UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
[Sidenote: Decay of University education in the eighteenth century]
If we seek to estimate the intellectual life of Oxford during the
century following the Revolution, we find a significant dearth of
trustworthy materials. Such evidence as we possess, however, justifies
on the whole the received opinion that this period is the Dark Age of
academical history. The impulse given to culture and scholarship by
the new learning of the Renaissance had died away as completely as
that given by the scholastic revival of the thirteenth century, and
nothing came in to supply its place. The old disputations were almost
obsolete, the Laudian system of examinations had fallen into scandalous
abuse, the _sex solemnes lectiones_ required for the B.A. degree had
degenerated into ‘wall lectures’ read in an empty school. The practice
of cramming, however, was unknown, and there were no artificial
restrictions to prevent Oxford becoming a paradise of mature study and
original research.
[Sidenote: Contemporary evidence]
Unhappily, it was far otherwise. Though undergraduates were freely
admitted to the Bodleian Library, and it was frequently enriched by
donations, we learn that between 1730 and 1740 many days passed without
there being a single reader there, and it was rare for more than two
books to be consulted in a day. Dean Prideaux, who had long resided in
Oxford, professes, in 1691, ‘an unconquerable aversion to the place,’
doubtless aggravated by his impatience of Jacobite ascendency in the
University, but partly founded on his conviction of its decline as a
seat of education. Hearne, writing in 1726, declared that in nearly
all the colleges the fellows were busied in litigation and quarrels
having no connection with the promotion of learning, adding that ‘good
letters miserably decay every day, insomuch that this Ordination
on Trinity Sunday at Oxford there were no fewer (as I am informed)
than fifteen denied Orders for insufficiency—which is the more to be
noted, because our bishops and those employed by them are themselves
generally illiterate men.’ Similar complaints against the degeneracy
of University teaching abound in eighteenth-century literature.
Adam Smith, in particular, attributes the inefficiency of tutors and
professors chiefly to the fact of their being paid by fixed stipends
instead of by fees. Johnson testifies that he learned very little at
Pembroke College; Lord Malmesbury regarded his two years at Merton
College as the most unprofitable of his life; Swift represents drinking
strong ale and smoking tobacco as the chief accomplishments—not indeed
of all students, but of ‘young heirs’ sent to Oxford in deference
to custom; Lord Chesterfield speaks of the University as known only
for its ‘treasonable spirit,’ and says that, having been at Oxford
himself, he resolved not to send his son there; Lord Eldon describes
the degree-examination in his own time as merely nominal. But perhaps
the most emphatic condemnation of the Oxford system in the eighteenth
century is supplied by the historian Gibbon, whose reminiscences of his
own University career are often quoted as conclusive evidence on the
state of the University in 1752-3. He laments the fourteen months which
he spent at Magdalen College as the ‘most idle and unprofitable of his
whole life.’ He declares that ‘in the University of Oxford, the greater
part of the Public Professors have for these many years given up even
the pretence of teaching.’ He testifies that, in his time, ‘the Fellows
of Magdalen were decent easy men who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the
Founder; their days were filled by a series of uniform employments:
the chapel and the hall, the coffee-house and the common-room; till
they retired, weary and well-satisfied, to a long slumber. From the
toil of reading, or thinking, or writing, they had absolved their
conscience.’ He proceeds to allege that gentlemen-commoners were left
to educate themselves, that ‘the obvious methods of public exercises
and examinations were totally unknown,’ that no superintendence was
exercised over the relations of tutors with their pupils, that his own
tutor, though a good old-fashioned scholar, took no pains to stimulate
or encourage his industry, and that he was allowed to make ‘a tour to
Bath, a visit into Buckinghamshire, and four excursions into London, in
the same winter.’
