Chapter II: Part 2

“If you have nothing more sensible to say than that, you had better be silent altogether,” is another of his recorded repartees to some one who remarked upon the weather; and one could make a long list of similar retorts of deadly finality behind which the Master entrenched himself. He probably did not know how much they hurt, but fought, not aggressively, but in self-defence, being sensitive, and fearing to be drawn, having a lively recollection of cases in which men had tried to draw him by arguing, in their weekly essays, in favour of atheism or anarchism, or setting any other sort of pitfall into which it would be pleasant to see one in authority stumbling. At all events men seem to have accepted his severe rejoinders in that spirit, and to have had too profound a reverence for his high intellectual standards to resent their rude practical application. If they did not suffer a rebuff from him gladly, at least they suffered it, as something inherent in the mysterious nature of things, something the reason for which might thereafter, if they were patient, be revealed to them.

For Jowett was not only a great man, but also, like most great men, a great enigma. Many wondered, and perhaps no one ever knew, how he reconciled his position with his conscience. He had subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, and then he had disproved them, or a good many of them, and then he had subscribed to them again. He had attached no condition to his second subscription of them except the simple one, “if you will give me a new pen.” There was also a story current, though it is probably untrue, as it is also told of Theodore Hook, of St. Mary Hall, that he offered to sign forty Articles if the signature of thirty-nine did not suffice.

Why did he do these things? What remnant of belief remained to him after he had done them? By what chain of argument was he bound to his office as a clergyman of the Church of England? Those were the problems posed, but he would have been a bold man who ventured to press the Master for the solutions.

His chief interests, at this stage, indeed, were rather practical than speculative. He gave large house parties of people who had succeeded in life. He bought an organ, and arranged for the Balliol Sunday evening concerts. He shortened the chapel services, saying—or so it is said—that if one could praise God adequately in half an hour, it was an absurd waste of time to devote three-quarters of an hour to the proceeding. He allowed Oxford to have a theatre—a thing forbidden by the pious wisdom of the men of old. He quoted “_sat prata biberunt_,” and negotiated for the drainage of the Oxford swamps.

He also preached, of course, and his sermons were always interesting, and sometimes pleasingly satirical, as when he smote Renan and Farrar with a double stroke, expressing his desire to read a Life of Christ which should be neither “sentimental” nor “picturesque”; but it could hardly be said that they settled the vexed question of his personal attitude towards the creeds which he recited without taking them too seriously or the formulæ which he manipulated with a sort of spiritual sleight-of-hand.

Possibly he argued that, as no clergyman ever believed all the Articles of the Christian Faith, one clergyman had as good a right as another to pick and choose among them. Or he may have felt that for a man to quit the Church merely because he had demonstrated some of its propositions to be erroneous was as ridiculous as for a doctor to take down his brass plate merely because he had discovered a new treatment of a disease at which the old-fashioned practitioners shook their heads. But, if that was his view, he never uttered it, preferring to go his own way, possessing his own soul and guarding his own secret.

One could almost see him guarding it; so that our last glimpse may be of a quaint-looking little old man in evening dress trotting through the parks in that unusual costume on a Sunday afternoon: an arresting figure, with venerable white hair, a beautifully fresh pink face, and the seal of inscrutable mystery on his forehead.

MERTON COLLEGE

Antiquity of Merton—The model of subsequent
foundations—Friction between the University and the town—The
great “town and gown row” of 1354—The scholars of Merton
save the University—The wardenship of Sir Henry Savile—The
visit of Queen Elizabeth—Oxford during the Civil War—Queen
Henrietta Maria at Merton—How Merton ceased to be a reading
college—Scandalous proceedings in the gardens—Mandell Creighton
and Lord Randolph Churchill.

Though in this work, as in the Oxford University Calendar, Merton stands third among the colleges, there is a sense in which the first place may be claimed for it. Both University and Balliol got their endowments at a slightly earlier date, but Merton was the first College to be launched, in 1264, a year before the meeting of the first English Parliament, as a self-governing corporation.

The bequest of William of Durham, which resulted in the foundation of University, was in its origin merely a pension fund, and John of Balliol, in the first instance, only paid for the support of scholars in a hired house. Walter de Merton, on the contrary, began at once to build and to legislate, and his Statutes were the model of the Statutes of subsequent foundations, not only at Oxford, but at Cambridge also. The founder of Peterhouse, the first of the Cambridge colleges, expressly decreed that the Peterhouse students were to live according to “the rule of the scholars of Merton at Oxford.”

It follows that the history of Merton is more closely connected than that of any other college with the earliest turmoils—which were many; and the historian of Merton may properly begin with a glance at those brawls which a later civilisation came to know as “town and gown rows.”

* * * * *

Discord between the town and the University began as soon as the University became important and powerful, and it owed its origin, not to incompatibility of temper between undergraduates and bargees, but to the mutual jealousies of conflicting jurisdictions, ill-defined and therefore liable to clash. Nowadays, of course, the object of the authorities on both sides—the police on the one hand and the proctors on the other—is to keep the peace between the combatants. In the Middle Ages the seniors were as pugnacious as the juniors, and joined as ferociously in the affrays.

