THE ROMANCE OF THE OXFORD COLLEGES
[Illustration: _Merton College._
_Photo. Hills & Saunders_
_Allen & Co. (London) Ltd. Sc._]
THE ROMANCE
OF THE
OXFORD COLLEGES
BY
FRANCIS GRIBBLE
SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF EXETER, AUTHOR OF “GEORGE
SAND AND HER LOVERS,” ETC.
WITH SEVENTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS
MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
49 WHITCOMB STREET
LONDON W.C.
_Published 1910_
PREFACE
This work does not purport to be either a history or a guide book. Of
Oxford Guide Books, and of Histories of Oxford, there is already an
adequate provision, and there is no dearth of Oxford Reminiscences, or
of Studies of Oxford Life and Manners. But there may still be room for
a modest volume which, while unscrupulously omitting whatever seems
tedious, or of purely local interest, recalls the stories concerning
which experience shows the average stranger to be most curious, and
answers the questions which the average stranger, when visiting the
various colleges, is most apt to ask.
The book, indeed, is the outcome of an experience which revealed the
nature, and the limits, of that curiosity. It was lately the privilege
of the writer to act as guide to some ladies who were visiting Oxford
for the first time, and he made a mental note of the points on which
they showed themselves most avid of information. They did not, he found,
desire to burden their memories with dates, or to be entertained with
lists of the names of the Heads of Colleges and Halls, and they were
content to admire the architecture without entering into technical
details. On the other hand, stories of human interest—stories introducing
well-known names—stories of events in which the history of Oxford came
into close touch with the history of England—were constantly and eagerly
demanded.
Why was Shelley expelled from University? Why did Dr. Johnson throw
the boots out of his window at Pembroke? What is the truth about the
Brasenose Hellfire Club, and the ghost? What was the origin of town and
gown rows? Is it true that Froude’s book was publicly burnt at Exeter?
What was Oxford like at the time of the Civil War? What sort of people
were the Tractarians, the Wesleyans, the Æsthetes and the Positivists?
Why was Jowett so famous? Why are so many Jesus men called Jones? Which
was Gladstone’s college, and which was Lord Randolph Churchill’s? Why
do they have boar’s head for dinner on Christmas Day at Queen’s? Is it
true that Beau Nash was an Oxford man? Can you tell me any stories about
Charles Reade—or Sir Richard Burton—or Southey—or de Quincey—or Pater?
Such were a few of the questions asked. The book answers them, and
answers a good many other questions of the same sort. It proceeds on the
assumption that every college, at some period of its history, through
some notable name on its books, has been profoundly interesting, not only
to the University, but to the world, and it dwells on those interesting
moments and those interesting incidents as fully as space permits.
FRANCIS GRIBBLE.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 17
Founders and benefactors—Alfred the Great—William of
Durham—The Statutes—The conversion of Obadiah Walker—Lord
Herbert of Cherbury—Lord Eldon’s examination in Hebrew—The
screwing up of the Senior Proctor—Shelley—A “Stinks Man”—His
unpopularity with the dons—His “printing freaks”—His friendship
with Hogg—His conversation with the Baby—His Religious
Opinions—His publication of “The Necessity of Atheism”—His
expulsion.
BALLIOL COLLEGE 36
The birching of Robert of Balliol by the Bishop of Durham—He
founds a College to make atonement for his fault—Insignificance
of the College in early times—Snell Exhibitioners—Adam
Smith—His scornful criticism of Oxford—Southey—His
introduction to Coleridge of Jesus, Cambridge—Their dream
of Pantisocracy—College “Rags” in the dark days—The dawn of
civilisation—Mastership of Parsons—Of Jenkyns—Of Jowett—Jowett
as tutor—His reforms—His conversation—His sermons—The
inscrutable secret which he guarded.
MERTON COLLEGE 55
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.
EXETER COLLEGE 70
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.
ORIEL COLLEGE 86
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.
QUEEN’S COLLEGE 106
What little Mr. Bouncer said of Queen’s—The inwardness of his
criticism—The boar’s head and the Canticle—Another song on
the same subject—The Provost and the alarm of fire—The Black
Prince at Queen’s—Wiclif at Queen’s—The first of the Oxford
Movements inaugurated by his poor preachers—Later times—Jeremy
Bentham—Walter Pater.
NEW COLLEGE 118
William of Wykeham—A self-educated man—His liberality and
his elaborate Statutes—The College depressed by too much
founder’s kin—“Golden scholars, silver bachelors, and leaden
Masters”—Notable New College men—Sydney Smith—Sir Henry
Wotton—Canon Spooner and “Spoonerisms”—Stories of Warden
Shuttleworth and others.
LINCOLN COLLEGE 129
A small college with many outstanding names—Mr. D. S.
Maccoll and his Newdigate—“Shifter” of the _Sporting
Times_—A reminiscence of “Shifter”—John Wesley and the
Methodists—Wesley’s meeting with Beau Nash of Bath—Mark
Pattison—His early connection with the Tractarians—His
abandonment of superstition—His great learning—His treatment of
undergraduates.
ALL SOULS COLLEGE 145
Peculiarities of the Constitution—A College without
undergraduates—Court favourites jobbed into
fellowships—Fellowships bought and sold—All Souls Fellows,
a link between Oxford and the outside world—Sir William
Blackstone—Edward Young—The song of the All Souls Mallard and
the scandal connected therewith.
