present day—supposing that there still are such—who listen to the lure of
the siren in the photographer’s shop; but the exactitude of the narrative
has been disputed. A contemporary reviewer of Dr. Goldsmith’s work had
heard from a Fellow of Jesus that “Mr. Nash, being too volatile to relish
the sober rules of a college life, took the opportunity of receiving his
quarter’s returns, and went off, leaving a debt behind him of about three
pounds eighteen shillings, which remains undischarged on the College
books to this day.” Which of the two stories is the true one it is, at
this distance of time, impossible to say; but the records which remain of
the Beau’s volatility do certainly indicate a manner of life for which a
University city was no proper setting.
In the days before he went to Bath and found his _métier_, he earned his
living in very curious ways, but chiefly by undertaking, for a wager,
to do some ridiculous thing. One of his feats, accomplished from this
pecuniary motive, was to strip himself naked and ride through the streets
of a village on the back of a cow. That, it will be generally admitted,
is a thing which it is better to do in the remote country than in the
High, or the Broad, or even the Turl.
* * * * *
Next—and perhaps last—on the roll of Jesus celebrities comes the name of
John Richard Green, the historian of the English People; and his debt to
Jesus—and even to Oxford—does not seem to have been a heavy one.
His place among the historians is undoubtedly better assured than the
place of Lewis Morris among the poets; but as an undergraduate he did
not shape so well. Instead of taking first class honours, he only took
a pass degree; instead of writing a prize essay, he wrote for a local
paper. His tutors thought him idle, and his contemporaries had some
reason to complain of him. He was part author of a satire—the “Gentiad,”
an imitation of the “Dunciad”—which ridiculed some of the characteristics
of Jesus men. This brought him unpopularity, and he passed through Oxford
without making many friends.
One good and great friend, however, he did make, almost by accident; and
that story may be best told in the words of the Life by Leslie Stephen:
“During his University career Arthur Penrhyn Stanley was
Professor of Ecclesiastical History. Green, during his last
term, went accidentally into the lecture-room where Stanley
was discoursing upon the Wesleys. The lecture fascinated him,
and he never missed another. In one lecture Stanley concluded
with the phrase, ‘_Magna est veritas et prævalebit_, words so
great that I could almost prefer them to the motto of our own
University, _Dominus illuminatio mea_.’ As Stanley left the
room, Green, who had been deeply interested, exclaimed, ‘_Magna
est veritas et prævalebit_ is the motto of the town!’ Stanley
was much pleased, invited his young admirer to walk home with
him, and asked him to dinner. The day appointed was early in
November (1859), and the ‘town and gown’ riots of the period
made the passage through the streets rather hazardous. ‘How
could you come at all?’ asked Stanley. ‘Sir,’ replied Green in
the words of Johnson, ‘it is a great honour to dine with the
Canons of Christ Church.’”
The friendship thus formed was of great importance to Green. It put heart
into him, as he afterwards told Stanley, at a time when he “found no help
in Oxford theology,” and was apparently the influence which stimulated
him to the point of taking orders. Afterwards, of course, he found
that Oxford theology was not the only theology which puzzled instead
of satisfying his intelligence. He had very little of the theological
mentality, and he had a severe historical conscience. He could neither
believe what he knew to be untrue, nor could he pretend to believe it;
and consequently—but that has nothing to do with Jesus College.
* * * * *
And so the Jesus pageant passes—a pageant in which, as we see, the
apparently inevitable name of Jones does not appear.
WADHAM COLLEGE
Nicholas and Dorothy Wadham—A miscellaneous list of
Wadham men—The story of the great Wadham “Rag”—Wadham
Evangelicalism—Stories of Warden Symons—The Wadham
Positivists—“Three Persons and no God”—Richard Congreve—Comte,
Clotilde de Vaux, and the Positivist schism—The last Oxford
Movement—Canon Barnett and Toynbee Hall.
The founders were Nicholas Wadham and Dorothy, his widow. Nicholas
accumulated the funds, and Dorothy applied them after his death, at her
discretion, in accordance with his wishes. The discreet and delightful
Wadham Gardens are said to have been due to her initiative; and she
also had the happy thought of exempting Fellows of the College from
the disconcerting necessity of taking Holy Orders. Though one knows
little else of her, one cannot but be prepossessed in her favour by the
beautiful euphony of her name. Mistress Dorothy Wadham—it is a name which
falls on the ear like the soft melody of silver bells.
