pounds, shillings, and pence!”
QUEEN’S COLLEGE
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.
A Queen’s man observed lounging in the portico of his own College is
spoken of by Little Mr. Bouncer in “Verdant Green” as thus “openly
confessing his shame”; and the playful criticism doubtless mirrors the
public opinion of a period when social distinctions were marked by more
outward signs than at present.
There were, and indeed there still are, at Queen’s a considerable
number of scholarships and exhibitions tenable only by youths educated
at certain specified North Country grammar schools. Religion and sound
learning may or may not have flourished in these remote educational
establishments, but they certainly were not, in past times, schools of
polished manners. Civilisation, as it were, filtered through to them,
leaving a good many of its graces in the filter. The undeniable virtues
of their _alumni_ were of the rugged order. They asserted themselves
in the broad accents of the fells and dales, and, in the matter of
dress, they supported the home industries of provinces in which the
art of tailoring was in its infancy. Such is the inwardness of Little
Mr. Bouncer’s comment, set forth as expressing the view of the “very
gentlemanly set of men” of the early Victorian Brasenose.
[Illustration: QUEEN’S COLLEGE CHAPEL.
[To face page 106.]
All that, however, is ancient history. _Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur
in illis_, is doubtless the well-warranted reflection of the Queen’s men
of to-day. The old traditions which they still keep alive fall under the
head, not of manners, but of customs. There is the custom, for instance,
of blowing a trumpet to signify that dinner is ready; there is the custom
of using the founder’s horn as a loving-cup on gaudy days; there is the
Bursar’s custom of presenting every guest, on New Year’s Day, with a
needle threaded with silk, and wishing him prosperity in the formula,
“Take this and be thrifty.” Finally there is the Christmas Day custom,
which never fails to get a paragraph in the papers, of bringing in the
boar’s head to the accompaniment of music.
* * * * *
To this last custom, of course, a story is attached, which may or may
not be true. A scholar of Queen’s, we are told, went, in the remote past,
for a walk on Shotover, and there met a wild boar, which charged him.
Instead of running away, he thrust the Aristotle which he was reading
down the beast’s throat and choked it; and then he cut off its head and
brought it home for supper—an heroic act, emblematical of the triumph of
scholarship over brute force, which was duly celebrated in a canticle,
still sung every Christmas night in the College hall while the butler is
bringing in the delicacy, and running thus:
“The boar’s head in hand bear I,
Bedecked with bays and rosemary.
And I pray you, my masters, merry be yee,
_Quot estis in convivio_.
_Caput apri defero,_
_Reddens laudes Domino._
The boar’s head, as I understand,
Is the bravest dish in all the land,
And thus bedecked with a gay garland
Let us _servire cantico_.
_Caput apri defero,_
_Reddens laudes Domino._
In memory of ye King of Bliss
Which on this day to be served is
_In Reginensi atrio_.
_Caput apri defero,_
_Reddens laudes Domino._”
Such is the carol which, at Queen’s, links the present with the past;
and if any reader desires a more modern song on the same subject, he may
find one in “The Oxford Sausage.” It may suffice to quote the last three
stanzas:
“So dreadful this bristle-backed foe did appear,
You’d have sworn he had got the wrong pig by the ear,
But instead of avoiding the mouth of the beast,
He rammed in a volume and cried—_Græcum est_.
In this gallant action such fortitude shewn is,
As proves him no coward, or tender Adonis,
No armour but logic, by which we may find,
That logic’s the bulwark of body and mind.
Ye squires, that fear neither hills nor rough rocks,
And think you’re full wise when you outwit a fox,
Enrich your poor brains and expose them no more,
Learn Greek and seek glory from hunting the boar.
Derry down, down, down, derry down.”