MAGDALEN COLLEGE 153
The College which withstood James II.—President Routh—His great
age and eccentricities—Slackness of the College—The careers of
Addison—Of Gibbon—Of Charles Reade—Oscar Wilde and the æsthetic
movement at Magdalen—Persecution of Wilde and suppression of
the movement.
BRASENOSE COLLEGE 171
The eponymous nose—The Hell Fire Club and its ghost—The
Phœnix—Dean Hole as the typical Brasenose man—Bishop Heber
and his prize poem—His _jeux d’esprit_—The note of satire in
his missionary hymns—Richard Heber the greatest bibliophile
that the world has ever seen—The author of “Ingoldsby
Legends”—Robertson of Brighton—Oxford objections to private
initiative in religion—Walter Pater and his philosophy of life.
CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE 192
The foundation by Bishop Foxe—Compulsory Greek—Strict
discipline in early times—The visitation by the Parliamentary
Commissioners—The ejection of the Fellows—Eminent _alumni_—The
judicious Hooker and his injudicious marriage—The Duke of
Monmouth—General Oglethorpe—Keble, and Arnold of Rugby—An
estimate of their work—Celebrities of modern times.
CHRIST CHURCH 209
Cardinal College—The fall of Wolsey—The foundation of
Christ Church—Notable scenes—The degradation of Cranmer—The
Parliamentary visitation—The eviction of Dean Fell, Mrs. Fell,
and all the little Fellses—Famous Deans of Christ Church—John
Fell—“I do not like you, Dr. Fell”—Aldrich—Atterbury—Cyril
Jackson—Gaisford—Eminent undergraduates—Sir Robert Peel’s
practical joke—Gladstone and Martin Farquhar Tupper.
TRINITY COLLEGE 226
Founded with the spoils of monasteries—The sympathy of
Queen Elizabeth—President Kettell—His objection to long
hair—His trouble with the Court ladies during the Civil
War—Dr. Johnson’s love of the College—The expulsion of Walter
Savage Landor—Newman in his evangelical days—The gentleman
adventurers—Richard Burton’s revolt against discipline.
SAINT JOHN’S COLLEGE 241
Founded by Sir Thomas White—Raised to fame by Archbishop
Laud—Calvinistic opposition to Laud—He triumphs over it and
makes Oxford a High Church University—His disciplinarian
regulations—His magnificent entertainment of royalty—The
entertainment of Admiral Tromp—He gets drunk and is taken home
in a wheelbarrow—Dean Mansel—His pugnacious Bampton Lectures
and his excruciating puns.
JESUS COLLEGE 255
Statistics concerning the Joneses of Jesus—A Welsh
enclave—Rarity of great names at Jesus—Henry Vaughan the
“Silurist”—Sir Lewis Morris—Beau Nash—John Richard Green.
WADHAM COLLEGE 267
Nicholas and Dorothy Wadham—A miscellaneous list of
Wadham men—The story of the great Wadham “Rag”—Wadham
Evangelicalism—Stories of Warden Symons—The Wadham
Positivists—“Three persons and no God”—Richard Congreve—Comte,
Clotilde de Vaux, and the Positivist schism—The last Oxford
Movement—Canon Barnett and Toynbee Hall.
PEMBROKE COLLEGE 278
Broadgates Hall—Its illustrious and fashionable _alumni_—The
Hall becomes Pembroke College—Dr. Johnson at Pembroke—He rags
the servitors and argues with the dons—His “spirited refusal of
an eleemosynary supply of shoes”—He shows Hannah More over the
College—George Whitefield at Pembroke—His relations with the
Methodists and his religious excitability.
WORCESTER COLLEGE 289
Early history of the buildings—Gloucester College—A College
for Benedictines—Its dissolution—Becomes the Bishop’s
palace—Gloucester Hall—Endowment of Worcester College—Remote
situation of Worcester—Stories bearing thereupon—Notable
Worcester men—Samuel Foote—Thomas de Quincey—Henry Kingsley—F.
W. Newman—Dean Burgon—Burgon’s famous Newdigate.
HERTFORD COLLEGE 303
Hart Hall—The principalship of Dr. Richard Newton—Hart Hall
becomes Hertford College—Decline, fall, and dissolution of the
College—The buildings purchased for Magdalen Hall—Magdalen
Hall once more transformed into Hertford College—Famous
men at Hertford and Magdalen Hall—Charles James Fox—George
Selwyn—Robert Stephen Hawker.
KEBLE COLLEGE 316
“Keble College, near Rome”—A memorial of the author of the
“Christian Year”—The ideals of the College—How far they have
been realised—Diversified results of the experiment—The Bishop
of London and Mr. Herbert Trench.
