mentioned of furnishing a point of rendezvous to the great body of
professors and students, and a point of concentration to the different
establishments of implements and machinery for elaborate researches [as,
for instance, of books and MSS., in the first place; secondly, of
maps, charts, and globes; and, thirdly, perhaps of the costly apparatus
required for such studies as Sideral astronomy, galvanic chemistry
or physiology, &c.]; all these are uses which cannot be regarded in a
higher light than as conveniences merely incidental and collateral to
the main views of the founders. There are, then, two much loftier
and more commanding ends met by the idea and constitution of such
institutions, and which first rise to a rank of dignity sufficient to
occupy the views of a legislator, or to warrant a national interest.
These ends are involved: 1st, in the practice of conferring _degrees_,
that is, formal attestations and guarantees of competence to give
advice, instruction, or aid, in the three great branches of liberal
knowledge applicable to human life; 2d, in that appropriation of fixed
funds to fixed professorships, by means of which the uninterrupted
succession of public and authorized teachers is sustained in all the
higher branches of knowledge, from generation to generation, and from
century to century. By the latter result it is secured that the great
well-heads of liberal knowledge and of severe science shall never grow
dry. By the former it is secured that this unfailing fountain shall
be continually applied to the production and to the _tasting_ of fresh
labors in endless succession for the public service, and thus, in
effect, that the great national fountain shall not be a stagnant
reservoir, but, by an endless _derivation_ (to speak in a Roman
metaphor!), applied to a system of national irrigation. These are the
two great functions and qualifications of a collegiate incorporation:
one providing to each separate generation its own separate rights of
heirship to all the knowledge accumulated by its predecessors, and
converting a mere casual life-annuity into an estate of inheritance--a
mere fleeting _agonisma_ into a _ktæma es æi_; the other securing for
this eternal dowry as wide a distribution as possible: the one function
regarding the dimension of _length_ in the endless series of ages
through which it propagates its gifts; the other regarding the dimension
of _breadth_ in the large application throughout any one generation
of these gifts to the public service. Here are grand functions, high
purposes; but neither one nor the other demands any edifices of stone
and marble; neither one nor the other presupposes any edifice at all
built with human hands. A collegiate incorporation, the church militant
of knowledge, in its everlasting struggle with darkness and error, is,
in this respect, like the church of Christ--that is, it is always and
essentially invisible to the fleshly eye. The pillars of this church are
human champions; its weapons are great truths so shaped as to meet the
shifting forms of error; its armories are piled and marshalled in human
memories; its cohesion lies in human zeal, in discipline, in childlike
docility; and all its triumphs, its pomps, and glories, must forever
depend upon talent, upon the energies of the will, and upon the
harmonious cooperation of its several divisions. Thus far, I say, there
is no call made out for _any_ intervention of the architect.
Let me apply all this to Oxford. Among the four functions commonly
recognized by the founders of universities, which are--1st, to find
a set of halls or places of meeting; 2d, to find the implements and
accessaries of study; 3d, to secure the succession of teachers and
learners; 4th, to secure the profitable application of their attainments
to the public service. Of these four, the two highest need no buildings;
and the other two, which are mere collateral functions of convenience,
need only a small one. Wherefore, then, and to what end, are the vast
systems of building, the palaces and towers of Oxford? These are either
altogether superfluous, mere badges of ostentation and luxurious wealth,
or they point to some fifth function not so much as contemplated by
other universities, and, at present, absolutely and chimerically beyond
their means of attainment. Formerly we used to hear attacks upon the
Oxford discipline as fitted to the true _intellectual_ purposes of a
modern education. Those attacks, weak and most uninstructed in facts,
false as to all that they challenged, and puerile as to what implicitly
they propounded for homage, are silent. But, of late, the battery has
been pointed against the Oxford discipline in its _moral_ aspects, as
fitted for the government and restraint of young men, or even as at all
contemplating any such control. The Beverleys would have us suppose,
not only that the great body of the students are a licentious crew,
acknowledging no discipline or restraints, but that the grave elders of
the university, and those who wield the nominal authority of the
place, passively resign the very shows of power, and connive at general
excesses, even when they do not absolutely authorize them in their
personal examples. Now, when such representations are made, to what
standard of a just discipline is it that these writers would be
understood as appealing? Is it to some ideal, or to some existing
and known reality? Would they have England suppose that they are here
comparing the actual Oxford with some possible hypothetic or imaginable
Oxford,--with some ideal case, that is to say, about which great
discussions would arise as to its feasibility,--or that they are
comparing it with some known standard of discipline actually realized
and sustained for generations, in Leipsic, suppose, or Edinburgh, or
Leyden, or Salamanca? This is the question of questions, to which we
may demand an answer; and, according to that answer, observe the dilemma
into which these furciferous knaves must drop. If they are comparing
Oxford simply with some ideal and better Oxford, in some ideal and
better world, in that case all they have said--waiving its falsehoods of
fact--is no more than a flourish of rhetoric, and the whole
discussion may be referred to the shadowy combats of scholastic
declamation-mongers--those mock gladiators, and _umbratiles doctores_.
