A GENERAL VIEW
WE have looked at Oxford life in so many different periods, that now,
perhaps, we may regard it, like our artist, as a whole, and take a
bird’s-eye view of its present condition. We may ask St. Bernard’s
question, _Whither hast thou come_? a question to which there are so many
answers readily given, from within and without the University. It is not
probable that the place will vary, in essential character, from that
which has all along been its own. We shall have considered Oxford to
very little purpose, if it is not plain that the University has been less
a home of learning, on the whole, than a microcosm of English
intellectual life. At Oxford the men have been thinking what England was
to think a few months later, and they have been thinking with the passion
and the energy of youth. The impulse to thought has not, perhaps, very
often been given by any mind or minds within the college walls; it has
come from without—from Italy, from France, from London, from a country
vicarage, perhaps, from the voice of a wandering preacher. Whencesoever
the leaven came, Oxford (being so small, and in a way so homogeneous) has
always fermented readily, and promptly distributed the new forces,
religious or intellectual, throughout England.
It is characteristic of England that the exciting topics, the questions
that move the people most, have always been religious, or deeply
tinctured with religion. Conservative as Oxford is, the home of
‘impossible causes,’ she has always given asylum to new doctrines, to all
the thoughts which comfortable people call ‘dangerous.’ We have seen her
agitated by Lollardism, which never quite died, perhaps, till its eager
protest against the sacerdotal ideal was fused into the fire of the
Reformation. Oxford was literally devastated by that movement, and by
the Catholic reaction, and then was disturbed for a century and a half by
the war of Puritanism, and of Tory Anglicanism. The latter had scarcely
had time to win the victory, and to fall into a doze by her pipe of port,
when Evangelical religion came to vex all that was moderate, mature, and
fond of repose. The revolutionary enthusiasm of Shelley’s time was
comparatively feeble, because it had no connection with religion; or, at
least, no connection with the religion to which our countrymen were
accustomed. Between the era of the Revolution and our own day, two
religious tempests and one secular storm of thought have swept over
Oxford, and the University is at present, if one may say so, like a ship
in a heavy swell, the sea looking much more tranquil than it really is.
The Tractarian movement was, of course, the first of the religious
disturbances to which we refer, and much the most powerful.
It is curious to read about that movement in the _Apologia_, for example,
of Cardinal Newman. On what singular topics men’s minds were bent! what
queer survivals of the speculations of the Schools agitated them as they
walked round Christ Church meadows! They enlightened each other on
things transcendental, yet material, on matters unthinkable, and,
properly speaking, unspeakable. It is as if they ‘spoke with tongues,’
which had a meaning then, and for them, but which to us, some forty years
later, seem as meaningless as the inscriptions of Easter Island.
[Picture: Old Episcopal Palace. From a Drawing by R. Kent Thomas]
This was the shape, the Tractarian movement was the shape, in which the
great Romantic reaction laid hold on England and Oxford. The father of
all the revival of old doctrines and old rituals in our Church, the
originator of that wistful return to things beautiful and long dead,
was—Walter Scott. Without him, and his wonderful wand which made the dry
bones of history live, England and France would not have known this
picturesque reaction. The stir in these two countries was curiously
characteristic of their genius. In France it put on, in the first place,
the shape of art, of poetry, painting, sculpture. Romanticism blossomed
in 1830, and bore fruit for ten years. The religious reaction was a
punier thing; the great Abbé, who was the Newman of France, was himself
unable to remain within the fantastic church that he built out of
medieval ruins. In England, and especially in Oxford, the æsthetic
admiration of the Past was promptly transmuted into religion. Doctrines
which men thought dead were resuscitated; and from Oxford came, not
poetry or painting, but the sermons of Newman, the _Tracts_, the whole
religious force which has transformed and revivified the Church of
England. That force is still working, it need hardly be said, in the
University of to-day, under conditions much changed, but not without
thrills of the old volcanic energy.