EPILOGUE 321
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
MERTON COLLEGE _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 17
BALLIOL COLLEGE 36
EXETER COLLEGE: FELLOWS’ GARDEN 70
ORIEL COLLEGE 86
QUEEN’S COLLEGE CHAPEL 106
NEW COLLEGE CLOISTERS AND TOWER 118
REREDOS, ALL SOULS CHAPEL 145
MAGDALEN COLLEGE 153
BRASENOSE KNOCKER 171
CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE 192
TOM QUAD AND TOWER, CHRIST CHURCH 209
TRINITY COLLEGE 226
ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE 241
WADHAM COLLEGE 267
WORCESTER COLLEGE 289
KEBLE COLLEGE 316
_All the above are from photographs by Messrs. Hills & Saunders, Oxford._
The Romance of the Oxford Colleges
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE
Founders and benefactors—Alfred the Great—William of Durham—The
Statutes—The conversion of Obadiah Walker—Lord Herbert of
Cherbury—Lord Eldon’s examination in Hebrew—The screwing up
of the Senior Proctor—Shelley—A “Stinks Man”—His unpopularity
with the dons—His “printing freaks”—His friendship with
Hogg—His conversation with the baby—His religious opinions—His
publication of “The Necessity of Atheism”—His expulsion.
It has often been asserted, but it has never been proved, that University
College was founded by Alfred the Great.
The principal evidence for the statement consists of a deed which is
known to have been forged and a quotation in Camden’s “Britannia” from
an alleged manuscript which cannot be found and probably never existed.
On the strength of that testimony the Court of King’s Bench ruled, in
1726, that Alfred was the founder; but the judgment seems to have been
based upon sentiment rather than evidence. “Religion,” it was argued by
the Fellows, “would receive a great scandal” if the Court decided that
“a succession of clergymen” had, for many generations, made the mistake
of thanking the wrong benefactor for their endowments. The Court was
moved by the plea and gave official sanction to the legend; but history,
as distinguished from legend, recognises the founder in William of
Durham, who, dying in 1249, bequeathed 310 marks to the University for
the benefit of Masters of Arts studying theology. A house was built for
the students to live in in 1253, and statutes for the governance of the
community were first drawn up in 1280.
[Illustration: UNIVERSITY COLLEGE.
[To face p. 17.]
Fifty shillings a year was the stipend of a student in those days, and
the bursar received a further five shillings a year for keeping the
College accounts. As rooms could then be rented for 6s. 8d. a year,
however, their condition was less penurious than the figures might
seem to indicate. It was provided that they should converse in Latin
and comport themselves “as becomes holy persons,” not interrupting one
another’s studies by “noise or clamour,” and resisting the temptations of
such light literature as “Ballads or Fables about Lovers”—with a good
deal more, on the same severe disciplinary lines, which one need not
trouble to recite.
The College, as Mr. Wells[1] states, “has been famous in the history of
Oxford rather for the careers of its sons than for any movements of which
it has been the centre”; and he might have added that the most notable
movement of which it has been the centre was a movement for the expulsion
of the most illustrious of its sons.
[1] “Oxford and its Colleges.” By J. Wells (Methuen).
Other interesting things, no doubt, have happened there. It was at
University that the junior members of the college resented the conversion
of their Master to Roman Catholicism by chanting, outside his door, the
impertinent refrain:
“Old Obadiah
Sang Ave Maria,
But so would not I—a.
If you ask me for why—a,
I’d as soon be a fool as a knave—a”—
a course of conduct which must have been very annoying to Obadiah Walker,
and very compromising to his dignity, if persisted in for long.
It was to University, again, that Lord Herbert of Cherbury brought a
bride in his second year of residence; “and now,” he writes in his
Autobiography, “I followed my book more close than ever.” But this
particular stimulus to diligence in study is one with which modern
undergraduates must, as a rule, dispense.
University, furthermore, was the scene of Lord Eldon’s memorable
examination in Hebrew. “What is the Hebrew for ‘the place of a skull’”?
the examiner asked him. “Golgotha,” he answered, and they let him
through, without even troubling him to translate “_Eloi, eloi, lama
sabacthani_” into English.
At University, to continue, the Senior Proctor—the “_Big_ Shaver” as men
called him to distinguish him from his brother, the Bishop of Liverpool,
who is of smaller stature—awoke one morning, some thirty years ago, to
find himself “screwed up.” He cut a noble figure as he descended by a
ladder into the High, amid the encouraging cheers of the populace; and
the authors of the outrage were not discovered until after the Master—the
late Dean Bradley, of Westminster—had sent the whole College down.
Every one of these stories has its merits, and some of them would be
worth relating at greater length if space allowed; but they all seem
trivial and local when set side by side with the story of the expulsion
of Shelley.
Shelley is not the only poet of whom the College boasts. Father Faber,
who believed too much to please his College, was, curiously enough, of
the same household as Shelley, who believed too little. So was Sir Edwin
Arnold, who is said to have found spiritual balm in Buddhism, and so is
Mr. Saint John Lucas, whose conformity to the golden mean in matters of
faith may perhaps be inferred from the fact that he was lately awarded a
prize for a poem on a sacred subject. But Shelley was, of course, by far
the greatest of the four, as well as the only one of them who set the
dons deliberately at defiance.
His defiance of the dons, indeed, assumed more forms than one, and the
publication of his notorious pamphlet, “The Necessity of Atheism,” was,
as it were, a last straw breaking the back of a patience which had long
been too severely tried. So, at all events, says Mr. Ridley, who was a
junior Fellow at the time, and so also says a Miss Grant, who happened to
be then on a visit to the Master.
“There were few, if any,” says Mr. Ridley, “who were not afraid of
Shelley’s strange and fantastic pranks.”