[Sidenote: Decline in numbers and dearth of eminence in science and
literature]
We cannot but acknowledge that Gibbon’s estimate of the University in
the middle of the century is confirmed by an examination of University
records. If we may judge by the statistics of matriculation, the nation
at large had lost confidence in Oxford education, for the annual number
of admissions, which had often exceeded 300 in the reigns of Anne and
George I., never reached that modest total between 1726 and 1810, while
it often fell below 200 about the end of George II.’s reign. It is
equally certain that Oxford contributed far less than in former ages
to politics or literature. In learning it was distanced by Cambridge,
where the modern examination system was developed earlier, and where
the immortal researches of Newton and the solid learning of Bentley
had raised the ideal of academical study. But the real intellectual
leadership of the country was transferred from both Universities to
London. Indeed, London itself was no longer the only non-academical
centre of science, art, and culture; for even provincial towns, like
Birmingham and Manchester, Derby and Bristol, Norwich, Leeds, and
Newcastle, were already acquiring an industrial independence, and
intellectual life, of their own. The Methodist Revival, indeed, of
which Gibbon was probably unconscious, owed its origin to a small
band of enthusiasts at Oxford.[15] But, except Methodism, the great
movements of thought which underlay the artificial society of the
eighteenth century had no connection with the University, and the
minds which dominated the world of politics and literature were
trained in a wholly different school. The broad constructive ideas,
and ‘encyclopædic spirit,’ as it has been well called, which animated
so many writers and politicians of that age, in all the countries of
western Europe, had little or no place in the University of Oxford.
It was hardly to be expected that engineers and inventors, like
Watt, Arkwright, and Brindley, should have received an University
education, nor do we look in degree-lists for the names of eminent
soldiers like Wellington, or nautical explorers like Cook. But it is
certainly remarkable that so many English poets and humourists—Pope and
Gay, Defoe, Smollett, and Hogarth—should have received no University
education, while Swift, Congreve, and Goldsmith were students of
Dublin, Thomson of Edinburgh, Fielding of Leyden, Prior, Sterne,
and Gray, of Cambridge. Again, if we look to graver departments of
literature, or the history of science, the result is still the same.
Robertson was educated at Glasgow, Hume in France, Berkeley in Dublin;
Herschel and Priestley owed nothing to University education, nor did
John Howard, or Joshua Reynolds, or John Wilkes, or many others who
powerfully influenced the minds of the Georgian era. Jeremy Bentham,
it is true, received a part of his education at Queen’s College,
but he carried away no kindly recollection of his college life, and
sums up his estimate of Oxford training in a single acrimonious
sentence—‘Mendacity and insincerity—in these I found the effects, the
sure and only sure effects, of an English University education.’
[Sidenote: Counter-evidence showing that education and learning were
not wholly neglected]
On the other hand, it would be easy to overstate both the intellectual
sterility and the educational torpor of the University in the century
following the Revolution. The ripe scholarship and academic wit of
Addison may still be appreciated in the pages of the ‘Spectator,’
and Dr. Parr, in replying to Gibbon, was able to compile an imposing
list of Oxford graduates in the eighteenth century ‘distinguished
by classical, oriental, theological, or mathematical knowledge,
by professional skill, or by parliamentary abilities.’ We must
remember that when the historian entered Magdalen College as a
gentleman-commoner, he was in his fifteenth year; when he left it, he
was barely sixteen. The college did not then bear a high reputation
for industry, there were no commoners, and gentlemen-commoners,
being of a different social class from the ‘demies,’ were supposed
to enjoy the privilege of idleness. Gibbon himself mentions that
Corpus was fortunate in possessing an admirable tutor in John Burton.
He also candidly admits that Bishop Lowth was a bright exception to
professional sinecurism, and quotes the bishop’s description of his own
academical life, which is too often forgotten, when Gibbon’s adverse
criticism is magnified into a judicial utterance. ‘I spent many
years,’ says Lowth, ‘in that illustrious society, in a well-regulated
course of useful discipline and studies ... where a liberal pursuit of
knowledge, and a genuine freedom of thought, was raised, encouraged,
and pushed forward by example, by commendation, and by authority.’
Moreover, Gibbon allows that his father may have been unfortunate
in the selection of a college and a tutor, that Sir William Scott’s
tutorial, and Blackstone’s professorial, lectures had done honour to
Oxford, that learning had been made ‘a duty, a pleasure, and even a
fashion’ at Christchurch, and that reforms in the system of instruction
had been effected elsewhere. Lord Sheffield, the editor of his memoirs,
adds further proofs of the same improvement, and, on the whole,
Gibbon’s testimony must be taken as a somewhat one-sided statement of
a witness strongly prejudiced against the ecclesiastical character
of Oxford, and irritated by the necessity of quitting it, owing to
his conversion to Romanism. Similar deductions must be made from the
testimony of Bentham, who entered Queen’s in 1760, at the age of 13,
and took his degree, in 1763, at the age of 16, having cherished a
precocious contempt for juvenile amusements, and a precocious, though
reasonable, objection to signing the XXXIX Articles, in spite of
conscientious doubts.
