contemporaries at Oxford of Shelley of University; but Shelley does not
seem to have been known to the others. Being orderly persons, scrupulous
observers of the regulations, well-conducted reading men, they would
probably have regarded him, if they had known him, as a dangerous and
disreputable associate. Keble’s business in life was to be to preach
at, and Arnold’s to summon to his study and flog, those who were, like
Shelley, “tameless and swift and proud.” And yet he and they had more in
common than they knew. They all represented, in their several ways, the
new spirit of the dawning century; they were all, in their several ways,
revolutionists, or at least men definitely related to revolution. Shelley
was the revolutionist _pur sang_; Keble was the counter-revolutionist;
Arnold was the practical man—the reformer with a reformer’s turn for
compromise and opportunism—who knew how to make a little revolution go a
long way.
Keble may perhaps be classed as an English analogue of Chateaubriand.
Personally, it is true, he bore not the faintest resemblance to the
religious reactionary who “took up religion as a subject,” and has been
described as the Catholic Don Juan; but he resembled Chateaubriand in
being a literary artist, with an artist’s feeling for the “beauty of
holiness,” and he launched the English Movement which corresponds to
the return of the æsthetes and aristocrats to their Catholic allegiance
in France. The principal story told of him at Corpus is that he damaged
the sun-dial in the quadrangle by throwing a bottle at it; and we may
permit ourselves to discover a certain symbolism in that performance. The
great sermon on National Apostasy—preached because reformers proposed to
curtail the scandalous superfluity of Irish bishoprics—may similarly be
described as a weak man’s heroic attempt to stop the clock.
The story of that attempt, however, and of the consequences which ensued
from it, belongs more properly to the annals of Oriel than of Corpus.
Arnold as well as Keble went on from Corpus to Oriel as a Fellow; but
what there is to be said about him may best be said in the present
chapter.
He and Keble became estranged in later years; but they continued
to respect each other’s characters while examining each other’s
propositions. To Arnold it seemed that Keble’s piety was no excuse for
the narrowness of his mind, and he would have nothing to say to Keble’s
view that a man could only achieve salvation by running in a groove. He
believed in earnestness, indeed—perhaps there never was a man in more
deadly earnest; but what he desired was an earnest conduct of the common
affairs of life, not an earnest adherence to a complicated series of
ecclesiastical propositions.
Hence his success, and his fame, as a schoolmaster. It was predicted
of him, by the Provost of Oriel, when he stood for the Headmastership
of Rugby, that he would, if elected, “change the face of public school
education throughout England.” He was elected, and he did change it. Many
of the changes which he introduced at Rugby were, indeed, based upon a
system of school government already in force at Winchester; but Arnold
breathed a new spirit into the institutions which he adopted. Members of
the Sixth Form, under his inspiration, held up their heads with a new
kind of pride. Rugbeians were distinguished—and boasted that they were
distinguished—from other schoolboys by their “moral seriousness.”
The other schoolboys, of course, have not accepted the Rugbeian example
without cavil or criticism. It has even been remarked—most notably by
Etonians—that the difference between the “moral seriousness” of Rugby and
the thing which is elsewhere called “priggishness” is not always visible
to the naked eye. Possibly it is not. Possibly Arnold “overdid it,” like
many another valuable innovator. But the thing which he did needed doing.
It was better to overdo it than not to do it at all; and the pride which
Corpus takes in Arnold is amply justified.
* * * * *
And so, of course, is the pride which Corpus takes in many _alumni_
of a later date, distinguished in a great variety of fields—in Henry
Nettleship, Professor of Latin; in Professor Fowler, the historian of
the College, whose lectures on Logic used to be as good as a play; in
Professor Case, to whose robust faith in the external world a reference
has already been made; in Mr. F. T. Dalton, who, as an editor, has struck
out many purple passages from the compositions of the present writer;
in Mr. Horace Hutchinson, the greatest living authority on the game of
golf; in Mr. Henry Newbolt, the author of “Admirals All”; in Mr. Herbert
Paul; and in Mr. A. B. Walkley, the dramatic critic who thrusts Aristotle
down the throats of the vulgar, and concerning whom it was deposed by Mr.
Zangwill, before a Parliamentary Committee on the Dramatic Censorship,
that to him “nothing is sacred except the dancing of Adeline Genée.”
