biographer as “unostentatious.” It was, in fact, so little ostentatious
while he was at Brasenose that he was “sent for” to explain his too
frequent absence from the College chapel.
“The fact is, sir,” urged his pupil, “you are too late for me.”
“Too late?” repeated the tutor in astonishment.
“Yes, sir—too late. I cannot sit up till seven o’clock in the morning; I
am a man of regular habits, and unless I get to bed by four or five at
latest I am really fit for nothing next day.”
* * * * *
If any one desired still further examples of the Brasenose touch,
he might have them by studying the career of Sir Tatton Sykes, that
excellent Yorkshire sportsman who used to breakfast off “a jug of new
milk and an immense apple-pie,” who broke stones to give him an appetite,
thrashed impertinent bargees for his amusement, and seldom missed a day’s
hunting till he had passed his seventy-sixth birthday, and lived to be
ninety-one. It so happens, however, that though Sir Tatton was classed
with York Minster and Fountains Abbey as one of the three great marvels
of his native county, his residence at Oxford has left no trail of
legend; so that we must leave him and pass on to the two eminent men of
whom it may fairly be said that, though they were in Brasenose, they were
not of it. They are F. W. Robertson—“Robertson of Brighton”—and Walter
Pater.
* * * * *
F. W. Robertson seems to have resembled the mass of Brasenose men in one
circumstance only: he took a pass degree. No doubt he would have obtained
high honours if he had sought them; but, like John Richard Green, of
Jesus, he did not seek them, and this may therefore be the proper place
in which to recall the untrue story that when, in the least intellectual
period of the history of Brasenose, the name of some commoner was, by
some accident, placed in a class list, the other commoners proceeded to
punish him under the pump as a violator of the unwritten law.
For the rest, F. W. Robertson, while at Brasenose, resembled neither the
average Brasenosian nor the F. W. Robertson of later days. He was the
Broad Church philosopher in the making, but he was not yet the Broad
Church philosopher fully made. His views, according to Mr. Stopford
Brooke, were “those of the Evangelical school, with a decided leaning to
moderate Calvinism.” He organised “a society for the purposes of prayer
and conversation on the Scriptures,” but it languished and died, and he
was “chilled by the apathy and coldness of Oxford.”
That one can understand and believe. Oxford has been a place of many
enthusiasms, many of them of a religious character, but private
initiative in religious matters, however devout, has never been
encouraged there. That sort of thing has always struck Oxford as odd,
and even a little disrespectful towards the ample official provision of
the means of grace. We saw the attitude exemplified when we spoke about
the experiences of the Wesleys at Lincoln, and there is a characteristic
story of a snub administered by the Head of a college to an undergraduate
who had taken to preaching at the corners of the streets.
The young man challenged the Head with what he thought would prove an
awkward question. What answer would he be able to make, he asked, if his
Divine Master reproached him on the Day of Judgment for having neglected
this means of diffusing a knowledge of the gospel truth? But the Head was
equal to the occasion. “You need have no anxiety about that,” he replied;
“I myself will take the entire responsibility.”
Robertson, one recognises, was the last man likely to feel at home in an
atmosphere in which some things were not only said, but said as a matter
of course, and approved. Probably they were heard with more approval at
Brasenose than at most other colleges; and Robertson appears to have
been hardly less out of his element there than was Nathaniel Hawthorne at
Brook Farm. In one field of Oxford activity, indeed, he did distinguish
himself. He was one of the orators of the Union Debating Society, where
he maintained against John Ruskin, then of Christ Church, that the
theatre was not an influence for good. “Pray for me,” he appealed to
the man sitting next to him when he rose, rather nervously, to make his
speech. But it cannot be said that he was, either in that or in any other
respect, a typical Brasenose man.
Still less was Walter Pater a typical Brasenose man.
