had a reputation as a disciplinarian. Parents heard of him as a Head who
could compel even rich young men to work and to behave themselves. Hence
the College attracted a good many gentlemen-commoners, whose high fees
kept the place going. Two of those gentlemen-commoners were George Selwyn
and Charles James Fox.
By degrees, however, after Newton’s death, the fashion changed, and
gentlemen-commoners went elsewhere. The endowments of the College
were scanty, and it could not stand the stress of evil times. The
fellowships were only worth £15 a year, and nobody wanted them. The
headship itself was only worth about £60 a year, and the day came when
no fit and qualified person would be satisfied with so small a stipend.
So matriculations ceased, and the men who had already matriculated
finished their course and left; and presently there remained nothing
but an empty college building, devoid alike of Principal, tutors, and
undergraduates—devoid of everything except an obstinate elderly gentleman
named Hewitt, who had elected himself to the vice-principalship, and
clamoured to be allowed to die in the enjoyment of that office. And then
a strange thing happened.
A certain solicitor named Roberson, having no house of his own, but
wanting one, boldly, without asking any man’s leave, moved, with his
goods and chattels, into the late Principal’s vacant apartments. To
those who questioned him as to his doings, he said that he had assumed
the office of caretaker of an ancient building which seemed in danger of
falling into ruins. He had, of course, no shadow of a right to be there;
but he knew as a solicitor—a master of useful knowledge—that, unless and
until the extinct corporation was reconstituted, no one would have the
right either to turn him out or to compel him to pay rent.
His example was quickly followed by other people, who argued that a legal
position which was good enough for a solicitor was good enough for
them. Any man who desired to live rent-free proceeded to appoint himself
caretaker of one of the vacant sets of rooms in Hertford College. Before
very long, the whole college was filled with self-appointed caretakers,
who took so little care that, at last, one of the buildings—a lath and
plaster affair containing at least a dozen sets of rooms—collapsed “with
a great crash and a dense cloud of dust.” Then, and not before it was
time, the University took it upon itself to interfere.
A Commission was appointed to envisage the extraordinary situation.
It reported that Hertford College, on a certain date, “became and was
dissolved” and its property escheated to the Crown; and an Act of
Parliament was then obtained, enabling the Crown to grant the escheated
property to the University in trust for Magdalen Hall.
* * * * *
The memory of Magdalen Hall is now principally kept alive by scraps of
humorous rhyme. There is the rhyme which speaks of
“Whiskered Tompkins from the Hall
Of seedy Magdalene.”
There is also the rhyme which celebrates
“A member of Magdalen Hall
Who knew next to nothing at all;
He was fifty-three
When he took his degree,—
Which was youngish for Magdalen Hall.”
The rhymes obviously suggest a Hall populated by the intellectual tagrag
and bobtail of the University—men for whom the obtaining of a pass degree
was the protracted labour of a lifetime; and that was the condition to
which Magdalen Hall tended to lapse as the nineteenth century ran its
course.
It had had, indeed, a distinguished past. Among the great men who took
their degrees, at a much earlier age than fifty-three, from Magdalen Hall
were included Jonathan Swift, William Waller, the poet, Sir Matthew Hale,
the distinguished judge, and Thomas Hobbes, the illustrious philosopher.
But that is ancient—or at all events it is not modern—history. Towards
the end of the eighteenth century Halls went out of fashion. They ceased
to attract in virtue either of the luxury of the life or of the laxity of
the discipline. Men of rank came to prefer Christ Church. Men of brains
were attracted to the Colleges by the scholarships and exhibitions. The
Halls tended more and more to become the refuges of the intellectually
destitute—establishments whose chief claim on the loyalty and gratitude
of their members was that they allowed them to remain in residence as
long as they liked, whether they succeeded in passing their examinations
or not. Their position, therefore, became precarious; and the question
of either merging them in colleges or transforming them into colleges
gradually arose. Thanks to the munificence of Mr. T. C. Baring, M.P., who
provided an ample endowment, Magdalen Hall was transformed into Hertford
College, and so entered upon a new lease of life in 1874.