CHRIST CHURCH
Cardinal College—The fall of Wolsey—The foundation of
Christ Church—Notable scenes—The degradation of Cranmer—The
parliamentary visitation—The eviction of Dean Fell, Mrs. Fell,
and all the little Fells—Famous Deans of Christ Church—John
Fell—“I do not like thee, Dr. Fell”—Aldrich—Atterbury—Cyril
Jackson—Gaisford—Eminent undergraduates—Sir Robert Peel’s
practical joke—Gladstone and Martin Farquhar Tupper.
Cardinal Wolsey founded Cardinal College, spent about £8,000 on it—say
£100,000 of our modern money—out of the proceeds of the disendowment of
the monasteries, and then fell like Lucifer. Henry VIII. first stopped
the work, but presently refounded the College, and united it with the
new bishopric of Oxford, which was removed to that site from Osney. The
Head of the College was also to be the Dean of the Cathedral; and the
number of students on the foundation was to be 101. The 101 strokes
of Great Tom, which are to be heard every evening of the year at nine
o’clock, were originally ordered as a separate reminder to each one of
the students that it was time to go to bed. Five minutes after the
last stroke, the gates, not of Christ Church only but of every college
in Oxford, are closed; though nowadays, as a concession to the modern
spirit, porters are in attendance to open them to those who knock.
[Illustration: TOM QUAD AND TOWER, CHRIST CHURCH.
[To face p. 209.]
That is as much as space permits to be said concerning the “beginnings.”
They were not humble beginnings, like those of most of the other
colleges, but splendid and ostentatious. Christ Church started with a
flourish of trumpets which has hardly yet ceased sounding in our ears.
Henry VIII. himself often dined in its Hall; and it has ever since been
the frequent recipient of royal favours. It is impossible to walk in
Tom Quad without feeling that this is the college of all others which
kings, to whom life is a pageant, would delight to honour. Tom Quad,
with its great spaces, its fountain, its wide pavement, has “an air
about it” which no other college even simulates. There is an indefinable
suggestion, not of study for study’s sake, but rather of leisurely
preparation for the leadership of men. The very place, one would say, for
the training of statesmen and pro-consuls. It seems incredible that the
student who has had the right to pace Tom Quad should go away and fail in
life. It does not cease to seem incredible when one learns that it has
sometimes happened.
The history of Christ Church, indeed, is more of a pageant—or is fuller
of pageants—than the history of any other college. Its full history would
fill a book—not a short book, but a long one; but those whose historic
sense bids them conjure up the picturesque features of the past will make
their first pause at the striking scene of the degradation of Archbishop
Cranmer, punished for being a Protestant at a time when the majority were
Catholics: a shocking spectacle, though an imposing ceremony, and one
anticipating, in all its meanest details of humiliation, that ceremony of
the degradation of Captain Dreyfus which, not many years since, stirred
the civilised world to horror.
The exact locality of the degradation is uncertain; but it took place,
at any rate, somewhere close to the cathedral, and probably in the
cloisters. Within the cathedral, Cranmer was set up on the rood-screen
and made to listen to the recital of his iniquities. Then he was dragged
down again and invested in episcopal robes made, in mockery, of rags
and canvas. Then, when he had been declared, in the name of the Blessed
Trinity and by the authority of the Church, deposed, degraded, and cut
off from all the privileges attached to his episcopal Order, he was
marched outside to endure the remainder of his punishment.
“One by one,” writes his biographer, Dean Hook, “all the
ornaments and distinctions of office were taken off.... A
barber clipped the hair round the Archbishop’s head; and
Cranmer was made to kneel before Bonner. Bonner scraped the
tips of the Archbishop’s fingers to desecrate the hand which,
itself anointed, had administered the unction to others.
The threadbare gown of a yeoman bedel was thrown over his
shoulders, and a townsman’s greasy cap was forced upon his
head. The Archbishop of Canterbury, or, as he was now called,
Thomas Cranmer, was handed over to the secular power. In
the lowest and most offensive manner the innate vulgarity
of Bonner’s mind displayed itself. Turning to Cranmer, he
exclaimed: ‘Now you are no longer my Lord,’ and he thought it
witty ever afterwards to speak of him as ‘this gentleman here.’”
And so to Bocardo, and thence to the stake of martyrdom—a lamentable
illustration of the bitter saying that Cambridge educated Reformers and
that Oxford burnt them.