Probably the Anglican ideas ceased to be the most powerfully agitating of
intellectual forces in Oxford about 1845. A new current came in from
Rugby, and the influence of Dr. Arnold and the natural tide of reaction
began to run very strong. If we had the _apologiæ_ of the men who
thought most, about the time when Clough was an undergraduate, we should
see that the influence of the Anglican divines had become a thing of
sentiment and curiosity. The life had not died out of it, but the people
whom it could permanently affect were now limited in number and easily
recognisable. This form of religion might tempt and attract the
strongest men for a while, but it certainly would not retain them. It is
by this time a matter of history, though we are speaking of our
contemporaries, that the abyss between the _Lives of the English Saints_,
and the _Nemesis of Faith_, was narrow, and easily crossed. There was in
Oxford that enthusiasm for certain German ideas which had previously been
felt for medieval ideas. Liberalism in history, philosophy, and religion
was the ruling power; and people believed in Liberalism. What is, or
used to be, called the Broad Church, was the birth of some ten or fifteen
years of Liberalism in religion at Oxford. The _Essays and Reviews_ were
what the _Tracts_ had been; and Homeric battles were fought over the
income of the Regius Professor of Greek. When that affair was settled
Liberalism had had her innings, there was no longer a single dominant
intellectual force; but the old storms, slowly subsiding, left the ship
of the University lurching and rolling in a heavy swell.
People believed in Liberalism! Their faith worked miracles; and the
great University Commission performed many wonderful works, bidding close
fellowships be open, and giving all power into the hands of Examiners.
Their dispensation still survives; the large examining-machine works
night and day, in term time and vacation, and yet we are not happy. The
age in Oxford, as in the world at large, is the age of collapsed
opinions. Never men believed more fervidly in any revelation than the
men of twenty years ago believed in political economy, free trade, open
competition, and the reign of Common-sense and of Mr. Cobden. Where is
that faith now? Many of the middle-aged disciples of the Church of
Common-sense are still in our midst. They say the old sayings, they
intone the old responses, but somehow it seems that scepticism is abroad;
it seems that the world is wider than their system. Not even open
examinations for fellowships and scholarships, not half a dozen new
schools, and science, and the Museum, and the Slade Professorship of Art,
have made Oxford that ideal University which was expected to come down
from Heaven like the New Jerusalem.
We have glanced at the history of Oxford to little purpose if we have not
learned that it is an eminently discontented place. There is room in
colleges and common rooms for both sorts of discontent—the ignoble, which
is the child of vanity and weakness; and the noble, which is the
unassuaged thirst for perfection. The present result of the last forty
years in Oxford is a discontent which is constantly trying to improve the
working, and to widen the intellectual influence, of the University.
There are more ways than one in which this feeling gets vent. The
simplest, and perhaps the most honest and worthy impulse, is that which
makes the best of the present arrangements. Great religious excitement
and religious discussion being in abeyance, for once, the energy of the
place goes out in teaching. The last reforms have made Oxford a huge
collection of schools, in which physical science, history, philosophy,
philology, scholarship, theology, and almost everything in the world but
archæology, are being taught and learned with very great vigour. The
hardest worked of men is a conscientious college tutor; and almost all
tutors are conscientious. The professors being an ornamental, but (with
few exceptions) _merely_ ornamental, order of beings, the tutors have to
do the work of a University, which, for the moment, is a
teaching-machine. They deliver I know not how many sets of lectures a
year, and each lecture demands a fresh and full acquaintance with the
latest ideas of French, German, and Italian scholars. No one can afford,
or is willing, to lag behind; every one is ‘gladly learning,’ like
Chaucer’s clerk, as well as earnestly teaching. The knowledge and the
industry of these gentlemen is a perpetual marvel to the ‘bellelettristic
trifler.’ New studies, like that of Celtic, and of the obscurer Oriental
tongues, have sprung up during recent years, have grown into strength and
completeness. It is unnecessary to say, perhaps, that these facts
dispose of the popular idea about the luxury of the long vacation.
During the more part of the long vacation the conscientious teacher must
be toiling after the great mundane movement in learning. He must be
acquiring the very freshest ideas about Sanscrit and Greek; about the
Ogham characters and the Cyprian syllabary; about early Greek
inscriptions and the origins of Roman history, in addition to reading the
familiar classics by the light of the latest commentaries.