Theoretically it was the function of the town to prevent, or punish, breaches of the peace by townsmen, while the University had a similar responsibility with regard to breaches of the peace by gownsmen; but when townsmen and gownsmen fell out, each authority resented the interference of the other. That was one cause of friction, and further friction occurred in connection with disputed points of sanitation and hygiene. The gownsmen objected to the sale of stinking fish and to the brewing of beer from water contaminated by sewage; the townsmen thought the objection fastidious, and were very angry when the University appealed to the King to interfere with these time-honoured customs. Hence constant bickerings, and a frequent exchange of abusive language; hence ultimately open war and that bloody Battle of Saint Scholastica’s Day, in which the townsmen found the scholars of Merton their most formidable foes.

The trouble began in a tavern, on February 10, 1354. Some scholars who were drinking there found fault with the wine, and the vintner said that it was quite good enough wine for them. The scholars then threw the wine at the vintner’s head, and the vintner called his friends and neighbours to the rescue. They rang the bell of the Church of Saint Martin at Carfax, and the populace, summoned by that tocsin, shot at the scholars with bows and arrows. The Chancellor of the University—the Lord Curzon of Kedleston of his epoch—appeared upon the scene, ingeminating peace where there was no peace, and he also was shot at. Then the bell of the University Church of Saint Mary began to ring, and the gownsmen gathered, and the _mêlée_ became general and lasted until the setting of the sun. No one was killed; the gownsmen got the best of it, and the Chancellor supposed that the riot was over. He issued a proclamation bidding the scholars go to their lectures as usual on the following day.

They went, but found the townsmen lying in wait for them. Reinforcements—two thousand peasants carrying an ominous black flag—had swarmed into the city from Cowley, Headington, and Hinksey. The Carfax tocsin pealed out a second time, just after the dinner hour, and the tocsin of Saint Mary’s responded as before. The townsmen, with their bucolic allies, not only assailed the scholars in the streets, but pursued them into their lodgings, inns, and halls, beating down the doors with improvised battering-rams, killing all the gownsmen they could catch, and stealing or destroying all the property that they could lay their hands on.

The Friars came out, carrying their huge crucifix and chanting their Litany, to try to compose the strife, but their intervention was in vain. They themselves became the objects of the popular fury, and one scholar was struck down even while clinging to the crucifix. Other scholars were followed into the churches and massacred at the foot of the altar. Dead bodies were flung on to dunghills, the wounded were hailed to prison, and even torture was not spared. “The crown of some chaplains,” says the chronicler, “viz., all the skin so far as the tonsure went, these diabolical imps flayed off in scorn of their clergy.”

At last the University could resist no more. The gownsmen began to flee into the country—all save the scholars of Merton. These had their solid walls behind which they could retire. Withdrawing to their college, while the town triumphed without—the sole representatives of learning in a deserted city which the Bishop had laid under an interdict—they waited for the day of vengeance and redress of grievances.

It came. The King sent down a special commission to investigate the matter. The Mayor of Oxford and his bailiffs were sent to prison; the sheriff was removed from office; and presently the town was further humiliated by the bestowal of fresh privileges upon the University authorities. They thenceforward, and not the townsmen, were to decide whether fish stank, and if they decided that it did, they were to send it to the hospital for the consumption of the sick. In addition to this privilege, they were to receive pecuniary compensation for the damage done in the riot, and their supremacy was in various other ways established on a firm constitutional basis.

Merton, that is to say, saved the University at an hour when, but for Merton, the townsmen would have wiped it out, and its clerks would have been dispersed over the face of the country.

* * * * *

As Merton was, through the scenes above described, the first college to be interesting, so, too, it was the first college to rise to conspicuous dignity, and enjoy the glories of a golden age. The supreme position achieved by Christ Church towards the end of the eighteenth and by Balliol in the middle of the nineteenth century, was won by Merton in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, under the Wardenship of Sir Henry Savile, and at the time when the founder of the Bodleian Library was a Fellow of the College.

It may be that Savile’s name has not echoed down the corridors of time quite as loudly as the names of some other Oxford men; but it is kept alive by the Savilian Professorships, and one may fix his position fairly well by saying that he was at once the Jowett and the Liddell of his generation. He was, that is to say, a great scholar and a great teacher; a great innovator and a man of great personal prestige; a link between the academic world and the world of action; the sort of man whom kings delighted to honour. Elizabeth honoured him, and so also did James I.

It was Savile who entertained Elizabeth on her visit to Oxford in 1592. He presided over the disputations held in her honour in Saint Mary’s Church, and delivered a ringing panegyric on her reign with the inevitable reference to the British triumph over the Armada: “_Tuis auspiciis Hispania Anglum non vidit nisi victorem, Anglia Hispanum nisi captivum_.” It was after enjoying his hospitality at Merton that her Majesty, as she rode away, paused on Shotover, and “looking wistfully towards Oxford,” said: “Farewell, farewell, dear Oxford! God bless thee and increase thy sons in number, holiness, and virtue!”

Elizabeth furthermore made Savile Provost of Eton—an office which he held concurrently with the Merton Wardenship. She gave him the office in spite of the fact that the Statutes reserved it for clergymen, and that Savile was a layman. He suggested to her Majesty that Statutes could not bind a sovereign, and her Majesty agreed with him, and it was while he was Provost of Eton that he entertained James I. and was made a baronet.

