"Round thy cloisters, in moonlight,
Branching dark, or touched with white:
Round old chill aisles, where, moon-smitten,
Blanches the Orate, written
Under each worn old-world face."
L. JOHHSON.
William of Wykeham's College had other marked features besides its
magnificent scale. Previous colleges had grown; at New College
everything was organized from the first. As the great architectural
History of Cambridge says: "For the first time, chapel, hall,
library, treasury, the Warden's lodgings, a sufficient range of
chambers, the cloister, the various domestic offices, are provided
for and erected without change of plan." The chapel especially gave
the model for the T shape, a choir and transepts without a nave,
which has become the normal form in Oxford. The influence of
Wykeham's building plan may be traced elsewhere also--at Cambridge
and even in Scotland.
In these well-planned buildings, definite arrangements were made for
college instruction, as opposed to the general teaching open to the
whole University; special /informafores/ were provided, who were to
supervise the work of all scholars up to the age of sixteen. This
marks the beginning of the Tutorial System, which has ever since
played so great a part in the intellectual life of England's two old
Universities.
Wykeham's scholars all came from Winchester, and were supposed to be
/pauperes/, but as one of the first, Henry Chichele, afterwards Henry
V's Archbishop of Canterbury and the Founder of All Souls', was a son
of the Lord Mayor of London, it is obvious that the qualification of
"poverty" was interpreted with some laxity. It was not until the
middle of the nineteenth century that others than Wykehamists were
admitted as scholars.
The fact that a mere boy was elected to a position which provided for
him for life was not calculated to stimulate subsequent intellectual
activity, and Wykehamists themselves have been among the first to say
that the intellectual distinction of the great bishop's beneficiaries
has by no means corresponded to the magnificence of the foundation or
the noble intentions of the Founder. Antony Wood records in the
seventeenth century that there was already an "ugly proverb" as to
New College men--"Golden scholars, silver Bachelors, leaden Masters,
wooden Doctors," "which is attributed," he goes on, "to their rich
fellowships, especially to their ease and good diet, in which I think
they exceed any college else."
The nineteenth century has changed all this; the small and close
college of pre-Commission days has become one of the largest and most
intellectual in the University; but Winchester men in their Oxford
college fully hold their own in every way against the scholars from
the world outside, who are now admitted to share with them the
advantages of Wykeham's foundation.
The bishop's careful provision, however, of good teaching at his
school and in his college bore good fruit at first, whatever may have
been the result later. If Corpus is especially the college of the
revival of learning, New College had prepared the way, and the first
Englishman to teach Greek in Oxford was the New College fellow,
William Grocyn, whom Erasmus called the "most upright and best of all
Britons." From the same college, about the same time, came the patron
of Erasmus, Archbishop Warham, of whose saintly simplicity and love
of learning he gives so attractive a picture. Warham was not
forgetful of his old college, and presented the beautiful "linen
fold" panelling which still adorns the hall.
At the time of the Reformation, New College was especially attached
to the old form of the faith, and it has been maintained that the
dangerous lowness of the wicket entrance in the Gate Tower was due to
the deliberate purpose of the governing body, who resolved that
everyone who entered the college, however Protestant his views,
should bow his head under the statue of the Blessed Virgin above. At
any rate, one New College man in the seventeenth century attributed
his perversion to "the lively memorials of Popery in statues and
pictures in the gates and in the chapel of New College."
Certain it is that under Elizabeth, after the purging of the college
from its recusant fellows, who contributed a large share of the Roman
controversialists to the colleges of Louvain and Douai, Wykeham's
foundation sank, as has been said, into inglorious ease for two
centuries. Yet, during this period, it had the honour of producing
two of the Seven Bishops who resisted King James II's attack on the
English Constitution--one of them the saintly hymn writer, Thomas
Ken. And to the darkest days of the eighteenth century belongs the
most famous picture of the ideal Oxford life: "I spent many years, in
that illustrious society, in a well-regulated course of useful
discipline and studies, and in the agreeable and improving commerce
of gentlemen and of scholars; in a society where emulation without
envy, ambition without jealousy, contention without animosity,
incited industry and awakened genius; 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."
These were the words of Bishop Lowth, whose great work on /The Poetry
of the Hebrews/ was delivered as lectures for the Chair of Poetry at
Oxford.
The spirit of Oxford has never been better described, and even that
bitter critic, the great historian Gibbon, admits that Lowth
practised what he preached, and that he was an ornament to the
University in its darkest period. Of the days of Reform a forerunner
was found in Sydney Smith, the witty Canon of St. Paul's.
The names of New College men famous for learning or for political
success, during the last half-century, are too recent to mention, but
it is fitting to put on record that to New College belongs the sad
distinction of having the longest Roll of Honour in the late War. It
has lost about 250 of its sons, including four of the most
distinguished young tutors in Oxford; History and Philosophy,
Scholarship and Natural Science are all of them the poorer for the
premature loss of Cheesman and Heath, Hunter and Geoffrey Smith;
their names are familiar to everyone in Oxford, and they would have
been familiar some day to the world of scholars everywhere. /Dis
aliter visum est/.