College, though its legal name is _Magna Aula Universitatis_. The
name "University College" causes much perplexity to visitors. They are
with difficulty taught by the friend who is lionizing them to
distinguish it from the University. But the University of Oxford is a
federation of colleges, of which University College is one, resembling
in all respects the rest of the sisterhood, being, like them, under the
federal authority of the University, retaining the same measure of
college right, conducting the domestic instruction and discipline of its
students through its own officers, but sending them to the lecture rooms
of the University Professors for the higher teaching, and to the
University examination rooms to be examined for their degrees. The
college is an ample and venerable pile, with two towered gateways, each
opening into a quadrangle, its front stretching along the High Street,
on the side opposite St. Mary's Church. The darkness of the stone seems
to bespeak immemorial antiquity, but the style, which is the later
Gothic characteristic of Oxford, and symbolical of its history, shows
that the buildings really belong to the time of the Stuarts. "That
building must be very old, Sir," said an American visitor to the master
of the college, pointing to its dark front. "Oh, no," was the master's
reply, "the colour deceives you; that building is not more than two
hundred years old." In invidious contrast to this mass, debased but
imposing in its style, the pedantic mania for pure Gothic which marks
the Neo-catholic reaction in Oxford, and which will perhaps hereafter be
derided as we deride the classic mania of the last century, has led Mr.
Gilbert Scott to erect a pure Gothic library. This building, moreover,
has nothing in its form to bespeak its purpose, but resembles a chapel.
Over the gateway of the larger quadrangle is a statue, in Roman costume,
of James II.; one of the few memorials of the ejected tyrant, who in his
career of reaction visited the college and had two rooms on the east
side of the quadrangle fitted up for the performance of mass. Obadiah
Walker, the master of the college, had turned Papist, and became one of
the leaders of the reaction, in the overthrow of which he was involved,
the fall of his master and the ruin of his party being announced to him
by the boys singing at his window--"Ave Maria, old Obadiah." In the same
quadrangle are the chambers of Shelley, and the room to which he was
summoned by the assembled college authorities to receive, with his
friend Hogg, sentence of expulsion for having circulated an atheistical
treatise. In the ante-chapel is the florid monument of Sir William
Jones. But the modern divinities of the college are the two great legal
brothers, Lord Eldon and Lord Stowell, whose colossal statues
fraternally united are conspicuous in the library, whose portraits hang
side by side in the hall, whose medallion busts greet you at the
entrance to the Common Room. Pass by these medallions, and look into the
Common Room itself, with panelled walls, red curtains, polished mahogany
table, and generally cozy aspect, whither after the dinner in hall the
fellows of the college retire to sip their wine and taste such social
happiness as the rule of celibacy permits. Over that ample fire-place,
round the blaze of which the circle is drawn in the winter evenings, you
will see the marble bust, carved by no mean hand, of an ancient king,
and underneath it are the words _Alfredus Rex Fundator_.
Alas! both traditions--the tradition that Alfred founded the University
of Oxford, and the tradition that he founded University College--are
devoid of historical foundation. Universities did not exist in Alfred's
days. They were developed centuries later out of the monastery schools.
When Queen Elizabeth was on a visit to Cambridge, a scholar delivered
before her an oration, in which he exalted the antiquity of his own
university at the expense of that of the University of Oxford. The
University of Oxford was roused to arms. In that uncritical age any
antiquarian weapon which the fury of academical patriotism could supply
was eagerly grasped, and the reputation of the great antiquary Camden is
somewhat compromised with regard to an interpolation in Asser's Life of
Alfred, which formed the chief documentary support of the Oxford case.