“The ringleader,” says Miss Grant, “in every species of mischief
within our grave walls was Mr. Shelley. He was very insubordinate,
always breaking some rule, the breaking of which, he knew, could not
be overlooked.... He was slovenly in his dress. When spoken to about
these and other irregularities, he was in the habit of making such
extraordinary gestures, expressive of humility under reproof, as to
overset, first the gravity, and then the temper, of the lecturing tutor.”
The dons would have been more than human if they had liked an
undergraduate who received their admonitions in that style, and they
would have been in advance of their times if they had been conciliated
by Shelley’s predilections for scientific study. His science was of the
crude, experimental sort which has caused its devotees to be stigmatised
as “Stinks Men.” He charged the knob of his door with electricity for
the confusion of those who tried to open it, and he demonstrated his
knowledge of chemistry by spilling a corrosive acid on the carpet of a
tutor who reprimanded him. Naturally, therefore, authority was disposed
to seize the first handle that he might give, and the first handle given
was the perverse pamphlet above referred to.
* * * * *
The pamphlet was not, of course, Shelley’s maiden literary effort. While
still at Eton, he had written a “penny dreadful,” and found a publisher
willing to give him £40 for it; and he had cherished the naïve hope of
achieving fame at a bound by the simple device of bribing the reviewers.
Of the staff of the _British Review_ in particular he had written that
they were “venal villains” who might be relied upon, if well “pouched,”
to lavish the praise which he desired; and he seems to have thought that
£10, judiciously distributed, would suffice to corrupt the whole of Fleet
Street.
Moreover, his literary ambitions were smiled upon by a blameless and
unsuspecting father. Mr. Timothy Shelley, M.P., when he brought his
son to Oxford, took him to the shop of Messrs. Munday and Slatter,
booksellers, in the High Street, and introduced him to one of the
partners.
“My boy here,” he said, pointing proudly to the long-haired, wild-eyed
youth—“my boy here has a literary turn. He is already an author, and do
pray indulge him in his printing freaks.”
Only a few months later, in that very shop—— But we must not anticipate,
but must first present Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg, also an undergraduate
of University.
* * * * *
Hogg was Shelley’s most intimate friend—and, indeed, practically his only
friend—at Oxford, and his “Life of Shelley” is our principal authority
for the incidents of Shelley’s Oxford career. Trelawny speaks of him as a
hard-headed man of the world who looked upon literature with contempt,
and he may have given that impression in later life, when he was a
Revising Barrister and a Municipal Corporation Commissioner, whatever
that may have been. Even then, however, he said that he regarded the
Greek language as “a prime necessary of life,” and in 1810 he would
have been remarked, not only as an ebullient but also as a romantic and
chivalrous young man.
He and Shelley made each other’s acquaintance by sitting next to each
other in hall, though Hogg assures us that “such familiarity was
unusual”—an interesting precedent for the alleged rule that one Oxford
man must not presume even to rescue another from drowning unless he has
been introduced to him. They fell into conversation on the comparative
value of German and Italian literature, and, after hall, they continued
the discussion in Hogg’s rooms, and sat up nearly all night over it.
On the following afternoon they met, by appointment, in Shelley’s
rooms—the typical rooms of a prehistoric “Stinks Man,” furnished with “an
electrical machine, an air-pump, a galvanic trough, a solar microscope,
and large glass jars and receivers,” and pervaded with “an unpleasant and
penetrating effluvium”; and after that they were inseparable.
Their Oxford, it must be remembered, was the early Oxford in which
no games were played. There was no “tubbing” in those days, and no
practising at the nets. Unless men haunted the prize ring and the rat
pit, their one way of amusing themselves was to walk and talk, and no
sporting “shop” could cast its monotonous shadow over their conversation.
The question whether the college was more likely to bump or to be bumped
did not arise, and no man burdened his brain with tables of “records”
or “averages.” The talk was about literature, about philosophy, and,
sometimes, about religion; and daring young thinkers hammered out for
themselves a good many subjects in which they were not called upon to be
examined.
Shelley, as we have seen, began with literature, but he soon got on to
philosophy. In particular he was fascinated by the Platonic doctrine of
the pre-existence of the soul—the doctrine popularised in Wordsworth’s
famous “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early
Childhood”; and he proceeded, as one would expect a chemist to do, to
try, as it were, to test the doctrine by experiment.
He snatched a baby, so Hogg tells us, out of its mother’s arms, on
Magdalen Bridge, and while the mother clung desperately to its swaddling
clothes, in an agony of terror lest it should be dropped into the
Cherwell, he gravely questioned her.
“Can your baby tell us anything about pre-existence, madam?” he asked, in
a piercing voice and with a wistful look.
“He cannot speak, sir,” answered the mother stolidly.
“Surely he can speak if he will,” Shelley insisted, “for he is only a
few weeks old. He cannot have entirely forgotten the use of speech in so
short a time.”
But the mother was as firm as the poet.
“It is not for me to argue with college gentlemen,” she rejoined, “but
babies of that age never do speak as far as _I_ know”; and with that she
begged that her infant might be returned to her before harm befell it,
and so the incident terminated.
* * * * *
The bearing of the baby story on the subject before us is only indirect,
but there is a reason for telling it. It shows in what spirit Shelley, as
an undergraduate, approached the profoundest problems of philosophy, and
there is no reason to suppose that the spirit in which he approached the
profoundest problems of religion was widely different. Just as he had got
a “rise” out of the Oxford matron, so he proposed to get a “rise” out of
the Oxford dons; and the dons being clergymen, atheism was the obvious
card to play. A profession of atheism might fairly be expected to affect
clergymen as a red rag affects a bull.
