The romance of the Oxford colleges

“Little is known,” say the works of reference, of William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, the founder of Magdalen; and the little that does happen to be known is of no absorbing interest.

The event in its history of which the College is officially proudest is its battle with James II. The King, for purposes of his own, proposed to nominate a President. The College demonstrated that the royal nominee was an unsuitable person to fill the office, and, “having first received the blessed Eucharist,” proceeded to elect a man of their own choice, and successfully upheld their election in the face of the royal displeasure. “Is that Magdalen Tower?” asked the Prince Regent when he visited Oxford with the allied sovereigns in 1814. “Yes, your Royal Highness,” replied his travelling companion, “that’s the tower against which James II. broke his head.”

A second object of the pride of Magdalen is the long presidency of Dr. Routh, whose long life was a link between historical and modern times.

There must be many men still living in Oxford who remember him, for he only died (at the age of ninety-nine) in 1854. He, on his part, remembered, and talked of, Dr. Johnson’s visits to Oxford, had attained his majority before the American Declaration of Independence, was old enough to be at a dame’s school when Wolfe was storming the Heights of Abraham, and had an aunt who had known a lady who had seen Charles I.

That he was either a great man or a great college ruler it would be an exaggeration to affirm. He was famous rather for wearing a wig, defying University Commissions, and favouring traditional abuses. His wig was sent, after his death, to the Knaresborough well to be petrified, and he himself was reverenced chiefly as an interesting relic of that remote past which his conversation could recall. A crowd used to assemble daily to see him shuffle from his lodgings to the chapel. He recollected Gownsman’s Gallows, on which he had seen undergraduate members of the University hanged for highway robbery. His politics, it is said, were those of Strafford, and his religion was that of Laud. He spoke currently of the Jacobite faction as a still living force; and his favourite joke was to inquire after people who had long been dead, and express astonishment when informed of their decease.

Among a mass of stories told about him the best are perhaps those related by the biographers of Charles Reade, who had been elected to a demyship under his presidency. In one of those anecdotes we see an undergraduate hauled before him by the tutors. The young man having delayed in town to amuse himself, and not having arrived in Oxford until three days after the commencement of the term, the tutors represented to the President that he ought to be rusticated.

“‘Three days late, is he?’ whimpered the old fellow in his childish treble. ‘Well, sirs, there has been an heavy fall of snow, and as the gentleman resides in Norfolk, no doubt the coaches have been detained along the road.’

“‘But,’ urged the tutors, ‘he could have reached Oxford in a few hours by railway.’

“‘Railway?’ quoth Dr. Routh incredulously. ‘Ah, well, I don’t know anything about that’; and so, with the typical flea in its ear, minor authority was dismissed.”

Another story relates to the case of an undergraduate who, after being in residence for three years and three-quarters, had not yet succeeded in passing “Smalls.” The junior tutor called to propose that the young man in question should be invited to remove his name from the College books.

“The venerable President at once assumed an expression of extreme astonishment. ‘I don’t know anything about your examinations,’ he replied to the complaining don. ‘Have you anything to say as regards the gentleman’s moral character or conduct?’ The tutor responded in the negative. ‘Then,’ cried the President in an outburst of righteous indignation, ‘how dare you come here, sir, to attack a respectable member of the College? His father, sir, is a friend of my friend, the Bishop of Bath and Wells; and I will not listen, sir, to any such frivolous allegations.’”

And finally there is the story of the President’s visit to London. He went there seldom, and always by coach, and the day came when competition compelled the reduction of the fares:

“Dr. Routh alighted, as was his wont, in Oxford Street, and was assisted respectfully by the coachman, to whom he handed £1 7s. 6d.—twenty-five shillings the fare, and half a crown, the gratuity to John, who, as the money was being paid to him, said, ‘The fare, Mr. President, is reduced to a guinea.’ Dr. Routh paused and reflected. ‘Sir,’ he replied, ‘I always have paid twenty-five shillings, and I always shall.’”

Such is our picture—a picture of an imperious old gentleman, constitutionally opposed to progress, looking upon his College as a Duke looks upon his estate, regarding a reformer as a Duke regards a Radical Chancellor of the Exchequer, convinced that the general well-being depended upon his being left at liberty to manage, or mismanage, his own affairs.