[Picture: The Ante Chapel, New College]
What is the tangible result, and what the gain of all these labours? The
answer is the secret of University discontent. All this accumulated
knowledge goes out in teaching, is scattered abroad in lectures, is
caught up in note-books, and is poured out, with a difference, in
examinations. There is not an amount of original literary work produced
by the University which bears any due proportion to the solid materials
accumulated. It is just the reverse of Falstaff’s case—but one
halfpenny-worth of sack to an intolerable deal of bread; but a drop of
the spirit of learning to cart-loads of painfully acquired knowledge.
The time and energy of men is occupied in amassing facts, in lecturing,
and then in eternal examinations. Even if the results are satisfactory
on the whole, even if a hundred well-equipped young men are turned out of
the examining-machine every year, these arrangements certainly curb
individual ambition. If a resident in Oxford is to make an income that
seems adequate, he must lecture, examine, and write manuals and primers,
till he is grey, and till the energy that might have added something new
and valuable to the acquisitions of the world has departed.
This state of things has produced the demand for the ‘Endowment of
Research.’ It is not necessary to go into that controversy. Englishmen,
as a rule, believe that endowed cats catch no mice. They would rather
endow a theatre than a _Gelehrter_, if endow something they must. They
have a British sympathy with these beautiful, if useless beings, the
heads of houses, whom it would be necessary to abolish if Researchers
were to get the few tens of thousands they require. Finally, it is asked
whether the learned might not find great endowment in economy; for it is
a fact that a Frenchman, a German, or an Italian will ‘research’ for life
on no larger income than a simple fellowship bestows.
The great obstacle to this ‘plain living’ is perhaps to be found in the
traditional hospitality of Oxford. All her doors are open, and every
stranger is kindly entreated by her, and she is like the ‘discreet
housewife’ in Homer—
εἴδατα πόλλ’ ἐπιθεῖσα, χαριζομένη παρεόντων.
In some languages the same word serves for ‘stranger’ and ‘enemy,’ but in
the Oxford dialect ‘stranger’ and ‘guest’ are synonymous. Such is the
custom of the place, and it does not make plain living very easy. Some
critics will be anxious here to attack the ‘æsthetic’ movement. One will
be expected to say that, after the ideas of Newman, after the ideas of
Arnold, and of Jowett, came those of the wicked, the extravagant, the
effeminate, the immoral ‘Blue China School.’ Perhaps there is something
in this, but sermons on the subject are rather luxuries than necessaries
in the present didactic mood of the Press. ‘They were friends of ours,
moreover,’ as Aristotle says, ‘who brought these ideas in’; so the
subject may be left with this brief notice. As a piece of practical
advice, one may warn the young and ardent advocate of the Endowment of
Research that he will find it rather easier to curtail his expenses than
to get a subsidy from the Commission.
The last important result of the ‘modern spirit’ at Oxford, the last
stroke of the sanguine Liberal genius, was the removal of the celibate
condition from certain fellowships. One can hardly take a bird’s-eye
view of Oxford without criticising the consequences of this innovation.
The topic, however, is, for a dozen reasons, very difficult to handle.
One reason is, that the experiment has not been completely tried. It is
easy enough to marry on a fellowship, a tutorship, and a few small
miscellaneous offices. But how will it be when you come to forty years,
or even fifty? No materials exist which can be used by the social
philosopher who wants an answer to this question. In the meantime, the
common rooms are perhaps more dreary than of old, in many a college, for
lack of the presence of men now translated to another place. As to the
‘society’ of Oxford, that is, no doubt, very much more charming and
vivacious than it used to be in the days when Tony Wood was the surly
champion of celibacy.
Looking round the University, then, one finds in it an activity that
would once have seemed almost feverish, a highly conscientious industry,
doing that which its hand finds to do, but not absolutely certain that it
is not neglecting nobler tasks. Perhaps Oxford has never been more busy
with its own work, never less distracted by religious politics. If we
are to look for a less happy sign, we shall find it in the tendency to
run up ‘new buildings.’ The colleges are landowners: they must suffer
with other owners of real property in the present depression; they will
soon need all their savings. That is one reason why they should be chary
of building; another is, that the fellows of a college at any given
moment are not necessarily endowed with architectural knowledge and
taste. They should think twice, or even thrice, before leaving on Oxford
for many centuries the uncomely mark of an unfortunate judgment.