* * * * *
Such might be the first striking scene in a Christ Church pageant. A
further scene—a whole series of further scenes, less tragic, indeed, but
not less remarkable—may be found at the time of that Civil War to which
it has been necessary to make so many references.
The King, as has already been mentioned, lodged at Christ Church, while
the Queen’s Court was at Merton. Almost all the Christ Church men save
the old and decrepit and the few who, as Wood puts it, “retained their
sacred habit as a cloak for their sloth or timidity,” were ready to fight
for the King; and they and many other men from other colleges mustered at
the Schools and were marched through the High to Christ Church, “where,
in the great quadrangle, they were reasonably instructed in the word of
command and their postures.” They fought valiantly—twenty of them as
officers—but with the result which the world knows; and presently, of
course, when the city surrendered, and the Parliament sent its Visitors,
there was as much trouble at Christ Church as anywhere.
Dean Samuel Fell, who was also Vice-Chancellor of the University, did
his best to be dignified in extremely difficult circumstances. The
Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, who was Chancellor, harangued his
Vice-Chancellor in the coarse language of the camp, and told him that he
ought to be flogged; but Samuel Fell was not to be intimidated. These
Visitors, he said, his juniors in academic standing and position, were
too “inconsiderable” persons for the Dean of Christ Church to parley
with. He therefore refused to parley with them; and they haled him off
to prison, and then proceeded to the Deanery, where Mrs. Fell and the
children held the fort.
They knocked, and there was no answer. They tried the door, and found
that it was locked and barred. They smashed their way through it with
sledge-hammers, entered, and waited for Mrs. Fell to go. But Mrs. Fell
did not budge. Mrs. Fell even said that she had no intention of budging.
When the Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery argued with her, she argued back
with equal vigour; and there was nothing for it but to bid the soldiers
act. They strapped Mrs. Fell into a chair, and they strapped all the
little Fells on to boards, and they lifted their living, screaming,
and protesting loads, and carried them out, and deposited them in the
middle of Tom Quad, where they remained until three of the canons came
to the rescue, and conducted them to a place of refuge in a neighbouring
apothecary’s house. It may be doubted whether Tom Quad has ever witnessed
so strange a scene, before or since.
* * * * *
Enough of the picturesque, however. We must next turn to personalities;
and, as we find more famous men among Deans of Christ Church than among
the Heads of any of the other Houses, we may fitly begin by saying
something about some of them in the Mainly about People style. Dr. Samuel
Fell’s son John has a fair title to come first. A popular rhyme preserves
his memory, and the story of that rhyme must be told.
This second Dr. Fell was one of the first of the deans to take not only
himself but his duties seriously. He insisted that Christ Church men
should read, and also that they should wear academic dress; he raised the
standard of examinations, and was strict in all matters of discipline. As
he ruled in the loose days of the Restoration, he inevitably had trouble
with some of the livelier spirits; and one of the liveliest of the
recalcitrant was Tom Brown, an author and wit of some note in his day,
though now forgotten. Tom Brown, having offended, was to be sent down;
but, at the last moment, the Dean partially relented. He handed Tom Brown
Martial’s epigram beginning “_Non amo te, Sabidi_,” and promised to allow
him to remain in residence if he could extemporise a satisfactory English
version of it. Whereupon Tom Brown improvised the familiar quatrain:
“I do not love thee, Dr. Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell,
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.”
Hardly less famous is Aldrich—equally famous, as a logician, as a writer
of catches, and as a smoker. His Logic remained the textbook in common
use at Oxford for more than two centuries. Concerning his addiction to
tobacco a story is told of a bet made that he would be found smoking at
ten o’clock in the morning—a bet lost because, at the moment when the
clock struck, he was not puffing at his pipe, but refilling it. One of
his most popular catches was specially composed for the use of smokers,
being so arranged as to give each singer a breathing time in which to
keep his pipe alight. Moreover, much as the Dean loved his pipe, he loved
his bowl no less; and he was the author of a Latin epigram, enumerating
five excuses for the glass:
“Si bene quid memini, sunt causæ quinque bibendi:
Hospitis adventus, præsens sitis atque futura,
Aut vini bonitas, aut quælibet altera causa.”