* * * * *
Pater came to Brasenose as a Fellow from Queen’s, where he had been a
Scholar. For a time he was a lecturer and tutor, and all the stories
indicate that, in engaging in those activities, he made a false start in
life. A pupil coming to him for advice as to his reading was recommended
to read the whole of Plato and the whole of Kant—which, from the point of
view of the examinations, was almost the worst counsel that could have
been given to him. His chief contribution to metaphysical thought is said
to have been an expression of opinion that Plato was “not such a fool
as he looked.” His attitude towards the discipline of the College was
illustrated by a commendation of the bonfires which destroyed the statue
of Cain and Abel, on the ground that they “lit up the spire of St. Mary’s
so beautifully.” He once was one of the adjudicators in a prize essay
competition, but when asked by the other adjudicators for his opinion,
he replied that he could only remember that one of the essayists was
called Sanctuary, and that Sanctuary had impressed him as a remarkably
euphonious name.
In spite of this, however—and even to some extent because of it—Pater cut
a considerable figure, and exercised a considerable influence, in the
Oxford of his day; and he became the hero of almost as many legends as
either Jowett or Mark Pattison. Mr. Edmund Gosse, as has been mentioned,
graphically described his personal appearance as that of “a benevolent
dragon.” All the world knows that he was the “Mr. Rose” of Mr. Mallock’s
“New Republic,” and his place may be defined as that of the link between
the pre-Raphaelites and the Æsthetes.
The note in his work which found the most eager listeners was the note of
artistic Epicureanism; the place in which it was most definitely sounded
was the “Conclusion” of the “Studies in the History of the Renaissance.”
There was the exhortation to “burn always with a hard gem-like flame”;
there was the eulogy of “great passions” as the source of a “quickened
sense of life”; there was the declamation on the best way of making the
most of life, leading up to the announcement that “the wisest” spend
it “in art and song”; there, finally, was the view of art “professing
frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they
pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.”
The essay containing those precepts became the gospel of a considerable
number of young men, and it was an insidiously dangerous gospel. The
proclamation of it in a company of money-grubbers might, indeed, have
some force, but, as a matter of fact, the audience which had least need
of it was precisely the audience which heard it most gladly. It appeared
to them to set a seal upon a holy alliance between debauchery and art;
and whereas few of them were much concerned about art, a great many of
them were deeply interested in debauchery. Debauchery, they now gathered,
was being held up to admiration as the duty which lay nearest to them.
They recognised it as an easy and agreeable duty, and they made haste to
discharge it.
Perhaps that was not precisely what Pater meant. He said that it was not,
and he ultimately struck the passage out lest it should “mislead some of
the young men into whose hands it might fall.” But he might nevertheless
have found it difficult to reply effectively to any controversialist who
urged that, if he had not meant what he had been taken to mean he could
not have meant anything at all.
CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE
The foundation by Bishop Foxe—Compulsory Greek—Strict
discipline in early times—The visitation by the Parliamentary
Commissioners—The ejection of the Fellows—Eminent _alumni_—The
judicious Hooker and his unhappy marriage—The Duke of
Monmouth—General Oglethorpe—Keble, and Arnold of Rugby—An
estimate of their work—Celebrities of modern times.
Corpus Christi College was founded in 1516, by Bishop Foxe; and it may
be necessary to anticipate the questions of some strangers by stating
at once that he was not the author of the “Book of Martyrs” but the
predecessor of Cardinal Wolsey in the counsels of Henry VIII. He spoke
of the College as his “hive” and of the scholars as his “bees” whom he
expected to be “busy bees” and to “make honey.”
[Illustration: CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE.
[To face p. 192.]
They have made plenty of it. The output of Corpus in the way of
scholarship has been out of all proportion to the small size of the
College. If it has never, like University, had an opportunity of
expelling a man of genius, it has trained innumerable men of talent; and
if the distinction of the most distinguished of its sons has not been,
with rare exceptions, of the sort that makes a magnetic appeal to the
imagination of mankind, there is, at least, no breach in the continuity
of its long list of _alumni_ illustrious through their services to humane
letters; a list which begins with the Hooker whom it is customary to call
“judicious” and is by no means ended when we come to Professor Case, who
alone, when Oxford seemed to be given over to the Hegelians, maintained,
with the robust vigour of a true sportsman, his belief in the reality of
the external world.
* * * * *
The original note of Corpus was an insistence upon compulsory Greek.