The Fellows of Merton of those days were already far removed from their early condition of “poor scholars.” They could hold their own at Court, and were well qualified to serve their country as ambassadors. Elizabeth sent one Merton man as Ambassador to Madrid, and another to Venice, Switzerland, and France; but the College did not lose touch with learning because it had gained touch with affairs. Sir Thomas Bodley, as all the world knows, returned from his travels to found the library which bears his name, and Savile assisted in the preparation of the Authorised Version of the Bible, produced an edition of St. Chrysostom which cost him £8,000, and founded the Professorships of Geometry and Astronomy in order that the multitude might no longer think “that the most useful branches of Mathematicks were spells and her professors limbs of the devil.”

He is said to have been a “very severe governor”—one whose students “hated him for his austerity.” He preferred the plodding and persevering to the brilliant. “If I would look for wits,” he said, “I would go to Newgate. There be the wits.” And there is a story of his own assiduous devotion to his studies, which probably illustrates the attitude of a good many homely wives towards learned husbands.

“He was so sedulous,” we read, “at his study that his lady
thereby thought herself neglected, and coming to him one day as
he was in his study, saluted him thus: ‘Sir Henry, I would I
were a book too, and then you would a little more respect me.’
Whereto, one standing by replied, ‘Madam, you must then be an
almanack, that he might change every year.’ Whereat she was not
a little displeased.”

Those were the great days; but the times were to be more exciting when the Civil War broke out, and Oxford, after the battle of Edgehill, became the Royalist headquarters, garrisoned by the royal troops, surrounded by fortifications which townsmen and gownsmen helped to build, and beleaguered, more or less—at first rather less than more, but finally rather more than less—by the Parliamentary forces under Fairfax, who threw a bridge over the Cherwell, near Marston, and mounted a battery on Headington Hill.

One cannot pause to tell that story at length, or draw that picture in detail; but a stray fact or two will indicate what Oxford in general and Merton College in particular then looked like.

Soldiers were, of course, encamped wherever there was room for them. The New College cloisters were turned into an arsenal, and a powder factory was established at Osney. New Inn Hall was the mint at which the College plate was being melted down and coined into money. A line of earthworks ran from Folly Bridge across Christ Church Meadows. Parliament—the Royalist section of Parliament, that is to say—met in the House of Convocation. Prisoners of war were stowed away, and very nearly starved, in the castle in which Queen Maud had once been beleaguered by King Stephen. Charles I. held his Court at Christ Church, and Queen Henrietta Maria held hers at Merton, the two royal apartments being connected by a secret passage.

It followed, therefore, that Merton was the centre of the light side of war. The Warden, Nathaniel Brent, was a Parliamentarian, and was absent, acting as Judge-Marshal in the Parliamentary Army; William Harvey, of Caius College, Cambridge, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, was thrust into his place; and Merton, having accepted him under protest, lived joyously, doing its best to entertain the Queen and her ladies, who, on their part, did their best to be gracious to Merton. “_Tota Academia morbo castrensi afflicta_” is one Mertonian’s summing up; but that is a grumbler’s unkind way of putting it.

Regiments of University men were raised. They did good service, but they could not always be fighting. They sallied, and raided, and cut up convoys, and then returned to their headquarters; and, on their return, the dust-soiled warriors were received by smiling ladies in the Merton Gardens or the Christ Church Broad Walk, or listened, with the ladies, to concerts in the college chapels, or played in a _masque_ in one of the college halls for their diversion.

It was a glorious time—a time when gaudily apparelled boys swaggered about with the assurance of men and the sincere conviction that the only life worth living was the life of the gallant who fought the King’s enemies in the morning and made love to the Queen’s ladies at night. But it was not a time at which students could be expected to mind their books; and the habit of study, when once lost, is not easily recovered. Amid the clash of arms Merton ceased to be a reading college, and circumstances conspired to prevent it from reverting to that character until after the lapse of many generations.

* * * * *

Three later royal visits—two by Charles II. and one by James II.—may be supposed to have operated unfavourably to study; and another cause of deterioration can be detected in the measures which the College took for the relief of its pecuniary embarrassments. A resolution was passed to the effect that the presence of poor men in the College should be discouraged, and that preference should be shown to postulants who were willing to present the College with silver tankards and subscribe heavily to the replenishment of the College Library.

The plan served its purpose. The Merton plate-chest was soon full to overflowing, and the shelves of the Merton library were also filled. But the College had, in the meantime, become a College of rich men, bent upon amusement rather than profit, and more eager to kindle material bonfires in the quad than to hand on the metaphoric torch of culture. Perhaps it has, by this time, lived down that reputation, but it certainly retained, and even nursed it, long after most of the other colleges had begun to take life seriously.

In the eighteenth century, indeed, one does not expect to find the age anything but dark; but even in that scandalous period Merton was distinguished by a special scandal of its own. Ladies of more charm than reputation came to Oxford in large numbers in those days, and the gardens of Merton were their favourite haunt. Their presence there has been celebrated alike in verse and prose. The prose censor rudely complains of “that multitude of Female Residentiaries who have of late infested our learned retirements”; while the poetical satirist exclaims:

“In vain his tutor with a watchful care
Rebukes his folly, warns him to beware,
Aspire above the common Merton crowd,
The vain, the lewd, the impudent and proud.
Beauty at Oxford is a thing so scarce
That all thy panegyrick turns to farce.”

From which state of things there resulted “imprudent marriages”—and worse—with the result that sleepy authority at last awoke to what was going on, and locked the garden gates.