[Illustration: WADHAM COLLEGE.
[To face p. 267.]
The date of the Charter is 1610—an early year in the reign of the comic
King who loved learning almost as much as he hated tobacco. Its Jacobean
architecture is a serene and perfect poem in grey stone, though the
grass in the quadrangle which contrasts so effectively with the grey
was added by one of the Wardens at a later time. It seems natural and
proper that it should have been the College of the two greatest of the
Oxford architects—Sir Christopher Wren and T. G. Jackson. It is also the
College of Admiral Blake, Nicholas Love, the regicide, Thomas Sydenham,
the physician, Speaker Onslow, the “wicked” Earl of Rochester, Lord
Chancellor Westbury, who won his scholarship as a prodigy of fourteen in
“jacket and frills,” Dean Church, who, according to Mark Pattison, was
elected to an Oriel Fellowship on account of his “moral beauty,” Father
Maconochie of Saint Alban’s, Holborn, those great athletes, Messrs. T. A.
Cook (now the editor of the _Field_) and C. B. Fry, Mr. F. E. Smith, and
many other men of note.
It is of the others that we will speak here, prefacing comment with the
remark that Wadham has been successively a Whig College, an Evangelical
College, a Positivist College—and also the College of the man who
launched the latest of the Oxford Movements, and the College which was
the scene of the last of the really historic Oxford “rags.” It may clear
the ground if one begins by saying a word about the “rag.”
* * * * *
The “rag” occurred as recently as 1880; and one must not pretend
to disentangle the rights and wrongs of it with the precision of a
scientific historian. In a general way, however, one may say that it
originated in an attempt on the part of authority to tighten the reins
of discipline at a time when pride at success on the river had made the
College restive. So first there were skirmishes, and then there was a
battle royal.
A bonfire seems, as usual, to have been the first overt act; and the
lighting of a bonfire on the grass—that beautifully kept Wadham grass—is
an act no more to be condoned by the historian than by the dons. The
answer to it—surely a justifiable answer—was the prohibition of the
annual College Concert. But then tempers were lost, and fur began really
to fly. The wrath of the junior members of the College was vented upon
“Unbelieving Dick”—a don so called because he professed himself sceptical
of the articles of the Christian Faith. There was a sudden irruption
of youth, flown with insolence and wine, into Unbelieving Dick’s
apartments at the dead of night. Unbelieving Dick had no power to eject
his visitors, and no time to dress in order to receive them. He fled, it
is related, across the quadrangle in his night-shirt—for none, in those
days, wore pyjamas—pursued with missiles and howls of execration.
Things, it was evident, could not be allowed to rest there. The
ring-leaders must be discovered and an example must be made. An appeal to
them to surrender themselves, however, met with no response; and the dons
presently engaged the services of a detective. The detective was himself
detected, and was severely punished under the pump. It only remained for
the dons to play their last card and send the whole College down. They
did so. Wadham, in the Autumn Term of 1880, was a howling wilderness,
with only a few freshmen in residence—a sorrowful spectacle indeed
for Dorothy Wadham, if she looked down on it from another world. The
rehabilitation of the College, though since fully accomplished, was only
a gradual process.
And now we will leave the rag, and speak of the religious (and
irreligious) history of Wadham.
* * * * *
Religion, as has been said, appears at Wadham chiefly in the form of
Evangelicalism. The College was the stronghold, or the hotbed—whichever
be the better word—of Evangelicalism in the fiery days of the Tractarian
Movement. Warden Symons, who ruled over it from 1831 to 1871, appears
to have conformed, so far as a scholar could, to the type which one
associates with missionary meetings, tea, hassocks, and well buttered
crumpets. His wife held prayer meetings in the drawing-room, and kept a
“missionary cow,” the proceeds of whose milk—supplied to undergraduates
at specially high terms—were allocated to the propagation of the Gospel
in foreign parts. He himself altered the hour of the services in the
Wadham Chapel for the express purpose of preventing his young men from
attending Newman’s sermons at Saint Mary’s. On one occasion he knocked at
the door of Newman’s retreat at Littlemore and asked if he might be shown
over the monastery. “We have no monastery here,” was the reply; and the
door was slammed in his face.
