about celebrities whose celebrity is purely local. It would be possible,
of course, if reverence did not forbid, to speak at some length on the
alleged Spoonerisms of Canon Spooner; but most of those stories are
probably untrue. It cannot be true, for instance, that Canon Spooner,
at a dinner-party inadvertently stuck his fork into the white hand of
the lady sitting next to him, murmuring, “Excuse me, I think that is my
bread.” It is still less credible that Canon Spooner, when a lady of his
family was seeing him off at the railway-station, gave the lady sixpence
in mistake for the porter, and kissed the porter in mistake for the lady.
And who believes that Canon Spooner, setting out to propose the health
of “our dear old Queen,” found himself proposing the health of “our
queer old Dean” instead? The trail of the mythmaker is over all these
anecdotes; and indeed it is said that the fabrication of “Spoonerisms” is
a favourite undergraduate diversion on Sunday afternoons.
An earlier Warden, Dr. Shuttleworth, is famous for a remarkable poem
which he composed while a Winchester boy—an Address to Learning, which
ends with the often-quoted lines:
“Make me, O Sphere-descended Queen,
A Bishop, or at least a Dean.”
His prayer was answered, and he became Bishop of Chichester, and, in that
capacity, made Manning an Archdeacon. He was, however, an opponent of the
Ritualists, and so formidable a one that his death was saluted by Pusey
as “a visible token of God’s presence in the Church of England”; whence
it appears that Pusey worshipped a God whom he believed to be capable of
killing off Broad Churchmen in order that High Churchmen might be spared
the embarrassment of meeting them in controversy.
A few stories of Shuttleworth, and a few other stories of other New
College notables of the same generation, may be found in Mr. Tuckwell’s
entertaining “Reminiscences of Oxford.” There is the story, for instance,
of Lancelot Lee, the incumbent of the College living of Wootton, near
Woodstock.
“Coming out of church one day, he found two disreputable
vagabonds in the churchyard.
“‘What are you doing here?’
“‘Oh, sir, we are seeking the Lord.’
“‘Seeking the Lord, are you? Do you see those stocks? That is
where the Lord will find you if you stay here another minute.’”
Then there is the story of Christopher Erle, who held a living in
Buckinghamshire, in the immediate vicinity of Lord Rothschild’s estate.
It seemed to Erle, as it has since seemed to Mr. Lloyd George, that it
was possible to have “too much of Lord Rothschild,” and he suppressed him:
“It was Erle’s whim to dress carelessly; and the plutocrat,
walking one day with a large party and meeting his Rector in
the parish, had the bad taste to handle his sleeve and say,
‘Rather a shabby coat, Parson, isn’t it?’ Erle held it up to
him—‘Will you buysh? Will you buysh?’ There ensued an _exitus
Israel_, and Erle walked on, chuckling and victorious.”
But perhaps the most characteristic of the stories is that of the highway
robbery:
“Some men were going to the Abingdon ball; and in the
common-room the conversation turned on a highway robbery
recently perpetrated near Wheatley. The ball-goers talked
valiantly of their own courage, contemptuously of brigand
dangers; their fly was announced, and off they drove. Coming
home, they were stopped in a dark part of Bagley Wood by
two masked men, one of whom held the horses’ heads, while
his mate pointed a pistol into the fly with the conventional
highwayman’s demand. Meekly our gallant travellers surrendered
money, watches, jewellery. One pleaded for a ring which had
belonged to his old mother; the deceased lady was consigned
to Tartarus, the ring was taken, and the marauders rode away.
Great commiseration was shown to the victims when they told
their tale, great activity displayed by the police; until on
going into Hall the next afternoon, they saw lying in a heap
on the centre of the high table the abstracted valuables,
including the maternal ring, while mounting guard over them
was a broken candle-stick which had done duty as a pistol. The
two practical jokers had ridden to the wood, tied their horses
to the trees, waited for the travellers, and played the wild
Prince Poins.”
And so forth; for all the best New College stories are stories of that
sort—stories of which the heroes are jesters or eccentrics rather than
men of light and leading. The future, no doubt, will be much richer in
intellectual glory; but the College has had but a short time in which to
assert itself since the University Commissioners released it from William
of Wykeham’s Statutes.
