on the foundations of William of Wykeham at Winchester and New College.
The souls which the name commemorates are those of the soldiers who fell
in Henry V.’s French wars—wars for which the Archbishop’s pugnacious
patriotism was very largely responsible. The distinctive feature of the
College is that it neither supports scholars nor harbours commoners,
its only undergraduate members being a sprinkling of Bible clerks.
The purpose of the founder, that is to say, was to endow study—not
to endow teaching; and the fact that the College was small prevented
undergraduates from creeping into it. There was no provision for their
instruction, and there was no room for them. A few commoners did, at one
time, obtain admission, but they were soon eliminated.
[Illustration: REREDOS, ALL SOULS CHAPEL.
[To face p. 145.]
Various consequences have followed from this state of things—some of
them good, and others not so good. The All Souls fellowships did not, in
practice, in the early days at all events, become the rewards of studious
virtue. They were regarded, on the contrary, as sinecures to be scrambled
for, to be jobbed into, to be bought and sold. No definite obligations,
unless it were of residence, attached to them; they were merely positions
in which a man might draw a living wage for doing nothing. Royal
favourites were pushed into fellowships, in the Stuart times, as a cheap
proof of royal favour, and fellowships could be purchased in the open
market, just like commissions in the Army—an abuse which was brought
about in this way:
When a resignation created a vacancy, the College co-opted a successor
to it; but the retiring Fellow shared with the other Fellows the right
to nominate a candidate. On the principle of “scratch my back and I’ll
scratch yours,” the tacit understanding was established that the retiring
Fellow’s candidate should always be elected. This was an opportunity for
any Fellow to offer to retire in favour of a particular candidate in
consideration of a money payment; and many Fellows availed themselves
of the opportunity. Hence the scandal of “corrupt resignations,” not
unknown, indeed, at other colleges, but specially gross and glaring at
All Souls, where it flourished long, and was not suppressed without great
difficulty.
Jobbery and corrupt resignations, in fact, combined to fill All Souls
with Fellows of a different stamp from the Fellows of the other colleges;
and the difference was, in some respects, for the better, and in other
respects for the worse. The Fellows, having no academic duties, were
idle; and Satan provided mischief for their idle hands. The Punishment
Book, and other official records, show them comporting themselves more
like junior than senior members of the University. We hear of several of
them being dropped upon for “noctivagation.” We find the Visitor calling
upon the Warden to “punish such of your Society as do spend their time
in taverns and ale-houses to the scandal of the House.” We discover a
representation that the College ale is too strong for students, and
that only small beer ought to be brewed there. We read that one of
the Fellows was reprimanded for “beating the Under-Butler.” Proof is
abundant, in short, that the College was by no means such a quiet resort
of industrious men as the founder had intended it to be.
Such were the drawbacks of the system; but it also, incidentally,
produced advantages. While many of the Fellows were worthless and
indolent persons, the loose mode of election and the total absence of
academic duties resulted in the introduction of a type of Fellow who
served as a link, just as we have noted that some of the Merton Fellows
did, between the University and the external world—the type of Fellow
whom the College porter appears to have had in mind when he replied
to the visitor who inquired whether the Fellows read the books in the
College library: “Lord bless you, sir! They don’t need to read books.
They’re gentlemen!”
“Well-born, well-dressed, and moderately educated,” is the hackneyed
description of a Fellow of All Souls. The candidates for fellowships, it
used to be said, instead of being put through an examination were invited
to dinner and given cherry-tart to eat; their fate depending upon the
manner in which they disposed of the cherry-stones. The story is told
of a Fellow who was elected as a reward for his delicacy in swallowing
the cherry-stones. It is not to be supposed that the story is literally
true; but no doubt a certain symbolical truth is enshrined in it. The
unmannerly bookworm has never been wanted at All Souls. The scholar who
is also a gentleman has always been preferred to him; and from the time
of Sir Christopher Wren to the time of Lord Curzon of Kedleston, the
College has generally been able to boast of some Fellow of wide fame, not
of a rigidly academic character.