Aldrich’s successor was Atterbury, who had been a tutor under him;
and Atterbury was the most brilliant of the Oxford representatives in
the famous “Battle of the Books” concerning the authenticity of the
“Epistles of Phalaris.” The ultimate victory in that encounter rested,
of course, with Bentley of Trinity, Cambridge, for the Oxford case
had not a leg to stand upon; but the Christ Church wits were at least
successful in obscuring the issue and throwing dust in the eyes of their
contemporaries: a cheap success, no doubt, but better than none at all.
It is a pretty story; but the reader who is curious about it must be
referred to Macaulay or Jebb, for there remain three other deans with
clamorous claims upon our space.
Cyril Jackson is the greatest of them. He had been the tutor of the
Regent and his brothers, who had “imbibed” from him, according to his
biographer, “that elevation of sentiment, that pride of soul, and that
generosity of spirit which teaches them, as it were innately, to look
down upon everything which bears the semblance of mean, low, or sordid
feeling.” In that eulogy, no doubt, the exaggerations of the courtier are
combined with those of the necrologist; but it was not Cyril Jackson’s
fault if the lovers of Mrs. Fitzherbert and Mary Ann Clarke failed to
imbibe all the virtues which one could wish them to have displayed. He
was an excellent tutor and an admirable Dean, who raised the College to
a pitch of efficiency never before attained. He joined with Parsons of
Balliol and Eveleigh of Oriel in originating honours examinations, and
his own men did strikingly well in them. Sir Robert Peel was one of his
double-firsts. He was in correspondence with Sir Robert at the beginning
of his public career, and advised him to perfect his oratorical style
“by the continual reading of Homer.”
His courtly dignity may be said to have laid the foundation of the
Christ Church manner—of the manner, at all events, which one associates
with the Deans of Christ Church. They, more than the Heads of any
other Houses, have aimed at fulfilling the ideal of the “magnificent
man” of Aristotle’s “Ethics”—with what success those who have seen
the towering figure of Dean Liddell, filling the aisles of the
cathedral with the pageant of his presence, are aware. This personal
majesty, it is understood, is rather the appanage of the office
than the accidental attribute of any individual; and the serene and
well-warranted self-sufficiency of Cyril Jackson, imitated, consciously
or unconsciously, by his successors, is its source.
Cyril Jackson was so satisfied with his position that he refused all
offers of ecclesiastical preferment. Probably he felt that no other
office could be more exalted than that which he held and adorned. At all
events he declined more than one bishopric, and his reply to one of the
offers is historical. “_Nolo episcopari._ Try my brother Bill; he’ll
take it.” But he did not, on the other hand, cling to the office from
which he was unwilling to be promoted. He retired from it, at the age of
sixty-three, when his reputation was at its highest, and spent his last
years quietly in the country. Some Latin elegiacs in which he expressed
his preference for the simple life are too delightful not to be quoted:
“Si mihi, si liceat traducere leniter ævum,
Non pompam, nec opes, nec mihi regna peto
Vellem ut divini pandens mysteria verbi,
Vitam in secreto rure quietus agam.
Curtatis decimis, modicoque beatus agello,
Virtutæ et pura sim pietate sacer.”
Dean Hall, who succeeded, may be passed over. Dean Smith, who came next,
was known as “Presence of mind Smith.” While an undergraduate, it was
said, he had gone boating, and had returned alone. His companion, he
explained, had fallen into the river, and had clung to the side of the
boat. “Neither of us,” Smith said, “could swim; and if I had not, with
great presence of mind, hit him on the head with the boat-hook, _both_ of
us would have been drowned.” That story, however, is only repeated, as
the journalists say, “with reserve.” Having repeated it, one passes on to
Gaisford, whose memory has left more lasting traces.
* * * * *
Gaisford was a protégé of Cyril Jackson, who is said to have said to
him: “You will never be a gentleman, but you may succeed with certainty
as a scholar.” That he was not, at any rate, a man of the world, may be
inferred from his reply to the letter in which Lord Liverpool offered
him the Regius Professorship of Greek. “My lord,” he wrote bluntly, “I
have received your letter and accede to its contents. Yours, &c.” That
he succeeded as a scholar is attested by the fact that when he went to
Germany and called on Dindorf, the great Teuton, though he had never been
introduced to him, fell on his neck, and kissed him on both cheeks.