But if, on the other hand, they pretend to take their station upon the
known basis of some existing institution,--if they will pretend that, in
this impeachment of Oxford, they are proceeding upon a silent comparison
with Edinburgh, Glasgow, Jena, Leipsic, Padua, &c.,--then are they
self-exposed, as men not only without truth, but without shame. For now
comes in, as a sudden revelation, and as a sort of _deus ex machina_,
for the vindication of the truth, the simple answer to that question
proposed above, Wherefore, and to what end, are the vast edifices of
Oxford? A university, as universities are in general, needs not, I have
shown, to be a visible body--a building raised with hands. Wherefore,
then, is the _visible_ Oxford? To what _fifth_ end, refining upon the
ordinary ends of such institutions, is the far-stretching system of
Oxford _hospitia_, or monastic hotels, directed by their founders, or
applied by their present possessors? Hearken, reader, to the answer:
These vast piles are applied to an end, absolutely indispensable to any
even tolerable system of discipline, and yet absolutely unattainable
upon any commensurate scale in any other university of Europe. They are
applied to the personal settlement and domestication of the students
within the gates and walls of that college to whose discipline they are
amenable. Everywhere else the young men live _where_ they please and
_as_ they please; necessarily distributed amongst the towns-people; in
any case, therefore, liable to no control or supervision whatever; and
in those cases where the university forms but a small part of a vast
capital city, as it does in Paris, Edinburgh, Madrid, Vienna, Berlin,
and Petersburg, liable to every mode of positive temptation and
distraction, which besiege human life in high-viced and luxurious
communities. Here, therefore, it is a mockery to talk of discipline;
of a nonentity there can be no qualities; and we need not ask for the
description of the discipline in situations where discipline there can
be none. One slight anomaly I have heard of as varying _pro tanto_
the uniform features of this picture. In Glasgow I have heard of an
arrangement by which young academicians are placed in the family of a
professor. Here, as members of a private household, and that household
under the presiding eye of a conscientious, paternal, and judicious
scholar, doubtless they would enjoy as absolute a shelter from peril
and worldly contagion as parents could wish; but not _more_ absolute,
I affirm, than belongs, unavoidably, to the monastic seclusion of an
Oxford college--the gates of which open to no egress after nine o'clock
at night, nor after eleven to any ingress which is not regularly
reported to a proper officer of the establishment. The two forms of
restraint are, as respects the effectual amount of control, equal; and
were they equally diffused, Glasgow and Oxford would, in this point,
stand upon the same level of discipline. But it happens that the
Glasgow case was a personal accident; personal, both as regarded him who
volunteered the exercise of this control, and those who volunteered to
appropriate its benefits; whereas the Oxford case belongs to the very
system, is coextensive with the body of undergraduates, and, from the
very arrangement of Oxford life, is liable to no decay or intermission.