* * * * *
Those great physicians Linacre and Sydenham were Fellows of All Souls;
and Linacre, in an age in which men could afford to specialise in more
than one subject, excelled in Greek as well as medicine. Sir Christopher
Wren has just been mentioned. The College owes to him its famous
sun-dial, with the motto: _Pereunt et imputantur_. It cost him £32 11s.
6d.; and its exactitude was such that Oxford watchmakers used to set
their clocks by it. General Codrington, to whom the College owes the
Codrington Library, went from All Souls to be Governor of Barbadoes, at
the time when Admiral Benbow was beating the French there; and other
Fellows whose names are known to all the world were Blackstone, of the
Commentaries, Edward Young, the author of “Night Thoughts,” and Bishop
Heber.
Blackstone was Bursar of All Souls. The Vinerian professorship was
expressly founded for him. His “Commentaries on the Laws of England”
were first delivered as a course of professorial lectures. He took his
position so seriously that he declined to read his lectures to the Prince
of Wales on the ground that he could not quit his duties at Oxford.
Campbell says of him that he was, after Bacon, “the first practising
lawyer at the English bar who, in writing, paid the slightest attention
to the selection or collocation of words.” He served his College by
compelling the executors of the Duke of Wharton to pay over to it a
donation promised by him at the instance of Edward Young.
Wharton was a rake; and Young, in his youth, was fond of consorting with
rakes. In later life, however, he repented and cancelled the dedications
of poems which he had addressed to his more disreputable associates. The
College books describe him as _poeta celeberrimus_; and he certainly had
for a time a vogue as great as that of Tennyson, or even Martin Farquhar
Tupper, though nowadays he is only remembered for the single sentiment:
“Procrastination is the thief of time.” A passage in Johnson shows that,
though he combined worldliness with his other-worldliness, he could be
effective as a Christian controversialist.
“The other boys,” said the atheist, “I can always answer,
because I always know whence they have their arguments, which I
have read a hundred times; but that fellow Young is continually
pestering me with something of his own.”
Heber remains; but what there is to be said about Heber may be better
said when we come to Brasenose. Here he is mentioned principally because,
in one of his letters home, he describes how, looking out from Brasenose,
he saw the All Souls Fellows searching for the All Souls mallard, and so
introduces us to the interesting legend of that bird.
The story is that, when the foundations of the College was being dug, a
mallard flew out of a drain. Thereupon, or it may be at a later date, a
College poet wrote a song about the mallard, of which the first and last
verses and the chorus may be given here:
“The griffin, bustard, turkey, capon,
Let other hungry mortals gape on,
And on their bones with stomach fall hard,
But let All Souls men have their mallard.
CHORUS.
Oh, by the blood of King Edward,
Oh, by the blood of King Edward,
It was a swapping, swapping mallard.
Then let us drink and dance a galliard
In the remembrance of the mallard,
And as the mallard doth in poole,
Let’s dabble, dive, and duck in bowl.
CHORUS.
Oh, by the blood of King Edward,
Oh, by the blood of King Edward,
It was a swapping, swapping mallard.”
The song is still sung at College gaudies. In the old days the Fellows,
after singing it, used to make a solemn pilgrimage round the College to
look for the mallard; but though the pilgrimage began solemnly, it was
apt to end uproariously. Bonfires were lighted; furniture was smashed;
the oaks of the unpopular were forced—all on pretence of discovering the
undiscoverable bird. The Fellows, in short, made their rounds “not on the
viewless wings of poesy, but charioted by Bacchus and his pards”; and
their proceedings attracted the attention of their Visitor, Archbishop
Abbot, who wrote to them:
“The feast of Christmas drawing now to an end both put me in
mind of the great outrage which, as I am informed, was the last
year committed in your College, where, although matters had
formerly been conducted with some distemper, yet men did never
before break forth into such intolerable liberty as to tear
down doors and gates, and disquiet their neighbours, as if it
had been a camp or a town in war. Civil men should never so far
forget themselves under pretence of a foolish mallard as to do
things barbarously unbecoming.”
MAGDALEN COLLEGE
The College which withstood James II.—President Routh—His great
age and eccentricities—Slackness of the College—The careers of
Addison—Of Gibbon—Of Charles Reade—Oscar Wilde and the Æsthetic
Movement at Magdalen—Persecution of Wilde and suppression of
the movement.