Such is the story; and it only remains to glance at a select few of the
distinguished names which illustrate it. Two of them have been already
mentioned—George Selwyn and Charles James Fox. A third—the Principal’s
private pupil—was Henry Pelham, the future Prime Minister.
* * * * *
These three young men were young men of pretty much the same sort. If
they had been contemporaries they would doubtless have been found in the
same set. For a picture of the kind of life they lived—a typical picture
of the life of fellow-commoners of the period—we may turn to the record
of the first Lord Malmesbury, who was up at the same time as Fox, though
not at the same college, being, in fact, a Merton man.
“The men,” Lord Malmesbury says, “with whom I lived were very pleasant,
but very idle, fellows. Our life was an imitation of high life in London.
Luckily drinking was not the fashion; but what we did drink was claret,
and we had our regular round of evening card-parties, to the great
annoyance of our finances. It has often been a matter of surprise to me
how so many of us made our way so well in the world and so creditably.”
No doubt the description is faithful enough in a general way—no statement
which connects Fox with cards or with claret is incredible; but, as a
matter of fact, nearly all our detailed information points to him as
having been considerably less idle than his associates. In later life,
as we know, when a friend remarked to him that it would be agreeable to
lie on the grass with a book, he replied that it would be still more
agreeable to lie on the grass without a book; but, in his Oxford days,
his indolence was so coloured by curiosity as to be hardly recognisable
as such.
There is a story to the effect that he once took a “memorable leap” from
an upper window into the street in order to play his part in a town and
gown row; but that story rests upon doubtful evidence. His letters, and
those of his correspondents, show him to have read hard enough—especially
in mathematics, which, strange as it may seem, he found “entertaining”—to
make both his father and his tutor anxious. The former removed him, and
took him abroad; the latter urged him not to trouble about mathematics
until his return.
“As to trigonometry,” he wrote, “it is a matter of entire indifference
to the other geometricians of the college whether they proceed to the
other branches of mathematics immediately, or wait a term or two longer.
You need not, therefore, interrupt your amusements by severe studies, for
it is wholly unnecessary to take a step onwards without you, and there we
shall stop until we have the pleasure of your company.”
And Fox’s own letters from Oxford indicate that he did indeed regard the
University, not as a haunt of dissipation, but as a seat of learning.
“I did not,” he says, “expect my life here could be so pleasant
as I find it; but I really think, to a man who reads a great
deal, there cannot be a more agreeable place.”
If Fox was a credit to the college, however, the same could by no means
be said of George Selwyn, who got into trouble with the Proctors.
George Selwyn, indeed, took Oxford seriously enough to read at the
Bodleian, and to seek the degree of B.C.L.; but the claret which he drank
went to his head, and he behaved unbecomingly in his cups.
He was a leading spirit in a Wine Club—such a society, no doubt, as that
which one remembers at Exeter, roaring out the jovial refrain, with “the
eternal note of sadness” at the end of it:
“Edite, bibite,
Conviviales:
Post multa sæcula,
Pocula nulla.”
One day it came to the ears of the Vice-Chancellor and the Proctors
that, at a meeting of this club in the house of a certain Deverelle, an
“unlicensed seller of wines,” the rite of the administration of the Holy
Communion had been parodied. An actual eucharistic chalice, it was said,
had been procured; Rhine wine had been handed round in it; and George
“did ludicrously and profanely apply the words used by our Saviour at the
said Institution to the intemperate purposes of the said club.”
Deverelle and the waiter were summoned to give evidence; and so were
several of George Selwyn’s boon companions—Lord Harley, and the sons of
Earl Gower and the Earl of Mansfield among them. Drunkenness was the
only possible defence; but the plea was not presented in the shape in
which it might have carried conviction. Instead of deposing that they had
themselves been too drunk to remember what had happened, the revellers
deposed that George Selwyn had been too drunk to know what he was doing;
and one of them even went so far as to try to secure his acquittal by
deposing that he was normally to be found in that condition after dinner.