Discipline, however, did not flourish in Gaisford’s time, or in that
of his immediate predecessors, as it had flourished in the time of the
great Cyril. This was the period in which an undergraduate was killed
in a “rag”—his back broken across a chair by the too athletic Lord
Hillsborough, he who, together with Peard of Brasenose (Garibaldi’s
Englishman), cleared the streets of bargees in “town and gown rows.”
This was also the period when the Marquis of Waterford and his company
painted the door of the Deanery, and the doors of the canons’ residences,
red, because of the objection taken to their hunting in pink. It was the
period, too, when the flowers were dug up out of the Deanery garden and
scattered about the quad—whence the expression “planting Peckwater” as a
picturesque synonym for a Christ Church rag. It was the period, finally,
when the statue of Mercury, formerly standing in the centre of the
fountain in Tom Quad, was dressed in the robes of a Doctor of Divinity.
The thing happened in the dead of winter, when the water in the fountain
was frozen hard. After the deed had been done, the ice was broken, so
that none could get to Mercury without wading through freezing water,
five feet deep.
Though these things happened, however, there was a dignity about
Gaisford, none the less. It came out when he received a letter
beginning: “The Dean of Oriel presents his compliments to the Dean of
Christ Church”; on which communication Gaisford’s classical comment was
“Alexander the coppersmith sends greeting to Alexander the Great!” It
came out again in the sermon in which he exhorted his congregation to the
study of the Greek language on the ground that a knowledge of that tongue
would enable them “not only to read the oracles of God in the original,
but also to look down with contempt upon the vulgar herd.”
* * * * *
Leaving the deans, and turning to the undergraduates, one hardly
knows where to begin; for the great names are as thick as bilberries,
and belong to every department of activity. One might begin a very
miscellaneous list with the names of Hakluyt, John Locke the
philosopher, and William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania—a list which
does not become any the less miscellaneous by the addition of the names
of John and Charles Wesley, and Canon Liddon. Or one may recall that
Christ Church has educated three successive Viceroys of India in Lords
Dalhousie, Canning, and Elgin, and three successive Premiers in Gladstone
and Lords Salisbury and Rosebery, and various other Prime Ministers,
including Lord Liverpool, and George Canning, and Sir Robert Peel.
Peel, it is to be remembered, was the first Christ Church man to take a
double first; and he took it with remarkable _éclat_. The _viva voce_
part of the examination was much more important in those days than in
these. Theoretically it still takes place in the presence of spectators;
but the benches are usually empty. Then there often were crowded houses
to listen to the entertainment; and the examining of Peel was a great
occasion, like a first night at an important theatre. There was “standing
room only”; and when the examinee distinguished himself there was “loud
and prolonged applause,” if not actually an _encore_ and a “call.” One
wonders whether there were any who divined the verbosity of the future
orator when they heard him render _suave_ in _suave mari magno_, “It is a
source of gratification.”
Yet Peel, prematurely solemn as he was, could sometimes unbend, and once
played a practical joke. The victim of it was a timorous freshman, known
to be a scholar of poor quality. The unhappy youth received a message to
the effect that the Vice-Chancellor, having heard of his ignorance, and
desiring to test it, proposed to examine him privately, in his rooms, in
the Greek Testament. The supposed Vice-Chancellor, who duly visited him,
was Peel in disguise, attended by a scout disguised as an Esquire Bedell.
Peel put the freshman through his paces, denounced his blunders in a
severe tone of voice, and told him that he would probably be expelled.
The freshman, so the story concludes, fled from the College without
waiting for the confirmation of this sentence of expulsion, and was never
heard of again.
Gladstone, who was to be so ardent a disciple of Peel in many things,
imitated him, in the first instance, by taking a double first—he was
one of the five first-class men in both the classical and mathematical
lists; but his failures are quite as interesting as his successes. He was
beaten for a Divinity Prize by Martin Farquhar Tupper, the proverbial
philosopher, whose acquaintance he had made as the result of their
common habit of attending the Communion Service at the Cathedral. He
also competed unsuccessfully for the Ireland; and he has related how one
of the examiners explained his defeat to him. “He abused me,” he says,
“for my essay, on which he said his own memorandum was ‘desultory beyond
belief’; also for throwing dust in the examiners’ eyes, like a man who,
when asked who wrote ‘God save the King?’ replied, ‘Thompson wrote “Rule,
Britannia.”’”