plenty of provocation. For the actors, who had jested with the Old
Religion on a ground of accepted understanding--much as a good husband
(if you will permit the simile) may gently tease his wife, not loving her
one whit the less, taught by affection to play without offending--had
mocked at the New Religion in a very different way: savagely, as enemies,
holding up to ridicule the Church's most sacred mysteries. Tertullian, in
an uncompromising treatise "De Spectaculis," denounces stage-plays root
and branch; tells of a demon who entered into a woman in a theatre and on
being exorcised pleaded that the mistake might well be excused, since he
had found her in his own demesne. Christians should avoid these shows and
await the greatest _spectaculum_ of all--the Last Judgment. 'Then,' he
promises genially, 'will be the time to listen to the tragedians, whose
lamentations will be more poignant, for their proper pain. Then will the
comedians turn and twist in capers rendered nimbler than ever by the
sting of the fire that is not quenched.' By 400 A.D. Augustine cries
triumphantly that the theatres are falling--the very walls of them
tumbling--throughout the Empire. _'Per omnes paene civitates cadunt
theatra ... cadunt et fora vel moenia in quibus demonia colebantur'_; the
very walls within which these devilments were practised. But the fury is
unabated and goes on stamping down the embers. In the eighth century our
own Alcuin (as the school of Freeman would affectionately call him) is no
less fierce. All plays are anathema to him, and he even disapproves of
dancing bears--though not, it would appear, of bad puns: _'nec tibi sit
ursorum saltantium cura, sed clericorum psallentium.'_[2]
The banning of _all_ literature you will find harder to understand; nay
impossible, I believe, unless you accept the explanation I gave you. Yet
there it is, an historical fact. 'What hath it profited posterity--_quid
posteritas emolumenti tulit,_' wrote Sulpicius Severus, about 400 A.D.,
'to read of Hector's fighting or Socrates' philosophising?' Pope Gregory
the Great--St Gregory, who sent us the Roman missionaries--made no bones
about it at all. '_Quoniam non cognovi literaturam,_' he quoted
approvingly from the 70th Psalm, '_introibo in potentias Domini_':
'Because I know nothing of literature I shall enter into the strength of
the Lord.' 'The praises of Christ cannot be uttered in the same tongue as
those of Jove,' writes this same Gregory to Desiderius, Archbishop of
Vienne, who had been rash enough to introduce some of his young men to
the ancient authors, with no worse purpose than to teach them a little
grammar. Yet no one was prouder than this Pope of the historical Rome
which he had inherited. Alcuin, again, forbade the reading of Virgil in
the monastery over which he presided: it would sully his disciples'
imagination. 'How is this, _Virgilian!_' he cried out upon one taken in
the damnable act,--'that without my knowledge and against my order thou
hast taken to studying Virgil?' To put a stop to this unhallowed
indulgence the clergy solemnly taught that Virgil was a wizard.
To us, long used as we are to the innocent gaieties of the Classical
Tripos, these measures to discourage the study of Virgil may appear
drastic, as the mental attitude of Gregory and Alcuin towards the Latin
hexameter (so closely resembling that of Byron towards the waltz) not far
removed from foolishness. But there you have in its quiddity the
mediaeval mind: and the point I now put to you is, that _out of this soil
our Universities grew._
We, who claim Oxford and Cambridge for our nursing mothers, have of all
men least excuse to forget it. A man of Leyden, of Louvain, of Liepzig,
of Berlin, may be pardoned that he passes it by. More than a hundred
years ago Salamanca had the most of her stones torn down to make defences
against Wellington's cannon. Paris, greatest of all, has kept her renown;
but you shall search the slums of the Latin Quarter in vain for the sixty
or seventy Colleges that, before the close of the fifteenth century, had
arisen to adorn her, the intellectual Queen of Europe. In Bologna, the
ancient and stately, almost alone among the continental Universities,
survive a few relics of the old collegiate system--the College of Spain,
harbouring some five or six students, and a little house founded for
Flemings in 1650: and in Bologna the system never attained to real
importance.