The historic existence of both the English universities dawns in the
reign of the scholar king, and the restorer of order and prosperity
after the ravages of the conquest and the tyranny of Rufus--Henry I. In
that reign the Abbot of Croyland, to gain money for the rebuilding of
his abbey, set up a school where, we are told, Priscian's grammar,
Aristotle's logic with the commentaries of Porphyry and Averroes, Cicero
and Quintilian as masters of rhetoric, were taught after the manner of
the school of Orleans. In the following reign a foreign professor,
Vacarius, roused the jealousy of the English monarchy and baronage by
teaching Roman law in the schools of Oxford. The thirteenth century,
that marvellous and romantic age of mediaeval religion and character,
mediaeval art, mediaeval philosophy, was also the palmy age of the
universities. Then Oxford gloried in Groseteste, at once paragon and
patron of learning, church reformer and champion of the national church
against Roman aggression; in his learned and pious friend, Adam de
Marisco; and in Roger Bacon, the pioneer and proto-martyr of physical
science. Then, with Paris, she was the great seat of that school
philosophy, wonderful in its subtlety as well as in its aridity, which,
albeit it bore no fruit itself, trained the mind of Europe for more
fruitful studies, and was the original product of mediaeval Christendom,
though its forms of thought were taken from the deified Stagyrite, and
it was clothed in the Latin language, though in a form of that language
so much altered and debased from the classical as to become, in fact, a
literary vernacular of the Middle Ages. Then her schools, her church
porches, her very street corners, every spot where a professor could
gather an audience, were thronged with the aspiring youth who had
flocked, many of them begging their way out of the dark prison-house of
feudalism, to what was then, in the absence of printing, the sole centre
of intellectual light. Then Oxford, which in later times became from the
clerical character of the headships and fellowships the great organ of
reaction, was the great organ of progress, produced the political songs
which embodied, with wonderful force, the principles of free government,
and sent her students to fight under the banner of the university in the
army of Simon de Montfort.
It was in the thirteenth century that University College was really
founded. The founder was William of Durham, an English ecclesiastic who
had studied in the University of Paris. The universities were, like the
church, common to all the natives of Latin Christendom, that
ecclesiastical and literary federation of the European States, which,
afterwards broken up by the Reformation, is now in course of
reconstruction through uniting influences of a new kind. William of
Durham bequeathed to the University a fund for the maintenance of
students in theology. The university purchased with the fund a house in
which these students were maintained, and which was styled the Great
Hall of the University, in contra-distinction to the multitude of little
private halls or hospices in which students lived, generally under the
superintendence of a graduate who was their teacher. The hall or college
was under the visitorship of the University; but this visitorship being
irksome, and a dispute having arisen in the early part of the last
century whether it was to be exercised by the University at large, in
convocation, or by the theological faculty only, the college set up a
claim to be a royal foundation of the time of King Alfred, the reputed
founder of the University, and thus exempt from any visitorship but that
of the Crown. It was probably not very difficult to convince a
Hanoverian court of law that the visitorship of an Oxford college ought
to be transferred from the Jacobite university to the Crown; and so it
came to pass that the Court of King's Bench solemnly ratified as a fact
what historical criticism pronounces to be a baseless fable. The case in
favour of William of Durham as the founder is so clear, that the
antiquaries are ready to burst with righteous indignation, and one
almost enjoys the intensity of their wrath.
The Great Hall of the University was not, when first founded, a perfect
college. It was only a house for some eight or ten graduates in arts who
were studying divinity. The first perfect college was founded by Walter
de Merton, the Chancellor of Henry III., to whom is due the conception
of uniting the anti-monastic pursuit of secular learning with monastic
seclusion and discipline, for the benefit of that multitude of young
students who had hitherto dwelt at large in the city under little or no
control, and often showed, by their faction fights and other outrages,
that they contained the quintessence of the nation's turbulence as well
as of its intellectual activity and ambition. The quaint old quadrangle
of Merton, called, nobody seems to know why, "Mob" Quad, may be regarded
as the cradle of collegiate life in England, and indeed in Europe.
Still University College is the oldest foundation of learning now
existing in England; and therefore it may be not inappropriately
dedicated to the memory of the king who was the restorer of our
intellectual life as well as the preserver of our religion and our
institutions. Mr. Freeman, as the stern minister of fact, would, no
doubt, cast down the bust of Alfred from the Common Room chimney-piece
and set up that of William of Durham, if a likeness of him could be
found, in its place. But it may be doubted whether William of Durham, if
he were alive, would do the same.