“Little is known,” say the works of reference, of William Waynflete,
Bishop of Winchester, the founder of Magdalen; and the little that does
happen to be known is of no absorbing interest.
The event in its history of which the College is officially proudest is
its battle with James II. The King, for purposes of his own, proposed to
nominate a President. The College demonstrated that the royal nominee was
an unsuitable person to fill the office, and, “having first received the
blessed Eucharist,” proceeded to elect a man of their own choice, and
successfully upheld their election in the face of the royal displeasure.
“Is that Magdalen Tower?” asked the Prince Regent when he visited Oxford
with the allied sovereigns in 1814. “Yes, your Royal Highness,” replied
his travelling companion, “that’s the tower against which James II. broke
his head.”
[Illustration: MAGDALEN COLLEGE.
[To face p. 153.]
A second object of the pride of Magdalen is the long presidency of Dr.
Routh, whose long life was a link between historical and modern times.
There must be many men still living in Oxford who remember him, for
he only died (at the age of ninety-nine) in 1854. He, on his part,
remembered, and talked of, Dr. Johnson’s visits to Oxford, had attained
his majority before the American Declaration of Independence, was old
enough to be at a dame’s school when Wolfe was storming the Heights of
Abraham, and had an aunt who had known a lady who had seen Charles I.
That he was either a great man or a great college ruler it would be an
exaggeration to affirm. He was famous rather for wearing a wig, defying
University Commissions, and favouring traditional abuses. His wig was
sent, after his death, to the Knaresborough well to be petrified, and he
himself was reverenced chiefly as an interesting relic of that remote
past which his conversation could recall. A crowd used to assemble daily
to see him shuffle from his lodgings to the chapel. He recollected
Gownsman’s Gallows, on which he had seen undergraduate members of the
University hanged for highway robbery. His politics, it is said, were
those of Strafford, and his religion was that of Laud. He spoke currently
of the Jacobite faction as a still living force; and his favourite
joke was to inquire after people who had long been dead, and express
astonishment when informed of their decease.
Among a mass of stories told about him the best are perhaps those related
by the biographers of Charles Reade, who had been elected to a demyship
under his presidency. In one of those anecdotes we see an undergraduate
hauled before him by the tutors. The young man having delayed in town to
amuse himself, and not having arrived in Oxford until three days after
the commencement of the term, the tutors represented to the President
that he ought to be rusticated.
“‘Three days late, is he?’ whimpered the old fellow in his
childish treble. ‘Well, sirs, there has been an heavy fall of
snow, and as the gentleman resides in Norfolk, no doubt the
coaches have been detained along the road.’
“‘But,’ urged the tutors, ‘he could have reached Oxford in a
few hours by railway.’
“‘Railway?’ quoth Dr. Routh incredulously. ‘Ah, well, I don’t
know anything about that’; and so, with the typical flea in its
ear, minor authority was dismissed.”
Another story relates to the case of an undergraduate who, after being in
residence for three years and three-quarters, had not yet succeeded in
passing “Smalls.” The junior tutor called to propose that the young man
in question should be invited to remove his name from the College books.
“The venerable President at once assumed an expression of
extreme astonishment. ‘I don’t know anything about your
examinations,’ he replied to the complaining don. ‘Have you
anything to say as regards the gentleman’s moral character or
conduct?’ The tutor responded in the negative. ‘Then,’ cried
the President in an outburst of righteous indignation, ‘how
dare you come here, sir, to attack a respectable member of the
College? His father, sir, is a friend of my friend, the Bishop
of Bath and Wells; and I will not listen, sir, to any such
frivolous allegations.’”
And finally there is the story of the President’s visit to London. He
went there seldom, and always by coach, and the day came when competition
compelled the reduction of the fares:
“Dr. Routh alighted, as was his wont, in Oxford Street, and
was assisted respectfully by the coachman, to whom he handed
£1 7s. 6d.—twenty-five shillings the fare, and half a crown,
the gratuity to John, who, as the money was being paid to him,
said, ‘The fare, Mr. President, is reduced to a guinea.’ Dr.
Routh paused and reflected. ‘Sir,’ he replied, ‘I always have
paid twenty-five shillings, and I always shall.’”
