"Here did Wren make himself a student home,
Or e'er he made a name that England loves;
I wonder if this straying shadow moves,
Adown the wall, as then he saw it roam."
A. UPSON.
[Plate XXII. Wadham College : The Chapel from the Garden]
The buildings of Wadham College have been pronounced by some good
judges to be the most beautiful in Oxford. This is not, however, the
usual opinion, nor is it my own, though, perhaps, it might be
accepted if modified into the statement that Wadham is the most
complete and perfect example of the ordinary type of college. However
that may be, there are three points as to these buildings which are
indisputable, and which are also most interesting to any lover of
English architecture. They are:
(1) Wadham is less altered than any other college in Oxford.
(2) It is the finest illustration of the fact that the Gothic
style survived in Oxford when it was being rapidly superseded
elsewhere.
(3) No building in Oxford (very few buildings anywhere) owe their
effect so completely to their simplicity and their absence of
adornment.
These three points must be illustrated in detail.
Wadham is the youngest college in Oxford, for all those that have
been founded since are refoundations of older institutions (but, as
its first stone was laid in 1610, it has a respectable antiquity);
yet the Front Quad is completely unaltered in design, and of the
actual stonework, hardly any has had to be renewed. Could the
Foundress return to life, she would find the college, which was to
her as a son, completely familiar.
The second point is a more important one. In the reign of Elizabeth,
classical architecture was being rapidly introduced; Gothic was
giving way before the style of Palladio, even as the New Learning was
banishing the schoolmen from the schools. This change is markedly
seen in the Elizabethan buildings at Cambridge, especially in Dr.
Caius' work, so far as it has been allowed to survive in the college
that bears his name. But in Oxford the old style went on for half the
following century; in the great building period of the first two
Stuarts the old models were still faithfully copied. It was the
genius of Wren, which, by its magnificent success in the Sheldonian,
ultimately caused the new style to prevail over the late Gothic, of
which his own college, Wadham, is so striking an example.
In Wadham the conservative Oxford workmen were inspired by the
presence of Somerset masons, whom the Foundress brought up from her
own county, so rich in the splendid Gothic of the fifteenth century.
Hence the chapel of Wadham (shown in Plate XXII) is to all intents
and purposes the choir of a great Somerset church. So marked is the
old style in its windows that some of the best authorities on
architecture have maintained that the stonework of these could not
have been made in the seventeenth century, but must have survived
from some older building; Ferguson, the historian of architecture,
when confronted with the fact that the college has still the detailed
accounts showing how, week by week, the Jacobean masons worked, swept
this evidence aside with the dictum--"No amount of documents could
prove what was impossible." But here the "impossible" really
happened.
The permanence of Gothic in Oxford is a point for professional
students; the studied simplicity, which is the great secret of
Wadham's beauty, concerns everyone. The effect of the garden front is
produced simply by the long lines of the string-courses and by the
procession of the beautifully proportioned gables. Neither here nor
in any part of the college is there a piece of carved work, except in
the classical screen, which marks the entry to the hall. It may be
noted that at Wadham and at Clare, Cambridge, the same effect is
produced by the same means; different as the two colleges are, the
one Gothic, the other classical, they have a restful and complete
beauty which makes them specially attractive. And this is due more
than anything else to the unbroken lines of the stonework, to which
everything is kept in due subordination. Clare was building during
half a century; Wadham was finished in three years; but both have
been fortunate in being left alone; they have not been "improved" by
later additions.
The chapel at Wadham has another feature of great interest for those
who visit it; the glass in it (not that in the ante-chapel) is all
contemporary with the college, and is a first-rate example of the
taste of early Stuart times. The apostles and the prophets of the
side windows have few merits, except their age, and the fact that
they illustrate what local craftsmen could do in the reign of James
I; but the big east window is of a very different rank. The college
authorities quarrelled with the local workmen, and introduced a
foreign craftsman, Bernard van Ling from London. In our day he would
have been called a "blackleg," and mobbed: perhaps, even in the
seventeenth century, he needed protection, for the college built him
a furnace in their garden, and he there produced the finest specimen
of seventeenth century glass that Oxford can show. Even for those who
are not students of glass, the Wadham windows are attractive with
their two Jonahs and two whales, "The big one that swallowed Jonah,
and the little one that Jonah swallowed" (to quote an old college
jest).
The gardens at Wadham are famous; they have not the magnificence of
St. John's or the antiquarian charm of the old walls at New College
or Merton; but, for the variety and fine growth of their trees, they
are unsurpassed, though the glory of these is passing. Warden Wills
planted them in the days of the French Revolution, and trees have
their time to fall at last, even though they long survive their
planters.