The Warden’s scorn of ceremonial observance was illustrated by his manner
of receiving the contents of the collection plate at the Communion
Service. It was his habit simply to shovel the money into his pocket and
walk off with it; and this brusque and indecorous proceeding naturally
furnished the basis of a legend. The Warden, it was said, had annexed the
offertory as a perquisite of his office, and exhorted undergraduates
to generosity in order to gain his private ends. “Gentlemen,” he was
reported to have said, “must really give a little more liberally; I have
been quite out of pocket by the last two or three collections.” It was
not true, of course; but it served him right. Every Warden becomes the
hero of the myths that he deserves. And, no doubt, it was largely in
consequence of the saponaceous slovenliness of Wadham religion that,
whereas the serious undergraduates of other colleges went over to Rome,
the serious undergraduates of Wadham, and the serious dons too, went over
to Paris and joined Comte in erecting Temples of Humanity on the ruins of
the Temples of God.
* * * * *
Those were the days in which it was said that Wadham was governed by a
Trinity consisting of Three Persons and No God; but the three persons
in question are differently identified by different cynics. The names
of Richard Congreve, Edmund Spencer Beesley, and Mr. Frederic Harrison
are those most commonly mentioned; but Mr. Harrison has stated, in an
autobiographical note, that he did not definitely adopt the Positivist
Religion until some years after he had gone down. It does not matter—or,
at all events, it does not matter very much. Wadham, in fact, has
harboured several generations of Positivists, so that there generally
have been at least three heads there which the caps fitted, right down to
the time of the Unbelieving Dick whose misadventures have been referred
to; and they all acknowledged Richard Congreve as their spiritual father.
He was a Rugby boy who acted, for a time, as a Rugby Master. His case
may be taken as a fresh exemplification of that “moral seriousness” of
which Rugby boasts. The beliefs in which he had been brought up slipped
away from him; but he continued to respect the sacred impulse of the
human heart which impels people to dress in their best and go somewhere
to be edified on Sundays. Just as Comte had arranged for them to do so
in Paris, so he arranged for them to do so in Lamb’s Conduit Street;
and so, at a later date, Mr. Frederic Harrison arranged for them to do
so in Fetter Lane. Really intellectual people, he felt, having passed
beyond theology and beyond metaphysics, might nevertheless kneel to
Humanity—that abstraction of what was noblest in their noblest selves—and
invoke Saints carefully selected from
“The choir invisible
Of the immortal dead who live again
In lives made better by their presence.”
At a later date there was to be trouble among the Positivists—an outburst
of heresy, schism, and dissent. Comte, it turned out, was not the easiest
Master for rational and self-respecting disciples to follow blindly. He
had been in a lunatic asylum and was supported by the voluntary offerings
of the faithful. Fully persuaded that he who preached the gospel was
entitled to live by the gospel, he solicited contributions and quarrelled
with subscribers whose contributions seemed to him inadequate. Moreover,
being separated from his wife, he fell in love with a lady who had been
separated from her husband, and insisted upon incorporating his romance
in his religious system. The worship of Humanity in general might, he
claimed, be most happily symbolised by the specific worship of Clotilde
de Vaux.
His relations with Clotilde de Vaux were, his biographers tell us,
“pure.” No doubt they had his word for it, and perhaps they also had
hers; but that detail cannot have mattered much to any one except the
philosopher and his affinity. To be called upon to worship another man’s
affinity, whatever the precise nature of his relations with his affinity,
is always a strain upon devout allegiance. It proved so in this instance.
There was a split, broadly speaking, between the Positivists who had a
sense of humour and the Positivists who had none; but we need not enter
into the rights and wrongs of the disruption. Enough to note the fact,
and to note also that, so far as England is concerned, Positivism has
been an Oxford Movement which Wadham has practically monopolised.
* * * * *
This brings us to the last of the Oxford Movements, with which Wadham is
also very definitely associated—the Social Movement which succeeded the
Æsthetic Movement, in or about the year 1884.
Something has already been said about it in the Magdalen chapter which
related the æsthetic collapse. The principal thing to be added here is
that the man who had most to do with the launching of it was Barnett
of Wadham, who had taken a Second in History in 1865, and was then the
incumbent of Saint Jude’s, Whitechapel.