The locking of the garden gates, however, did not in itself suffice to make Merton a hive of industry, or even a home of order; and legends of stormy occurrences within its walls continue to be frequent until a comparatively recent date. “All that I can say, gentlemen,” said the Warden, Dr. Marsham, on one occasion, haranguing the undergraduates in hall—“all that I can say is, that if you want to behave like barbarian savages, why—ahem! ahem!—you should come and ask leave first”; and an authentic story relates that Dr. Mandell Creighton, the late Bishop of London, was once, while an undergraduate, “employed to fetch in after dinner a supply of penny whistles and other musical instruments, armed with which, with tea-trays as drums, making the most horrible din, and letting off squibs and crackers as they went, the undergraduates marched round and round the Fellows’ quad.”

And, if Creighton did these things, what may we suppose to have been done by Creighton’s pupil, the late Lord Randolph Churchill? That is a delicate subject on which Lord Randolph’s biographers do not as a rule say more than is strictly necessary; but there is at any rate one story of his undergraduate days which it seems right to tell, because the delightful audacity of the future leader of the Fourth Party is foreshadowed in it.

Lord Randolph, it is said, was once “sent for” to be “ragged,” whether for cutting lectures or for some other offence against discipline. He was received by an indignant don, who began to deliver stern expostulations from the hearthrug, on which he stood, warming his back at the fire. In the heat of self-justification Lord Randolph advanced boldly, and the don, intimidated, shrank away. As the interview was approaching its conclusion, another undergraduate, who had also been summoned to the presence, knocked and entered. He found Lord Randolph on the hearthrug, with his coat-tails comfortably drawn up, delivering a vehement harangue, while the don cowered submissively in a corner of the apartment listening to him.

Remembering that story, we cannot wonder that Lord Randolph is still a hero with the rising generation of the College which educated him so imperfectly that when, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was confronted with some decimal fractions, he had to send for a permanent official to tell him “the meaning of those d—d dots.”

EXETER COLLEGE

The West Country College—A Whig College—“Debauched by a
drunken governor”—Eminent _Alumni_—“Parson Jack”—His bout
at fisticuffs—Garibaldi’s Englishman—His prowess on the
river—James Anthony Froude—His innate Protestantism—The burning
of his “Nemesis of Faith”—Burne Jones and William Morris.

Exeter is the College for whose founder’s soul the author of this work is particularly bound to pray; and he hereby renders grateful homage to the memory of the Bishop of Exeter and Lord High Treasurer of England in the sorry reign of Edward II., whose benefaction he enjoyed in the character of a Stapledon scholar. If he says but little about Walter de Stapledon, that is because there is little to be said, except that he was a good bishop and a King’s man who lost his head in the King’s cause, being charged with the defence of London when the King fled to Wales, with the result that he was seized by the mob and brought to the block in Cheapside.

[To face p. 70.]

His period was one in which it was thought proper to combine the patronage of learning with the patronage of a particular locality. He wished the scholars, and also the Fellows, of his College to be taken from the counties of Devon and Cornwall; and his patriotic injunctions were faithfully observed until the University commissioners interfered, happily leaving a certain number of West Country scholars, but condemning the West Country fellowships to extinction. The last of the West Country Fellows was the Rev. Charles Boase, who piloted the present writer through the ceremony of matriculation, and concerning whom a statistician with a pencil once computed that he talked in the course of a single evening, on sixty-seven learned subjects, ranging from the Chemistry of Agriculture to the Philosophy of the Unconditioned.

Commoners, however, have followed where scholars led the way; and Exeter has always been recognised as the particular College of West Countrymen. Even the connection between Blundell’s School, Tiverton, and Balliol has not broken down its claims to this distinction. In “Westward Ho” we find Frank Leigh, as a matter of course, sent there from the Bideford Grammar School; and one of the characters in “Tom Jones” went there, equally as a matter of course, from Taunton, in the dark days in which the College was reputed to be given over to “nothing but drunkenness and duncery.”

The College was, at that melancholy period, known, equally with Merton, as a Whig College; and one of the rectors is said to have carried democratic principles to the point of marrying the daughter of the College cook. It distinguished itself, at one of the borough elections, by inviting Whig voters not only to pass through the College quadrangle on their way to the poll, but also to taste the College beer while passing. For several days, it is said, the Hall was filled with “a smoking, drinking, expectorating crowd,”—a spectacle which it is indeed difficult to conjure up in the decorous circumstances of contemporary academic life.

But let that pass. The interest of a college—of Exeter as of any other college—depends, not upon the proceedings of the vulgar herd, but upon its association with names which have left a trail of glory behind them. In the days when Exeter was, as Wood says, “debauched by a drunken governor,” and in the days immediately before and immediately after that deplorable debauchery, the most conspicuous Exeter names are hardly names which the plain man recognises at the first glance; but the nineteenth century introduces names worthy of remark in more than one department of endeavour.

Let “Parson Jack” come first.

To students of the Clergy List he is the Reverend John Russell, Perpetual Curate of Swymbridge. To the West Country he is “Parson Jack”—the hunting parson who kept the hounds and defied the Bishop who bade him give up keeping them: a man, no doubt, of more energy than intellect, but a clergyman—he would not have thanked any one for calling him a priest—whose parishioners carefully minded what he said, holding, it may be, that so good a judge of a horse must be an equally good judge of a religion.