That he was not actually an atheist at this time is as nearly
demonstrable as anything can ever be. The evidence is in his own
letters—not in one letter only, but in several.
“It is impossible,” he wrote, “not to believe in the Soul of the
Universe, the intelligent, and necessarily beneficent, actuating
principle.”
“Can we suppose,” he asked in another letter, “that our nature itself
could be without cause—‘First Cause’—a God?”
In these expressions, as they were not written for publication, we may
presume that we see the real Shelley. But, on the other hand—
1. Shelley, though not an atheist, fell short of the contemporary
standards of orthodoxy. He had been reading Hume, and felt that the
current answers to Hume were insufficient.
2. Shelley had been conducting a philosophical correspondence with his
cousin, Harriet Grove. The correspondence had been broken off because his
philosophical opinions were unsatisfactory; and he was embittered, being
in love with his cousin, and regarded himself as a persecuted martyr.
3. The temptation to exaggerate, and so “pull the legs” of grave and
reverend seniors, was irresistible.
He began by writing, under an assumed name, to strangers—the most grave
and reverend strangers whom he thought likely to reply to him—submitting
brief abstracts of Hume’s arguments, and appealing for assistance in
rebutting them. If the person to whom he wrote “took the bait,” says
Hogg, Shelley “would fall upon the unwary disputant and break his bones.”
Once, it is said, by pretending to be a woman, he lured a bishop into
controversy, and handled him as the impertinent have delighted to handle
the pompous from the beginning of the world. It was splendid fun, he
thought, but it would be still better fun if he could “get a rise” out of
the Vice-Chancellor, the Proctors, the Regius Professors, and the Heads
of colleges and halls. So, Hogg agreeing, he and Hogg put their heads
together, and “The Necessity of Atheism” was produced, and advertised in
the _Oxford Herald_ of February 9, 1811, and copies of it were posted to
several of the dons, “with the compliments of Mr. Jeremiah Stukeley.”
Nor was that all. There was the off-chance that the dons, scenting a
practical joke, might ignore the outrage, and Shelley, avid of publicity,
was determined to compel them to take notice. So he came down, with a
bundle of his pamphlets under his arm, to Messrs. Munday and Slatter’s
shop—the very shop in which an indulgent parent had given out that his
“printing freaks” were to be encouraged. He wished those pamphlets, he
said, to be offered for sale at sixpence each; he wished them to be well
displayed on the counter and in the window; in order that the window
might be dressed properly, he proposed to dress it himself.
He did so with an obliging readiness which overwhelmed the amiable
bookseller’s assistant. In a minute or two “The Necessity of Atheism” was
displayed in Messrs. Munday and Slatter’s shop, much as the first number
of a new magazine with a gaudy cover might be displayed on one of the
railway bookstalls to-day.
It remained so displayed for about twenty minutes; and then the Rev. John
Walker, a Fellow of New College, passed the shop, looked into the window
to see what new publications had arrived, read the title of Shelley’s
pamphlet, and, after being surprised and shocked, was moved to action. He
walked into the shop, demanded the proprietors, and gave them peremptory
instructions:
“Mr. Munday, and Mr. Slatter! What is the meaning of this?”
“We beg pardon, sir. We really didn’t know. We hadn’t examined the
publication personally. But, of course, now that our attention is drawn
to it——”
“Now that your attention is drawn to it, Mr. Munday and Mr. Slatter,
you will be good enough to remove all the copies of it that lie on your
counter and in your window, and to take them out into your back kitchen
and there burn them.”
Such was the dialogue, as one can reconstruct it from Mr. Slatter’s
recollections, contained in a letter addressed to Robert Montgomery, the
poet.
Mr. Walker, of course, had no legal right to give the instructions which
he gave. From the strictly legal point of view, he was ordering a man
over whom he had no jurisdiction to destroy property which did not belong
to him; he would never have presumed to give such orders in, say, Mr.
Hatchard’s shop in Piccadilly. At Oxford, however, his foot was firmly
planted on his native heath, and Messrs. Munday and Slatter knew it. He
might speak to the Vice-Chancellor; and the Vice-Chancellor might forbid
undergraduates to deal at their establishment. So they were all bows and
smiles and obsequious anxiety to oblige.
“By all means, Mr. Walker. An admirable idea, sir! Just what we were
ourselves on the point of suggesting. You may rely on us to carry out
your wishes.”
“You will be good enough to carry them out in my presence. I will
accompany you to your kitchen for that purpose.”
“That will be very good of you, Mr. Walker. It will be a great honour to
our kitchen. Will you please walk this way, sir?”
So the holocaust was effected; and Messrs. Munday and Slatter begged
Shelley to call on them, and told him what they had been obliged to do.
“We are really very sorry, Mr. Shelley. We really could not help
ourselves. Mr. Walker was so very firm in the matter; and even in your
own interest, you know——”
_Et cetera._ There was to be no further publicity for Shelley through the
instrumentality of the booksellers; and as no one was likely to trouble
about the authorship of an anonymous brochure which had been reduced to
ashes, that would have been the end of the matter if Shelley had not
circulated his pamphlet through the post. But then he _had_ so circulated
it, and the covering “compliments of Jeremiah Stukeley” were very
obviously in his hand-writing; and the recipients of the presentation
copies, who included every bishop on the bench, were saying that
something really ought to be done; and the dons were not only willing but
anxious, and not only anxious but eager, to lay hold of the handle which
Shelley had given them.