But in England where, great as London is, the national mind has always
harked to the country for the graces of life, so that we seem by instinct
to see it as only desirable in a green setting, our Universities, planted
by the same instinct on lawns watered by pastoral streams, have suffered
so little and received as much from the years that now we can hardly
conceive of Oxford or Cambridge as ruined save by 'the unimaginable touch
of Time.' Of all the secular Colleges bequeathed to Oxford, she has lost
not one; while Cambridge (I believe) has parted only with Cavendish. Some
have been subsumed into newer foundations; but always the process has
been one of merging, of blending, of justifying the new bottle by the old
wine. The vengeance of civil war--always very much of a family affair in
England--has dealt tenderly with Oxford and Cambridge; the more
calculating malignity of Royal Commissions not harshly on the whole.
University reformers may accuse both Oxford and Cambridge of
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade:
but with those sour men we have nothing here to do: like Isaak Walton's
milkmaid we will not 'load our minds with any fears of many things that
will never be.'
But, as they stand, Oxford and Cambridge--so amazingly alike while they
play at differences, and both so amazingly unlike anything else in the
wide world--do by a hundred daily reminders connect us with the Middle
Age, or, if you prefer Arnold's phrase, whisper its lost enchantments.
The cloister, the grave grace in hall, the chapel bell, the men hurrying
into their surplices or to lectures 'with the wind in their gowns,' the
staircase, the nest of chambers within the oak--all these softly
reverberate over our life here, as from belfries, the mediaeval mind.
And that mediaeval mind actively hated (of partial acquaintance or by
anticipation) almost everything we now study! Between it and us, except
these memorials, nothing survives to-day but the dreadful temptation to
learn, the dreadful instinct in men, as they grow older and wiser, to
trust learning after all and endow it--that, and the confidence of a
steady stream of youth.
The Universities, then, sprang out of mediaeval life, out of the
mediaeval mind; and the mediaeval mind had for centuries been taught to
abominate literature. I would not exaggerate or darken the 'Dark Ages'
for you by throwing too much bitumen into the picture. I know that at the
beginning there had been a school of Origen which advocated the study of
Greek poetry and philosophy, as well as the school of Tertullian which
condemned it. There is evidence that the 'humanities' were cultivated
here and there and after a fashion behind Gregory's august back. I grant
that, while in Alcuin's cloister (and Alcuin, remember, became a sort of
Imperial Director of Studies in Charlemagne's court) the wretched monk
who loved Virgil had to study him with an illicit candle, to copy him
with numbed fingers in a corner of the bitter-cold cloister, on the other
hand many beautiful manuscripts preserved to us bear witness of cloisters
where literature was tolerated if not officially honoured. I would not
have you so uncritical as to blame the Church or its clergy for what
happened; as I would have you remember that if the Church killed
literature, she--and, one may say, she alone--kept it alive.
Yet, and after all these reservations, it remains true that Literature
had gone down disastrously. Even philosophy, unless you count the pale
work of Boethius--_real_ philosophy had so nearly perished that men
possessed no more of Aristotle than a fragment of his Logic, and '_the_
Philosopher' had to creep back into Western Europe through translations
from the Arabic! But this is the point I wish to make clear.--Philosophy
came back in the great intellectual revival of the twelfth century;
Literature did not. Literature's hour had not come. Men had to catch up
on a dreadful leeway of ignorance. The form did not matter as yet: they
wanted science--to know. I should say, rather, that as yet form _seemed_
not to matter: for in fact form always matters: the personal always
matters: and you cannot explain the vast crowds Abelard drew to Paris
save by the fascination in the man, the fire communicated by the living
voice. Moreover (as in a previous lecture I tried to prove) you cannot
divorce accurate thought from accurate speech; but for accuracy, even for
hair-splitting accuracy, of speech the Universities had the definitions
of the Schoolmen. In literature they had yet to discover a concern.