Here, then, the reader apprehends the first great characteristic
distinction of Oxford--that distinction which extorted the rapturous
admiration of Lipsius as an exponent of enormous wealth, but which I
now mention as applying, with ruinous effect, to the late calumnies upon
Oxford, as an inseparable exponent of her meritorious discipline. She,
most truly and severely an "Alma Mater" gathers all the juvenile part of
her flock within her own fold, and beneath her own vigilant supervision.
In Cambridge there is, so far, a laxer administration of this rule,
that, when any college overflows, undergraduates are allowed to lodge
at large in the town. But in Oxford this increase of peril and
discretionary power is thrown by preference upon the senior graduates,
who are seldom below the age of twenty-two or twenty-three; and the
college accommodations are reserved, in almost their whole extent, for
the most youthful part of the society. This extent is prodigious. Even
in my time, upwards of two thousand persons were lodged within the
colleges; none having fewer than two rooms, very many having three, and
men of rank, or luxurious habits, having often large suites of rooms.
But that was a time of war, which Oxford experience has shown to have
operated most disproportionably as a drain upon the numbers disposable
for liberal studies; and the total capacity of the university was far
from being exhausted. There are now, I believe, between five and six
thousand names upon the Oxford books; and more than four thousand, I
understand, of constant residents. So that Oxford is well able to lodge,
and on a very sumptuous scale, a small army of men; which expression of
her great splendor I now mention (as I repeat) purely as applying to
the question of her machinery for enforcing discipline. This part of
her machinery, it will be seen, is unique, and absolutely peculiar to
herself. Other universities, boasting no such enormous wealth, cannot
be expected to act upon her system of seclusion. Certainly, I make it
no reproach to other universities, that, not possessing the means of
sequestering their young men from worldly communion, they must abide by
the evils of a laxer discipline. It is their misfortune, and not their
criminal neglect, which consents to so dismal a relaxation of academic
habits. But let them not urge this misfortune in excuse at one time,
and at another virtually disavow it. Never let _them_ take up a stone to
throw at Oxford, upon this element of a wise education; since in them,
through that original vice in their constitution, the defect of
all means for secluding and insulating their society, discipline is
abolished by anticipation--being, in fact, an impossible thing; for the
walls of the college are subservient to no purpose of life, but only to
a purpose of convenience; they converge the students for the hour or two
of what is called lecture; which over, each undergraduate again becomes
_sui juris_, is again absorbed into the crowds of the world, resorts to
whatsoever haunts he chooses, and finally closes his day at----if,
in any sense, at home--at a home which is not merely removed from the
supervision and control, but altogether from the bare knowledge, of
his academic superiors. How far this discipline is well administered in
other points at Oxford, will appear from the rest of my account. But,
thus far, at least, it must be conceded, that Oxford, by and
through this one unexampled distinction--her vast disposable fund
of accommodations for junior members within her own private
cloisters--possesses an advantage which she could not forfeit, if she
would, towards an effectual knowledge of each man's daily habits, and a
control over him which is all but absolute.
This knowledge and this control is much assisted and concentrated by the
division of the university into separate colleges. Here comes another
feature of the Oxford system. Elsewhere the university is a single
college; and this college is the university. But in Oxford the
university expresses, as it were, the army, and the colleges express the
several brigades, or regiments.
To resume, therefore, my own thread of personal narration. On the next
morning after my arrival in Oxford, I assembled a small council of
friends to assist me in determining at which of the various separate
societies I should enter, and whether as a "commoner," or as a
"gentleman commoner." Under the first question was couched the following
latitude of choice: I give the names of the colleges, and the numerical
account of their numbers, as it stood in January, 1832; for this will
express, as well as the list of that day, (which I do not accurately
know), the _proportions_ of importance amongst them.
Mem.