He was a “Stinks Man,” and he was a rowdy man; he made malodorous
chemical experiments, and he was impertinent when he was “ragged.” The
Senior Common-room was not going to stand atheism or any other nonsense
from such a man as that. So Shelley was sent for “with the Dean’s
compliments”—those compliments of evil omen—and the rest of the story may
best be told in the words of that Mr. Ridley already quoted, who is a
less prejudiced witness than Hogg.
“It was announced one morning at a breakfast party towards the end of
the Lent Term,” writes Mr. Ridley, “that Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had
recently become a member of University College, was to be called before
a meeting of the common-room for being the supposed author of a pamphlet
called ‘The Necessity of Atheism.’ This anonymous work, consisting of
not many pages, had been studiously sent to most of the dignitaries of
the University and to others more or less connected with Oxford. The
meeting took place the same day, and it was understood that the pamphlet,
together with some notes sent with it, in which the supposed author’s
hand-writing appeared identified with that of P. B. S., was placed before
him. He was asked if he could or would deny the obnoxious production as
his. No direct reply was given either in the affirmative or negative.
“Shelley having quitted the room, T. J. Hogg immediately appeared,
voluntarily on his part, to state that, if Shelley had anything to do
with it, he (Hogg) was equally implicated, and desired his share of the
penalty, whatever was inflicted. It has always been supposed that Hogg
wrote the Preface.
“Towards the afternoon a large paper bearing the College seal, and signed
by the Master and Dean, was affixed to the hall door, declaring that the
two offenders were publicly expelled from the college _for contumacy in
refusing to answer certain questions put to them_. The aforesaid two had
made themselves as conspicuous as possible by great singularity of dress,
and by walking up and down the centre of the quadrangle, as if proud of
their anticipated fate,”—and, in modern times, they would doubtless have
driven to the station in triumph on the roofs of hansoms, escorted by a
long procession of uproarious admirers, though, as it was, they went away
quietly on the coach.
That is all; for the subsequent picture of Mr. Timothy Shelley, M.P.,
pursuing his peccant son to his London lodging, sending out for a
bottle of port, and reading aloud extracts from Paley’s “Evidences of
Christianity” while he drank it, belongs to Shelley’s Life, but not to
Oxford history.
* * * * *
Robert Montgomery, of Lincoln, who tried to compensate by the piety of
his sentiments for his lack of distinction as a poet, has recorded his
opinion that the offenders thoroughly deserved their punishment. “Strange
and unnatural as it may appear,” he writes, “there are many in Oxford
who think that a University, based on the immortal truths of the Gospel,
ought not to license or encourage blasphemy, however gilded by genius.”
No doubt there are many, not in Oxford only but elsewhere as well, who
agree that this limitation of the functions of Universities is desirable.
The general proposition, at any rate, shall not be disputed here. Jowett
himself, an advanced thinker if the Church of England ever included one,
appears to have endorsed it when circumstances brought him face to face
with an undergraduate who declined to attend chapel on the ground that
he did not believe in a God. “If you do not believe in a God by eight
o’clock to-morrow morning, you will be sent down,” the Master of Balliol
is said to have chirruped on that occasion; and it is difficult to
applaud his keen sense of the necessity of discipline and condemn that of
the Master of University.
It does not follow, however, that it is necessary to take the grave
Robert Montgomery’s solemn view of Shelley’s offence. His case was not
that of the conscientious and convinced blasphemer, but rather that
of a practical joker who over-reached himself and accepted martyrdom
rather than confess that he had been joking. And that, one concludes,
was the view of those later dignitaries of the college who permitted the
erection of a monument to Shelley within the college precincts—albeit in
a dark corner of those precincts, only to be reached by way of an obscure
passage which looks as if it led to a coal-hole wherein an unwary visitor
would run a serious risk of being arrested and charged with loitering
with intent to commit a felony.
BALLIOL COLLEGE
The birching of Robert of Balliol by the Bishop of Durham—He
founds a College to make atonement for his fault—Insignificance
of the College in early times—Snell Exhibitioners—Adam
Smith—His scornful criticism of Oxford—Southey—His introduction
to Coleridge of Jesus, Cambridge—Their joint dream of
Pantisocracy—College “rags” in the dark days—The dawn of
civilisation—Mastership of Parsons—Of Jenkyns—of Jowett—Jowett
as tutor—His reforms—His conversation—His sermons—The
inscrutable secret which he guarded.
Balliol is the tangible and enduring product of one of the most
interesting of the abuses (as Protestants esteem them) of the Roman
Catholic religion.
The story begins on the day on which Robert of Balliol—a lord of many
lands in the North of England—“got drunk,” as the chronicler puts it,
“in a manner unbecoming his station in life,” and insulted the Bishop
of Durham. It is resumed on the day on which Robert apologised to the
Bishop, and consented to do penance. The Bishop then “birched him in the
presence of the populace on the steps of the cathedral,” and sent him
forth with a tingling cuticle and an injunction to make amends for his
fault by spending money on a benevolent undertaking. So he hired a house
for the accommodation of sixteen poor scholars of Oxford, and allowed
them eightpence a day each for their expenses. After his death, his
widow, the Lady Devorguilla of Balliol, bearing no malice against the
Bishop for his treatment of her husband—having reason to know, perhaps,
that it had done him good—supplemented the endowment by a further
substantial donation.
