Jenkyns comes out. But he took his position as Head of a college very
seriously, at a time when most Heads of colleges preferred their wine,
their ease, or their theology; and he was an astoundingly good judge
alike of a competent tutor and of a clever undergraduate. Hence his
success. The Balliol tutors, in his time, were the best. They taught the
men, with rare exceptions, instead of worrying them about “movements”;
and the Balliol scholarship became, at this time, the blue riband for
which the chief public schools most eagerly competed. Presumably it is so
still; and it certainly was so when, after the colourless interlude of
Scott, Jowett succeeded to the Mastership in 1870.
* * * * *
Jowett’s is the one name of supreme and outstanding consequence
in Balliol annals. He was elected to a scholarship there from St.
Paul’s School in 1836; he was promoted to a fellowship while still
an undergraduate; he became a tutor of the College at the age of
twenty-five; he continued to be associated with its fortunes, without a
break, until his death in 1893. He not only did more than any other man
to make Balliol just what Balliol is; he also aspired, as he said, to
“inoculate England with Balliol.”
In that ambition he succeeded, for Balliol under Jowett was a nursery of
almost every kind of talent. Perhaps it was weak in divinity—it was a
Balliol man, according to the story, who told the examiner that Gamaliel
was “a hill at the foot of which Paul was brought up”—but it surpassed
all the other colleges in its “output” of statesmen, pro-consuls,
professors, and men of letters. Mr. Asquith, Lord Lansdowne, and Lord
Peel are Balliol men; so are Lord Milner and Lord Curzon. Balliol has
largely staffed the Universities of Scotland. At Jowett’s funeral seven
of the pall-bearers were Heads of Oxford houses who had been at Balliol,
and the list of Balliol representatives in recent and contemporary
literature includes the names of A. C. Swinburne, John Addington Symonds,
Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. W. H. Mallock, Mr. J. A. Godley, Canon Beeching, Mr.
Anthony Hope Hawkins, and the late G. W. Steevens—“the Balliol prodigy,”
as they called him—who became a journalist and succeeded in sounding a
new note on the brazen trumpet of the _Daily Mail_. One could easily
extend the list, but to what end? We have no need of further witnesses.
Jowett, as the table of results proves, was a great educator, and a great
organiser and director of education, but he was also something more than
that—a great personality, who fought a hard fight and won it, wearing
down opposition and smiling down detraction.
He was not a particularly great scholar. “Hullo! Another howler!” is
said to have been the refrain occasionally uttered automatically in
his presence by friends to whom he submitted the manuscript of his
translations of Plato and Thucydides; and it was maliciously said that
his appointment to the Regius Professorship of Greek was a case of the
“endowment of research”—a pecuniary inducement held out to him to learn
the language. Nor was he a great philosopher, or, in spite of “Essays and
Reviews” and the Commentary on the Epistle to the Thessalonians, a great
divine. But he was, nevertheless, emphatically a great man, who grew into
a great institution. One could not hear of Oxford without hearing of him;
one could not live at Oxford without feeling that his presence pervaded
it. He was, in the end, the very _genius loci_, and one would no more
have spoken disrespectfully of him than of the Equator.
It is said to have been Mrs. Grote who christened him “the cherub.” His
bust in the Bodleian certainly looks like the bust of a cherub, and the
sound of his voice was like a cherub’s chirp. It gave one the impression
of an innocent man who had never known anything of the passionate
temptations which distract the young, and for whom all the riddles of the
painful earth could be solved, without reference to such passions, by the
dry light of intellect alone. He seemed to come down to breakfast from a
higher plane of thought—an intellectual tribunal before which his guests
were summoned, and from which there was no appeal. He was criticism—as a
rule destructive criticism—incarnate. His praise was approbation from Sir
Hubert Stanley; his blame could make the cleverest man feel a fool.
It followed that he could not be widely popular. Criticism, especially if
it be unemotional, is not very popular as a literary art, and is still
less popular as a social accomplishment; and though, if we may believe
the biographers, the Master was not really unemotional, he generally
contrived to seem to be so, being, in fact, very shy, and very much
afraid of his emotions. One may think of him most justly, perhaps, as a
man full of the milk of human kindness, but profoundly conscious that
milk makes a mess when it boils over, and firmly resolved to prevent that
catastrophe by keeping it in a refrigerator. He gave generously out of
his later abundance, and with a positive shrinking from advertisement.
