Æsthetic Movement and the strange jargon, initiated by Oscar Wilde, and
talked by the _illuminés_. They were “utter,” they said; they were “too
too”; they were “all but.” And no doubt the boast that they were “all
but” was the best founded, and received the most ironical justification.
They had not, that is to say, the sincerity of conviction which could
enable them to stand firm in the day of persecution; and that day of
persecution came upon them with the suddenness of a thunder-clap.
What happened, to be precise, was this: Towards the end of a certain
summer term, and in the midst of the season of bump suppers, a certain
æsthete of some notoriety brought forward a resolution at the Oxford
Union proposing that the Society should discontinue its subscription to
_Punch_, because that journal was ridiculing the “New Renaissance.” The
proposal was rejected; but the end of the matter was not in the Debating
Hall, but at the æsthete’s own College, which happened to be Magdalen,
where a party of boating men were convivially celebrating their success
upon the river. The harmony of the evening ended in an attack upon the
æsthete. His collection of blue china was thrown out of his window, and
he himself, like John Conington, was put under the College pump. It was
threatened that the same measures would be taken with other æsthetes in
other colleges, and in the panic which ensued, the Æsthetic Movement
perished. The leading æsthetes hurried as one man to the barber’s to
get their hair cut, and to the haberdasher’s to buy high collars. Men
who, on the previous day, had resembled owls staring out of ivy-bushes
now cultivated the appearance of timid cows shyly peeping over white
walls; and all the available enthusiasm—since Oxford must always have
an enthusiasm of some sort—was transferred to Canon Barnett’s scheme
for conveying the higher life to the lower orders through the medium of
University Settlements in the slums of London.
Such is the history of the Æsthetic Movement, compressed into a nutshell,
and related with the irreducible minimum of reference to Oscar Wilde;
but there is not really, at this time of day, any reason for leaving him
out. Magdalen, of course, is not proud of him, though he took two firsts
and won the Newdigate; but visitors to Magdalen are generally inquisitive
about him. He was a feature—an institution; and he belongs to literary
history.
Probably no undergraduate ever attracted more attention while still an
undergraduate, or left a more enduring trail of legend behind him when
he went down. He understood, as the pre-Raphaelites whom he succeeded
had not understood it, the great art of posing—the art of challenging
attention, not for what he had done but for what he was. He was the
first to expound the art of life as the art of “existing beautifully.”
The conception appealed to the _âmes sensibles_ and the vain—especially,
no doubt, to the vain whose vanity had no _raison d’être_ in the way of
visible achievement. It supplied them with passwords and shibboleths; and
it filled Oxford with a long, limp, languishing procession of mild-eyed
enthusiasts, who preferred the easy morals of Greece to the stern code of
Palestine, and took their leader far more seriously than he took himself.
His sayings were quoted, and anecdotes of his strange doings were passed
round. One heard, and talked, of the blue china which he “lived up to”
in the most æsthetically furnished rooms in Oxford, and of his discovery
of the “utter” loveliness of sunflowers. One was particularly proud of
the stories of his contemptuous treatment of the Professor of Poetry.
Principal Shairp, it was said, had read over his prize poem with him and
suggested alterations. He had listened with the politeness of a potentate
negotiating with a rival potentate, and had then printed his poem
without adopting a single one of the proposed amendments.
There was a time when he was “ragged” on account of his eccentricities,
but he was ragged in vain. On one occasion eight stalwart Philistines
bound him with ropes and trailed him along the ground to the top of a
hill. Instead of losing his temper, he expressed himself as lost in
admiration of the view. After that, it seems to have been felt that he
had earned his right to be eccentric. At all events, the Philistines
troubled him no more. He had founded his school. It continued to flourish
for some years after his departure, and to feed itself upon stories of
his sayings and doings in the wider world.
There were the stories, for instance, of his lecturing tour in America.
He had gone “to carry culture to a continent,” but he had been
“disappointed with the Atlantic Ocean.” There was the story of his
comment on the case of the man—a brother poet named John Barlas—who was
reported to have gone mad as the result of reading the Bible. “When I
think,” said Oscar, “of all the harm that book has done I despair of ever
writing anything to equal it.” And, finally, there were the innumerable
stories which identified him with Du Maurier’s Postlethwaite. A feeble
follower of his—one of those who ultimately suffered martyrdom for the
cause—was ridiculed in the Union, in the course of the debate above
referred to, as “the least of all the a-Postlethwaites and scarce worthy
to be called an a-Postlethwaite.”