Such is our picture—a picture of an imperious old gentleman,
constitutionally opposed to progress, looking upon his College as a Duke
looks upon his estate, regarding a reformer as a Duke regards a Radical
Chancellor of the Exchequer, convinced that the general well-being
depended upon his being left at liberty to manage, or mismanage, his own
affairs.
And the point of view of the President was also, for many generations,
the point of view of the Fellows under him. They had a very fine piece
of property to cut up, and they carved it to their common satisfaction.
The endowment amounted to about £24,000 a year in all. The President
took about £4,000 a year, and the Fellows from £500 to £600 a year
each; while the Demies, who were nominated by the Fellows in their
turn, had a statutory right to succeed to the Fellowships as vacancies
occurred—the elections, save in rare instances, being governed by the
sacred principles of nepotism. “Your nominee, sir,” the President might
occasionally remark with sarcasm, “may be a very excellent young man, but
he is no scholar”; but the excellence was almost invariably allowed to
compensate for the lack of scholarship.
It could only, in such circumstances, be by accident that the names of
good men were entered on the College books; but such happy accidents
did, of course, occur from time to time. Addison was the first accident,
Gibbon the second, and Charles Reade the third.
* * * * *
Addison, in fact, did get his demyship as the reward of merit. He was
originally at Queen’s, but was invited to migrate to Magdalen because his
Latin verses were admired. “Addison’s Walk” still keeps his memory alive
there. He is even said to have planted some of the trees in the walk,
though he was not the sort of man who was likely to spend much of his
time in planting trees; but little is recorded of the incidents of his
career, except that he “was always very nervous,” and that he “kept late
hours.” One pictures him as sleek, correct, precocious, grave, yet with a
sound appreciation of good claret.
Of Gibbon there is more to be said; for the historian’s description of
the manners and tone of Magdalen society is one of the most pleasant
passages in his famous Autobiography. It is well known, but it must
nevertheless be quoted:
“The fellows, or monks, of my time” (says Gibbon) “were decent
men who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder: their days
were filled by a series of uniform employments; the chapel and
the hall, the coffee-house, and the common-room, till they
retired, weary and well-satisfied, to a long slumber.... Their
conversation stagnated in a round of college business, Tory
politics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal: their dull
and deep potations excused the brisk intemperance of youth.”
There were few lectures, he continues, and the tutors did not insist upon
attendance at such lectures as there were. He gravely tells us with what
impunity he “cut” them:
“As they appeared equally devoid of profit and pleasure, I
was once tempted to try the experiment of a formal apology.
The apology was accepted with a smile. I repeated the offence
with less ceremony; the excuse was admitted with the same
indulgence; the slightest motive of laziness or indisposition,
the most trifling avocation at home or abroad, was allowed as
a worthy impediment; nor did my tutor appear conscious of my
absence or neglect.”
Nor does it even appear to have been necessary for Gibbon to apply for an
_exeat_, or to plead the necessity of consulting his dentist or attending
the funeral of his grandmother, when he wished temporarily to absent
himself from Oxford. The tutor who, when granting his pupil a grudging
permission to attend such a funeral, added that he “could wish that it
had been a nearer relative” belongs to a later generation. Gibbon’s tutor
seems never to have known whether his pupil was in residence or not.
“The want of experience, of advice, and of occupation” (he
says) “soon betrayed me into some improprieties of conduct,
ill-chosen company and inconsiderate expense. My growing debts
might be secret; but my frequent absence was visible and
scandalous; and a tour to Bath, a visit into Buckinghamshire,
and four excursions to London in the same winter, were costly
and dangerous frolics.... In all these excursions I eloped from
Oxford; I returned to College; in a few days I eloped again,
as if I had been an independent stranger in a hired lodging,
without once hearing the voice of admonition, without once
feeling the hand of control.”
This in the case of a boy of fourteen (for Gibbon was no more when
he matriculated) and in a College in which religion, discipline, and
learning were jointly and severally endowed with £24,000 a year! There
could be no clearer proof of the darkness of the dark ages at Oxford;
and, in spite of the testimony of Adam Smith, already quoted, as to the
state of things at Balliol, it seems that they were really darker at
Magdalen than elsewhere.