Parson Jack won no laurels for his College in the schools, being contented with a pass degree; but it is said that the supper-party at which he bade the College farewell was the noisiest supper-party ever given within College walls, and that, as this chronicler knows, is saying a good deal. For, if he had not distinguished himself at his books, he had at least distinguished himself with his fists, in circumstances graphically described by his biographer.

A certain gentleman-commoner named Gordon, addicted to the society of out-college men, had, it appears, been boasting in hall of the superior prowess “with the gloves” of some friends of his at Christ Church. A certain Denne, lately from Eton, withstood him, saying: “Bring your three best men from Christ Church to my rooms, and if they can only stand up in a fair set-to against three of Exeter, we’ll give your heroes full credit for all you say of them, but not till then.”

Such a challenge, of course, could not be declined; and while Gordon was accepting it on behalf of his out-college friends, Jack Russell, overhearing the conversation, rose from his place and volunteered his services.

“Don’t forget me, Denne,” he said. “I’ll be one of the three, mind that, and the sooner we meet the better.”

So the meeting was arranged, and the result of it may best be given in the words of Russell’s biographer:

“Russell was deputed to open the ball, the antagonist selected
to meet him being the second best of the Christ Church lot. It
was a brisk set-to while it lasted, but evidently a one-sided
affair from beginning to end; for Russell’s long reach, and
quick, straight blows, which fell with tremendous thuds on his
adversary’s visage, brought the trial to a close in little more
than ten minutes.

“The latter, admitting himself over-matched, then declined the
unequal contest; while Russell, self-reliant and still “fresh
as paint,” refused to take off his gloves, calling stoutly
for the next man to come on. Denne, however, interposed, and
would have his turn; going in first with No. 1, then No. 3, and
finally polishing them both off with as much ease as if they
had been two old women.

“‘Now,’ said Russell, addressing Gordon aside, ‘I think you had
better take your three fellows home; and don’t make such fools
of them again.’”

Another hero who flourished at a slightly later date in the same field of prowess as Parson Jack was James Whitehead Peard. He had “the shoulders of a bull,” and when he played his part in one of those town and gown rows of which mention has just been made in the account of Merton, the town, with one accord, fled before him. He was to become Colonel Peard, to distinguish himself in a revolution in Italy, and to be known to the whole world as Garibaldi’s Englishman. At Exeter, however, he was principally a boating man. He rowed against Cambridge; and at a time when, as the Rev. J. Pycroft has related, “the dons held the boat in abhorrence and considered any man belonging to it as keeping rather questionable company,” he insisted that rowing was not only a manly but a moral recreation.

In proof of his claim, he submitted the rules of the Boating Club to Mr. Richards, then a tutor, and afterwards the Rector, pointing out that they forbade to men in training the indulgences which one is accustomed to couple in the pentameter line of elegiac verse as “_Bacchus et alma Venus_.” Whereupon Mr. Richards fell upon him crushingly.

“Exactly,” he said, “as I have always maintained. These rules show plainly and are a written confession of the wild character of the men for whom you can anticipate the necessity of such fines; no decent men would want such rules.”

Let us hope that modern boating men, at all events, are virtuous by instinct and need no laws to keep them so; and then let us cull a few other Exeter names, illustrious in other fields.

* * * * *

James Anthony Froude was elected a Fellow of Exeter from Oriel, in the days when the Tractarians seemed likely to succeed in their great task of turning Oxford upside down. More brilliant than industrious in those days, he had only taken a Second; but he had the clean-cut intellect which “penetrates through sophisms, ignores commonplaces, and gives to conventional illusions their true value,” and it was inevitable that, while looking for his way in life, he should come into violent collision with the Obscurantists. He did so on at least two notable occasions.

He began life in the shadow of his brother’s greater name and of the expectation that he would adopt his brother’s point of view and echo his brother’s opinions. Richard Hurrell Froude—a most imperious and dictatorial personage—had bullied him into seeming acquiescence in his doctrines. For the time being he presumably believed that he believed in them; and his vivid literary gifts marked him out as an ideal contributor to Newman’s projected series of “Lives of the Saints.” Newman wanted to establish the continuity of miracle within the Church; and he regarded Froude as a man credulous of miracles, and a dialectician capable of making out a good case for them. His instructions to his contributors were, not to try to find out whether the alleged miracles had really happened or not, but, in effect, to accept as many of them as a man could swallow without making himself too conspicuously ridiculous.

Froude accepted the commission; and there is no reason to doubt that he accepted it in good faith. The truth, however, was too strong for him; the evidence was too weak; and he had a turn for biting irony which he could not suppress. Saint Neot was his subject, and he ended his study with the remarkable sentence: “This is all, and perhaps rather more than all, that is known of the life of the blessed Saint Neot.” It was as if he had played a practical joke on Newman; and there were those who considered that to play practical jokes on Newman was almost as bad as laying a profane hand on the Ark of the Covenant. Newman himself was almost certainly of that opinion; but Protestantism “will out,” and Froude was a Protestant in grain, and was to become something more than a Protestant when he matured.

He first matured into a deacon of the Church of England; but that meant nothing. The College Fellows of those days took orders as normally as they took their degrees, and without making more ado about it. There was no more a question of a “call” to be a shepherd of souls than of a “call” to be a Master of Arts. In travelling so far, Froude was only travelling the common road. The desire to divagate from it did not come to him until later; and, even so, no one would have troubled much about his divagations if he had not chosen to divagate in print.