Whether inebriety is an extenuation or an aggravation of the offence of
blasphemy is a question which might be argued; so also is the question
whether private blasphemy is an offence of which public cognisance should
be taken. Neither of the questions need be argued here, however, for
neither of them was argued at the time. The fact having been established,
the punishment followed as a matter of course; and George Selwyn was
sentenced, in the noble language of the official decree, “to be utterly
expelled and banished from our said University, and never henceforward
to be permitted to enter and reside within the precincts of our said
University.”
* * * * *
So much, then, for the Hertford men of the first foundation. Of the
Hertford men of the second foundation, since it only dates from 1874, it
would be premature to speak, though one of them, Mr. G. H. Thring, is
the Secretary of the Incorporated Society of Authors. But there is just
one of the Magdalen Hall men of the intervening half century of whom one
cannot choose but speak. If Magdalen Hall had done nothing but afford a
shelter to Robert Stephen Hawker, the parson poet of Morwenstow, on the
northern coast of Cornwall, its existence would be amply justified.
His case was curious. In the midst of his career at Oxford, his father
one day informed him that he could not afford to keep him at the
University any longer; but the quick instinct of genius showed the young
man a way out of the difficulty,—he would marry his godmother, a lady
twenty-one years his senior, who had an income of £200 a year. Jumping
on his horse, he rode in hot haste from Stratton to Bude, where the lady
lived, proposed to her, and was accepted. Then he returned to Oxford,
and, as they did not want married undergraduates at Pembroke, which was
his original college, he migrated to Magdalen Hall, where he won the
Newdigate with a poem on “Pompeii.”
That is all that there is to be said of his Oxford days; and of his
marriage there is nothing to be related except that it turned out
happily, and that it was not out of disrespect for his excellent wife’s
memory that he wore a pink hat without a brim at her funeral. He was
always eccentric in his dress; and a pink hat without a brim was, at that
period of his life, his usual headgear. There was precedent for it, he
said, in the Eastern Church, of the ceremonies of which he was always an
earnest student.
For the rest, he became Vicar of Morwenstow, on the rock-bound shore
of the Atlantic, and lived there in complete isolation, five miles from
the nearest butcher’s shop, and more than twenty miles from the nearest
railway station—the hero of many good stories which this is not the place
to relate—the author of much true poetry, composed, it is said, under the
influence of opium, which may be praised here, because praise of it is
nowhere out of place. And, if any reader demands that the praise should
be supported by quotation, then let him read this:
“Forth gleamed the East, and yet it was not day:
A white and glowing steed outrode the dawn;
A youthful rider ruled the bounding rein
And he, in semblance of Sir Galahad shone:
A vase he held on high; one molten gem,
Like massive ruby or the chrysolite:
Thence gushed the light in flakes; and flowing, fell
As though the pavement of the sky brake up,
And stars were shed to sojourn on the hills,
From grey Morwenna’s stone to Michael’s tor,
Until the rocky land was like a heaven.
“Then saw they that the mighty quest was won:
The Sangraal swooned along the golden air:
The sea breathed balsam like Gennesaret:
The streams were touched with supernatural light:
And fonts of Saxon rock stood, full of God.”
That settles it, and we have no need of further evidence. It was a great
poet, and no mere versifier, who wrote those lines; and, in “The Quest
of the Sangraal,” the Newdigate prize-man from Magdalen Hall, who drank
opium and dreamt in the hut of driftwood which he had built himself on
the face of the black cliff looking out across the Atlantic to Labrador,
competed with Tennyson on his own ground and beat him.
KEBLE COLLEGE
“Keble College, near Rome”—A memorial of the author of the
“Christian Year”—The ideals of the College—How far they have
been realised—Diversified results of the experiment—The Bishop
of London and Mr. Herbert Trench.
The last stage of our pilgrimage leads us away from Oxford to the
flaming bricks of Keble, adjacent to the Parks. It was a Keble man who
once presumed to address a letter to “Worcester College, near Oxford.”
The reply, so the story continues, was addressed to “Keble College,
near Rome,”—and did not go astray. And these things, of course, are an
allegory.