This boar’s head story is, beyond question, the most picturesque item
in the Queen’s annals. In more recent times the College has twice
been seriously damaged by fire, and each of the two outbursts invites
a marginal comment. One of them originated in the bursary, and was
attributed by the wits to the action of the Bursar in cooking the
accounts. On the occasion of the other, the Provost nearly perished in
the flames as a concession to dignity and decorum. The Fellows and
scholars, who had fled into the quadrangle, missed him, and wondered what
had become of him. He had, in fact, lingered in the blazing building to
complete his toilet. He did not emerge from it, like the others, in his
night-gear, but in his wig, and cap and gowns, and bands, and complete
ecclesiastical trappings. A magnificent spectacle truly! Having conjured
it up, we may turn back and call the roll of the names of which Queen’s
is most justly proud.
* * * * *
The eponymous Queen of the College was Philippa of Hainault, the
consort of Edward III., whose chaplain and confessor was the founder.
It followed, most naturally, that Edward the Black Prince was for a
time a student there, though no legends, whether of his studies or his
diversions, have been handed down. It was, at any rate, on quite other
fields than those of learning that the Black Prince was to win his fame;
and the first serious Queen’s man whose reputation really counts is
Wiclif.
Queen’s, it is true, has no exclusive claim to him. He was also, for a
period, Master of Balliol, and, for another period, Master of Canterbury
Hall—an extinct establishment on the site of the present Canterbury Quad,
at Christ Church. He is further said, though on doubtful evidence, to
have been, for a while, a Fellow of Merton. The brief years, however,
during which he occupied rooms at Queen’s were among the most important
of his life; for to those years belong the preparation and inauguration
of the first of the Oxford Movements.
Personal details are almost entirely lacking—personal details are nearly
always to seek in the biographies of the great men of the Middle Ages.
It may be that Wiclif was the student who thrust the Aristotle down the
throat of the wild boar. It may also be—and, on the whole, it is quite
as likely—that he was not. There is no evidence either way, and the
probabilities are nicely balanced. But he was, at any rate, the Morning
Star of the Reformation. He translated the Bible; he stood up against the
Pope; and he called upon the laity to reform the clergy. Nor was that
all. He also missed preferment through his zeal, and organised “poor
preachers” to spread the light which he had kindled.
Oxford, indeed, was in those days the only available centre for the
dissemination of a new idea. The light of Paris had temporarily paled,
and the light of Cambridge had hardly yet begun to shine; so that Oxford
was the most important of the stages in the pilgrimage of a wandering
scholar. Then, if ever, there was reason to hope that what Oxford thought
to-day England would think to-morrow. The machinery for bringing this
result about existed, and Wiclif set it in motion, “pressing the button,”
as we moderns say, in his room at Queen’s. The excesses of disciples who
joyously predicted the coming of a day when “priests’ heads would be as
cheap as sheeps’” no doubt outran his intentions; but it is worth while,
in view of current political conflicts, to note that this first Oxford
Movement was the occasion of an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the
House of Lords to usurp the privileges of the House of Commons.
The Archbishop of Canterbury proposed, the Lords passed, and the King
assented to a law to the effect, broadly speaking, that the “poor
preachers” should be arrested wherever found, and locked up in whatever
house of detention was most convenient, until they gave such an account
of themselves as satisfied Holy Church. The Commons represented that this
so-called Statute was not a Statute, since it had not been laid before
them. They demanded its withdrawal, and it was withdrawn; the privileges
of the Lower House being thus asserted, in the interest of an Oxford
Movement, as long ago as 1382.
Already at that date, however, the Movement had had its martyrs. Some
Fellows of Queen’s had been expelled as Wicliffites in 1376; and it
cannot be said that they had departed in a blaze of glory, for it appears
that they had taken with them the common seal, and some jewels and other
valuable property belonging not to them, but to the College. That, too,
may have been a picturesque proceeding; but the details are obscure, and
the subject cannot be discussed with profit.