They were still dark, though not so dark as they had been, when Charles
Reade came into residence.
* * * * *
Charles Reade, in a sense, got his demyship by merit; but it was only by
accident that his merit was allowed to count. The nominee of a nepotist
had broken down so utterly in the qualifying examination that President
Routh for once lost his temper and declared that he would not consent to
the election of an absolute ignoramus. The examiners then proceeded to
look at the papers of the other candidates; and Charles Reade’s English
Essay impressed them. “Look here!” one of them was heard to shout into
the deaf President’s ear. “Here is a boy who gives us his own ideas
instead of other people’s!” The President read the essay, and agreed that
it was so; and Charles Reade was duly elected to a demyship, which led,
in due course, to a fellowship, tenable for life.
Even so, however, he still needed accident to befriend him, and did not
trust to accident in vain. His election to the fellowship hung upon his
ability to pass an examination in the Rudiments of Faith and Religion—an
examination which has since come to be known, first as “Ruders” and
latterly as “Divers.” Candidates for that examination were required to
know all the Thirty-nine Articles by heart. Charles Reade had only learnt
three of them; but he happened to be asked to recite one of the three,
and came off with flying colours, though the odds, as can be shown by the
subtle processes of arithmetic, were thirteen to one against him.
A little later he won the Vinerian Law Scholarship; and that success also
was a triumph, if not of accident, at least of favour. The election to
that scholarship, in those days, did not depend solely on the examiners,
but was decided, in the last resort, by the votes of all the Masters
of Arts whose names were on the books. Charles Reade and his mother
instituted a careful canvass of the country clergy and the country
squires, and even supplied conveyances to drive the voters to the polling
station. He was returned at the head of the poll, and defended his
corrupt practices by an ingenious argument.
“The way,” he said, “in which my canvass was organised and carried out
was rather unusual, but it argues a talent of the practical kind superior
to that of my competitors. The University in its wisdom has chosen right.”
Thereafter he lived a good deal, from time to time, in his Magdalen
rooms, and did a good deal of his work there. “The rooms he occupied in
No. 2, New Buildings,” say his biographers, “were scantily furnished.
MSS. and books littering in heaps on the floor, the walls being decorated
with looking-glasses instead of pictures.” He thought so highly of the
College cook that, when in London, he often had his dinner cooked at
Magdalen and sent up to town in a set of silver dishes. The cook, in
return, thought so highly of him that he spoke of “It is Never Too Late
to Mend” as “the fifth Gospel.” Mr. Tuckwell relates that he “would
beguile acquaintances into his ill-furnished rooms, and read to them _ad
nauseam_ from his latest MS.”
Though he was never a College tutor, he held two College offices—those
of Dean of Arts and Vice-President. It is on record that he performed
the functions of Dean in a bright green coat with brass buttons—a
costume considered objectionable by Professor Goldwin Smith, who was
then a Magdalen undergraduate. It was also while Charles Reade was
Dean that John Conington, the future Professor of Latin, known to his
contemporaries as “the sick vulture,” was put under the College pump as
a punishment for starting a College debating society, and migrated in
consequence to University.
Whether this last incident is really typical of the attitude of Magdalen
Philistinism towards culture may be arguable; but it forms, at any rate,
a fitting prelude to the story which remains to be told of the great
Magdalen outburst which finally overthrew the Æsthetic Movement.
* * * * *
The source of æstheticism is presumably to be found in
pre-Raphaelitism—that interesting revolt against the Philistinism and
general ugliness of early and mid-Victorian life. It established a new
religion of beauty, albeit on what must have seemed to the Philistines a
somewhat doleful basis. It lacked laughter. The enemies of Philistinism
who laughed, as Matthew Arnold did, were not pre-Raphaelites. The
pre-Raphaelites themselves were perhaps a little too conscious that the
overthrow of Philistinism was no laughing matter. Ecstasy was perhaps
their substitute for hilarity. It was a disposition to a sort of æsthetic
ecstasy which they bequeathed to their Oxford successors, specifically
known as Æsthetes, who had first Walter Pater, a Fellow of Brasenose, and
then Oscar Wilde, a demy of Magdalen, for their prophets.