Modern reformers appear to think that, in demanding that the study of
Greek should be optional at Oxford, they are marching forward—“moving
with the times.” As a matter of fact, they are proposing to revert to
a condition of things which prevailed at Oxford in the ignorant times
prior to the Revival of Learning. Greek was, in those times, in the noble
language of school prospectuses, an “extra”; and men could only learn it
at their own expense from private tutors. Bishop Foxe put it into the
curriculum, endowing a Reader in Greek, and required all Corpus men to
attend his classes on pain of “loss of commons”—the loss, that is to say,
of their dinner—if they should fail to do so.
That was one of his severe regulations; and there were many others which
show him to have had a keen eye for discipline and detail.
Every Fellow of Corpus, it was ordained, was to share his bedroom with a
Scholar; the Fellow sleeping in a high bed, and the Scholar in a truckle
bed. One also gathers, since the Statutes contain no provision for
scouts, that it was by the Scholars that the beds were to be made and
the slops emptied. Dinner was to be eaten in hall, and the diners were
only to converse in Greek or Latin. Those who went for walks were to go
in parties of three, carrying no weapons except bows and arrows; and the
only games permitted were “games of ball” in the College gardens. Certain
prayers, private as well as public, were obligatory. It was expressly
forbidden to any Scholar or Fellow—to any one, in fact, under the grade
of President—to carry his own washing to the laundress; and violations of
this, or any other rule, were to be punished in various ways. The junior
members of the society might, for sufficient cause, be whipped; or they
might be compelled to sit at separate tables in hall, consuming dry
bread and water, while the well-conducted dined.
Such were the sanctions of industry and virtue; and the archives of the
College are full of records of their application. One of the Scholars was
once deprived of commons for a fortnight for “attempted murder”—a light
sentence which suggests that the Senior Common-room had but an imperfect
sympathy with the victim. Another, bearing the unusual name of Anne, was
castigated for writing a satirical poem on the Mass. As he was condemned
to receive a stripe for every line of his composition, he doubtless rose
from the block with a sincere conviction that brevity is the soul of wit
and crystallised epigram the best form in which to exhibit poetry.
Save for incidents of that sort, however, Corpus has not had a specially
exciting history; and the first really animated scene in its annals
occurs when Oxford, so to say, changed hands, and Charles I. being a
prisoner, and the city having surrendered to Fairfax, the Lords and
Commons resolved upon the Visitation and Reformation of Oxford with
a View to “the due correction of offences, abuses, and disorders,
especially of late times, committed there.”
* * * * *
Corpus, curiously enough, is a College which preserved its plate at
a time when the plate of most of the colleges was melted down into
money to reinforce the royal treasury. The story goes that it was
preserved—exactly how, the story does not say—through the devotion of
a butler to the College interests. The exploration of a secret cellar,
or of an old drain, according to the legend, discovered the skeleton
of a butler with the grip of his bony fingers clenched upon a precious
punch-bowl. That is not the sort of story that one would willingly
give up; but the evidence for it does not appear to be very solid; and
the conjecture of Dr. Fowler that the bowl was first surrendered and
afterwards redeemed with a money payment has more of the ingredients of
plausibility.
Be that as it may, however, the Corpus men suffered more than the members
of most colleges from the heavy hands of the Parliamentary Commissioners;
and we have to picture “a Drum with a guard of musketeers” marching
through the gate into the quadrangle—the drum beaten as a call for
silence—the affixing of the Visitors’ Orders in the porter’s lodge—and
the reading of a long list of Fellows and Scholars who were to be
expelled.
It was a longer list than at some of the other colleges because the
Visitors had been received in a contumacious spirit. They had no sooner
entered the name of the new President of their choice, Dr. Staunton, in
the College Register than two Scholars of the College—Will Fulman and Tim
Parker—first erased the entry, and then tore out the sheet on which it
had been made. When they proceeded to break open the College Treasury,
which the Bursar would not unlock for them, they found that its valuable
contents had already been removed. Whence resulted wholesale evictions of
a brutally precipitate character.