Afterwards, of course—but why dwell upon what happened afterwards?
Wilde’s biographer, Mr. Sherard, suggests that he was “to a very
large extent a victim of the Oxford educational system, of the Oxford
environment.” He supports his view by the statement that Oxford “produces
side by side the saint, the sage, and the depraved libertine,” and “sends
men to Parnassus or to the public-house, to Latium or the lenocinium.”
But that will not do at all; for precisely the same thing might be said,
with equal truth, of any curriculum through which large masses of young
men pass, or any environment which they frequent. The descent to Avernus
is easy, and hell has many gates quite as accessible from the seats of
ignorance as from the seats of learning.
“With my brain,” Oscar Wilde once said in later life, “I might have
become anything that I chose.”
Undoubtedly he might; and it is a great tragedy that he chose so ill; but
it would be a gross injustice to hold Oxford responsible for his choice.
Oxford, as we have seen, did its best to curb his wantonness by trailing
him on the ground to the top of a hill; and even when he was no longer
_in statu pupillari_, Oxford planned a second effort for his salvation.
He was at Oxford, on a visit to a friend at University College on the
night of the riot, already spoken of, which put the Æsthetic Movement
down. He had even accepted, for that night, an invitation to the rooms of
a Magdalen disciple; and the plot had been laid to seize him, and submit
him, together with his disciple, to the discipline of the College pump.
One of the conspirators privately warned him of his danger, and he made
an excuse, and stayed away.
Perhaps, if he had gone, the pump would have saved him from himself; but
that, after all, is an idle speculation.
BRASENOSE COLLEGE
The eponymous nose—The Hell Fire Club and its ghost—The
Phœnix—Dean Hole as the typical Brasenose man—Bishop Heber
and his prize poem—His _jeux d’esprit_—The note of satire in
his missionary hymns—Richard Heber the greatest bibliophile
that the world has never seen—The author of “Ingoldsby
Legends”—Robertson of Brighton—Oxford objections to private
initiative in religion—Walter Pater and his Philosophy of Life.
There are two questions which every visitor to Brasenose can be relied
upon to ask: What, he will demand, is the origin of the eponymous nose?
And what are the rights of the story about the Hell Fire Club and its
ghost?
[Illustration: BRASENOSE KNOCKER.
[To face p. 171.]
As regards the nose, two doctrines have gained currency. The first is
contained in the works of the French traveller, Dr. Sorbière:
“I shall not take upon me,” writes the Doctor, “to describe all
the colleges to you. There is one at whose gate I saw a great
brazen nose, like Punchinello’s vizard. I was also told they
call it ‘Brasen-Nose College,’ and that John Duns Scotus taught
here, in remembrance of which they set up the sign of his nose
at the gate.”
The other explanation is to be found in that entertaining classic,
“Verdant Green”:
“Mr. Larkyns,” we there read, “drew Verdant’s attention to
the brazen nose that is such a conspicuous object over the
entrance gate. ‘That,’ said he, ‘was modelled from a cast of
the principal feature of the first Head of the College, and so
the College was named Brazen-nose. The nose was formerly used
as a place of punishment for any misbehaving Brasenosian, who
had to sit upon it for two hours.... These punishments were so
frequent that they gradually wore down the nose to its present
small dimensions.’”
It is hardly necessary to add that Dr. Sorbière, as well as Mr. Verdant
Green, was hoaxed. The nose seems originally to have been a knocker of
no importance, though, at a later date, it came to be regarded almost
as a fetish or a mascot, and acquired an accretion of legend. When, in
the year 1334, some members of Brasenose Hall (which preceded Brasenose
College) migrated from Oxford to Stamford, in Lincolnshire, because
Oxford was too riotous a place to suit their tastes, they took the
knocker with them. The students who stayed in Oxford procured another
nose in place of it; but the nose which had gone astray was bought back
by the College, 656 years after its removal, and now embellishes the
dining-hall.
That point cleared up, we may go on to the story of the Hell Fire Club
and the ghost.