Like most of the other “honest doubters,” however, he could not keep his honest doubts to himself. He wrote and published “The Nemesis of Faith,” and then the fat was in the fire. The publication cost him his fellowship, and the book was burnt. The latter incident is famous, and has been magnified by legend. The belief prevails that there was a solemn and formal _auto da fé_ under the direction of the University authorities. There was, in fact, only a private display of theological temper on the part of the Rev. William Sewell.

Sewell, afterwards the founder of Radley School, was a High Churchman, encompassed by all the limitations of that intellectual state. He was also a discursive lecturer who stood with his back to the fire, and made Aristotle’s “Ethics” or Virgil’s “Georgics” an excuse for propounding his opinions on matters of topical interest. He did not set out to talk about “The Nemesis of Faith,” but came to talk of it by accident, and then proceeded to denounce it with the vigour of a _Quarterly_ or _Saturday Reviewer_. Finally he inquired whether any member of his audience possessed a copy of the book. One of them admitted that he did.

“Then bring it here, sir,” thundered Sewell.

It was brought; and Sewell stripped off the binding, tore the pages across, pitched the mutilated volume into the flames, and stood over it, thrusting at it with the poker until it was burnt to ashes.

Such was the actual occurrence, as related by Mr. Boase, who was present at the lecture at which it took place. There was no public holocaust, but only a spasmodic explosion of wrath on the part of a single excited theologian. The act, however, gained piquancy from the fact that Froude was Sewell’s colleague. The witnesses went out, and told what they had seen; and the story lost nothing in the telling. In after years, as we have seen, some of them recovered their historical consciences and reduced it to its true proportions; but, at the moment, they indulged their mythopœic faculties to their hearts’ content, and erected an enduring edifice of romance on a scanty foundation of fact.

And Froude, at any rate, had to go. The Rector and the Fellows asked him whether he would prefer to resign or to be turned out; and he elected to resign. The Visitor of the College—the Bishop of Exeter—applauded their action; and Froude’s father, the Archdeacon of Totnes, “conceiving,” as Mr. Herbert Paul puts it in his Life of Froude, “that the best remedy for free thought was short commons, stopped his son’s allowance.” Such was the message to him of “the last enchantments of the Middle Ages.”

* * * * *

Time passed. R. D. Blackmore, the immortal author of “Lorna Doone” took his degree at Exeter in the forties. He and Charles Reade, of Magdalen, of whom more in due course, are without dispute the two greatest novelists whom Oxford has yet produced; and there shall be no attempt here to prove that either of them was greater than the other. Has it not been written that, to a West Countryman, “Lorna Doone” is “almost as good as clotted cream”? Did not the author reply that he was too fond of clotted cream not to be gratified by the compliment, but also too fond of it to admit that any book whatever could successfully challenge comparison therewith? He was a modest man, however—so modest that hardly anything is known of him; and as no stories of his quiet passage through Exeter have been preserved, we may pass on to our next interesting names, which are those of William Morris and Edward Burne Jones.

They came up in 1853; and Morris’ biographer, Mr. J. W. Mackail, has given a good deal of offence by his supercilious account of the internal condition of Exeter at that period. Himself a Balliol man, he appears to take the view that outside Balliol there is no academical salvation.

That is a proposition which we need not turn aside to discuss at any length. It is neither to be desired nor to be expected that all the colleges of the University should resemble each other like peas in a pod; and it is not to be denied that there are some functions which Balliol fulfils better than Exeter. It dry nurses its men with more success, takes greater pains to make them conform to a type, and then lays itself out to magnify the type to scale. The result is conspicuous in the higher ranks of the most efficient Civil Service that the world has ever seen. It is an excellent system for its purpose; but it has its limitations, and is not equally suitable for all men, as even Jowett recognised.

Jowett doubted whether, if a poet came to Balliol, Balliol “would be able to hold him.” But Balliol held Swinburne; and the real danger is rather lest Balliol should turn a poet into a Judge of the High Court, or a stiff and starched Permanent Under-Secretary. Perhaps it would be a good thing for many poets to be thus transfigured; but it is not good for all of them; and it would not have been good for William Morris. What Morris wanted was to be left alone and not worried by pastors and masters who “generalise” and try to compel exceptional men to walk in conventional paths. Whatever may be the case now, Exeter was, in no distant past, a College in which a man might go his own way without excessive admonition; and William Morris was indubitably one of the successes of the system.

His tutor described him as “a rather rough and unpolished youth who exhibited no special literary tastes or capacity but had no difficulty in mastering the usual subjects of examination.” The opinion which he, on his part, entertained of tutors generally was not more flattering. “The name of ‘don,’” says his biographer, “was used by him as a synonym for all that was narrow, ignorant, and pedantic.” But the dons did him a good turn, though neither he nor they knew it at the time, by not going out of their way to disturb his view of them, their interests, and pursuits.

Except for Burne Jones, indeed, he had hardly a friend in his own College. With the reading men and with the uproarious men—and Exeter has always had its share of these—he had equally little in common. Men called him “Topsy” on account of his uncombed woolly head of hair; he accepted the nickname and was not to be driven by it into tidiness. Art, and beauty, and antiquities, were the things which interested him; and Oxford was for him, not a seat of learning, but “a vision of grey-roofed houses, and a long, winding street, and the sound of many bells.”