Literature was a thing of the past, inanimate. Nowhere in Europe could it
be felt even to breathe. To borrow a beautiful phrase of Wordsworth's,
men numbered it among 'things silently gone out of mind or things
violently destroyed.'
Nobody quite knows how these Universities began. Least of all can anybody
tell how Oxford and Cambridge began. In Bede, for instance--that is, in
England as the eighth century opens--we see scholarship already moving
towards the _thing_, treading with sure instinct towards the light.
Though a hundred historians have quoted it, I doubt if a feeling man who
loves scholarship can read the famous letter of Cuthbert describing
Bede's end and not come nigh to tears.
And Bede's story contains no less wonder than beauty, when you consider
how the fame of this holy and humble man of heart, who never left his
cloisters at Jarrow, spread over Europe, so that, though it sound
incredible, our Northumbria narrowly missed in its day to become the
pole-star of Western culture. But he was a disinterested genius, and his
pupil, Alcuin, a pushing dull man and a born reactionary; so that, while
Alcuin scored the personal success and went off to teach in the court of
Charlemagne, the great chance was lost.
No one knows when the great Universities were founded, or precisely out
of what schools they grew; and you may derive amusement from the
historians when they start to explain how Oxford and Cambridge in
particular came to be chosen for sites. My own conjecture, that they were
chosen for the extraordinary salubrity of their climates, has met (I
regret to say) with derision, and may be set down to the caprice of one
who ever inclines to think the weather good where he is happy. Our own
learned historian, indeed--Mr J. Bass Mullinger--devotes some closely
reasoned pages to proving that Cambridge was chosen as the unlikeliest
spot in the world, and is driven to quote the learned Poggio's opinion
that the unhealthiness of a locality recommended it as a place of
education for youth; as Plato, knowing naught of Christianity, but gifted
with a soul naturally Christian, '_had selected a noisome spot for his
Academe, in order that the mind might be strengthened by the weakness of
the body._' So difficult still it is for the modern mind to interpret the
mediaeval!
Most likely these Universities grew as a tree grows from a seed blown by
chance of the wind. It seems easy enough to understand why Paris, that
great city, should have possessed a great University; yet I surmise the
processes at Oxford and Cambridge to have been only a little less
fortuitous. The schools of Remigius and of William of Champeaux (we will
say) have given Paris a certain prestige, when Abelard, a pupil of
William's, springs into fame and draws a horde of students from all over
Europe to sit at his feet. These 'nations' of young men have to be
organised, brought under some sort of discipline, if only to make the
citizens' lives endurable: and lo! the thing is done. In like manner
Irnerius at Bologna, Vacarius at Oxford, and at Cambridge some innominate
teacher, 'of importance,' as Browning would put it, 'in his day,'
possibly set the ball rolling; or again it is suggested that a body of
scholars dissatisfied with Oxford (such dissatisfaction has been known
even in historical times) migrated hither--a laborious journey, even
nowadays--and that so
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far!
These young or nascent bodies had a trick of breaking away after this
fashion. For reasons no longer obvious they hankered specially towards
Stamford or Northampton. Until quite recently, within living memory, all
candidates for a Mastership of Arts at Oxford had to promise never to
lecture at Stamford. A flood here in 1520, which swept away Garret Hostel
Bridge, put Cambridge in like mind and started a prophecy (to which you
may find allusion in the fourth book of "The Faerie Queene") that both
Universities would meet in the end, and kiss, at Stamford. Each in turn
broke away for Northampton, and the worthy Fuller (a Northamptonshire
man) has recorded his wonder that so eligible a spot was not finally
chosen.
I have mentioned a flood: but the immediate causes of the migrations or
attempted migrations were not usually respectable enough to rank with any
such act of God. They started as a rule with some Town and Gown row, or
some bloody affray between scholars of the North and of the South.