LINCOLN COLLEGE
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.
For a small College—and it has always been one of the smallest—Lincoln
is associated with a goodly list of outstanding names, notable in
very diverse departments of endeavour. Mr. D. S. MacColl, of the
National Gallery, is, perhaps, the most distinguished of its recent
representatives. He won the Newdigate; and is said to have won it, as
Dean Burgon did, by the supreme merit of a single line. Burgon’s striking
line was, as all the world remembers:
“A rose-red city—half as old as time.”
To do full justice to Mr. MacColl’s line one must also quote the few
lines which precede it:
“But better still, in slumber-slanting ease,
To be beside the falling of the seas,
To listen and to listen till the tune
Of all the life of all the afternoon
Deepens to one note of a long distress—
_The monotone of everlastingness_.”
To quote Mr. MacColl, however, is to begin at the end. There are earlier
names which also scintillate with varying degrees of brilliance, and
make their appeal to hero-worshippers of various temperaments. The
most remarkable are those of John Wesley, “Ideal” Ward, more commonly
associated with Balliol, where he held a fellowship until his conversion
to Roman Catholicism, Mark Pattison, Lord Morley, Cotter Morrison, and
“Shifter.”
* * * * *
It was a question, earnestly considered, whether “Shifter” should
be mentioned in these pages. The question was finally put to a
representative assemblage of literary men—only a minority of them from
Oxford; and the answer was unanimously in the affirmative. The name of
“Shifter,” it was agreed, was by no means to be treated as if it had been
“writ in water.” If it had ceased to be a household word, at any rate it
was remembered. His case was interesting, if only because he had arrived
at fame by a road not commonly travelled by modern Oxford men; and there
were those, it was felt, who would learn, with a sort of scandalised
astonishment, that “Shifter” was once Goldberg of Lincoln.
The present writer once met “Shifter,” and discovered that the vogue
of his pseudonym filled him with genuine pride. The meeting-place was
a printing office in the purlieus of Fleet Street. A diminutive man
of rather drowsy manner was sitting at the end of a long, bare table,
engaged in slow and careful literary composition. An impatient boy was
carrying off the sheets of his copy as he finished them. He looked up
with affability, yet with an air of self-importance, at the new arrival,
and introduced himself. “You know who I am, don’t you?” he said. “I’m
‘Shifter.’ I’m writing the Office Boy’s Diary”; and there followed
an invitation to partake of refreshment with him, after his task was
concluded. The invitation was accepted, and there ensued some talk of
Oxford—a place which, in those rather sordid surroundings, seemed very
far away.
Oxford, in fact, used to figure, from time to time, in “Shifter’s”
contributions to the sporting press. He liked to describe himself as the
_enfant terrible_ returning to the respectable bosom of _alma mater_ and
creating a sensation there. He spoke, in particular, of a “respectable
brother,” in residence at another College, whom he used to visit—and to
shock. The stock story was that he stayed out all night, and came back
to College with the milk, and threatened to report the milkman to the
College authorities for neglecting to mix rum with it.
Probably the story was untrue—such stories generally are. It reads like
the humorous invention of a “fanfaron of vice.” Of “Shifter’s” actual
career at Lincoln there are few authentic records except that he wore
plum-coloured clothes, and slopped about the quad in slippers. He might
easily, it is said, have been a good scholar if he had been industrious;
he was a very tolerable scholar in spite of his lack of industry, as,
indeed, were a good many members of the original team driven by the
famous “Master” of the pink _Sporting Times_. But the “Master” showed a
good many clever young men how the “fanfaron of vice” could make a living
out of the fanfaronade. Goldberg of Lincoln was one of the cleverest of
the young men who learnt the “Master’s” cynical lesson. He blossomed into
“Shifter,” and his name was more often in the mouths of men than those of
many worthier persons.
It is tempting to moralise; but the temptation shall be resisted—or very
nearly so. “Shifter” was not, after all, an absolutely unique Oxford
product. One can find Oxford parallels and Oxford precedents for his
case. There are several precedents in Elizabethan Oxford, among the wits
who came to town, and wrote for the stage, and died young as the result
of too much tavern life—George Peele of Christ Church, for example.