* * * * *
Wiclif, of course, is eminent not only as a Reformer, but also as a man
of letters. His version of the Bible helped, no less than Chaucer’s
“Canterbury Tales,” to fix the English language; and so we are led on, by
a natural transition, to mention Wycherly, the dramatist, who was also a
Queen’s man, and Addison, and William Collins, the poet, who were both
tempted by the offer of demyships to migrate from Queen’s to Magdalen,
and Tickell, who contributed to Steele’s _Spectator_—Steele himself being
a Merton man—and William Mitford, the historian of Greece, and Jeremy
Bentham, whose “mark of everlasting light,” being “the greatest happiness
of the greatest number,” could hardly be said to be “above the howling
senses’ ebb and flow,” and Francis Jeffrey, the founder of the _Edinburgh
Review_, and Walter Pater, who is more interesting than any of them.
Jeremy Bentham is, perhaps, most memorable as the third of the great trio
of Oxonians who have “shown up” the inefficiency of Oxford University
teaching in the eighteenth century. The comments of Adam Smith on that
branch of the subject have already been quoted; those of Gibbon will
have to be quoted presently; those of Bentham, of Queen’s, may as well
be quoted now. He learnt at Oxford, he said, nothing except “mendacity
and insincerity.” He found his tutor, Joseph Jefferson, morose—“a sort
of Protestant monk,” who even forbade him to play the innocent game of
battledore and shuttlecock. His lectures, and the lectures of the other
tutors also, were “foolish,” teaching only “something of logical jargon”;
and Bentham listened even to the law lectures of the great Blackstone,
Fellow of All Souls, “with rebel ears.” Moreover, he tells us that he was
afraid of encountering ghosts on the solitary staircases of the College.
His own ghost, dreading other ghosts, is indeed one of the gloomiest
that one meets at Oxford. The pursuit of the greatest happiness of the
greatest number had not, in his college days, begun; and there was but
little happiness for “number one.” Bentham went up too young—he was only
thirteen; he was kept short of money, and he was badly dressed. “I wish
you would let me come home very soon,” he wrote to his father, “for my
clothes are dropping off my back”; and happiness is often a shy fugitive
when chased by a ragged man in the midst of more fashionably attired
companions. Indeed, the one service which Oxford rendered Jeremy Bentham
was to cure him of a taste for gambling. “They always,” he says, “forced
me to pay when I lost; and, as I could never get the money when I won, I
gave up the habit”—a statement which sheds a queerly lurid light upon the
conduct of the gamesters of Queen’s in the year 1761. They seem to have
bullied this lad of thirteen somewhat in the style of Flashman in “Tom
Brown.” We can only pity him, and leave him.
* * * * *
Of Pater, of course, there will be more to be said when we come to
Brasenose, where he won his fellowship and made his name. Even at
Queen’s, however, where his undergraduate days were passed, he did not
fail to make some mark. He was conspicuous, among other things, for
ugliness—an ugliness so extreme that it excited the sympathetic attention
of his friends, who formed themselves into a Committee to Consider what
could be Done for the Improvement of Pater’s Personal Appearance. A
suggestion that he should buy a new hat was discarded on the ground that
he could not be expected to wear his hat in bed. What was wanted, it was
agreed, was an irremovable addition to his features; and the Committee,
after taking all available evidence, reported in favour of a moustache.
The moustache, when ultimately grown, was at least a palliative. It was
no longer necessary for Pater, when examining himself in the mirror, to
exclaim that he would give ten years of his life to be better looking.
He acquired, according to Mr. Edmund Gosse, the aspect of a benevolent
dragon.
His intellectual outlook, however, was already beginning, even in those
days, to divide attention with his physical features. He combined a
sceptical disdain for the doctrines of the Church of England with an
æsthetic sympathy for its ritual; and he made no secret of either the
sympathetic or the intellectual attitude. His friends were interested,
intrigued, and ultimately excited. They watched his spiritual
development, much as Lausanne watched the spiritual development of
Sainte-Beuve, when he was lecturing there on the Jansenists, and Vinet
was expected to convert him to Protestantism. Some of them even ended by
quarrelling with him and renouncing him.
The trouble was that, having gone up to Oxford with a view of taking
Orders, he still proposed to take them, in spite of his effaced beliefs.