Without diminishing your sense of the real fervour for learning which
drew young men from the remotest parts of Europe to these centres, but
having for my immediate object to make clear to you that, whatever these
young men sought, it was not literature, I wish you first to have in your
minds a vivid picture of what a University town was like, and what its
students were like during the greater part of the 12th and 13th
centuries; that is to say, after the first enthusiasm had died down, when
Oxford or Cambridge had organised itself into a _Studium Generale_, or
_Universitas_ (which, of course, has nothing to do with Universality,
whether of teaching or of frequenting, but simply means a Society.
_Universitas_ = all of us).
To begin with, the town was of wood, often on fire in places; with the
alleviation of frequent winter floods, which in return, in the words of a
modern poet, would 'leave a lot of little things behind them.' It
requires but a small effort of the imagination in Cambridge to picture
the streets as narrow, dark, almost meeting overhead in gables out of
which the house slops would be discharged after casual warning down into
a central gutter. That these narrow streets were populous with students
remains certain, however much discount we allow on contemporary bills of
reckoning. And the crowd was noisy. Men have always been ingenious in
their ways of celebrating academical success. Pythagoras, for example,
sacrificed an ox on solving the theorem numbered 47 in the first book of
Euclid; and even to-day a Professor in his solitary lodge may be
encouraged to believe now and then, from certain evidences in the sky,
that the spirit of Pythagoras is not dead but translated.
But of the mediaeval University the lawlessness, though well attested,
can scarcely be conceived. When in the streets 'nation' drew the knife
upon 'nation,' 'town' upon 'gown'; when the city bell started to answer
the clang of St. Mary's; horrible deeds were done. I pass over massacres,
tumults such as the famous one of St Scholastica's Day at Oxford, and
choose one at a decent distance (yet entirely typical) exhumed from the
annals of the University of Toulouse, in the year 1332. In that year
Five brothers of the noble family de la Penne lived together in a
Hospicium at Toulouse as students of the Civil and Canon Law. One of
them was Provost of a Monastery, another Archdeacon of Albi, another an
Archpriest, another Canon of Toledo. A bastard son of their father,
named Peter, lived with them as squire to the Canon. On Easter Day,
Peter, with another squire of the household named Aimery Béranger and
other students, having dined at a tavern, were dancing with women,
singing, shouting, and beating 'metallic vessels and iron culinary
instruments' in the street before their masters' house. The Provost and
the Archpriest were sympathetically watching the jovial scene from a
window, until it was disturbed by the appearance of a Capitoul and his
officers, who summoned some of the party to surrender the prohibited
arms which they were wearing. '_Ben Senhor, non fassat_' was the
impudent reply. The Capitoul attempted to arrest one of the offenders;
whereupon the ecclesiastical party made a combined attack upon the
official. Aimery Béranger struck him in the face with a poignard,
cutting off his nose and part of his chin and lips, and knocking out or
breaking no less than eleven teeth. The surgeons deposed that if he
recovered (he eventually did recover) he would never be able to speak
intelligibly. One of the watch was killed outright by Peter de la
Penne. That night the murderer slept, just as if nothing had happened,
in the house of his ecclesiastical masters. The whole household,
masters and servants alike, were, however, surprised by the other
Capitouls and a crowd of 200 citizens, and led off to prison, and the
house is alleged to have been pillaged. The Archbishop's Official
demanded their surrender. In the case of the superior ecclesiastics
this, after a short delay, was granted. But Aimery, who dressed like a
layman in 'divided and striped clothes' and wore a long beard, they
refused to treat as a clerk, though it was afterwards alleged that the
tonsure was plainly discernible upon his head until it was shaved by
order of the Capitouls. Aimery was put to the torture, admitted his
crime, and was sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out by
hanging, after he had had his hand cut off on the scene of the crime,
and been dragged by horses to the place of execution. The Capitouls
were then excommunicated by the Official, and the ecclesiastical side
of the quarrel was eventually transferred to the Roman Court. Before
the Parlement of Paris the University complained of the violation of
the Royal privilege exempting scholars' servants from the ordinary
tribunals. The Capitouls were imprisoned, and after long litigation
sentenced to pay enormous damages to the ruffian's family and erect a
chapel for the good of his soul. The city was condemned for a time to
the forfeiture of all its privileges. The body was cut down from the
gibbet on which it had been hanging for three years, and accorded a
solemn funeral. Four Capitouls bore the pall, and all fathers of
families were required to walk in the procession. When they came to the
Schools, the citizens solemnly begged pardon of the University, and the
cortège was joined by 3000 scholars. Finally, it cost the city 15,000
livres tournois or more to regain their civic privileges.[3]
The late Mr Cecil Rhodes once summarized all Fellows of Colleges as
children in matters of finance. Be that as it may, you will find nothing
more constant in history than the talent of the Universities for
extracting money or money's worth out of a riot. Time (I speak as a
parent) has scarcely blunted that faculty; and still--since where young
men congregate, noise there must be--our Universities like Wordsworth's
Happy Warrior
turn their necessity to glorious gain.
