supposed to have operated unfavourably to study; and another cause of
deterioration can be detected in the measures which the College took
for the relief of its pecuniary embarrassments. A resolution was passed
to the effect that the presence of poor men in the College should be
discouraged, and that preference should be shown to postulants who were
willing to present the College with silver tankards and subscribe heavily
to the replenishment of the College Library.
The plan served its purpose. The Merton plate-chest was soon full to
overflowing, and the shelves of the Merton library were also filled. But
the College had, in the meantime, become a College of rich men, bent upon
amusement rather than profit, and more eager to kindle material bonfires
in the quad than to hand on the metaphoric torch of culture. Perhaps it
has, by this time, lived down that reputation, but it certainly retained,
and even nursed it, long after most of the other colleges had begun to
take life seriously.
In the eighteenth century, indeed, one does not expect to find the
age anything but dark; but even in that scandalous period Merton was
distinguished by a special scandal of its own. Ladies of more charm than
reputation came to Oxford in large numbers in those days, and the gardens
of Merton were their favourite haunt. Their presence there has been
celebrated alike in verse and prose. The prose censor rudely complains of
“that multitude of Female Residentiaries who have of late infested our
learned retirements”; while the poetical satirist exclaims:
“In vain his tutor with a watchful care
Rebukes his folly, warns him to beware,
Aspire above the common Merton crowd,
The vain, the lewd, the impudent and proud.
Beauty at Oxford is a thing so scarce
That all thy panegyrick turns to farce.”
From which state of things there resulted “imprudent marriages”—and
worse—with the result that sleepy authority at last awoke to what was
going on, and locked the garden gates.
The locking of the garden gates, however, did not in itself suffice to
make Merton a hive of industry, or even a home of order; and legends
of stormy occurrences within its walls continue to be frequent until a
comparatively recent date. “All that I can say, gentlemen,” said the
Warden, Dr. Marsham, on one occasion, haranguing the undergraduates in
hall—“all that I can say is, that if you want to behave like barbarian
savages, why—ahem! ahem!—you should come and ask leave first”; and an
authentic story relates that Dr. Mandell Creighton, the late Bishop of
London, was once, while an undergraduate, “employed to fetch in after
dinner a supply of penny whistles and other musical instruments, armed
with which, with tea-trays as drums, making the most horrible din, and
letting off squibs and crackers as they went, the undergraduates marched
round and round the Fellows’ quad.”
And, if Creighton did these things, what may we suppose to have been
done by Creighton’s pupil, the late Lord Randolph Churchill? That is
a delicate subject on which Lord Randolph’s biographers do not as a
rule say more than is strictly necessary; but there is at any rate one
story of his undergraduate days which it seems right to tell, because
the delightful audacity of the future leader of the Fourth Party is
foreshadowed in it.
Lord Randolph, it is said, was once “sent for” to be “ragged,” whether
for cutting lectures or for some other offence against discipline. He was
received by an indignant don, who began to deliver stern expostulations
from the hearthrug, on which he stood, warming his back at the fire.
In the heat of self-justification Lord Randolph advanced boldly, and
the don, intimidated, shrank away. As the interview was approaching its
conclusion, another undergraduate, who had also been summoned to the
presence, knocked and entered. He found Lord Randolph on the hearthrug,
with his coat-tails comfortably drawn up, delivering a vehement harangue,
while the don cowered submissively in a corner of the apartment listening
to him.
Remembering that story, we cannot wonder that Lord Randolph is still a
hero with the rising generation of the College which educated him so
imperfectly that when, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was confronted
with some decimal fractions, he had to send for a permanent official to
tell him “the meaning of those d—d dots.”
EXETER COLLEGE
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.
Exeter is the College for whose founder’s soul the author of this work
is particularly bound to pray; and he hereby renders grateful homage to
the memory of the Bishop of Exeter and Lord High Treasurer of England
in the sorry reign of Edward II., whose benefaction he enjoyed in the
character of a Stapledon scholar. If he says but little about Walter de
Stapledon, that is because there is little to be said, except that he was
a good bishop and a King’s man who lost his head in the King’s cause,
being charged with the defence of London when the King fled to Wales,
with the result that he was seized by the mob and brought to the block in
Cheapside.