Others had done so, he said, so why should not he? And, suiting the
action to the argument, he asked the Bishop of London to ordain him.
The Bishop, not being in his confidence, was aware of no reason why he
should not do so; but Pater’s friend, McQueen—who is only famous because
he was Pater’s friend—resolved to stop the crime. He sought advice on
the matter from Canon Liddon, then Principal of St. Edmund Hall; and
Liddon’s answer was: “Write to the Bishop of London. You might be able
to prevent ordination, and if not you will have delivered your soul.” He
did write, and he did prevent ordination; and no doubt it was well, for
Pater’s sake no less than for the sake of the Church, that ordination was
prevented. Having said that, we will leave Pater until we meet him again
at Brasenose.
NEW COLLEGE
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.
William of Wykeham, the founder of New College, was perhaps the greatest
pluralist in the history of the Church. Ecclesiastical benefices were
heaped upon him in unexampled profusion as the reward for services in no
sense of an ecclesiastical character. He served his King chiefly as a
Clerk of the Works—or perhaps one should say as a Chief Commissioner of
the Works—at Windsor and elsewhere; and the King, instead of paying him
an adequate salary, bestowed upon him prebends, canonries, deaneries, and
archdeaconries. No fewer than nine prebends were given to him in a single
year; he received three more prebends a year or two afterwards. While
holding them, he also held at least one deanery and two archdeaconries,
as well as several livings; and in the end he became Bishop of
Winchester. The story that he established himself in the royal esteem by
persuading his niece to become the King’s mistress may be the calumnious
invention of a later age; but it is evident, at any rate, that he was
more a man of the world than a Churchman, and only found that godliness
was great gain because he combined it with other qualities.
[Illustration: NEW COLLEGE CLOISTERS AND TOWER.
[To face page 118.]
He was not himself a University man, but had left school early and
entered a notary’s office. Perhaps he was the more deeply impressed
with the value of “educational advantages” because he had enjoyed so
few of them. There are men who admire learning for that reason, just as
there are those who despise it on the ground that it unfits a youth for
walking in the wily paths of commerce; and William of Wykeham admired
it sufficiently to endow it in the grand style and on a great scale,
like the Rockefellers and the Johns Hopkinses of a later age and a newer
continent. He endowed Winchester School as well as New College—the former
to feed the latter, and “Manners makyth man” to be the motto of both; and
he gave his foundation both more elaborate buildings and more elaborate
Statutes than any previous college had had, with the result that Wiclif
sneered at him as a man “wise of building castles or worldly doing,
though he cannot read well his psalter.”
While the Warden of Merton lived in a “lodging” and kept only four
horses, the Warden of New College was to keep six horses and have a house
to himself. That was one of the founder’s splendid provisions. He also
provided that there should be no fewer than five Deans and three Bursars;
and he made many minor stipulations which have had an enduring influence
upon University development. His sense that his soul stood in sore need
of the prayers of the faithful impelled him to prescribe that daily
attendance at the chapel services—Masses, of course, in those days—should
be compulsory. He believed in a simple and serious life, and therefore
forbade his scholars to play games. Not only “wrestlings, dances, jigs,”
&c., were forbidden by his regulations, but the prohibition extended to
games of “ball” and games of chess; while the interests of morality were
safeguarded by the direction that the College laundress should be “of
such age and condition that no sinister suspicion can, or ought to, fall
on her.” Finally, by enacting that there should be special teaching in
the College in addition to the teaching provided by the University, he
foreshadowed what is known as the “tutorial system.”
The Statutes, it must be admitted, were, on the whole, in advance of
the times in which they were drafted. The founder had clear and, in the
main, sound ideas on the subject of educational reform. He understood,
for one thing, that classical Latin was better than monkish Latin; and
he understood that, in order to shape students as he wished, it was
necessary to catch them young. That was the significance of the linked
endowment of the College and the School; and no doubt it seemed to
William of Wykeham only an act of common justice that, in the selection
of recipients of his bounty, a preference should be shown to “founders’
kin.”