His rooms were in Hell Quad, and his favourite diversion was talking. Burne Jones tells how, on one occasion, “Morris came tumbling in and talked incessantly for the next seven hours and a half.” Most of his talking, however, was done at Pembroke, where he had two great friends: Faulkner, the mathematician who is said to have been ploughed in Divinity for including the Prophet Isaiah in a list of the Twelve Apostles, and Dixon, afterwards Canon Dixon, the pre-Raphaelite poet. He paid his tribute to the influence of his ecclesiastical surroundings by talking of devoting his entire private fortune of £900 a year to the foundation of a monastery; but he happily was wise in time. And presently his friends discovered his genius, though the dons did not.

“He’s a big poet,” Burne Jones one day exclaimed.

“Who is?”

“Why, Topsy.”

So he took his degree, and went down; and the rest of his career does not concern us, except for the beginnings of his association with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was brought up to Oxford to decorate the ceiling of the Union Debating Hall. He and Morris and Burne Jones were always together in Rossetti’s rooms in George Street; and a fourth member of their coterie was Swinburne of Balliol, the poet whom Balliol “held.”

They talked and talked interminably. Their talks were the beginning of that pre-Raphaelitism which was, in due course, to develop (or to degenerate) into the Æsthetic Movement; and the most picturesque incident of their alliance took place when they set out together to accept an invitation to dine at Christ Church.

Morris, who had with difficulty been persuaded to dress for the banquet, happened to remove his hat, and it was then discovered that the connection between art and letters was symbolised by an enormous daub of blue paint on his hair. But for that accident, and the hurried visit to the barber which followed it, he would have sat at high table, illuminated like a saintly figure in a missal or a stained-glass window.

ORIEL COLLEGE

Foundation by Adam de Brome—Butler and his
“Analogy”—Causes of the efficiency of Oriel—The
“Noetics”—Eveleigh—Coplestone—Whately—The Tractarians—Who
started the Tractarian Movement?—What did the Tractarians
want?—The logical weakness of their position—The attitude of
the bishops—The stampede to Rome—The honest doubters—Matthew
Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough—Cecil Rhodes at Oriel.

Edward II.’s almoner, Adam de Brome, obtained his charter for the foundation of a new College at Oxford in 1324. Originally called the House, or Hall, of the Blessed Mary at Oxford, it took the name of Oriel from La Oriole—a tenement included in the premises. Among its endowments was included the advowson and rectory of the Church of St. Mary—a fact of which we shall perceive the importance as we proceed. It was a small College, and a poor one, but it was to have its hour of signal intellectual pre-eminence, though not until the early days of the nineteenth century. Before that time the noteworthy names are scarce.

[To face p. 86.]

The most noteworthy of them all, if one could be sure of one’s facts, would be that of Sir Walter Raleigh. Sir Walter is said to have been an Oriel man, and one likes to think that he was—if only to furnish an Elizabethan Oriel precedent for Cecil Rhodes; but the proofs offered are inconclusive. Of the undisputed _alumni_ of the darker ages the greatest was Bishop Butler, of the “Analogy”—a precedent, perhaps, if one is looking for precedents, for those Oriel “Noetics” of whom we shall have to speak; but Oriel owes more to Butler than Butler owed to Oriel. He is a witness—like Gibbon of Magdalen and Adam Smith of Balliol—to the inefficiency of Oxford teaching in the eighteenth century.

“We are obliged,” Butler wrote, “to mis-spend so much time here in attending frivolous lectures and unintelligible disputations that I am quite tired out with such a disagreeable way of trifling.”

He also threatened to leave Oxford and migrate to Cambridge, though, as the historian of Oriel writes, “it saves the blushes of an Oxonian to reflect that the migration was never carried out.” That is all that can be said, however, for that is all that is known; so we will leave Butler, and hasten on to the really interesting epoch.

* * * * *

The fame of Oriel, at the time when Oriel was famous, depended upon the distinction of its Fellows. The Statutes allowed more latitude to the electors there than at most of the other colleges. They were not restricted in their choice to their own men, to their founders’ kin, or, except in the case of a few specific fellowships, to candidates from particular counties. A few happy selections made the tuition exceptionally efficient. The reputation for efficiency attracted a steady supply of good men. The attraction was the greater because the electors chose for themselves, on principles of their own, and were but little, if at all, influenced by records of successes gained in other examinations. The ideal man for them, they said, was a man whose mind was “an instrument and not a receptacle”; and they often, for that reason, preferred men who had taken seconds to men who had taken firsts, and their preference was generally justified by developments. Whately, Newman, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, and Richard Hurrell Froude all took seconds, and became Fellows of Oriel.

An Oriel fellowship became, in that way, like a Balliol scholarship, the real “blue riband” of the University. It marked a man, not as a precocious scholar, but as an intellectual force—a man who was expected to make his mark on thought. Oriel, in consequence, came to be recognised as a great intellectual centre—the seething source of the new ideas which Oxford would presently diffuse through England. That was the great and golden age of the Oriel Common-room. It began under Provost Eveleigh, who was jointly concerned with the Master of Balliol and the Dean of Christ Church in the institution of the Honours Schools. It continued under Coplestone, who resigned to become Bishop of Llandaff in 1826. It came to an end, some time in the forties, under Hawkins.