It is impossible to ascertain how far the admitted decay of University
lectures and examinations was compensated by college tuition. But
it is clear that some colleges maintained an educational system of
their own, and imposed exercises on their members, often in the
form of declamations or disputations, which stood more or less in
the place of those formerly required by the University. At Merton
College, for instance, there were regular hall-disputations, in which
even gentlemen-commoners were expected to bear their part, besides
more solemn disputations in divinity for Bachelors of Arts, and
‘Variations’ for ‘Master-Fellows’ at the end of the Act Term. These
Variations, as described in a work published in 1749, do not seem
to have possessed any great educational value, and, according to a
contemporary author, ‘were amicably concluded with a magnificent and
expensive supper, the charges of which formerly came to 100_l._, but
of late years much retrenched.’ Such logical encounters were clearly
mere survivals or revivals of mediæval dialectics, but there is some
reason to believe that sounder and more useful knowledge was quietly
cultivated, and rewarded by fellowships, though not yet recognised by
University honours. When John Wesley was elected a fellow of Lincoln,
in 1726, disputations were held six times a week, as at Merton, but
he formed his own scheme of studies. He allotted Mondays and Tuesdays
to classics; Wednesdays to logic and ethics; Thursdays to Hebrew and
Arabic; Fridays to metaphysics and natural philosophy; Saturdays
to rhetoric, poetry, and composition; Sundays to divinity; besides
which, he bestowed much attention on mathematics. Doubtless, John
Wesley was no common man, but he was never regarded as a prodigy of
learning by his fellows, and it was the deliberate opinion of Johnson,
in the next generation, that college tuition was not the farce which
Gibbon imagined it. Speaking of Oxford in 1768, Dr. Johnson said:
‘There is here, sir, such a progressive emulation. The students are
anxious to appear well to their tutors; the tutors are anxious to have
their pupils appear well in the college; the colleges are anxious
to have their students appear well in the University; and there are
excellent rules of discipline in every college.’ Sir William Jones,
who obtained a scholarship at University College in 1764, and a
fellowship two years later, found means to prosecute his Oriental
researches there, and mapped out his own time, like Wesley, between
different branches of study. By the statutes of Hertford College,
framed in 1747, undergraduates were required to produce a declamation,
theme, or translation every week, composing it in English during
their second and third years, and in Latin during their fourth. Nor
were fellowship-examinations by any means an unmeaning form in good
colleges. Those at All Souls’ had long been a real test of intellectual
merit, though motives of favouritism sometimes governed the choice
of the electors. At Merton, in the early part of the eighteenth
century, we read of fellowship-elections being preceded by a thorough
examination, including two days of book-work in Homer, Xenophon,
Lucian, Tacitus, and Horace, besides a ‘theme,’ doubtless in Latin.
When we find that some two hundred and fifty editions of classical
works, mostly, but not wholly, in the ancient languages, were published
in Oxford during the first half of the eighteenth century, it is hardly
possible to doubt that many industrious readers must have existed
among the students and fellows of colleges, however imperfect may have
been the organisation of lectures. Dr. Charlett, the eminent Master
of University College, writing in 1715, was able to praise the youths
under his own charge as ‘sober, modest, and studious,’ nor is there
any reason to doubt that many students in other colleges deserved a
like character. Degenerate as it was, and far inferior to Cambridge
in the performance of its higher functions, the University was not so
utterly effete as it is sometimes represented. It produced few great
scholars and fewer great teachers, but it was not wholly unfaithful
to its mission of educating the English clergy and gentry, and the
great philosopher, Berkeley, who had described it as an ideal retreat
for learning and piety, deliberately chose it as his final home and
resting-place.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] No description is here given of the origin and progress of
Methodism in Oxford, since the history of the Methodist Revival is
reserved for a separate volume in the present series.