“Shifter” also died young, not, one fears, because the gods loved him,
being of the same year as Oscar Wilde, and Mr. A. D. Godley, and Mr. L.
R. Farnell, and Dr. Horton, the Hampstead preacher. His appeal, it must
be granted, was to the lower elements in our fallen nature; but at least
he appealed to them wittily, and not like the vulgarians of the _Winning
Post_. _Sit terra levis!_ One may wish that for him, though one would not
wish it for them; and then one may pass on, striking a pleasant note of
contrast, to the very different case of John Wesley.
* * * * *
Let us be fair to Wesley. Above all, let us avoid the easy error of
supposing that we shall be helped to draw the picture of his manner and
deportment by visiting the nearest Wesleyan chapel and listening to any
Wesleyan minister who may happen to conduct the service there.
The modern Wesleyan organisation is democratic in a sense in which the
Church of England is not. Its ministers are mostly men of the people,
fluent but shallow, good biblical scholars but not otherwise highly
educated, and lacking in social polish. Their accents are often broad;
their gesticulations are often violent; they are skilled in exhorting the
lower orders in language which the lower orders understand.
Perhaps that is as it should be; perhaps their limitations are included
among the sources of their strength. Their congregations often think so,
and say so. One may sometimes hear Wesleyan Church members accounting for
their preference for Wesleyan places of worship on the express ground
that Wesleyan ministers are not, as they themselves choose to put it,
“gentlemen.” The priest of the Church of England, they aver, patronises
the artisan and small shopkeeper and keeps them at a distance. The
Wesleyan minister treats them as his brothers and sisters, and takes tea
with them, in a friendly way, in their back parlours. As the arrangement
pleases him, and pleases them, no one else is called upon to criticise
it. The matter is only mentioned here for the purpose of removing a
possible misapprehension and pointing out that Wesley of Lincoln was not
that sort of Wesleyan.
Wesley of Lincoln, who had been at Charterhouse and Christ Church before
his election to a Lincoln Fellowship, was a gentleman and a scholar,
in the fullest sense of the words. He had as much of the Oxford manner
as had been invented in his time, and he was rather a reserved than an
effervescent man. One must picture him, to picture him rightly, as a
kind of High Church don, of studious habits and ascetic inclinations, a
little more anxious than the other dons to enroll undergraduates as his
disciples. One finds his closest counterpart in modern times, not in any
of the tub-thumpers of any of the denominational tabernacles, but in some
of the Canons of Christ Church—say Canon Pusey, or Canon King, or Canon
Liddon. He was the kind of man, in short, who, in slightly different
circumstances, might have inaugurated, not an evangelical revival, but a
Tractarian Movement.
In order to understand him, one has to understand, not only the England,
but also the Oxford of the eighteenth century. It is not necessary to
enter into the alleged “aridity” of that century; but it is important
to remember that it was a century in which spiritual problems were very
generally waved aside. And the tendencies of the country as a whole were
reflected in an exaggerated shape at Oxford.
Oxford was comfortable, and was taking no thought for the morrow. The
dons, being well provided for, liked to sit in coffee-houses and read
the papers, indolently jeering at the House of Hanover. It did not
occur to them to concern themselves with the salvation of their souls
or of the souls of their pupils. It hardly even occurred to them to
concern themselves with the education of their pupils. Gibbon’s tutor,
remembering that he had a salary to receive but forgetting that he had a
duty to perform, was, in spite of the exceptions which can be adduced,
a typical don of the date. Indifferentism, in short, was the note; and
enthusiasm, at Oxford, was regarded as the abomination of desolation
standing where it ought not.
Such was the scene on which Wesley entered. He came from a country
parsonage where, in spite of the general trend of theological thought,
the lamp of piety had been kept burning. It was more natural to him to
work than to be idle, and he was keenly conscious that he had a soul
to be saved. He did not quite know how to save it; but he had picked
up hints from the writings of Thomas à Kempis, Jeremy Taylor, and John
Law. On the whole he was inclined to think that the way of salvation lay
in doing as the Churchmen did, only more so, in redeeming the time by
industry, and in sedulously observing the ritual prescriptions of the
Book of Common Prayer.