But he did not suffer fools gladly, and he could even snub the deserving,
if they gave him the opportunity, in the knock-down style of Dr. Johnson.
Nor was he an equally sound critic of all kinds of intellectual promise.
He divined, for instance, the potentialities of Mr. Asquith, but failed
to discern those of Mr. Andrew Lang. “Asquith is sure to succeed, he
is so direct,” was his verdict on the former; but to the latter, as Mr.
Lang has himself recorded, he tendered the advice: “Don’t write as if you
were writing for a penny paper.” And there is a story of a scholar of the
eighties, now an eminent teacher of youth, who shall be nameless here,
who suffered even more severely at his hands.
It was at breakfast, and the conversation flagged, as it was a little apt
to do when parties of undergraduates breakfasted with the Master. The
scholar tried to stimulate it by a literary remark which he hoped might
give the silent Master something to talk about. “Master,” he ventured,
“I have been reading Matthew Arnold’s poems, and I think he is a great
poet.” There was a dead silence while the company waited for the Master
to follow up the theme. “We all think so, Mr. X.,” he piped in his high
treble, and it was felt that he could not have blanketed the conversation
more effectively if he had left the room, slamming the door behind him.
“If you have nothing more sensible to say than that, you had better be
silent altogether,” is another of his recorded repartees to some one who
remarked upon the weather; and one could make a long list of similar
retorts of deadly finality behind which the Master entrenched himself. He
probably did not know how much they hurt, but fought, not aggressively,
but in self-defence, being sensitive, and fearing to be drawn, having
a lively recollection of cases in which men had tried to draw him by
arguing, in their weekly essays, in favour of atheism or anarchism, or
setting any other sort of pitfall into which it would be pleasant to
see one in authority stumbling. At all events men seem to have accepted
his severe rejoinders in that spirit, and to have had too profound a
reverence for his high intellectual standards to resent their rude
practical application. If they did not suffer a rebuff from him gladly,
at least they suffered it, as something inherent in the mysterious nature
of things, something the reason for which might thereafter, if they were
patient, be revealed to them.
For Jowett was not only a great man, but also, like most great men,
a great enigma. Many wondered, and perhaps no one ever knew, how he
reconciled his position with his conscience. He had subscribed to the
Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, and then he had disproved
them, or a good many of them, and then he had subscribed to them again.
He had attached no condition to his second subscription of them except
the simple one, “if you will give me a new pen.” There was also a story
current, though it is probably untrue, as it is also told of Theodore
Hook, of St. Mary Hall, that he offered to sign forty Articles if the
signature of thirty-nine did not suffice.
Why did he do these things? What remnant of belief remained to him after
he had done them? By what chain of argument was he bound to his office as
a clergyman of the Church of England? Those were the problems posed, but
he would have been a bold man who ventured to press the Master for the
solutions.
His chief interests, at this stage, indeed, were rather practical than
speculative. He gave large house parties of people who had succeeded in
life. He bought an organ, and arranged for the Balliol Sunday evening
concerts. He shortened the chapel services, saying—or so it is said—that
if one could praise God adequately in half an hour, it was an absurd
waste of time to devote three-quarters of an hour to the proceeding. He
allowed Oxford to have a theatre—a thing forbidden by the pious wisdom of
the men of old. He quoted “_sat prata biberunt_,” and negotiated for the
drainage of the Oxford swamps.
He also preached, of course, and his sermons were always interesting, and
sometimes pleasingly satirical, as when he smote Renan and Farrar with
a double stroke, expressing his desire to read a Life of Christ which
should be neither “sentimental” nor “picturesque”; but it could hardly
be said that they settled the vexed question of his personal attitude
towards the creeds which he recited without taking them too seriously or
the formulæ which he manipulated with a sort of spiritual sleight-of-hand.
