to carry culture to a continent,” but he had been “disappointed with the Atlantic Ocean.” There was the story of his comment on the case of the man—a brother poet named John Barlas—who was reported to have gone mad as the result of reading the Bible. “When I think,” said Oscar, “of all the harm that book has done I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.” And, finally, there were the innumerable stories which identified him with Du Maurier’s Postlethwaite. A feeble follower of his—one of those who ultimately suffered martyrdom for the cause—was ridiculed in the Union, in the course of the debate above referred to, as “the least of all the a-Postlethwaites and scarce worthy to be called an a-Postlethwaite.”

Afterwards, of course—but why dwell upon what happened afterwards?

Wilde’s biographer, Mr. Sherard, suggests that he was “to a very large extent a victim of the Oxford educational system, of the Oxford environment.” He supports his view by the statement that Oxford “produces side by side the saint, the sage, and the depraved libertine,” and “sends men to Parnassus or to the public-house, to Latium or the lenocinium.” But that will not do at all; for precisely the same thing might be said, with equal truth, of any curriculum through which large masses of young men pass, or any environment which they frequent. The descent to Avernus is easy, and hell has many gates quite as accessible from the seats of ignorance as from the seats of learning.

“With my brain,” Oscar Wilde once said in later life, “I might have become anything that I chose.”

Undoubtedly he might; and it is a great tragedy that he chose so ill; but it would be a gross injustice to hold Oxford responsible for his choice. Oxford, as we have seen, did its best to curb his wantonness by trailing him on the ground to the top of a hill; and even when he was no longer _in statu pupillari_, Oxford planned a second effort for his salvation.

He was at Oxford, on a visit to a friend at University College on the night of the riot, already spoken of, which put the Æsthetic Movement down. He had even accepted, for that night, an invitation to the rooms of a Magdalen disciple; and the plot had been laid to seize him, and submit him, together with his disciple, to the discipline of the College pump. One of the conspirators privately warned him of his danger, and he made an excuse, and stayed away.

Perhaps, if he had gone, the pump would have saved him from himself; but that, after all, is an idle speculation.

BRASENOSE COLLEGE

The eponymous nose—The Hell Fire Club and its ghost—The
Phœnix—Dean Hole as the typical Brasenose man—Bishop Heber
and his prize poem—His _jeux d’esprit_—The note of satire in
his missionary hymns—Richard Heber the greatest bibliophile
that the world has never seen—The author of “Ingoldsby
Legends”—Robertson of Brighton—Oxford objections to private
initiative in religion—Walter Pater and his Philosophy of Life.

There are two questions which every visitor to Brasenose can be relied upon to ask: What, he will demand, is the origin of the eponymous nose? And what are the rights of the story about the Hell Fire Club and its ghost?

[To face p. 171.]

As regards the nose, two doctrines have gained currency. The first is contained in the works of the French traveller, Dr. Sorbière:

“I shall not take upon me,” writes the Doctor, “to describe all
the colleges to you. There is one at whose gate I saw a great
brazen nose, like Punchinello’s vizard. I was also told they
call it ‘Brasen-Nose College,’ and that John Duns Scotus taught
here, in remembrance of which they set up the sign of his nose
at the gate.”

The other explanation is to be found in that entertaining classic, “Verdant Green”:

“Mr. Larkyns,” we there read, “drew Verdant’s attention to
the brazen nose that is such a conspicuous object over the
entrance gate. ‘That,’ said he, ‘was modelled from a cast of
the principal feature of the first Head of the College, and so
the College was named Brazen-nose. The nose was formerly used
as a place of punishment for any misbehaving Brasenosian, who
had to sit upon it for two hours.... These punishments were so
frequent that they gradually wore down the nose to its present
small dimensions.’”

It is hardly necessary to add that Dr. Sorbière, as well as Mr. Verdant Green, was hoaxed. The nose seems originally to have been a knocker of no importance, though, at a later date, it came to be regarded almost as a fetish or a mascot, and acquired an accretion of legend. When, in the year 1334, some members of Brasenose Hall (which preceded Brasenose College) migrated from Oxford to Stamford, in Lincolnshire, because Oxford was too riotous a place to suit their tastes, they took the knocker with them. The students who stayed in Oxford procured another nose in place of it; but the nose which had gone astray was bought back by the College, 656 years after its removal, and now embellishes the dining-hall.

That point cleared up, we may go on to the story of the Hell Fire Club and the ghost.

* * * * *

The Brasenose Hell Fire Club was an imitation of the more famous Hell Fire Club of Medmenham Abbey. It flourished from 1828 to 1834, and its _raison d’être_ was the defiance of religion and mortality. The meetings were held in the various members’ rooms. The members sat at a table with a vacant chair at the head of it—the theory being that their chairman was the invisible but omnipresent Enemy of Mankind—and they drank hard and competed with one another in blasphemous declamation and the telling of indecorous stories. The dons, it appears, had some vague inkling of their proceedings, but no precise information on which it was possible for them to act. They did not know how the Club differed from other wine clubs, nor had they a list of its members; but the truth was to be revealed to them in a sudden and dramatic manner.