The proclamation, according to one of its victims, was to the effect that
“whosoever named in the Order should remain in Oxon, or within five miles
of it, after sunset, should be taken and prosecuted as a spy.” This,
it is added, was taken to mean that they would be hanged, “though many
knew not whither to go on so short warning, nor could they have time to
dispose their books and such goods as they had”; while, as an additional
affront, “some were searched for letters only to pick their pockets.”
It must have been a shocking scene, though the relation of it can be
relieved by an anecdote which has the merit of exhibiting Oliver Cromwell
in a more human light than usual.
One of the ejected, it appears, a certain James Quin, was presented to
the Lord Protector; and the Lord Protector, having been told that he had
a good voice, called upon him for a song. He sang so well that the Lord
Protector “liquor’d him with sack,” and bade him ask a favour. He asked
that his place on the foundation of the College might be restored to him,
and his request was granted: a quaint incident, judged by our modern
notions, but one for which there is a parallel in the later annals of the
College, during the genial period of the Restoration.
Dr. Staunton had, by that time, been turned out; and his predecessor, Dr.
Newlyn, had been brought back. This Dr. Newlyn was a shocking nepotist.
He filled all the profitable places on the foundation with relatives of
his own, and was only moderately shocked by the fact that one of them
broke into the rooms of one of the Fellows and tried to murder him in his
sleep; but there were some offences at which he drew the line, as the
occurrence of a gross scandal was presently to prove.
This time there was a lady in the case. The offender was Matthew Curtois,
a Probationer Fellow, a Master of Arts, and a Clerk in Holy Orders; and
the offence was committed within the College walls. The punishment was
a refusal to confirm Matthew Curtois in his Fellowship; but Matthew
Curtois, instead of submitting and slinking away, made bold to appeal to
the King. His weakness, he judged, was one with which the lover of Nell
Gwynne and so many others was likely to sympathise; and his judgment
was correct. The King, acting through the Visitor, George Morley, Bishop
of Winchester, not only decreed his fellow-sinner’s restitution to his
honours and emoluments, but also ordered him to be paid a pecuniary
indemnity for his suspension: an act of royal interference with
academical affairs which marks, as well as any other, the difference
between those times and these.
But now, before going farther, we must turn back, and glance at the
careers of a few of the representative men of whom Corpus is most justly
proud.
* * * * *
Bishop Jewell should properly come first; but he is less interesting
than Bishop Hooker, who comes next, and was introduced to Corpus through
Jewell’s patronage. First a Scholar, he afterwards became a Fellow and
a Lecturer in Hebrew; and we read of him, in the Life by Izaak Walton,
that “in four years he was but twice absent from the chapel prayers.”
Evidently he was just such a man as good Bishop Foxe would have wished to
inhabit his “bee-hive”; and the tragedy of his life, which Walton relates
in sympathetic detail, was his removal from it. The story must be told,
if only to show that it was not in the conduct of his private life that
the illustrious author of the “Ecclesiastical Polity” earned the fixed
epithet of “judicious.”
He was, in fact, a pious don of the old-fashioned, simple-minded sort;
and, of course, he was a bachelor, and in Holy Orders. Appointed to
preach certain endowed sermons at Paul’s Cross, and coming up to London
from Corpus for that purpose, he lodged in the house of John Churchman,
sometime a draper in Watling Street. He caught a chill on the way; but
Mrs. Churchman gave him “drink proper for a cold,” and then proceeded to
admonish him in a motherly manner.
“Mr. Hooker,” she said—so Walton tells us—“you are a man of tender
constitution. It would be best for you to have a wife that might prove a
nurse to you—such a one as might both prolong your life and make it more
comfortable, such a one as I can and will provide for you if you see fit
to marry.”
It was, no doubt, in the abstract, good advice. It seemed very good
advice indeed to Hooker as he sat by the roaring fire and sipped the
comforting possets which Mrs. Churchman prepared for him. And he knew
too, as an earnest student of the Bible, that a busy man might find good
precedents for entrusting the choice of his wife to another. As Eleazar
had been trusted to seek a wife for Isaac, so Mrs. Churchman should be
trusted to choose a wife for him. But Mrs. Churchman had a daughter;
and her chief anxiety was not to make Mr. Hooker happy, but to get
her daughter off her hands. So she brought Joan Churchman forward and
presented her.