Possibly he argued that, as no clergyman ever believed all the Articles
of the Christian Faith, one clergyman had as good a right as another to
pick and choose among them. Or he may have felt that for a man to quit
the Church merely because he had demonstrated some of its propositions
to be erroneous was as ridiculous as for a doctor to take down his brass
plate merely because he had discovered a new treatment of a disease at
which the old-fashioned practitioners shook their heads. But, if that was
his view, he never uttered it, preferring to go his own way, possessing
his own soul and guarding his own secret.
One could almost see him guarding it; so that our last glimpse may be of
a quaint-looking little old man in evening dress trotting through the
parks in that unusual costume on a Sunday afternoon: an arresting figure,
with venerable white hair, a beautifully fresh pink face, and the seal of
inscrutable mystery on his forehead.
MERTON COLLEGE
Antiquity of Merton—The model of subsequent
foundations—Friction between the University and the town—The
great “town and gown row” of 1354—The scholars of Merton
save the University—The wardenship of Sir Henry Savile—The
visit of Queen Elizabeth—Oxford during the Civil War—Queen
Henrietta Maria at Merton—How Merton ceased to be a reading
college—Scandalous proceedings in the gardens—Mandell Creighton
and Lord Randolph Churchill.
Though in this work, as in the Oxford University Calendar, Merton stands
third among the colleges, there is a sense in which the first place may
be claimed for it. Both University and Balliol got their endowments at a
slightly earlier date, but Merton was the first College to be launched,
in 1264, a year before the meeting of the first English Parliament, as a
self-governing corporation.
The bequest of William of Durham, which resulted in the foundation of
University, was in its origin merely a pension fund, and John of Balliol,
in the first instance, only paid for the support of scholars in a hired
house. Walter de Merton, on the contrary, began at once to build and to
legislate, and his Statutes were the model of the Statutes of subsequent
foundations, not only at Oxford, but at Cambridge also. The founder
of Peterhouse, the first of the Cambridge colleges, expressly decreed
that the Peterhouse students were to live according to “the rule of the
scholars of Merton at Oxford.”
It follows that the history of Merton is more closely connected than that
of any other college with the earliest turmoils—which were many; and the
historian of Merton may properly begin with a glance at those brawls
which a later civilisation came to know as “town and gown rows.”
* * * * *
Discord between the town and the University began as soon as the
University became important and powerful, and it owed its origin, not to
incompatibility of temper between undergraduates and bargees, but to the
mutual jealousies of conflicting jurisdictions, ill-defined and therefore
liable to clash. Nowadays, of course, the object of the authorities on
both sides—the police on the one hand and the proctors on the other—is
to keep the peace between the combatants. In the Middle Ages the seniors
were as pugnacious as the juniors, and joined as ferociously in the
affrays.
Theoretically it was the function of the town to prevent, or punish,
breaches of the peace by townsmen, while the University had a similar
responsibility with regard to breaches of the peace by gownsmen; but when
townsmen and gownsmen fell out, each authority resented the interference
of the other. That was one cause of friction, and further friction
occurred in connection with disputed points of sanitation and hygiene.
The gownsmen objected to the sale of stinking fish and to the brewing
of beer from water contaminated by sewage; the townsmen thought the
objection fastidious, and were very angry when the University appealed to
the King to interfere with these time-honoured customs. Hence constant
bickerings, and a frequent exchange of abusive language; hence ultimately
open war and that bloody Battle of Saint Scholastica’s Day, in which the
townsmen found the scholars of Merton their most formidable foes.
The trouble began in a tavern, on February 10, 1354. Some scholars who
were drinking there found fault with the wine, and the vintner said that
it was quite good enough wine for them. The scholars then threw the wine
at the vintner’s head, and the vintner called his friends and neighbours
to the rescue. They rang the bell of the Church of Saint Martin at
Carfax, and the populace, summoned by that tocsin, shot at the scholars
with bows and arrows. The Chancellor of the University—the Lord Curzon
of Kedleston of his epoch—appeared upon the scene, ingeminating peace
where there was no peace, and he also was shot at. Then the bell of the
University Church of Saint Mary began to ring, and the gownsmen gathered,
and the _mêlée_ became general and lasted until the setting of the sun.