[Illustration: EXETER COLLEGE: FELLOWS’ GARDEN.
[To face p. 70.]
His period was one in which it was thought proper to combine the
patronage of learning with the patronage of a particular locality. He
wished the scholars, and also the Fellows, of his College to be taken
from the counties of Devon and Cornwall; and his patriotic injunctions
were faithfully observed until the University commissioners interfered,
happily leaving a certain number of West Country scholars, but condemning
the West Country fellowships to extinction. The last of the West Country
Fellows was the Rev. Charles Boase, who piloted the present writer
through the ceremony of matriculation, and concerning whom a statistician
with a pencil once computed that he talked in the course of a single
evening, on sixty-seven learned subjects, ranging from the Chemistry of
Agriculture to the Philosophy of the Unconditioned.
Commoners, however, have followed where scholars led the way; and Exeter
has always been recognised as the particular College of West Countrymen.
Even the connection between Blundell’s School, Tiverton, and Balliol has
not broken down its claims to this distinction. In “Westward Ho” we find
Frank Leigh, as a matter of course, sent there from the Bideford Grammar
School; and one of the characters in “Tom Jones” went there, equally as a
matter of course, from Taunton, in the dark days in which the College was
reputed to be given over to “nothing but drunkenness and duncery.”
The College was, at that melancholy period, known, equally with Merton,
as a Whig College; and one of the rectors is said to have carried
democratic principles to the point of marrying the daughter of the
College cook. It distinguished itself, at one of the borough elections,
by inviting Whig voters not only to pass through the College quadrangle
on their way to the poll, but also to taste the College beer while
passing. For several days, it is said, the Hall was filled with “a
smoking, drinking, expectorating crowd,”—a spectacle which it is indeed
difficult to conjure up in the decorous circumstances of contemporary
academic life.
But let that pass. The interest of a college—of Exeter as of any other
college—depends, not upon the proceedings of the vulgar herd, but upon
its association with names which have left a trail of glory behind them.
In the days when Exeter was, as Wood says, “debauched by a drunken
governor,” and in the days immediately before and immediately after that
deplorable debauchery, the most conspicuous Exeter names are hardly names
which the plain man recognises at the first glance; but the nineteenth
century introduces names worthy of remark in more than one department of
endeavour.
Let “Parson Jack” come first.
To students of the Clergy List he is the Reverend John Russell, Perpetual
Curate of Swymbridge. To the West Country he is “Parson Jack”—the
hunting parson who kept the hounds and defied the Bishop who bade him
give up keeping them: a man, no doubt, of more energy than intellect,
but a clergyman—he would not have thanked any one for calling him a
priest—whose parishioners carefully minded what he said, holding, it may
be, that so good a judge of a horse must be an equally good judge of a
religion.
Parson Jack won no laurels for his College in the schools, being
contented with a pass degree; but it is said that the supper-party at
which he bade the College farewell was the noisiest supper-party ever
given within College walls, and that, as this chronicler knows, is saying
a good deal. For, if he had not distinguished himself at his books, he
had at least distinguished himself with his fists, in circumstances
graphically described by his biographer.
A certain gentleman-commoner named Gordon, addicted to the society of
out-college men, had, it appears, been boasting in hall of the superior
prowess “with the gloves” of some friends of his at Christ Church. A
certain Denne, lately from Eton, withstood him, saying: “Bring your three
best men from Christ Church to my rooms, and if they can only stand up
in a fair set-to against three of Exeter, we’ll give your heroes full
credit for all you say of them, but not till then.”
Such a challenge, of course, could not be declined; and while Gordon
was accepting it on behalf of his out-college friends, Jack Russell,
overhearing the conversation, rose from his place and volunteered his
services.
“Don’t forget me, Denne,” he said. “I’ll be one of the three, mind that,
and the sooner we meet the better.”