[Illustration: BALLIOL COLLEGE.
[To face p. 36.]
Such were the picturesque beginnings of the College in the reign of Henry
III. Other gifts and legacies enriched its chest from time to time.
The Snell Exhibitions connected it with the University of Glasgow. The
Blundell Endowment introduced a steady flow of scholars from Tiverton.
But the college remained unimportant. Its great period—a period which
began under the mastership of Dr. Parsons and culminated under the
mastership of Benjamin Jowett—belongs to the nineteenth century. Before
that time it has no history worth relating; and the few great men who, by
accident, went there to be educated, owed nothing to their tutors, but
were left to educate themselves as best they could.
Adam Smith, who was up from 1740 to 1746, was the greatest of them; and,
if Adam Smith’s ghost still haunts the Balliol quadrangles, we may be
quite sure that it is an ungrateful and a growling ghost.
He was one of the Snell Exhibitioners above-mentioned; and the Snell
Exhibitioners of the eighteenth century had a very uncomfortable time.
They came from Scotland; and the College took Dr. Johnson’s view of
Scotsmen, regarding them as pauper aliens, who ought to be repatriated,
and “smugs,” unfit to mix with civilised mankind. The worst rooms in the
college were invariably allotted to them by the dons; and their weird
accents and barbarous dress were the subject of the ribald mirth of
undergraduates.
Things got, indeed, to such a pass, at one time, that the Exhibitioners
sent a formal complaint to Glasgow, and Glasgow made formal
representations to the Master of the College; but the Master’s answer
was unsatisfactory and curt. He said that he did not particularly want
the Snell Exhibitioners at Balliol and would raise no objection if they
liked to transfer themselves to another college. He even went so far as
to suggest that perhaps they would feel more at home at Hertford; and as
the hint was not taken, his relations with them continued to be strained.
Such was the tone of the college when Adam Smith’s name was entered on
the books. The only friend whom he made there was Douglas, afterwards
Bishop of Salisbury, a Snell Exhibitioner like himself. We know little of
the circumstances of his career except that he habitually took tar-water
as a remedy for “an inveterate scurvy and shaking of the head”; that
undergraduates gibed at him for his poverty, exhorting him to gorge
himself in the hall on the ground that his long-delayed chance of eating
a full meal had come to him at last; and that a don reprimanded him for
reading Hume’s “Treatise on Human Nature” and confiscated the pernicious
book. It is not much; but it is enough to lead us to expect to find him
regarding his University with feelings of disgust and contempt; and there
is abundant evidence that he did so.
Adam Smith, indeed, is a far more convincing witness than Gibbon, who
was at Magdalen a few years after he had gone down, of the deplorable
state of learning at Oxford in the eighteenth century. He was older; he
was longer in residence; he was more anxious to learn. But he sought in
vain, he says, for “the proper means of being taught the sciences which
it is the proper business of these incorporated bodies to teach”; and his
generalisation about the college tutors is that “every man consented
that his neighbour might neglect his duty provided he himself were
allowed to neglect his own.” Moreover he passed one criticism on Oxford
which is a delightful variant on a more famous utterance of another
Balliol man of a later date.
Oxford, Matthew Arnold has told us, is the home of “lost causes” and
“impossible loyalties.” Adam Smith said pretty much the same thing,
but he said it very differently, speaking of the most venerable of our
seats of learning as “a sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete
prejudices find shelter and protection after they have been hunted out of
every corner of the world.” The sentiments are practically identical; and
there could be no more charming example of truth changing its aspect as
men change their point of view.
* * * * *
The only other name which counts in the annals of eighteenth century
Balliol is that of Southey, who was up in 1793.
He was by way of being a reading man; but though the dark ages were
almost over and the dawn of civilisation was near at hand, the College
did little, if anything, to direct his studies. “Mr. Southey,” said one
of his tutors in a burst of candour, “you won’t learn anything from my
lectures sir, so if you have any studies of your own, you had better
pursue them.”
He did so. He rose at five in order to do so, quickening his diligence
with “negus.” One suspects that he must have been drinking negus on the
morning of the day on which he went on the river “in a little skiff which
the least deviation from the balance would upset,” and “did not step
exactly in the middle,” with the result that “the boat tilted up” and
its occupant only saved himself from complete submersion by clinging to
the side of a barge. The incident does certainly seem to give colour to
his reflection that “temperance is much wanted at Oxford,” and that “the
waters of Helicon are too much polluted by the wine of Bacchus.”
Nor did the studies pursued under the cheering influence of matutinal
negus belong to the ordinary curriculum of the place. Southey neglected
his Aristotle. He preferred, he says, “the brilliant colours of fancy,
nature, and Rousseau” to “the positive dogmas of the Stagirite”; and
though the _Contrat Social_ may serve as a substitute for the “Politics,”
the presumption is strong that Southey preferred “_La nouvelle Héloise_”
which can by no means be regarded as a worthy alternative to the “Ethics.”