No one was killed; the gownsmen got the best of it, and the Chancellor
supposed that the riot was over. He issued a proclamation bidding the
scholars go to their lectures as usual on the following day.
They went, but found the townsmen lying in wait for them.
Reinforcements—two thousand peasants carrying an ominous black flag—had
swarmed into the city from Cowley, Headington, and Hinksey. The Carfax
tocsin pealed out a second time, just after the dinner hour, and the
tocsin of Saint Mary’s responded as before. The townsmen, with their
bucolic allies, not only assailed the scholars in the streets, but
pursued them into their lodgings, inns, and halls, beating down the doors
with improvised battering-rams, killing all the gownsmen they could
catch, and stealing or destroying all the property that they could lay
their hands on.
The Friars came out, carrying their huge crucifix and chanting their
Litany, to try to compose the strife, but their intervention was in
vain. They themselves became the objects of the popular fury, and one
scholar was struck down even while clinging to the crucifix. Other
scholars were followed into the churches and massacred at the foot of the
altar. Dead bodies were flung on to dunghills, the wounded were hailed to
prison, and even torture was not spared. “The crown of some chaplains,”
says the chronicler, “viz., all the skin so far as the tonsure went,
these diabolical imps flayed off in scorn of their clergy.”
At last the University could resist no more. The gownsmen began to flee
into the country—all save the scholars of Merton. These had their solid
walls behind which they could retire. Withdrawing to their college, while
the town triumphed without—the sole representatives of learning in a
deserted city which the Bishop had laid under an interdict—they waited
for the day of vengeance and redress of grievances.
It came. The King sent down a special commission to investigate the
matter. The Mayor of Oxford and his bailiffs were sent to prison; the
sheriff was removed from office; and presently the town was further
humiliated by the bestowal of fresh privileges upon the University
authorities. They thenceforward, and not the townsmen, were to decide
whether fish stank, and if they decided that it did, they were to
send it to the hospital for the consumption of the sick. In addition
to this privilege, they were to receive pecuniary compensation for the
damage done in the riot, and their supremacy was in various other ways
established on a firm constitutional basis.
Merton, that is to say, saved the University at an hour when, but for
Merton, the townsmen would have wiped it out, and its clerks would have
been dispersed over the face of the country.
* * * * *
As Merton was, through the scenes above described, the first college to
be interesting, so, too, it was the first college to rise to conspicuous
dignity, and enjoy the glories of a golden age. The supreme position
achieved by Christ Church towards the end of the eighteenth and by
Balliol in the middle of the nineteenth century, was won by Merton in the
reign of Queen Elizabeth, under the Wardenship of Sir Henry Savile, and
at the time when the founder of the Bodleian Library was a Fellow of the
College.
It may be that Savile’s name has not echoed down the corridors of time
quite as loudly as the names of some other Oxford men; but it is kept
alive by the Savilian Professorships, and one may fix his position fairly
well by saying that he was at once the Jowett and the Liddell of his
generation. He was, that is to say, a great scholar and a great teacher;
a great innovator and a man of great personal prestige; a link between
the academic world and the world of action; the sort of man whom kings
delighted to honour. Elizabeth honoured him, and so also did James I.
It was Savile who entertained Elizabeth on her visit to Oxford in
1592. He presided over the disputations held in her honour in Saint
Mary’s Church, and delivered a ringing panegyric on her reign with the
inevitable reference to the British triumph over the Armada: “_Tuis
auspiciis Hispania Anglum non vidit nisi victorem, Anglia Hispanum nisi
captivum_.” It was after enjoying his hospitality at Merton that her
Majesty, as she rode away, paused on Shotover, and “looking wistfully
towards Oxford,” said: “Farewell, farewell, dear Oxford! God bless thee
and increase thy sons in number, holiness, and virtue!”
Elizabeth furthermore made Savile Provost of Eton—an office which he held
concurrently with the Merton Wardenship. She gave him the office in spite
of the fact that the Statutes reserved it for clergymen, and that Savile
was a layman. He suggested to her Majesty that Statutes could not bind
a sovereign, and her Majesty agreed with him, and it was while he was
Provost of Eton that he entertained James I. and was made a baronet.