He made the acquaintance of a small group of like-minded men. He, and his
brother Charles, and George Whitefield (of Pembroke), and James Hervey
(of his own College), who was to win fame by meditating among the tombs,
and one or two others, formed a Club. The rules of the Club, which was
called, in derision, the Holy Club, were merely to the effect that the
members must order their lives regularly, discharge all their duties
punctually, and receive the Sacrament at appointed intervals. Because
they were thus men of method, they were nicknamed Methodists. The name
had no more recondite origin than that. The actual thing—the spiritual
point of view distinctive of Methodism—was of later date. The young
Fellow of Lincoln and “those about” him were only feeling their way to
it. Far from being Dissenters, they were better Churchmen than their
neighbours; their purpose was not to rouse the country but to rouse the
Church.
Wesley, moreover, was, at this date, an Oxonian of the type that clings
to Oxford. He could not bear the thought of “going down,” even for the
purpose of taking a cure of souls. It was put to him that he ought, for
family reasons, to take over his father’s country living; but he raised
objections—just the sort of objections which it is natural for an Oxford
man to raise. He knew, he said, of “no other place under heaven, save
Oxford, where I can always have at hand half a dozen persons of my own
judgment and engaged in the same studies.” The sociability, that is to
say, of Oxford appealed to him. He enjoyed his position as the sovereign
ruler of a small coterie, even though that coterie was unpopular with the
rest of the University.
The University, in truth, had no case against the Methodists. If they
were zealots, they were not, as yet, schismatics. There was nothing to
be said against them except that they rose early, kept regular hours,
received the Sacrament as often as possible, visited the prisoners and
the sick, and lived economically in order that they might be able to
afford to be charitable—proceedings which it must have been exceedingly
difficult for other Churchmen to indict. Yet the University did, as a
matter of fact, dislike them; and its displeasure was justified by Dr.
Johnson, and was manifested in a variety of ways. “They were not fit,”
said Johnson, in his robust and ponderous way, “to be in the University
of Oxford. A cow is a very good animal in the field, but we turn her out
of a garden.” And there were others who said that the conduct of the
Methodists was only excusable if it could be assumed that they were mad;
others, again, who pelted them with mud when they were on their way to
church. It is worth while to remember that it was in the days when Oxford
was entirely in the hands of the orthodox that communicants were pelted
with mud near the porch of Saint Mary’s Church as a protest against the
strictness of their religious observances.
And there we may leave them, for the story of Methodism is much too long
a story to be repeated. How Wesley presently ceased to make broad his
phylacteries, and suddenly awoke to a sense of the supreme importance of
the “inward witness” to the Christian propositions, and founded the vast
organisation which numbered 12,000,000 adherents before his death—all
this is written in innumerable biographies and need not be re-written
here. Here it is enough to indicate the personality of the man: to point
out that he was no ranter, but a don on whom Oxford had set its mark—a
scholar, quiet, reserved, and dignified, though with an immense fund of
strength and energy in reserve. And perhaps one may conclude with a story
of his passage of arms with another Oxford man of a very different type—a
passage of arms in which his quick wit and dignified demeanour easily won
him the victory.
The place was Bath, and the time was near the beginning of Wesley’s
missionary journeys. A certain Nash of Jesus was there—the Nash of Jesus
whom the world knows as Beau Nash, the King of Bath. The two men met on a
narrow pavement, and one of them had to make way for the other.
“I never make way for a fool,” said Nash of Jesus, insolently holding his
ground.
“Don’t you? I always do,” replied Wesley of Lincoln, quietly stepping on
one side; and the world is agreed that it was Wesley of Lincoln who got
the best of that encounter.
And now leaving Wesley, we will evoke the memory of another notable
Lincoln man, Mark Pattison, so long the Rector of the College.