“Take her—she is yours,” she said; and the simple-minded don forgot to be
judicious, but married Joan Churchman, as Mrs. Churchman had meant him to
do from the beginning, and lived unhappily with her ever afterwards.
“By this marriage,” Walton continues, “the good man was drawn from the
tranquillity of his College, from that garden of piety, of pleasure, of
peace, and a sweet conversation, into the thorny wilderness of a busy
world.” And he draws a pathetic picture of a visit paid to the good man
by two of his old pupils, Edwin Sandys and George Cranmer, in the country
parsonage to which he retired together with the lady described by another
biographer as “a clownish, silly woman and withal a mere Xanthippe.”
The pupils found their tutor in a field attached to the parsonage,
looking after the sheep; Mrs. Hooker having told him to do so, as she
wished to employ the shepherd as a man-servant in the house. They went
up to the parsonage with him, hoping to enjoy his conversation; but Mrs.
Hooker immediately called him away to rock the cradle. They fled, driven
out by Mrs. Hooker’s inhospitable proceedings; and one of them condoled
with him, saying that his wife evidently was not a very “comfortable
companion.” Whereupon Mr. Hooker made answer:
“My dear George, if saints have usually a double share in the miseries of
this life, I, that am none, ought not to repine at what my wise Creator
hath appointed for me: but labour—as, indeed, I do daily—to submit myself
to His will, and possess my soul in patience and peace.”
The story, of course, is full of morals for bachelor dons; only one
imagines that the dons of our own day do not need the moral, but are much
better able than was Hooker of Corpus to take care of themselves in the
matters of the heart and the bonds of holy matrimony.
* * * * *
Another Corpus man of a very different character was the Duke of
Monmouth, the favourite, and reputed natural son, of Charles II. He
entered his name when the Court was driven to Oxford by the plague in
1665; but little is known about his term of residence except that he gave
the College a piece of plate which the College is believed to have melted
down in order to express its disapproval of the Monmouth rebellion. Dr.
Pocock, the Oriental traveller, should also be mentioned, for he was the
first of a long list of Oxford men who have distinguished themselves in
the exploration of the Alps. He and William Windham, meeting at Geneva,
in 1741, made up a party to explore the glaciers of Chamonix—a place
till then unknown to tourists. General Oglethorpe, the associate of the
Wesleys, and the founder of the State of Georgia, is a third who must
not be overlooked. And a passing word may be given to Edward Young,
afterwards Fellow of All Souls, the pious author of “Night Thoughts,”
and the originator of the sentiment that “Procrastination is the thief
of time.” “There are those,” we read, in a biographical account of the
doings of this divine at Oxford, “who say that Young at this time was not
the ornament to religion and morality which he afterwards became”; and
that is credible enough, for we all know many ornaments of religion and
morality whose proceedings while _in statu pupillari_ invite a similar
remark.
The remark, however, is, on the whole, less applicable to the divines
who have come from Corpus than to the divines who have come from a good
many of the other colleges; so we need not insist, but may pass on to
the period when the occurrence of more widely popular names gives Corpus
a blaze of glory perceptible from afar. That period was in the early
days of the nineteenth century, when Keble and Thomas Arnold—Arnold of
Rugby—were contemporaries. A third member of the society at that time
was John Taylor Coleridge—Mr. Justice Coleridge—who defeated them in
some competitions for University and College prizes, and lived to write
Keble’s Life, and to contribute a chapter of Corpus reminiscences to the
Life of Arnold written by Dean Stanley.
Most of the time of the little company, when they were not reading for
their examinations, appears to have been given to argument; most of
Coleridge’s recollections are recollections of dialectical affrays.
Oxford, at this date, was beginning to think of other matters besides
political and academical affairs. The old wrangles between Jacobites and
Hanoverians had ceased; and no one any longer thought it worth while to
provoke authority by calling for cheers for the Young Pretender. Though
the older men could remember such things, the younger men regarded them
as belonging to history. The thing which was beginning to interest them
was religion—or in some cases irreligion; and it interested them as an
end in itself, and not merely in its relation to preferment and emolument.