* * * * *
The Brasenose Hell Fire Club was an imitation of the more famous Hell
Fire Club of Medmenham Abbey. It flourished from 1828 to 1834, and its
_raison d’être_ was the defiance of religion and mortality. The meetings
were held in the various members’ rooms. The members sat at a table with
a vacant chair at the head of it—the theory being that their chairman was
the invisible but omnipresent Enemy of Mankind—and they drank hard and
competed with one another in blasphemous declamation and the telling of
indecorous stories. The dons, it appears, had some vague inkling of their
proceedings, but no precise information on which it was possible for them
to act. They did not know how the Club differed from other wine clubs,
nor had they a list of its members; but the truth was to be revealed to
them in a sudden and dramatic manner.
One of the Brasenose dons had been dining with the dons of Exeter—in the
Senior Common-room of which College an excellent port is dispensed—and
his way home took him along Brasenose Lane, which, as strangers will
remark, is one of the darkest and loneliest thoroughfares in Oxford.
On one side of it is the forbidding _façade_ of Brasenose itself,
with savage iron bars fastened across all the windows to prevent
undergraduates from climbing out of them and seeking adventures at
unseemly hours; on the other side is the high, blank wall of the Exeter
Fellows’ garden.
The hour was midnight, and as the don pursued his solitary way he heard
sounds of revelry—and then sounds which were not of revelry—proceeding
from a room on the ground floor in which the members of the Hell Fire
Club were assembled. He was startled; he stopped; he looked up, and saw
an astounding and appalling spectacle. The first figure which met his
eyes was that of Beelzebub, the Prince of Darkness—blue fire, and horns,
and hoofs, and all; and then he perceived that Beelzebub was not alone.
An undergraduate, well known to the don as a _mauvais sujet_, was in his
grip, struggling, resisting, with agony and terror in his face, while the
Evil One dragged his body in mocking triumph through the bars.
Doubting the evidence of his senses, the don took to his heels and
ran all the way to the College gate. He knocked and was admitted, and
staggered, in an almost fainting condition, into the porch. At the same
time there was a cry and a rush of men from one of the rooms on the right
of the quadrangle. They came from a meeting of the Hell Fire Club, with
the news that the owner of the rooms in which the session had been held
had suddenly fallen dead—of apoplexy, as one gathers—in the midst of a
blasphemous tirade.
The story is told by the Rev. F. G. Lee in his “Glimpses of the
Supernatural.” It was current in his own Oxford days, Mr. Lee says, “on
what could not but be regarded as good authority.” It is still current,
whatever be the value of the authority, and is invariably recalled
whenever a College debating society discusses the motion, “That this
House believes in ghosts.” Probably, since the ghost does not appear
in the record of the circumstances preserved in the Vice-Principal’s
Register, the supernatural element in the story is a later accretion, due
to the mythopœic faculty of youth; but the sudden death of the member of
the Hell Fire Club is history.
Even that fact, indeed, has sometimes been denied by rationalising
sceptics, who have gone so far as to declare that there was no death
in the College in the year in which the Hell Fire Club was wound up;
but the death of Edward Leigh Trafford, the member in question, is duly
chronicled in the Register above referred to, and the present writer has
even heard a contemporary witness, an aged clergyman whose acquaintance
he made in a hotel smoking-room, relate that the dead man’s coffin was
solemnly laid out in the College hall, and that all the undergraduates
in residence were paraded before it, and warned of the judgment by which
sinners might at any hour be overtaken.
* * * * *
Another Brasenose Club, hardly less famous than the Hell Fire Club, and
much more worthy of fame, is the Phœnix. It is sometimes said that the
Phœnix was so called because it rose from the ashes of the Hell Fire
Club; but that is a mistake. The Phœnix is the older society of the two,
dating from 1781 or 1782, and is, in fact, the oldest social club in the
University. Its traditions, though convivial, are seemly. Many of its
members have risen to high places, alike in the University and in Church
and State. Five of its original twelve members, indeed, became Fellows of
Colleges; and one of its later members, Frodsham Hodson, became Principal
of Brasenose, and so great a man that, according to Mark Pattison, when
he returned to College after the Long Vacation, he drove the last stage
into Oxford with post horses, lest it should be said that “the first
Tutor of the first College of the first University of the world entered
it with a pair.”