Marcus Aurelius, Alfred and St. Louis, are the three examples of perfect
virtue on a throne. But the virtue of St. Louis is deeply tainted with
asceticism; and with the sublimated selfishness on which asceticism is
founded, he sacrifices everything and everybody--sacrifices national
interests, sacrifices the lives of the thousands of his subjects whom he
drags with him in his chimerical crusades--to the good of his own soul.
The Reflections of Marcus Aurelius will be read with ever increasing
admiration by all who have learned to study character, and to read it in
its connection with history. Alone in every sense, without guidance or
support but that which he found in his own breast, the imperial Stoic
struggled serenely, though hopelessly, against the powers of evil which
were dragging heathen Rome to her inevitable doom. Alfred was a
Christian hero, and in his Christianity he found the force which bore
him, through calamity apparently hopeless, to victory and happiness.
It must be owned that the materials for the history of the English king
are not very good. His biography by Bishop Asser, his counsellor and
friend, which forms the principal authority, is panegyrical and
uncritical, not to mention that a doubt rests on the authenticity of
some portions of it. But in the general picture there are a consistency
and a sobriety, which, combined with its peculiarity, commend it to us
as historical. The leading acts of Alfred's life are, of course, beyond
doubt. And as to his character, he speaks to us himself in his works,
and the sentiments which he expresses perfectly correspond with the
physiognomy of the portrait.
We have called him a Christian hero. He was the victorious champion of
Christianity against Paganism. This is the real significance of the
struggle and of his character. The Northmen, or, as we loosely term
them, the Danes, are called by the Saxon chroniclers the Pagans. As to
race, the Northman, like the Saxon, was a Teuton, and the institutions,
and the political and social tendencies of both, were radically the
same.
It has been said that Christianity enervated the English and gave them
over into the hands of the fresh and robust sons of nature. Asceticism
and the abuse of monachism enervated the English. Asceticism taught the
spiritual selfishness which flies from the world and abandons it to ruin
instead of serving God by serving humanity. Kings and chieftains, under
the hypocritical pretence of exchanging a worldly for an angelic life,
buried themselves in the indolence, not seldom in the sensuality, of the
cloister, when they ought to have been leading their people against the
Dane. But Christianity formed the bond which held the English together,
and the strength of their resistance. It inspired their patriot martyrs,
it raised up to them a deliverer at their utmost need. The causes of
Danish success are manifest; superior prowess and valour, sustained by
more constant practice in war, of which the Saxon had probably had
comparatively little since the final subjection of the Celt and the
union of the Saxon kingdoms under Egbert; the imperfect character of
that union, each kingdom retaining its own council and its own
interests; and above all the command of the sea, which made the invaders
ubiquitous, while the march of the defenders was delayed, and their
junction prevented, by the woods and morasses of the uncleared island,
in which the only roads worthy of the name were those left by the
Romans.