So the meeting was arranged, and the result of it may best be given in
the words of Russell’s biographer:
“Russell was deputed to open the ball, the antagonist selected
to meet him being the second best of the Christ Church lot. It
was a brisk set-to while it lasted, but evidently a one-sided
affair from beginning to end; for Russell’s long reach, and
quick, straight blows, which fell with tremendous thuds on his
adversary’s visage, brought the trial to a close in little more
than ten minutes.
“The latter, admitting himself over-matched, then declined the
unequal contest; while Russell, self-reliant and still “fresh
as paint,” refused to take off his gloves, calling stoutly
for the next man to come on. Denne, however, interposed, and
would have his turn; going in first with No. 1, then No. 3, and
finally polishing them both off with as much ease as if they
had been two old women.
“‘Now,’ said Russell, addressing Gordon aside, ‘I think you had
better take your three fellows home; and don’t make such fools
of them again.’”
Another hero who flourished at a slightly later date in the same field of
prowess as Parson Jack was James Whitehead Peard. He had “the shoulders
of a bull,” and when he played his part in one of those town and gown
rows of which mention has just been made in the account of Merton, the
town, with one accord, fled before him. He was to become Colonel Peard,
to distinguish himself in a revolution in Italy, and to be known to
the whole world as Garibaldi’s Englishman. At Exeter, however, he was
principally a boating man. He rowed against Cambridge; and at a time
when, as the Rev. J. Pycroft has related, “the dons held the boat in
abhorrence and considered any man belonging to it as keeping rather
questionable company,” he insisted that rowing was not only a manly but a
moral recreation.
In proof of his claim, he submitted the rules of the Boating Club to Mr.
Richards, then a tutor, and afterwards the Rector, pointing out that
they forbade to men in training the indulgences which one is accustomed
to couple in the pentameter line of elegiac verse as “_Bacchus et alma
Venus_.” Whereupon Mr. Richards fell upon him crushingly.
“Exactly,” he said, “as I have always maintained. These rules show
plainly and are a written confession of the wild character of the men for
whom you can anticipate the necessity of such fines; no decent men would
want such rules.”
Let us hope that modern boating men, at all events, are virtuous by
instinct and need no laws to keep them so; and then let us cull a few
other Exeter names, illustrious in other fields.
* * * * *
James Anthony Froude was elected a Fellow of Exeter from Oriel, in the
days when the Tractarians seemed likely to succeed in their great task
of turning Oxford upside down. More brilliant than industrious in those
days, he had only taken a Second; but he had the clean-cut intellect
which “penetrates through sophisms, ignores commonplaces, and gives to
conventional illusions their true value,” and it was inevitable that,
while looking for his way in life, he should come into violent collision
with the Obscurantists. He did so on at least two notable occasions.
He began life in the shadow of his brother’s greater name and of the
expectation that he would adopt his brother’s point of view and echo
his brother’s opinions. Richard Hurrell Froude—a most imperious and
dictatorial personage—had bullied him into seeming acquiescence in his
doctrines. For the time being he presumably believed that he believed in
them; and his vivid literary gifts marked him out as an ideal contributor
to Newman’s projected series of “Lives of the Saints.” Newman wanted to
establish the continuity of miracle within the Church; and he regarded
Froude as a man credulous of miracles, and a dialectician capable of
making out a good case for them. His instructions to his contributors
were, not to try to find out whether the alleged miracles had really
happened or not, but, in effect, to accept as many of them as a man could
swallow without making himself too conspicuously ridiculous.
Froude accepted the commission; and there is no reason to doubt that he
accepted it in good faith. The truth, however, was too strong for him;
the evidence was too weak; and he had a turn for biting irony which he
could not suppress. Saint Neot was his subject, and he ended his study
with the remarkable sentence: “This is all, and perhaps rather more than
all, that is known of the life of the blessed Saint Neot.” It was as
if he had played a practical joke on Newman; and there were those who
considered that to play practical jokes on Newman was almost as bad as
laying a profane hand on the Ark of the Covenant. Newman himself was
almost certainly of that opinion; but Protestantism “will out,” and
Froude was a Protestant in grain, and was to become something more than a
Protestant when he matured.