* * * * *
Mark Pattison won his Lincoln fellowship from Oriel; and he resembled
Wesley in beginning life as a High Churchman. He was Newman’s curate,
and, being much attached to Newman, very nearly accompanied, or followed,
him into the Church of Rome. He only failed to do so, according to the
commonly accepted story, because he missed the train, or the omnibus,
or whatever conveyance it was by which he had arranged to travel to
the place appointed for his “reception.” While waiting for the next
train or omnibus, it is said, he changed his mind and decided to
remain, provisionally at all events, a member of the Church of England.
Nominally he remained a member of the Church of England until the end;
but it was an open secret, confirmed by statements in his “Memoirs,” that
he believed in nothing in particular and did not believe very profoundly
even in that. He is one of the many men who have been credited with the
pregnant saying: “Nothing is new, and nothing is true, but it doesn’t
matter much.”
His reasons for not formally quitting the Church in which he had ceased
to believe need not detain us. He is said to have said that, as he had
taken Orders in good faith, he felt entitled to retain them through all
beliefs and none instead of facing an unpleasant alternative; but it
shall be left to casuists to estimate the value of that casuistry. The
really interesting thing to note is that, in later life, he looked upon
the years in which he had been religious in almost exactly the same light
as that in which the Methodists of whom we have been speaking looked upon
the years prior to their assurance of salvation. He came to think that
as a Christian—and more particularly as a Puseyite—he had lived in outer
darkness; and he despised, and almost hated, himself for having done so.
“Fanaticism,” he says, “was laying its deadly grip around me.” He speaks
of his “fury of zeal” and his “abject prostration of mind” and his
“degrading superstition,” and of the “time-wasting and mind-drowning
occupation” in which he was involved by his too close attention to his
devotional exercises. He adds that he once “got so low by fostering a
morbid state of conscience as to go to confession to Dr. Pusey”; and he
continues:
“Years afterwards it came to my knowledge that Pusey had told a fact
about myself, which he got from me on that occasion, to a friend of his,
who employed it to annoy me.”
Presently, however, he began to discover that the Puseyites were “not
intellectually equal companions,” and that Newman himself was a man
of limited philosophical acquirements—a man to whom “all the grand
development of human reason from Aristotle down to Hegel was a sealed
book.” So, though there was a struggle—due to “that profound pietistic
impression which lay like lead upon my understanding”—reason got its way,
and Pattison’s intelligence evolved. There was a day when he called on
James Anthony Froude, desiring “to sympathise with his scepticism for
the purpose of helping him through it”; but presently he travelled on
the same road that Froude had taken, and travelled farther on it. The
Tractarian became an Essayist and Reviewer. The Essayist and Reviewer
came to regard all religions as vain guesses at the answer of an
unanswerable riddle.
He enjoyed, in his later years, one of those great University reputations
which, recognised by instinct, and admitted by universal assent, do
not require to be based on visible or tangible achievement. It was
commonly assumed that he knew everything, not only on his own subject,
but on all subjects; also that he had thought out all problems and was
only restrained from throwing light on them because he despised his
fellow-creatures and resented their impertinent curiosity. He was too
much absorbed, in fact, in his thoughts to pay much attention to his
duties; and he ended his pilgrimage as a somewhat weird figure—somewhat
of an enigma to the old and a formidable terror to the young.
Undergraduates, in particular, were too often the objects of a scorn
which he was at no pains to hide. The undergraduates of his own College
lived in an agony of apprehension lest he should ask them to go for walks
with him; and it cannot be said that their fears were altogether without
warrant. He did not speak when walking, but waited to be spoken to; and
the consequences of speaking to him were incalculable—not unlike the
consequences of trying to make friends with some strange and dangerous
wild beast.
There is a stock story of an undergraduate who ventured to break the
embarrassing silence by contrasting the irony of Sophocles with the irony
of Euripides; but he only discovered that the irony of the Rector of
Lincoln was greater than either. “Quote, sir, quote,” was the Rector’s
only rejoinder; and as the timorous youth was not prepared with a
quotation, nothing further was said, on either side, on any subject,
for the remainder of the afternoon. But the undergraduate who confined
himself to simple topics which he did understand—the state of the
weather, for example—was handled still more roughly. “If that is all you
have to say, you are not a very intelligent young man,” was the retort
with which the Rector closured him.
ALL SOULS
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.