It would be wrong to call the Northmen mere corsairs, or even to class
them with piratical states such as Cilicia of old, or Barbary in more
recent times. Their invasions were rather to be regarded as an after-act
of the great migration of the Germanic tribes, one of the last waves of
the flood which overwhelmed the Roman Empire, and deposited the germs of
modern Christendom. They were, and but for the defensive energy of the
Christianized Teuton would have been, to the Saxon what the Saxon had
been to the Celt, whose sole monuments in England now are the names of
hills and rivers, the usual epitaph of exterminated races. Like the
Saxons the Northmen came by sea, untouched by those Roman influences,
political and religious, by which most of the barbarians had been more
or less transmuted before their actual irruption into the Empire. If
they treated all the rest of mankind as their prey, this was the
international law of heathendom, modified only by a politic humanity in
the case of the Imperial Roman, who preferred enduring dominion to blood
and booty. With Christianity came the idea, even now imperfectly
realized, of the brotherhood of man. The Northmen were a memorable race,
and English character, especially its maritime element, received in them
a momentous addition. In their northern abodes they had undergone, no
doubt, the most rigorous process of national selection. The sea-roving
life, to which they were driven by the poverty of their soil, as the
Scandinavian of our day is driven to emigration, intensified in them the
vigour, the enterprise, and the independence of the Teuton. As has been
said before, they were the first ocean sailors; for the Phoenicians,
though adventurous had crept along the shore; and the Greeks and Romans
had done the same. The Northman, stouter of heart than they, put forth
into mid Atlantic. American antiquarians are anxious to believe in a
Norse discovery of America. Norse colonies were planted in Greenland
beyond what is now the limit of human habitation; and when a power grew
up in his native seats which could not be brooked by the Northman's love
of freedom, he founded amidst the unearthly scenery of Iceland a
community which brought the image of a republic of the Homeric type far
down into historic times. His race, widely dispersed in its course of
adventure, and everywhere asserting its ascendancy, sat on the thrones
of Normandy, Apulia, Sicily, England, Ireland, and even Russia, and gave
heroic chiefs to the crusaders. The pirates were not without heart
towards each other, nor without a rudimentary civilization, which
included on the one hand a strong regard for freehold property in land,
and on the other a passionate love of heroic days. Their mythology was
the universal story of the progress of the sun and the changes of the
year, but in a northern version, wild with storms and icebergs, gloomy
with the darkness of Scandinavian winters. Their religion was a war
religion, the lord of their hearts a war god; their only heaven was that
of the brave, their only hell that of the coward; and the joys of
Paradise were a renewal of the fierce combat and the fierce carouse of
earth. Some of them wound themselves up on the eve of battle to a frenzy
like that of a Malay running amuck. But this was, at all events, a
religion of action, not of ceremonial or spell; and it quelled the fear
of death. In some legends of the Norse mythology there is a humorous
element which shows freedom of spirit; while in others, such as the
legend of the death of Balder, there is a pathos not uncongenial to
Christianity. The Northmen were not priest-ridden. Their gods were not
monstrous and overwhelming forces like the hundred-handed idols of the
Hindu, but human forms, their own high qualities idealized, like the
gods of the Greek, though with Scandinavian force in place of Hellenic
grace.
Converted to Christianity, the Northman transferred his enthusiasm, his
martial prowess and his spirit of adventure from the service of Odin to
that of Christ, and became a devotee and a crusader. But in his
unconverted state he was an exterminating enemy of Christianity; and
Christianity was the civilization as well as the religion of England.
Scarcely had the Saxon kingdom been united by Egbert, when the barks of
the Northmen appeared, filling the English Charlemagne, no doubt, with
the same foreboding sorrow with which they had filled his Frankish
prototype and master. In the course of the half century which followed,
the swarms of rovers constantly increased, and grew more pertinacious
and daring in their attacks. Leaving their ships they took horses,
extended their incursions inland, and formed in the interior of the
country strongholds, into which they brought the plunder of the
district. At last they in effect conquered the North and Midland, and
set up a satrap king, as the agent of their extortion. They seem, like
the Franks of Clovis, to have quartered themselves as "guests" upon the
unhappy people of the land. The monasteries and churches were the
special objects of their attacks, both as the seats of the hated
religion, and as the centres of wealth; and their sword never spared a
monk. Croyland, Peterborough, Huntingdon and Ely, were turned to blood-
stained ashes. Edmund, the Christian chief of East Anglia, found a
martyrdom, of which one of the holiest and most magnificent of English
abbeys was afterwards the monument. The brave Algar, another East
Anglian chieftain, having taken the holy sacrament with all his
followers on the eve of battle, perished with them in a desperate
struggle, overcome by the vulpine cunning of the marauders. Among the
leaders of the Northmen were the terrible brothers Ingrar and Ubba,
fired, if the Norse legend may be trusted, by revenge as well as by the
love of plunder and horror; for they were the sons of that Ragnar
Lodbrok who had perished in the serpent tower of the Saxon Ella. When
Alfred appeared upon the scene, Wessex itself, the heritage of the house
of Cerdic and the supreme kingdom, was in peril from the Pagans, who had
firmly entrenched themselves at Reading, in the angle between the Thames
and Kennet, and English Christianity was threatened with destruction.