How far the allegory is faithful—to what extent Rome and Keble are in
spiritual proximity—is a debatable question which it shall be left to
others to debate. The College may be regarded, at any rate, as a protest
and a reaction: a sectarian excrescence upon an age which seemed to be
beginning to be liberal. One may regard it, according to one’s point of
view, either as a gaudy monument to a lost cause or as a gaudy temple
erected to celebrate the renascence of a discredited idea.
[Illustration: KEBLE COLLEGE.
[To face p. 316.]
Tractarianism seemed to have had its hour at Oxford. The secession of
the Newmanites had induced many Anglican Catholics to ask themselves
whether they were not living in a fool’s paradise. The Essayists and
Reviewers—the Seven against Christ as the wit of the orthodox party
styled them—had set men reconsidering their theological position. The
tendency of the hour was to look forward instead of backward, to break
down barriers instead of building them, and to get rid of formulæ instead
of offering money prizes to those who would subscribe to them. And
then came Keble, a “throwback,” as it were, announced by a flourish of
Puseyite trumpets.
The College was founded by public subscription as a memorial of the
author of the “Christian Year,” and was designed to combine plain living
with High Church thinking. Self-denying ordinances were to be imposed in
the cause of economy, and the advantages of the institution were to be
confined to members of the Church of England. The central idea of the
College, in short, was to be the government of members of the Church of
England by members of the Church of England for the benefit of the Church
of England. “It is hoped,” ran the appeal for help, “that it will prove,
by God’s blessing, the loyal handmaid of our mother Church, to train up
men who, not in the ministry only, but in the manifold callings of the
Christian life, shall be steadfast in the faith.”
Such was the ideal; and it does not need to be proved that it was an
ideal as narrow as it was lofty, reposing, not only upon piety, but also
upon confusion of thought. Religion being a spiritual experience, and the
Anglican Church being a branch of the Civil Service, it is only by loose
thinkers that the two things can be treated as one and indivisible; and
the implied proposition that Dissenters are poisonous is not a logical
corollary of any exhortation to a devout and holy life. Loose thinking
has, however, in this instance, proved a mainspring of generous giving,
and has resulted in an endowment of learning which is not without value
because it has concurrently endowed the speculative opinions and ritual
practices of a particular school of thought. The endowment of learning
for the exclusive benefit of Churchmen may not have much more _raison
d’être_ than the endowment of learning for the special benefit of
albinoes, or vegetarians, or anti-tobacconists; but it is a vast deal
better than no endowment of learning at all.
* * * * *
Whether the wisdom of the founders and benefactors of Keble has been
justified of its children is a delicate question of which it would at
present be premature to do more than lightly touch the fringe; but
certain generalisations may be hazarded.
In the first place the economical advantages have not been so marked as
to attract a class of men previously excluded from the University. In the
second place the College has never been of the nature of a seminary, and
its particular influences have been largely overshadowed by the general
influences of the University itself. Keble men, that is to say, have been
very much like other Oxford men; and the test of Churchmanship has not
winnowed them to any really noticeable extent. Thought has, in effect,
been as free there as elsewhere, in spite of the nominal restrictions
of orthodox authority. Some of the men have thought as they were told
to think, and others have thought for themselves—encouraged, in some
instances, by unexpectedly latitudinarian dons. The wind has blown where
it listed, with the usual diversified results.
There are those who would say that Keble at its best and most
characteristic is represented by the present Bishop of London: a
high-minded and popular prelate whose portraits—especially the portrait
in which he is to be seen beaming benignantly beside his favourite
crozier—are treasured by almost as many ladies as the portraits of Mr.
George Alexander himself; a prelate also in such a continual hurry to do
good that he too often gives the sober the impression of a man who speaks
before he thinks. But Keble is also the College of Mr. Herbert Trench: a
poet whose visions of the ultimate stand in no perceptible relation to
the metaphysics of the Establishment, and who resembles the author of
“The Christian Year” only in the accidental circumstance that some of his
compositions have been set to music; and it might puzzle the trustees
of Keble, as it would puzzle the writer of these pages, to find the
intellectual common denominator of Dr. Winnington-Ingram and the manager
of the Haymarket Theatre.