Other members of the Phœnix were Bishop Heber, R. H. Barham, the author
of “Ingoldsby Legends,” and the late Dean Hole. The names are of high
repute, a testimonial in themselves; and we probably shall not be wrong
in saying that it is characteristic of the tone of Brasenose that the
most intellectual as well as the least intellectual of its _alumni_, its
clerical as well as its sporting prodigies, have seen no harm in filling,
or in emptying, the flowing bowl. That, at any rate, has been one of the
characteristics of the College, though not, of course, the only one.
“A very gentlemanly set” is the appreciation of Brasenose men in “Verdant
Green”; and as the author of “Verdant Green” speaks of an undergraduate
of another College as “openly confessing his shame” by displaying himself
in the porch of that College, we may take it that he was not using words
at random but affirming a proposition which he was prepared to defend in
argument. Most of the men, in fact, have belonged to good and well-to-do
families in the northern counties, and have exhibited both the qualities
and the limitations to be expected from such an origin.
They have been terribly in earnest about athletic and other sports,
but they have seldom been very much in earnest about anything else.
Their scholarship, when they have been scholarly, has been more often
graceful than profound; and, in the matter of religion, they have shown
a disposition to save themselves the trouble of thinking by taking the
conventional for granted, accepting the religion provided for them in
the spirit in which one accepts the _plat du jour_ at a restaurant, but
accepting it in a hearty spirit, without feeling that it implied any
obligation to pull long faces or to mortify the flesh. We may find an
exception to the rule in the case of Robertson of Brighton, of whom more
presently; but if we desire an example of it, we may find one in the case
of Dean Hole.
* * * * *
The Dean was an excellent and breezy person who, even as an octogenarian,
gave one the impression of a young man rejoicing in his youth; but no
one ever accused him of endangering his intelligence by over-taxing it,
and he seems hardly to have been less at ease in Zion than at the jovial
gatherings of the Phœnix. That is not only a critic’s view of him; it is
also his own view of himself and his life, frankly expressed by him in
both prose and verse. “The reading men,” he tells us in his delightful
reminiscences, “were not, as a rule, such cheery companions as the men
who rode, and drove, and played cricket, and wore gay clothing, and
smoked fragrant regalias”; and when he drops into poetry, it is:—
“How jollily, how joyously, we live at B.N.C.!
Our reading is all moonshine—the wind is not more free.”
The Dean also tells us that he went to Brasenose with a serious intention
of studying, but soon found his energies diverted into other channels.
He read hard for two terms; but one day he “met a friend in black velvet
cap and scarlet coat, a bird’s-eye blue tie, buff kerseymere waistcoat,
buck-skin breeches, and pale brown tops,” and the splendid spectacle
aroused his envious ambition. He bought a horse, and wrote home for his
pink. It came, and he enjoyed, and distinguished, himself in the hunting
field; and his attitude towards the problems of the spiritual life became
that which seems generally to have found favour at Brasenose.
Concerning the official attitude of Brasenose towards such matters he
tells two good stories. Two Brasenose men, it appears, on two different
occasions, being perplexed by religious doubts, ventured to lay their
difficulties before their tutor. The poor man was amazed. Such a thing
had never happened to him before in the whole course of his tutorial
experience. He told one of the young men that his digestion was probably
out of order, and that he had better see a doctor; he told the other
that, if he cherished this desire for auricular confession, he had
better join the Church of Rome. The Dean himself, one gathers, never
laid himself open to any such rebuke; but his comments on the Romeward
movement, of which he was a contemporary, are eloquent as to his
religious mentality. The fish caught in the Roman net, he says, were so
poor and flabby that a true sportsman would have thrown them back into
the water.
So much for the jolly and Philistine Dean. It was worth while to dwell
on him because he seems to represent, better than any other Brasenose
man, the distinctive Brasenose point of view; but when we proceed to the
task of praising famous men, there are other famous men whom it is more
imperative to praise.
* * * * *
Bishop Heber is beyond question the most famous of them; and his
Newdigate on “Palestine” is the most famous Newdigate ever written. That
it is also the best will be disputed by admirers of Dean Burgon’s “Petra”
and Mr. D. S. MacColl’s “Carthage,” not to mention Sir Rennell Rodd’s
“Sir Walter Raleigh”; but that point of taste cannot be debated here.