One of the Brasenose dons had been dining with the dons of Exeter—in the Senior Common-room of which College an excellent port is dispensed—and his way home took him along Brasenose Lane, which, as strangers will remark, is one of the darkest and loneliest thoroughfares in Oxford. On one side of it is the forbidding _façade_ of Brasenose itself, with savage iron bars fastened across all the windows to prevent undergraduates from climbing out of them and seeking adventures at unseemly hours; on the other side is the high, blank wall of the Exeter Fellows’ garden.

The hour was midnight, and as the don pursued his solitary way he heard sounds of revelry—and then sounds which were not of revelry—proceeding from a room on the ground floor in which the members of the Hell Fire Club were assembled. He was startled; he stopped; he looked up, and saw an astounding and appalling spectacle. The first figure which met his eyes was that of Beelzebub, the Prince of Darkness—blue fire, and horns, and hoofs, and all; and then he perceived that Beelzebub was not alone. An undergraduate, well known to the don as a _mauvais sujet_, was in his grip, struggling, resisting, with agony and terror in his face, while the Evil One dragged his body in mocking triumph through the bars.

Doubting the evidence of his senses, the don took to his heels and ran all the way to the College gate. He knocked and was admitted, and staggered, in an almost fainting condition, into the porch. At the same time there was a cry and a rush of men from one of the rooms on the right of the quadrangle. They came from a meeting of the Hell Fire Club, with the news that the owner of the rooms in which the session had been held had suddenly fallen dead—of apoplexy, as one gathers—in the midst of a blasphemous tirade.

The story is told by the Rev. F. G. Lee in his “Glimpses of the Supernatural.” It was current in his own Oxford days, Mr. Lee says, “on what could not but be regarded as good authority.” It is still current, whatever be the value of the authority, and is invariably recalled whenever a College debating society discusses the motion, “That this House believes in ghosts.” Probably, since the ghost does not appear in the record of the circumstances preserved in the Vice-Principal’s Register, the supernatural element in the story is a later accretion, due to the mythopœic faculty of youth; but the sudden death of the member of the Hell Fire Club is history.

Even that fact, indeed, has sometimes been denied by rationalising sceptics, who have gone so far as to declare that there was no death in the College in the year in which the Hell Fire Club was wound up; but the death of Edward Leigh Trafford, the member in question, is duly chronicled in the Register above referred to, and the present writer has even heard a contemporary witness, an aged clergyman whose acquaintance he made in a hotel smoking-room, relate that the dead man’s coffin was solemnly laid out in the College hall, and that all the undergraduates in residence were paraded before it, and warned of the judgment by which sinners might at any hour be overtaken.

* * * * *

Another Brasenose Club, hardly less famous than the Hell Fire Club, and much more worthy of fame, is the Phœnix. It is sometimes said that the Phœnix was so called because it rose from the ashes of the Hell Fire Club; but that is a mistake. The Phœnix is the older society of the two, dating from 1781 or 1782, and is, in fact, the oldest social club in the University. Its traditions, though convivial, are seemly. Many of its members have risen to high places, alike in the University and in Church and State. Five of its original twelve members, indeed, became Fellows of Colleges; and one of its later members, Frodsham Hodson, became Principal of Brasenose, and so great a man that, according to Mark Pattison, when he returned to College after the Long Vacation, he drove the last stage into Oxford with post horses, lest it should be said that “the first Tutor of the first College of the first University of the world entered it with a pair.”

Other members of the Phœnix were Bishop Heber, R. H. Barham, the author of “Ingoldsby Legends,” and the late Dean Hole. The names are of high repute, a testimonial in themselves; and we probably shall not be wrong in saying that it is characteristic of the tone of Brasenose that the most intellectual as well as the least intellectual of its _alumni_, its clerical as well as its sporting prodigies, have seen no harm in filling, or in emptying, the flowing bowl. That, at any rate, has been one of the characteristics of the College, though not, of course, the only one.

“A very gentlemanly set” is the appreciation of Brasenose men in “Verdant Green”; and as the author of “Verdant Green” speaks of an undergraduate of another College as “openly confessing his shame” by displaying himself in the porch of that College, we may take it that he was not using words at random but affirming a proposition which he was prepared to defend in argument. Most of the men, in fact, have belonged to good and well-to-do families in the northern counties, and have exhibited both the qualities and the limitations to be expected from such an origin.

They have been terribly in earnest about athletic and other sports, but they have seldom been very much in earnest about anything else. Their scholarship, when they have been scholarly, has been more often graceful than profound; and, in the matter of religion, they have shown a disposition to save themselves the trouble of thinking by taking the conventional for granted, accepting the religion provided for them in the spirit in which one accepts the _plat du jour_ at a restaurant, but accepting it in a hearty spirit, without feeling that it implied any obligation to pull long faces or to mortify the flesh. We may find an exception to the rule in the case of Robertson of Brighton, of whom more presently; but if we desire an example of it, we may find one in the case of Dean Hole.

* * * * *