EPILOGUE
The pilgrimage is over, and the “dreaming spires” disappear into the
plain as we depart. It is time to say, as Queen Elizabeth said, pausing,
as has been told, on Shotover: “Farewell, farewell, dear Oxford! God
bless thee, and increase thy sons in number, holiness, and virtue!”
In numbers, truly, they have been increased, and are still increasing.
New buildings, seldom as beautiful as the old ones, spring up continually
as witnesses and consequence of the increase. As for holiness and
virtue—well, these are not things which can be weighed or measured; and
as the words mean different things to different preachers, positive
asseveration would be out of place.
Those who associate virtue and holiness with the domination of the Church
of England as by law established have some reason to view the prospect
gloomily. The religious tests have gone—except from Keble; and Oxford
Methodists are no longer liable to be pelted with mud in the High.
Nonconformists of all grades, from Romanists to Unitarians, come to
Oxford in battalions.
A few of them secede. There is a story of a Wesleyan undergraduate, the
son of a Wesleyan minister, whose heart was so touched by the doctrine
of the apostolical succession that whenever, from that time forward,
he corresponded with his father, he refused him on principle the
complimentary title of “Reverend.” But that is an exceptional case. The
majority of the Oxford Dissenters maintain their own point of view, even
when they come into contact with the point of view of the University; and
the profit from the clash of opinions is mutual. Oxford learns something
from the new-comers, even while it keeps up, with proper dignity, the
pretence of having nothing to learn from any one; but Oxford also
influences them, and so indirectly extends its own influence into corners
of the world which previously it could not reach. Even the City Temple
has lately become, by this means, a remarkable centre of illumination.
For, after all, in spite of all that we hear, and say, about Oxford
Schools and Oxford Movements, the secret of Oxford is not wrapped up in
any particular body of opinions; and the attitude of Oxford towards its
Movements may fairly remind one of the French Revolution devouring its
own children. The various Oxford Movements, though they have succeeded,
have not resembled one another. On the contrary, they have clashed
with, and have extinguished, one another. Oxford sent out Wiclif’s
“poor preachers”; but Oxford also burnt more than its fair share of the
Reformers. Oxford bred the Tractarians; but Oxford also confounded the
Tractarians in “Essays and Reviews.” Oxford nurtured the Æsthetes; but
Oxford also put the Æsthetes under the pump.
And so on to the end of the chapter. Action, in Oxford, has always
been followed by reaction, and reformation by counter-reformation. The
bane and the antidote have always grown side by side in the Oxford
meadows; and the survey of Oxford history—the rapid evocation of
typically illustrious Oxford names—gives an impression of a University
as miscellaneously diversified as the Universe itself. And yet, in the
face of all these divergencies, there is a something in the atmosphere
of Oxford which never fails to affect the mentality of all the men who
breathe it.
A part of the secret lies, no doubt, in the beauty of Oxford; a greater
part, perhaps, in the leisure, and the comparative isolation and
disinterestedness of the life. One is in touch with the world there,
without being of it. One is not hustled or hurried. One can acquire
knowledge for its own sake, without considering its immediate practical
application. One can pursue and possess one’s own soul, and face, with
help and sympathy, but undisturbed, all those perplexing problems of
the painful earth which most of those busier men who are bundled from a
school to an office can, as a rule, hardly so much as state. And all that
in the most impressionable years of one’s life.
It is a great privilege—a privilege which it would be impossible to
overvalue. Among those who have enjoyed it—even if they are conscious
of not having made so much of it as they might—a kind of freemasonry
exists, even when they are engaged in confuting each other’s doctrines.
They are, or think they are, the initiated. Hence the reserve, the
aloofness, the air of calm composure, and the refusal to be startled into
emotion or surprise which go to the making of what is commonly called
the “Oxford manner”; and if those characteristics are sometimes too
prominently displayed to give unmixed pleasure in a mixed society, no one
is more ready than the Oxford man to admit in the abstract the truth of
Aristotle’s saying that an excess of virtue is a vice.
And so once more: “Farewell, farewell, dear Oxford! God bless thee, and
increase thy sons in number, holiness, and virtue!”
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON.
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=THE COURT OF WILLIAM III.= By EDWIN and MARION SHARPE GREW. With many
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