“Palestine” has, at any rate, been reprinted several times, and derives a
special interest from the fact that it was amended at the suggestion of
Sir Walter Scott. The story is an old one; but it must be repeated.
Scott was a friend of Heber’s half-brother, Richard, the
book-collector—“Heber the magnificent,” he called him, “whose library and
cellar are so superior to all others in the world.” Richard Heber took
him to Oxford, and they went together to see Reginald Heber, whose poem
had just won the prize.
“Scott observed,” says Lockhart, “that in the verses on
Solomon’s Temple, one striking circumstance had escaped him,
namely that no tools were used in the erection. Reginald
retired for a few minutes to a corner of the room, and returned
with the beautiful lines:
“No hammer fell, no ponderous axes rung,
Like some tall palm the mystic fabric sprung.
Majestic silence!”
It may be added that Heber was not only a serious but also a humorous
poet. He wrote a satire called the _Whippiad_, and was also the author
of a _jeu d’esprit_ on the misfortunes of the Dean of the College, a
gentleman nicknamed “Dr. Toe,” whose _fiancée_, a Miss Belle H——, jilted
him and married a footman:
“’Twixt footman John and Doctor Toe
A rivalship befell,
Which of the two should be the beau
To bear away the _Belle_.
“The footman won the lady’s heart,
And who can blame her?—No man.
The _whole_ prevailed against the _part_;
’Twas _Foot_-man _versus_ _Toe_-man.”
It will be agreed that there is something piquant and refreshing in the
discovery that these lines are the product of the same pen that wrote
“From Greenland’s Icy Mountains”; but even in that great missionary hymn
by a missionary bishop the hand of the satirist has been detected. The
hasty generalisation that, in the Orient, “only man is vile” is said to
have found its way into a devotional composition because Heber discovered
that a Cingalese tradesman had cheated him. If so, the interpolation may
be accepted as a delightful example of what may be styled “the Brasenose
touch.”
* * * * *
Reginald Heber’s brother Richard has already been mentioned; and there
are those who would consider him a greater man than the Bishop. The
Bishop, they would say, was only one bishop among many, whereas the
bibliophile was the greatest bibliophile that the world has ever seen.
He was less than sixty when he died, and he had already accumulated a
library of 146,827 volumes, stored in six houses in various parts of
England and the Continent. He was so occupied in collecting them that he
quite forgot to dispose of them by will, and his executors had to sell
them for the benefit of his estate. The sales extended over a period of
three years, and the English sales alone realised £56,774. One gets a
glimpse at the collection in the “Literary Reminiscences” of a brother
bibliophile, Dr. T. F. Dibdin.
Dr. Dibdin had long been Richard Heber’s friend, and, hearing of his
unexpected death, he hastened to his house in Pimlico, and was admitted
to the room in which he lay in his coffin.
“And then,” he writes, “the room in which he had breathed his
last! It had been that of his birth. The mystic veil, which
for twenty-five years had separated me from this chamber, and
which the deceased would never allow me, nor any one else, to
enter, was now effectually drawn aside by the iron hand of
Death. I looked around me with amazement. I had never seen
rooms, cupboards, passages, and corridors so choked, so
suffocated with books. Treble rows were there, double rows were
there. Hundreds of slim quartos—several upon each other—were
longitudinally placed over thin and stunted duodecimos,
reaching from one extremity of a shelf to another. Up to the
very ceiling the piles of volumes extended, while the floor was
strewed with them in loose and numerous heaps.”
A marvellous spectacle truly, and a case to be quoted whenever it is said
that all Brasenose men are obtuse to the charms of literature, though,
of course, it may be said that Richard Heber was not a typical Brasenose
man. Yet we may find the Brasenose touch in the statement already quoted
from Scott, that his fine taste in books was combined with an equally
fine taste for port and claret; and if we continue to seek that touch
through the later history of the College, we may find it in the fact
that Dean Milman, another of the great men of Brasenose and a winner of
the Newdigate, began his literary career by producing a play at a London
theatre, and we may further find it in the one story which survives of
the Oxford career of the Rev. Richard Harris Barham.