Other forces were, indeed, indirectly at work. Sir Walter Besant’s
advocacy of a People’s Palace in “All Sorts and Conditions of Men” was
one. Mr. George R. Sims’s tract entitled “The Bitter Cry of Outcast
London” was another. Here, at all events, were the elements of stir, if
not of movement in the narrow sense—the vague suggestion that “something
ought to be done,” and that the people who had culture owed a debt of
some sort to the people who were trying to get along without it. Barnett
of Wadham, with many earnest helpers from other colleges, focussed the
Movement at Oxford in a memorable speech delivered in the Union Debating
Hall.
The only hope for the East End of London, it was then laid down, was for
Oxford men to colonise it. They alone, or almost alone, possessed the
secret of culture. A number of them, therefore, must settle there, and
set good examples, illuminating Whitechapel by their shining influence.
Forthwith they jumped at the idea, and carried it out, almost in the
twinkling of an eye. Toynbee Hall was the result, and Barnett of Wadham,
now Canon Barnett, was its first Warden.
Oxford, in those days, was, it must be admitted, a very serious
University indeed—as serious a University as even the Rugby men could
have wished to see it. Even unbelievers took to going to church, and
gravely envisaged the question whether a lack of belief was really a
sufficient excuse for not taking Holy Orders. The _Oxford Magazine_
became the ponderous organ of the seriously minded, and, for a season,
no sermon was too tedious to be reported verbatim in its columns, until
one day there appeared a protest in the shape of a rhymed letter to the
editor:
“Mr. Editor, surely some lightness of touch
Would be not unbecoming your famed magazine.
Of lectures and sermons you give us too much;
Toynbee Hall gets to pall, and I _loathe_ Bethnal Green.”
The author of those lines was Mr. Quiller Couch of Trinity, whom the
world knows as “Q.” The immediate effect of them was to clear the air at
Oxford; though Mr. Barnett’s Oxonian procession continued to carry the
lamps of culture down the Mile End Road, with results which, according to
the latest reports, are eminently satisfactory.
PEMBROKE COLLEGE
Broadgates Hall—Its illustrious and fashionable _alumni_—The
Hall becomes Pembroke College—Dr. Johnson at Pembroke—He rags
the servitors and argues with the dons—His “spirited refusal of
an eleemosynary supply of shoes”—He shows Hannah More over the
College—George Whitefield at Pembroke—His relations with the
Methodists and his religious excitability.
In the eyes of the average visitor to Pembroke, one fact outweighs all
other facts in importance. Pembroke was the college of Dr. Johnson.
It is much more profitable to tell a visitor that than to dwell on
the circumstances in which Pembroke College grew out of the earlier
Broadgates Hall.
Broadgates Hall, it is true, had cut a considerable figure in the early
social history of Oxford. Christ Church men who could not be accommodated
in the House often had rooms there—a fact which the modern Christ Church
men should remember when they are tempted to their traditional gibe:
“Is that Pembroke? I always thought that was where the Christ Church
coals were kept.” John Pym, too, the great Parliamentary leader, was at
Broadgates Hall; and the Hall was “a nest of singing birds” long before
the greatest of her sons claimed that distinction for Pembroke. George
Peele, Francis Beaumont (of the Beaumont and Fletcher combination), and
Sir Fulke Greville were all poets of Broadgates Hall; but it is not easy
to arouse the curiosity of the visitor concerning them. He keeps most of
his curiosity for Dr. Johnson; and if he has any curiosity left over, he
bestows it upon George Whitefield, the Methodist preacher.
Let us consider Dr. Johnson first.
* * * * *
Johnson went up in 1728; but his career was brief—about fourteen months
from start to finish. Carlyle says he was a servitor; but he was, in
fact, a commoner. A friend who offered him financial help did not fulfil
his promise. His father fell into financial difficulties, and he had to
go home, leaving his caution money to defray his dues.
Old Michael Johnson brought him up, and took him to call upon his tutor.
He astonished the common-room, after a modest silence, by interjecting
a quotation from Macrobius, thus proving himself to be precocious and
well-read, though he was not to turn out to be the sort of model scholar
whom the donnish mind approves. Laziness was to be his besetting vice
through life. He was already lazy while an undergraduate; and he shared
with many men of meaner intelligence a disposition to cut his lectures,
and to excuse himself on grounds which the lecturers could not but regard
as inadequate. Of the Christ Church man it has been written by an Oxford
humourist that “he goeth not to lectures, for he saith: ‘How can a man
lecture in bags cut like that?’” Johnson was guilty of a more outspoken
rudeness. Summoned to account for his absence from the classroom, he
explained that he had been skating on Christ Church meadows. Fined
for his neglect of the obligation, he said: “Sir, you have sconced me
twopence for a lecture that was not worth a penny.” And the biography
continues:
“BOSWELL: That, Sir, was great fortitude of mind.