1. University College ................. 207
2. Balliol " ................. 257
3. Merton " ................. 124
4. Exeter " ................. 299
5. Oriel " ................. 293
6. Queen's " ................. 351
7. New " ................. 157
8. Lincoln " ................. 141
9. All Souls' " ................. 98
10. Magdalene " ................. 165
11. Brazennose " ................. 418
12. Corpus Christi " ................. 127
13. Christ Church " ................. 949
14. Trinity " ................. 259
15. St. John's " ................. 218
16. Jesus " ................. 167
17. Wadham " ................. 217
18. Pembroke " ................. 189
19. Worcester " ................. 231
Then, besides these colleges, five _Halls_, as they are technically
called, (the term _Hall_ implying chiefly that they are societies not
endowed, or not endowed with fellowships as the colleges are), namely:
Mem.
1. St. Mary Hall. .............. 83
2. Magdalen " .............. 178
3. New Inn " .............. 10
4. St. Alban " .............. 41
5. St. Edmund " .............. 96
Such being the names, and general proportions on the scale of local
importance, attached to the different communities, next comes the very
natural question, What are the chief determining motives for guiding
the selection amongst them? These I shall state. First of all, a man
not otherwise interested in the several advantages of the colleges has,
however, in all probability, some choice between a small society and a
large one; and thus far a mere ocular inspection of the list will serve
to fix his preference. For my part, supposing other things equal, I
greatly preferred the most populous college, as being that in which
any single member, who might have reasons for standing aloof from the
general habits of expense, of intervisiting, etc., would have the best
chance of escaping a jealous notice. However, amongst those "other
things" which I presumed equal, one held a high place in my estimation,
which a little inquiry showed to be very far from equal. All the
colleges have chapels, but all have not organs; nor, amongst those which
have, is the same large use made of the organ. Some preserve the full
cathedral service; others do not. Christ Church, meantime, fulfilled
_all_ conditions: for the chapel here happens to be the cathedral of the
diocese; the service, therefore, is full and ceremonial; the college,
also, is far the most splendid, both in numbers, rank, wealth, and
influence. Hither I resolved to go; and immediately I prepared to call
on the head.
The "head," as he is called generically, of an Oxford college (his
_specific_ appellation varies almost with every college--principal,
provost, master, rector, warden, etc.), is a greater man than the
uninitiated suppose. His situation is generally felt as conferring a
degree of rank not much less than episcopal; and, in fact, the head of
Brazennose at that time, who happened to be the Bishop of Bangor, was
not held to rank much above his brothers in office. Such being the rank
of heads generally, _a fortiori_, that of Christ Church was to be had
in reverence; and this I knew. He is always, _ex officio_, dean of the
diocese; and, in his quality of college head, he only, of all deans that
ever were heard of, is uniformly considered a greater man than his own
diocesan. But it happened that the present dean had even higher titles
to consideration. Dr. Cyril Jackson had been tutor to the Prince of
Wales (George IV.); he had repeatedly refused a bishopric; and _that_,
perhaps, is entitled to place a man one degree above him who has
accepted one. He was also supposed to have made a bishop, and
afterwards, at least, it is certain that lie made his own brother a
bishop. All things weighed, Dr. Cyril Jackson seemed so very great a
personage that I now felt the value of my long intercourse with great
Dons in giving me confidence to face a lion of this magnitude.
Those who know Oxford are aware of the peculiar feelings which have
gathered about the name and pretensions of Christ Church; feelings of
superiority and leadership in the members of that college, and often
enough of defiance and jealousy on the part of other colleges. Hence
it happens that you rarely find yourself in a shop, or other place of
public resort, with a Christ-Church man, but he takes occasion, if young
and frivolous, to talk loudly of the Dean, as an indirect expression of
his own connection with this splendid college; the title of _Dean_ being
exclusively attached to the headship of Christ Church. The Dean, as may
be supposed, partakes in this superior dignity of his "House;" he
is officially brought into connection with all orders of the British
aristocracy--often with royal personages; and with the younger branches
of the aristocracy his office places him in a relation of authority and
guardianship--exercised, however, through inferior ministry, and seldom
by direct personal interference. The reader must understand that, with
rare exceptions, all the princes and nobles of Great Britain, who choose
to benefit by an academic education, resort either to Christ Church
College in Oxford, or to Trinity College in Cambridge; these are the
alternatives. Naturally enough, my young friends were somewhat startled
at my determination to call upon so great a man; a letter, they fancied,
would be a better mode of application. I, however, who did not adopt the
doctrine that no man is a hero to his valet, was of opinion that very
few men indeed are heroes to themselves. The cloud of external pomp,
which invests them to the eyes of the _attoniti_ cannot exist to their
own; they do not, like Kehama, entering the eight gates of Padalon at
once, meet and contemplate their own grandeurs; but, more or less, are
conscious of acting a part. I did not, therefore, feel the tremor which
was expected of a novice, on being ushered into so solemn a presence.