And the point of view of the President was also, for many generations, the point of view of the Fellows under him. They had a very fine piece of property to cut up, and they carved it to their common satisfaction. The endowment amounted to about £24,000 a year in all. The President took about £4,000 a year, and the Fellows from £500 to £600 a year each; while the Demies, who were nominated by the Fellows in their turn, had a statutory right to succeed to the Fellowships as vacancies occurred—the elections, save in rare instances, being governed by the sacred principles of nepotism. “Your nominee, sir,” the President might occasionally remark with sarcasm, “may be a very excellent young man, but he is no scholar”; but the excellence was almost invariably allowed to compensate for the lack of scholarship.

It could only, in such circumstances, be by accident that the names of good men were entered on the College books; but such happy accidents did, of course, occur from time to time. Addison was the first accident, Gibbon the second, and Charles Reade the third.

Addison, in fact, did get his demyship as the reward of merit. He was originally at Queen’s, but was invited to migrate to Magdalen because his Latin verses were admired. “Addison’s Walk” still keeps his memory alive there. He is even said to have planted some of the trees in the walk, though he was not the sort of man who was likely to spend much of his time in planting trees; but little is recorded of the incidents of his career, except that he “was always very nervous,” and that he “kept late hours.” One pictures him as sleek, correct, precocious, grave, yet with a sound appreciation of good claret.

Of Gibbon there is more to be said; for the historian’s description of the manners and tone of Magdalen society is one of the most pleasant passages in his famous Autobiography. It is well known, but it must nevertheless be quoted:

“The fellows, or monks, of my time” (says Gibbon) “were decent 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.... Their conversation stagnated in a round of college business, Tory politics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal: their dull and deep potations excused the brisk intemperance of youth.”

There were few lectures, he continues, and the tutors did not insist upon attendance at such lectures as there were. He gravely tells us with what impunity he “cut” them:

“As they appeared equally devoid of profit and pleasure, I was once tempted to try the experiment of a formal apology. The apology was accepted with a smile. I repeated the offence with less ceremony; the excuse was admitted with the same indulgence; the slightest motive of laziness or indisposition, the most trifling avocation at home or abroad, was allowed as a worthy impediment; nor did my tutor appear conscious of my absence or neglect.”

Nor does it even appear to have been necessary for Gibbon to apply for an exeat, or to plead the necessity of consulting his dentist or attending the funeral of his grandmother, when he wished temporarily to absent himself from Oxford. The tutor who, when granting his pupil a grudging permission to attend such a funeral, added that he “could wish that it had been a nearer relative” belongs to a later generation. Gibbon’s tutor seems never to have known whether his pupil was in residence or not.

“The want of experience, of advice, and of occupation” (he says) “soon betrayed me into some improprieties of conduct, ill-chosen company and inconsiderate expense. My growing debts might be secret; but my frequent absence was visible and scandalous; and a tour to Bath, a visit into Buckinghamshire, and four excursions to London in the same winter, were costly and dangerous frolics.... In all these excursions I eloped from Oxford; I returned to College; in a few days I eloped again, as if I had been an independent stranger in a hired lodging, without once hearing the voice of admonition, without once feeling the hand of control.”

This in the case of a boy of fourteen (for Gibbon was no more when he matriculated) and in a College in which religion, discipline, and learning were jointly and severally endowed with £24,000 a year! There could be no clearer proof of the darkness of the dark ages at Oxford; and, in spite of the testimony of Adam Smith, already quoted, as to the state of things at Balliol, it seems that they were really darker at Magdalen than elsewhere.

They were still dark, though not so dark as they had been, when Charles Reade came into residence.

Charles Reade, in a sense, got his demyship by merit; but it was only by accident that his merit was allowed to count. The nominee of a nepotist had broken down so utterly in the qualifying examination that President Routh for once lost his temper and declared that he would not consent to the election of an absolute ignoramus. The examiners then proceeded to look at the papers of the other candidates; and Charles Reade’s English Essay impressed them. “Look here!” one of them was heard to shout into the deaf President’s ear. “Here is a boy who gives us his own ideas instead of other people’s!” The President read the essay, and agreed that it was so; and Charles Reade was duly elected to a demyship, which led, in due course, to a fellowship, tenable for life.

Even so, however, he still needed accident to befriend him, and did not trust to accident in vain. His election to the fellowship hung upon his ability to pass an examination in the Rudiments of Faith and Religion—an examination which has since come to be known, first as “Ruders” and latterly as “Divers.” Candidates for that examination were required to know all the Thirty-nine Articles by heart. Charles Reade had only learnt three of them; but he happened to be asked to recite one of the three, and came off with flying colours, though the odds, as can be shown by the subtle processes of arithmetic, were thirteen to one against him.