These were the excesses of young 'bloods,' and their servants: but with
them mingled scholars not less ferocious in their habits because almost
desperately poor. You all know, I dare say, that very poor scholars would
be granted licences to beg by the Chancellor. The sleeve of this gown in
which I address you represents the purse or pocket of a Master of Arts,
and may hint to you by its amplitude how many crusts he was prepared to
receive from the charitable.
Now, choosing to ignore (because it has been challenged as overpainted) a
picture of penury endured by the scholars of St John's College in this
University, let me tell you two stories, one well attested, the other
fiction if you will, but both agreeable as testifying to the spirit of
youth which, ever blowing upon their sacred embers, has kept Oxford and
Cambridge perennially alive.
My first is of three scholars so poor that they possessed but one 'cappa'
and gown between them. They took it in turns therefore, and when one went
to lecture the other two kept to their lodgings. I invite you even to
reflect on the joy of the lucky one, in a winter lecture room, dark, with
unglazed windows, as he listened and shuffled his feet for warmth in the
straw of the floor. [No one, by the way, can understand the incessant
harping of our early poets upon May-time and the return of summer until
he has pictured to himself the dark and cold discomfort of a
Middle-English winter.] These three poor scholars fed habitually on
bread, with soup and a little wine, tasting meat only on Sundays and
feasts of the Church. Yet one of them, Richard of Chichester, who lived
to become a saint, _saepe retulit quod nunquam in vita sua tam jucundam,
tam delectabilem duxerat vitam_--that never had he lived so jollily, so
delectably.
That is youth, youth blessed by friendship. Now for my second story,
which is also of youth and friendship.--
Two poor scholars, who had with pains become Masters of Arts and saved
their pence to purchase the coveted garb, on the afternoon of their
admission took a country walk in it, together flaunting their new finery.
But, the day being gusty, on their return across the bridge, a puff of
wind caught the _biretta_ of one and blew it into the river. The loss was
irrecoverable, since neither could swim. The poor fellow looked at his
friend. His friend looked at him. 'Between us two,' he said, 'it is all
or naught,' and cast his own cap to float and sink with the other down
stream.
You will never begin to understand literature until you understand
something of life. These young men, your forerunners, understood
something of life while as yet completely careless of literature. After
the impulse of Abelard and others had died down, the mass of students
betook themselves to the Universities, no doubt, for quite ordinary,
mercenary reasons. The University led to the Church, and the Church, in
England at any rate, was the door to professional life.
Nearly all the civil servants of the Crown--I am here quoting freely--the
diplomatists, the secretaries or advisers of great nobles, the
physicians, the architects, at one time the secular law-givers, all
through the Middle Ages the then large tribe of ecclesiastical lawyers,
were ecclesiastics.... Clerkship did not necessarily involve even minor
orders. But as it was cheaper to a King or a Bishop or a temporal magnate
to reward his physician, his legal adviser, his secretary, or his agent
by a Canonry or a Rectory than by large salaries, the average student of
Paris or Oxford or Cambridge looked toward the Church as the 'main
chance' as we say, and small blame to him! He never at any rate looked
towards Literature: nor did the Universities, wise in their generation,
encourage him to do anything of the sort.