He first matured into a deacon of the Church of England; but that meant
nothing. The College Fellows of those days took orders as normally as
they took their degrees, and without making more ado about it. There was
no more a question of a “call” to be a shepherd of souls than of a “call”
to be a Master of Arts. In travelling so far, Froude was only travelling
the common road. The desire to divagate from it did not come to him
until later; and, even so, no one would have troubled much about his
divagations if he had not chosen to divagate in print.
Like most of the other “honest doubters,” however, he could not keep
his honest doubts to himself. He wrote and published “The Nemesis of
Faith,” and then the fat was in the fire. The publication cost him his
fellowship, and the book was burnt. The latter incident is famous, and
has been magnified by legend. The belief prevails that there was a
solemn and formal _auto da fé_ under the direction of the University
authorities. There was, in fact, only a private display of theological
temper on the part of the Rev. William Sewell.
Sewell, afterwards the founder of Radley School, was a High Churchman,
encompassed by all the limitations of that intellectual state. He was
also a discursive lecturer who stood with his back to the fire, and made
Aristotle’s “Ethics” or Virgil’s “Georgics” an excuse for propounding his
opinions on matters of topical interest. He did not set out to talk about
“The Nemesis of Faith,” but came to talk of it by accident, and then
proceeded to denounce it with the vigour of a _Quarterly_ or _Saturday
Reviewer_. Finally he inquired whether any member of his audience
possessed a copy of the book. One of them admitted that he did.
“Then bring it here, sir,” thundered Sewell.
It was brought; and Sewell stripped off the binding, tore the pages
across, pitched the mutilated volume into the flames, and stood over it,
thrusting at it with the poker until it was burnt to ashes.
Such was the actual occurrence, as related by Mr. Boase, who was present
at the lecture at which it took place. There was no public holocaust,
but only a spasmodic explosion of wrath on the part of a single excited
theologian. The act, however, gained piquancy from the fact that Froude
was Sewell’s colleague. The witnesses went out, and told what they had
seen; and the story lost nothing in the telling. In after years, as
we have seen, some of them recovered their historical consciences and
reduced it to its true proportions; but, at the moment, they indulged
their mythopœic faculties to their hearts’ content, and erected an
enduring edifice of romance on a scanty foundation of fact.
And Froude, at any rate, had to go. The Rector and the Fellows asked him
whether he would prefer to resign or to be turned out; and he elected to
resign. The Visitor of the College—the Bishop of Exeter—applauded their
action; and Froude’s father, the Archdeacon of Totnes, “conceiving,” as
Mr. Herbert Paul puts it in his Life of Froude, “that the best remedy for
free thought was short commons, stopped his son’s allowance.” Such was
the message to him of “the last enchantments of the Middle Ages.”
* * * * *
Time passed. R. D. Blackmore, the immortal author of “Lorna Doone” took
his degree at Exeter in the forties. He and Charles Reade, of Magdalen,
of whom more in due course, are without dispute the two greatest
novelists whom Oxford has yet produced; and there shall be no attempt
here to prove that either of them was greater than the other. Has it not
been written that, to a West Countryman, “Lorna Doone” is “almost as
good as clotted cream”? Did not the author reply that he was too fond
of clotted cream not to be gratified by the compliment, but also too
fond of it to admit that any book whatever could successfully challenge
comparison therewith? He was a modest man, however—so modest that hardly
anything is known of him; and as no stories of his quiet passage through
Exeter have been preserved, we may pass on to our next interesting names,
which are those of William Morris and Edward Burne Jones.
They came up in 1853; and Morris’ biographer, Mr. J. W. Mackail, has
given a good deal of offence by his supercilious account of the internal
condition of Exeter at that period. Himself a Balliol man, he appears to
take the view that outside Balliol there is no academical salvation.