But he did not foresee. Or perhaps it would be juster to say that he
foresaw, and provided for, too much. The world moved, and New College
could not move with it because it was tied up and entangled. The
restrictions on the diversions of the students did not, of course, matter
much. They could be, and were, ignored, when it was recognised that they
were obsolete and unprofitable. The limitation of the choice of students
to a narrow field, and the provision of an income for them for life
whether they worked or were idle, had more pernicious consequences. It
condemned New College, in spite of the magnificence of its buildings, to
insignificance in the life of the University; and it now makes the task
of the historian in search of interesting _alumni_ an extremely hard one.
Nowadays, let it be ungrudgingly admitted, New College is prosperous
and successful. Its scholars, and also its Fellows, have distinguished
themselves in many ways, and have won particular distinction in the
highest walks of journalism. Mr. Buckle, the editor of the _Times_, was
a scholar of New College, and so was Mr. E. T. Cook, who successively
edited the _Pall Mall Gazette_, the _Westminster Gazette_, and the _Daily
News_. Mr. W. L. Courtney, whose signature is familiar to every reader
of the _Daily Telegraph_, was a Fellow; as was also Viscount Milner,
a journalist before he became a pro-consul. In literature, too, the
College has been represented by Lionel Johnson—one of the most subtle and
delicate poets of our generation, though one whose course was brief like
that of Young Marcellus.
But all those names are modern names, occurring subsequently to the
cutting of the entanglement by the University Commissioners. To plunge
into the past is to plunge into a very different state of things. We
quickly get back to a time when it was justly said of New College that
it had “golden scholars, silver bachelors, and leaden masters”—a time
when the College was famous, not for its output of learning, but for
its consumption of negus. There was once a dispute as to the comparative
merits of the negus of New College and of All Souls; and a jury of
Queen’s and Brasenose men who were invited to decide the question gave
a unanimous verdict in favour of the New College recipe. Balliol, where
Southey drank so much negus, was not in the competition.
The notable New College names in this dark age, and in the ages hardly
less dark which preceded it, are names which mean little to the
University and less to the community at large. There are the names of
some respectable divines among them, and even the names of some more than
respectable bishops—two, for instance, of the seven who stood up against
James II; but there is hardly a single name which burns like a beacon; as
does, say, the name of Shelley at University, or the name of Dr. Johnson
at Pembroke.
* * * * *
There is Sydney Smith; but of his Oxford career hardly anything is known
except that he had to get through it on an allowance of £100 a year, and
consequently could not afford to play his part in the dissipations of
the day. He took his degree a year before Southey came into residence at
Balliol, “got into debt to buy books,” and formed such a poor opinion of
his _alma mater_ that he never, throughout the remainder of his life,
ceased to sneer at her. When, for example, the Honours Schools were
instituted, he wrote:
“If Oxford is become at last sensible of the miserable state to which it
was reduced, as everybody else was out of Oxford, and if it is making
serious efforts to recover from the degradation into which it was plunged
a few years past, the good wishes of every respectable man must go with
it.”
And when he heard that a lady of his acquaintance was sending her son to
Oxford, his comment was:
“I feel for her about her son at Oxford, knowing, as I do, that the only
consequences of a University education are the growth of vice and the
waste of money.”
On which the only reasonable comment is that, if Sydney Smith had been at
another college, he might have written less vituperatively.
* * * * *
Another name which arouses some, though only a mild, interest is that of
Sir Henry Wotton, the diplomatist, who ended by becoming Provost of Eton.
He was not on the foundation, but was a gentleman commoner—though few
gentlemen commoners were permitted to enter at New College—and it may be
hoped that he behaved better there than he did afterwards, when he lived,
for a while, in the house of Isaac Casaubon, at Geneva. He was the great
scholar’s “paying guest”; and he not only went away without paying, but
pledged his host’s credit for the horse on which he took his departure.
Casaubon ultimately got the money, but not until he had written to nearly
every classical scholar in Europe to expose Wotton’s outrageous behaviour.