The Fellows of Merton of those days were already far removed from their
early condition of “poor scholars.” They could hold their own at Court,
and were well qualified to serve their country as ambassadors. Elizabeth
sent one Merton man as Ambassador to Madrid, and another to Venice,
Switzerland, and France; but the College did not lose touch with learning
because it had gained touch with affairs. Sir Thomas Bodley, as all
the world knows, returned from his travels to found the library which
bears his name, and Savile assisted in the preparation of the Authorised
Version of the Bible, produced an edition of St. Chrysostom which cost
him £8,000, and founded the Professorships of Geometry and Astronomy in
order that the multitude might no longer think “that the most useful
branches of Mathematicks were spells and her professors limbs of the
devil.”
He is said to have been a “very severe governor”—one whose students
“hated him for his austerity.” He preferred the plodding and persevering
to the brilliant. “If I would look for wits,” he said, “I would go to
Newgate. There be the wits.” And there is a story of his own assiduous
devotion to his studies, which probably illustrates the attitude of a
good many homely wives towards learned husbands.
“He was so sedulous,” we read, “at his study that his lady
thereby thought herself neglected, and coming to him one day as
he was in his study, saluted him thus: ‘Sir Henry, I would I
were a book too, and then you would a little more respect me.’
Whereto, one standing by replied, ‘Madam, you must then be an
almanack, that he might change every year.’ Whereat she was not
a little displeased.”
Those were the great days; but the times were to be more exciting when
the Civil War broke out, and Oxford, after the battle of Edgehill, became
the Royalist headquarters, garrisoned by the royal troops, surrounded
by fortifications which townsmen and gownsmen helped to build, and
beleaguered, more or less—at first rather less than more, but finally
rather more than less—by the Parliamentary forces under Fairfax, who
threw a bridge over the Cherwell, near Marston, and mounted a battery on
Headington Hill.
One cannot pause to tell that story at length, or draw that picture in
detail; but a stray fact or two will indicate what Oxford in general and
Merton College in particular then looked like.
Soldiers were, of course, encamped wherever there was room for them. The
New College cloisters were turned into an arsenal, and a powder factory
was established at Osney. New Inn Hall was the mint at which the College
plate was being melted down and coined into money. A line of earthworks
ran from Folly Bridge across Christ Church Meadows. Parliament—the
Royalist section of Parliament, that is to say—met in the House of
Convocation. Prisoners of war were stowed away, and very nearly starved,
in the castle in which Queen Maud had once been beleaguered by King
Stephen. Charles I. held his Court at Christ Church, and Queen Henrietta
Maria held hers at Merton, the two royal apartments being connected by a
secret passage.
It followed, therefore, that Merton was the centre of the light side of
war. The Warden, Nathaniel Brent, was a Parliamentarian, and was absent,
acting as Judge-Marshal in the Parliamentary Army; William Harvey, of
Caius College, Cambridge, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood,
was thrust into his place; and Merton, having accepted him under protest,
lived joyously, doing its best to entertain the Queen and her ladies,
who, on their part, did their best to be gracious to Merton. “_Tota
Academia morbo castrensi afflicta_” is one Mertonian’s summing up; but
that is a grumbler’s unkind way of putting it.
Regiments of University men were raised. They did good service, but they
could not always be fighting. They sallied, and raided, and cut up
convoys, and then returned to their headquarters; and, on their return,
the dust-soiled warriors were received by smiling ladies in the Merton
Gardens or the Christ Church Broad Walk, or listened, with the ladies, to
concerts in the college chapels, or played in a _masque_ in one of the
college halls for their diversion.
It was a glorious time—a time when gaudily apparelled boys swaggered
about with the assurance of men and the sincere conviction that the only
life worth living was the life of the gallant who fought the King’s
enemies in the morning and made love to the Queen’s ladies at night.
But it was not a time at which students could be expected to mind their
books; and the habit of study, when once lost, is not easily recovered.
Amid the clash of arms Merton ceased to be a reading college, and
circumstances conspired to prevent it from reverting to that character
until after the lapse of many generations.
* * * * *