That is a proposition which we need not turn aside to discuss at any
length. It is neither to be desired nor to be expected that all the
colleges of the University should resemble each other like peas in a pod;
and it is not to be denied that there are some functions which Balliol
fulfils better than Exeter. It dry nurses its men with more success,
takes greater pains to make them conform to a type, and then lays itself
out to magnify the type to scale. The result is conspicuous in the higher
ranks of the most efficient Civil Service that the world has ever seen.
It is an excellent system for its purpose; but it has its limitations,
and is not equally suitable for all men, as even Jowett recognised.
Jowett doubted whether, if a poet came to Balliol, Balliol “would be able
to hold him.” But Balliol held Swinburne; and the real danger is rather
lest Balliol should turn a poet into a Judge of the High Court, or a
stiff and starched Permanent Under-Secretary. Perhaps it would be a good
thing for many poets to be thus transfigured; but it is not good for all
of them; and it would not have been good for William Morris. What Morris
wanted was to be left alone and not worried by pastors and masters who
“generalise” and try to compel exceptional men to walk in conventional
paths. Whatever may be the case now, Exeter was, in no distant past, a
College in which a man might go his own way without excessive admonition;
and William Morris was indubitably one of the successes of the system.
His tutor described him as “a rather rough and unpolished youth who
exhibited no special literary tastes or capacity but had no difficulty in
mastering the usual subjects of examination.” The opinion which he, on
his part, entertained of tutors generally was not more flattering. “The
name of ‘don,’” says his biographer, “was used by him as a synonym for
all that was narrow, ignorant, and pedantic.” But the dons did him a good
turn, though neither he nor they knew it at the time, by not going out of
their way to disturb his view of them, their interests, and pursuits.
Except for Burne Jones, indeed, he had hardly a friend in his own
College. With the reading men and with the uproarious men—and Exeter has
always had its share of these—he had equally little in common. Men called
him “Topsy” on account of his uncombed woolly head of hair; he accepted
the nickname and was not to be driven by it into tidiness. Art, and
beauty, and antiquities, were the things which interested him; and Oxford
was for him, not a seat of learning, but “a vision of grey-roofed houses,
and a long, winding street, and the sound of many bells.”
His rooms were in Hell Quad, and his favourite diversion was talking.
Burne Jones tells how, on one occasion, “Morris came tumbling in and
talked incessantly for the next seven hours and a half.” Most of his
talking, however, was done at Pembroke, where he had two great friends:
Faulkner, the mathematician who is said to have been ploughed in Divinity
for including the Prophet Isaiah in a list of the Twelve Apostles, and
Dixon, afterwards Canon Dixon, the pre-Raphaelite poet. He paid his
tribute to the influence of his ecclesiastical surroundings by talking of
devoting his entire private fortune of £900 a year to the foundation of
a monastery; but he happily was wise in time. And presently his friends
discovered his genius, though the dons did not.
“He’s a big poet,” Burne Jones one day exclaimed.
“Who is?”
“Why, Topsy.”
So he took his degree, and went down; and the rest of his career does
not concern us, except for the beginnings of his association with Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, who was brought up to Oxford to decorate the ceiling
of the Union Debating Hall. He and Morris and Burne Jones were always
together in Rossetti’s rooms in George Street; and a fourth member of
their coterie was Swinburne of Balliol, the poet whom Balliol “held.”
They talked and talked interminably. Their talks were the beginning
of that pre-Raphaelitism which was, in due course, to develop (or to
degenerate) into the Æsthetic Movement; and the most picturesque incident
of their alliance took place when they set out together to accept an
invitation to dine at Christ Church.
Morris, who had with difficulty been persuaded to dress for the
banquet, happened to remove his hat, and it was then discovered that
the connection between art and letters was symbolised by an enormous
daub of blue paint on his hair. But for that accident, and the hurried
visit to the barber which followed it, he would have sat at high table,
illuminated like a saintly figure in a missal or a stained-glass window.
ORIEL COLLEGE
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.