We may let that pass, however; and we may also let pass Southey’s
denunciation of the “waste of wigs and wisdom” which he discerned
among the dons and the “abandoned excess” which he detected among those
undergraduates who did not rise early to drink negus. The importance
of Southey’s Oxford career resides neither in these trifles nor even
in his refusal to have his hair powdered by the college barber before
sitting down to dinner. The most significant thing that happened to him
was that he made the acquaintance of a young man from a neighbouring
University—Mr. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, of Jesus College, Cambridge, who
was introduced to him by a bookseller.
The young Cantab. and the young Oxonian took to each other at once, and
proceeded to see visions and dream dreams in concert. Rousseau and the
Revolutionists, with their cry of “Back to Nature!” and their belief in
the “perfectibility of the human race,” appealed to their imagination
and inspired it. The world, they agreed, was weary of the past. Why not
escape from it? So they sat in Southey’s rooms at Balliol—no doubt with
steaming tumblers of negus on the table—and discussed the ways and means
of doing so.
America, of course, was to be the scene of the experiment. They would
cross the Atlantic, and settle on the banks of the Susquehanna—how could
they fail to be happy on the banks of a river with such a melodious
name? Land, they had been informed, was cheap there. An American land
agent had offered to sell them some, and had assured them that the danger
alike from buffaloes and from mosquitoes was much exaggerated. So they
would borrow money, and get married, and go there. They themselves would
till the soil, and their wives should “cook and perform all domestic
offices.” It would be delightful, Southey thought, “to go with all my
friends; to live with them in the most agreeable and most honourable
employment; to eat the fruits I have raised, and see every face happy
around me; my mother sheltered in her declining years from the anxieties
which have pursued her; my brothers educated to be useful and virtuous.”
It came to nothing. The Pantisocracy, as it was to be called, was never
formed. Perhaps “the females of the party” did not take so kindly to
the idea of cooking and domestic offices—far away from bonnet-shops—as
had been expected; and there was, at any rate, the difficulty that the
capital required was not forthcoming. But the dream was a generous one
and sheds a golden glamour on the closing years of a dark age. Southey,
whether one cares about his poetry or not, is the most engaging figure in
eighteenth-century Balliol.
The darkness of the dark age at Balliol could be illustrated by many
anecdotes of many “rags.” On one occasion the Dean was ragged—though
it does not appear that he was put on the bonfire, as once happened,
in quite recent times, to the Dean of an adjacent college. On another
occasion some Balliol Jacobites celebrated the birthday of Cardinal York
by sallying forth into the streets and ragging every notable Hanoverian
whom they met, including a Canon of Windsor, and cheering for King James
III.—an offence for which, after the Master had let them off with a Latin
imposition, they were brought to trial in the Court of King’s Bench, and
sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour.
It was exploits of that order, and not any idle impulse to play upon
words, which first caused Balliol men to be spoken of as Men of Belial.
They were of frequent occurrence, and the bad name which they gave the
College was not redeemed by any intellectual distinction; but presently,
in 1798, Dr. Parsons became Master, and then a memorable change began.
Dr. Parsons organised the tutorial system, and cast his vote for throwing
Balliol fellowships open to outsiders. He also collaborated with the
Provost of Oriel and the Dean of Christ Church in the institution of
the Honours Schools, in which firsts were presently taken by two very
remarkable Balliol men, Sir William Hamilton, the philosopher, and J. G.
Lockhart, the author of the Life of Scott. And then came Dr. Jenkyns.
* * * * *
Undoubtedly Jenkyns was a great man, as much greater than Parsons as
Jowett was to be greater than himself. Judging him by results, one is led
irresistibly to that conclusion. Yet how he managed to be so great, and
to accomplish such results, is a perplexing puzzle; for among all the
stories of him which have been preserved there is hardly one in which he
does not cut a grotesque and undignified figure.
There is the story, for example, of his encounter with Blaydes of
Balliol, who was afterwards to change his name to Calverley. Blaydes, it
is said, was taking ladies over the college, and wished to show them all
the lions. “That,” he said, pointing, “is the Master of Balliol’s study
window”; and he picked up a stone and threw it. The missile went crashing
through the glass, and an angry countenance became visible, glaring
through the aperture. “And that, I rather fancy,” Blaydes continued
calmly, “is the Master of Balliol himself.”
Then there is the story of Jenkyns’s passage of arms with Sir William
Hamilton. Sir William, it is related, coming hurriedly out of his room,
discovered Jenkyns listening at the keyhole. Furious at this prying
curiosity, he clutched the spy by his coat collar, lifted him over the
balustrade, and held him howling in mid-air. Then, having terrified him
sufficiently, he lifted him back again, and apologised: “Good gracious,
sir! I’m so sorry, but I had no idea that it would possibly be you!”
Finally, since there is no room for all the stories, one may recall, on
Jowett’s authority, the story of Jenkyns’s comic sermon. He gave out the
text, “The sin that doth so easily beset us”; and then he dropped into
bathos. “I mean,” he explained in severe and acid tones, “the habit of
contracting debts.” The undergraduates looked at each other and wondered.
Had the Master actually said this thing, or had he only seemed to say it?
They realised, at last, that he had actually said it; and then, for the
first and only time in its history, the walls of the College chapel shook
with the inextinguishable laughter of an insolvent congregation. It was
several minutes, Jowett tells us, before the preacher could proceed with
his discourse.