II.
OXFORD.
The Dean was sitting in a spacious library or study, elegantly, if not
luxuriously furnished. Footmen, stationed as repeaters, as if at some
fashionable rout, gave a momentary importance to my unimportant self,
by the thundering tone of their annunciations. All the machinery of
aristocratic life seemed indeed to intrench this great Don's approaches;
and I was really surprised that so very great a man should condescend
to rise on my entrance. But I soon found that, if the Dean's station and
relation to the higher orders had made him lofty, those same relations
had given a peculiar suavity to his manners. Here, indeed, as on other
occasions, I noticed the essential misconception, as to the demeanor of
men of rank, which prevails amongst those who have no personal access to
their presence. In the fabulous pictures of novels (such novels as once
abounded), and in newspaper reports of conversations, real or pretended,
between the king and inferior persons, we often find the writer
expressing _his_ sense of aristocratic assumption, by making the
king address people without their titles. The Duke of Wellington,
for instance, or Lord Liverpool, figures usually, in such scenes, as
"Wellington," or "Arthur," and as "Liverpool." Now, as to the private
talk of George IV. in such cases, I do not pretend to depose; but,
speaking generally, I may say that the practice of the highest classes
takes the very opposite course. Nowhere is a man so sure of his titles
or official distinctions as amongst _them_; for, it is upon giving to
every man the very extreme punctilio of his known or supposed claims,
that they rely for the due observance of their own. Neglecting no form
of courtesy suited to the case, they seek, in this way, to remind
men unceasingly of what they expect; and the result is what I
represent--that people in the highest stations, and such as bring them
continually into contact with inferiors, are, of all people, the least
addicted to insolence or defect of courtesy. Uniform suavity of manner
is indeed rarely found, except in men of high rank. Doubtless this
may arise upon a motive of self-interest, jealous of giving the least
opening or invitation to the retorts of ill-temper or low breeding. But,
whatever be its origin, such I believe to be the fact. In a very long
conversation of a general nature upon the course of my studies, and the
present direction of my reading, Dr. Cyril Jackson treated me just as he
would have done his equal in station and in age. Coming, at length, to
the particular purpose of my visit at this time to himself, he assumed a
little more of his official stateliness. He condescended to say that
it would have given him pleasure to reckon me amongst his flock; "But,
sir," he said, in a tone of some sharpness, "your guardians have acted
improperly. It was their duty to have given me at least one year's
notice of their intention to place you at Christ Church. At present I
have not a dog-kennel in my college untenanted." Upon this, I observed
that nothing remained for me to do but to apologize for having occupied
so much of his time; that, for myself, I now first heard of this
preliminary application; and that, as to my guardians, I was bound to
acquit them of all oversight in this instance, they being no parties
to my present scheme. The Dean expressed his astonishment at this
statement. I, on my part, was just then making my parting bows, and had
reached the door, when a gesture of the Dean's, courteously waving me
back to the sofa I had quitted, invited me to resume my explanations;
and I had a conviction at the moment that the interview would have
terminated in the Dean's suspending his standing rule in my favor. But,
just at that moment, the thundering heralds of the Dean's hall announced
some man of high rank: the sovereign of Christ Church seemed distressed
for a moment; but then recollecting himself, bowed in a way to indicate
that I was dismissed. And thus it happened that I did not become a
member of Christ Church.