“JOHNSON: No, Sir; stark insensibility.”
He was poor; but the picture of his poverty has sometimes been overdrawn.
His account for battells, which remains in the College archives, shows
that he had enough to eat and drink, and that, in that important
respect, at all events, he lived on the same scale as the majority of
his compeers. Nor did his lack of means compel him to an isolated and
unsociable existence. He joined with the other commoners in ragging
the servitors whose duty it was to knock at the doors of commoners and
ascertain whether they were in their own rooms at the appointed hour. He
hunted them down the stairs, it is recorded, “with the noise of pots and
candlesticks”; and there are contemporary recollections which show him to
have been somewhat of a leader of men.
“I have heard,” wrote Bishop Percy, “from some of his
contemporaries, that he was generally to be seen lounging at
the College Gate with a circle of young students round him,
whom he was entertaining with wit, and keeping from their
studies, if not spiriting them up to rebellion against the
College discipline, which in his maturer years he so much
extolled. He would not let these idlers say ‘prodigious’ or
otherwise misuse the English tongue.”
Dr. Adams, too, then a tutor, and afterwards Master of the College, told
Boswell that Johnson, as an undergraduate, was “a gay and frolicsome
fellow,” and was “caressed and loved by all about him”; but Boswell
proceeds:
“When I mentioned to him this account, he said: ‘Ah, Sir, I
was mad and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for
frolick. I was miserably poor, and I thought to fight my way by
my literature and my wit; so I disregarded all power and all
authority.’”
Very likely, however, that recollection was coloured by later memories
of the struggle for bread in Grub Street. Between the manifestations
of bitterness and frolic the average undergraduate can, as a rule,
discriminate; and Pembroke was not a rich man’s college. The pangs of
poverty only became intense when Johnson crossed the road to Christ
Church, to see his friend Taylor. Then contrast made him conscious of his
shabbiness. As Boswell writes:
“Mr. Bateman’s lectures were so excellent that Johnson used
to come and get them at second hand from Taylor, till his
poverty being so extreme that his shoes were worn out, and
his feet appeared through them, he saw that this humiliating
circumstance was perceived by the Christ Church men, and he
came no more. He was too proud to accept of money, and somebody
having set a pair of new shoes at his door, he threw them away
with indignation.”
This “spirited refusal of an eleemosynary supply of shoes,” as Boswell
calls it, is the best known of all the stories of Johnson’s Oxford
career; but there is no evidence that the memory of the incident
mortified him in after life. He never vilified Oxford, as did Gibbon
and Adam Smith. On the contrary he was always proud to remember that he
was an Oxford man; he spoke very highly of the tutors whose instruction
he had neglected; and he delighted to revisit the University in his
prosperous and famous period. We have a graphic account of one such visit
from the pen of Hannah More:
“Who do you think is my principal cicerone in Oxford? Only Dr
Johnson! And we do so gallant it about! You cannot imagine
with what delight he showed me every part of his own College,
nor how rejoiced Henderson looked to make one of the party.
Dr. Adams had contrived a very pretty piece of gallantry. We
spent the day and evening at his house. After dinner Johnson
begged to conduct me to see the College; he would let no one
show it me but himself. ‘This was my room; this Shenstone’s.’
Then, after pointing out all the rooms of the poets who have
been of his College, ‘In short,’ he said, ‘we were a nest of
singing-birds. Here we walked, there we played at cricket.’
He ran over with pleasure the history of the juvenile days he
passed there.”
That may be, indeed, the language of a man whose undergraduate days
had been passed in poverty; but it assuredly is not the language of a
man whose poverty had made life unbearable in the manner which Carlyle
suggests. Johnson, it is hardly to be doubted, enjoyed himself at Oxford
as much as his constitutional tendency to melancholia ever permitted him
to enjoy himself anywhere; and one may even conjecture that the condition
of his shoe-leather was as much due to untidiness as to indigence.
To find a Pembroke man who was really poor, and really miserable and
morbid, we have to turn to the case of that eminent Methodist divine, the
Reverend George Whitefield.
* * * * *