The golden age, however, ought really to be divided into three golden ages, which ran into each other, but must here be glanced at separately. The first period is that of the so-called “Noetics,” who had Whately for their prophet and leader. The second is that of the Tractarians—the period when the influence, first of Keble and then of John Henry Newman, was paramount. The third, following on the secession of some of the Tractarians to Rome, and the defeat, so far as Oxford was concerned, of those who remained in the Church of England, may be called the period of the Honest Doubters. The names belonging to it, which all the world knows, are those of Clough and Matthew Arnold. First, then, of the “Noetics.”

The word “Noetic” has gone out of use. Our own generation hardly knows what it means; and perhaps its meaning was not very precise, even when it was bandied freely. If we render it “Intellectuals”—with a capital I—we shall get as near to it as we need to go; but we must also remember that the Noetics flattered themselves on being, above all things, logicians. It was a common saying, in the Oxford of their time, that the Oriel Common-room “stank of logic.”

Provost Eveleigh, whom we have mentioned, was not exactly a Noetic himself, but it was his policy which brought the Noetics together at Oriel. He was the first Provost who insisted that the College should make a proper use of its freedom in the choice of Fellows. The tendency of the times was to use that freedom to serve the ends of private friendship, and bring clubbable and convivial men together. Eveleigh took the line that intellectual distinction was of more account than good manners or geniality in social intercourse. There were those who said that, by doing so, he made the Oriel Common-room a bear-garden; but that is only a way of saying that it focussed heat as well as light.

Coplestone, afterwards Bishop of Llandaff, Hampden, afterwards Bishop of Hereford, Whately, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin, Arnold of Rugby, Hawkins, presently to be Provost, Baden-Powell, Savilian Professor of Geometry—these are the principal Noetic names. They formed no definite school of thought; they had no common body of doctrine. Some of them were more noetic than others, and one or two of them ended by relapsing into reactionary ways. Some of them, again, were very polished, while others were very rough diamonds. But they were, all of them, very clever, and knew it, and liked other people to know it. They brought the dry light of logic to bear upon ecclesiastical and other conundrums. Liberals in theology, equally contemptuous of High Church aridity and oleaginous Evangelicanism, they liked to express their Liberalism in terms of robust and aggressive common sense.

Arnold and Whately are perhaps the only two of them whose names now live; and Arnold, of course, made his fame elsewhere than at Oxford. Whately, however, was a tutor at Oriel for a considerable time, and afterwards became Principal of St. Alban Hall. He was a Bohemian of Bohemians, an eccentric of eccentrics, the least donnish of dons, and the most carelessly defiant of all academical etiquette. The Provost of Oriel, who hated tobacco, was once shocked to discover him on the roof of Oriel, smoking a cigar among the leads.

In costume, too, as well as in conduct, Whately outraged the prejudices of his fellow-men. It is related that, when there were holes in his archiepiscopal silk stockings he neither bought new ones nor sent the old ones to be darned, but tried to conceal the deficiencies by affixing black sticking-plaster to his calves. At a time when other dons were never seen in Christ Church meadows except in cap and gown, he walked there in his ordinary attire—described as consisting of “pea-green coat, white waistcoat, stone-coloured shorts, flesh-coloured stockings.” He took a number of dogs with him on his walks, and trained them to climb trees and drop into the Cherwell; and when Coplestone accompanied him, as he sometimes did, that very dignified man was quite appalled by his proceedings.

“Whately,” said Coplestone in a pained tone, “really forgot himself during our walk this afternoon; he actually, while in sight of other passengers, picked up a stone and threw it at a bird.”

In the lecture-room, again, Whately’s deportment was all his own. He lectured, lying on his back, on a sofa, with his legs dangling over the end of it, puffing a large pipe. It was in that attitude, no doubt, that he delivered himself of his famous aphorism that “woman is a creature that cannot reason and pokes the fire from the top”—an alleged example, of course, of definition _per genus et differentiam_. As for his deportment at the breakfast-table, it is recorded that “he would scatter tea-leaves over the table while he talked, and made rings on the tablecloth with the wet bottom of his teacup”; while an account of his demeanour in drawing-rooms may be borrowed from Mr. Tuckwell’s “Reminiscences of Oxford”:

“I remember,” Mr. Tuckwell writes, “my mother’s terror when he
came to call. She had met him in the house of newly-married
Mrs. Baden-Powell, who had filled her drawing-room with the
spider-legged chairs just then coming into fashion. On one of
these sat Whately, swinging, plunging, and shifting on his seat
while he talked. An ominous crack was heard; a leg of the chair
had given way; he tossed it on to the sofa without comment, and
impounded another chair.”

It was while Whately was a tutor of Oriel that Newman was elected a Fellow, and the two men saw a good deal of each other. Newman, in those days, might have been described, as Lord Morley during his Lincoln days has been described by one of his unauthorised biographers, as “somewhat of a mooning evangelical.” He had lately been converted, in strict accordance with the evangelical programme; and Whately decided to take him in hand, wake him up, and teach him to think for himself. He did so, though with results quite different from those which he anticipated; for he was not other-worldly enough for Newman. Newman thought that he lacked spirituality and inwardness—that he had too much common sense and too large an appetite. He preferred the influence of the saintly Keble and the “bright and beautiful” Richard Hurrell Froude; and so he set out, first as a disciple, presently as a leader, on the long, straight road to Rome.

This brings us, of course, to the Tractarian Movement; and we will glance, though space hardly suffers us to do more, at the part which Oriel played in it.

* * * * *