A younger but a favourite child, Alfred was sent in his infancy by his
father to Rome to receive the Pope's blessing. He was thus affiliated,
as it were, to that Roman element, ecclesiastical and political, which,
combined with the Christian and Teutonic elements, has made up English
civilization. But he remained through life a true Teuton. He went a
second time, in company with his father, to Rome, still a child, yet old
enough, especially if he was precocious, to receive some impressions
from the city of historic grandeur, ancient art, ecclesiastical order,
centralized power. There is a pretty legend, denoting the docility of
the boy and his love of learning, or at least of the national lays; but
he was also a hunter and a warrior. From his youth he had a thorn in his
flesh, in the shape of a mysterious disease, perhaps epilepsy, to which
monkish chroniclers have given an ascetic and miraculous turn; and this
enhances our sense of the hero's moral energy in the case of Alfred, as
in that of William III.
As "Crown Prince," to use the phrase of a German writer, Alfred took
part with his elder brother, King Ethelbert, in the mortal struggle
against the Pagans, then raging around Reading and along the rich valley
through which the 'Great Western Railway' now runs, and where a Saxon
victory is commemorated by the White Horse, which forms the subject of a
little work by Thomas Hughes, a true representative, if any there be, of
the liegemen and soldiers of King Alfred. When Ethelbert was showing
that in him at all events Christianity was not free from the ascetic
taint, by continuing to hear mass in his tent when the moment had come
for decisive action, Alfred charged up-hill "like a wild boar" against
the heathen, and began a battle which, his brother at last coming up,
ended in a great victory. The death of Ethelbert, in the midst of the
crisis, placed the perilous crown on Alfred's head. Ethelbert left
infant sons, but the monarchy was elective, though one of the line of
Cerdic was always chosen; and those were the days of the real king, the
ruler judge, and captain of the people, not of what Napoleon called the
_cochon a l'engrais a cinq millions par an_. In pitched battles,
eight of which were fought in rapid succession, the English held their
own; but they were worn out, and at length could no longer be brought
into the field. Whether a faint monkish tradition of the estrangement of
the people by unpopular courses on the part of the young king has any
substance of truth we cannot say.
Utter gloom now settled down upon the Christian king and people. Had
Alfred yielded to his inclinations, he would probably have followed the
example of his brother-in-law, Buhred of Mercia, and sought a congenial
retreat amidst the churches and libraries of Rome; asceticism would have
afforded him a pretext for so doing; but he remained at the post of
duty. Athelney, a little island in the marshes of Somersetshire--then
marshes, now drained and a fruitful plain--to which he retired with the
few followers left him, has been aptly compared to the mountains of
Asturias, which formed the last asylum of Christianity in Spain. A jewel
with the legend in Anglo-Saxon, "Alfred caused me to be made," was found
near the spot, and is now in the University Museum at Oxford. A similar
island in the marshes of Cambridgeshire formed the last rallying point
of English patriotism against the Norman Conquest. Of course, after the
deliverance, a halo of legends gathered around Athelney. The legends of
the king disguised as a peasant in the cottage of the herdsman, and of
the king disguised as a harper in the camp of the Dane, are familiar to
childhood. There is also a legend of the miraculous appearance of the
great Saxon Saint Cuthbert. The king in his extreme need had gone to
fish in a neighbouring stream, but had caught nothing, and was trying to
comfort himself by reading the Psalms, when a poor man came to the door
and begged for a piece of bread. The king gave him half his last loaf
and the little wine left in the pitcher. The beggar vanished; the loaf
was unbroken, the pitcher brimful of wine; and fishermen came in
bringing a rich haul of fish from the river. In the night St. Cuthbert
appeared to the king in a dream and promised him victory. We see at
least what notion the generations nearest to him had of the character of
Alfred.