A little later he won the Vinerian Law Scholarship; and that success also was a triumph, if not of accident, at least of favour. The election to that scholarship, in those days, did not depend solely on the examiners, but was decided, in the last resort, by the votes of all the Masters of Arts whose names were on the books. Charles Reade and his mother instituted a careful canvass of the country clergy and the country squires, and even supplied conveyances to drive the voters to the polling station. He was returned at the head of the poll, and defended his corrupt practices by an ingenious argument.

“The way,” he said, “in which my canvass was organised and carried out was rather unusual, but it argues a talent of the practical kind superior to that of my competitors. The University in its wisdom has chosen right.”

Thereafter he lived a good deal, from time to time, in his Magdalen rooms, and did a good deal of his work there. “The rooms he occupied in No. 2, New Buildings,” say his biographers, “were scantily furnished. MSS. and books littering in heaps on the floor, the walls being decorated with looking-glasses instead of pictures.” He thought so highly of the College cook that, when in London, he often had his dinner cooked at Magdalen and sent up to town in a set of silver dishes. The cook, in return, thought so highly of him that he spoke of “It is Never Too Late to Mend” as “the fifth Gospel.” Mr. Tuckwell relates that he “would beguile acquaintances into his ill-furnished rooms, and read to them ad nauseam from his latest MS.”

Though he was never a College tutor, he held two College offices—those of Dean of Arts and Vice-President. It is on record that he performed the functions of Dean in a bright green coat with brass buttons—a costume considered objectionable by Professor Goldwin Smith, who was then a Magdalen undergraduate. It was also while Charles Reade was Dean that John Conington, the future Professor of Latin, known to his contemporaries as “the sick vulture,” was put under the College pump as a punishment for starting a College debating society, and migrated in consequence to University.

Whether this last incident is really typical of the attitude of Magdalen Philistinism towards culture may be arguable; but it forms, at any rate, a fitting prelude to the story which remains to be told of the great Magdalen outburst which finally overthrew the Æsthetic Movement.

The source of æstheticism is presumably to be found in pre-Raphaelitism—that interesting revolt against the Philistinism and general ugliness of early and mid-Victorian life. It established a new religion of beauty, albeit on what must have seemed to the Philistines a somewhat doleful basis. It lacked laughter. The enemies of Philistinism who laughed, as Matthew Arnold did, were not pre-Raphaelites. The pre-Raphaelites themselves were perhaps a little too conscious that the overthrow of Philistinism was no laughing matter. Ecstasy was perhaps their substitute for hilarity. It was a disposition to a sort of æsthetic ecstasy which they bequeathed to their Oxford successors, specifically known as Æsthetes, who had first Walter Pater, a Fellow of Brasenose, and then Oscar Wilde, a demy of Magdalen, for their prophets.

A number of Oxford men not yet middle-aged can well remember that Æsthetic Movement and the strange jargon, initiated by Oscar Wilde, and talked by the illuminés. They were “utter,” they said; they were “too too”; they were “all but.” And no doubt the boast that they were “all but” was the best founded, and received the most ironical justification. They had not, that is to say, the sincerity of conviction which could enable them to stand firm in the day of persecution; and that day of persecution came upon them with the suddenness of a thunder-clap.

What happened, to be precise, was this: Towards the end of a certain summer term, and in the midst of the season of bump suppers, a certain æsthete of some notoriety brought forward a resolution at the Oxford Union proposing that the Society should discontinue its subscription to Punch, because that journal was ridiculing the “New Renaissance.” The proposal was rejected; but the end of the matter was not in the Debating Hall, but at the æsthete’s own College, which happened to be Magdalen, where a party of boating men were convivially celebrating their success upon the river. The harmony of the evening ended in an attack upon the æsthete. His collection of blue china was thrown out of his window, and he himself, like John Conington, was put under the College pump. It was threatened that the same measures would be taken with other æsthetes in other colleges, and in the panic which ensued, the Æsthetic Movement perished. The leading æsthetes hurried as one man to the barber’s to get their hair cut, and to the haberdasher’s to buy high collars. Men who, on the previous day, had resembled owls staring out of ivy-bushes now cultivated the appearance of timid cows shyly peeping over white walls; and all the available enthusiasm—since Oxford must always have an enthusiasm of some sort—was transferred to Canon Barnett’s scheme for conveying the higher life to the lower orders through the medium of University Settlements in the slums of London.

Such is the history of the Æsthetic Movement, compressed into a nutshell, and related with the irreducible minimum of reference to Oscar Wilde; but there is not really, at this time of day, any reason for leaving him out. Magdalen, of course, is not proud of him, though he took two firsts and won the Newdigate; but visitors to Magdalen are generally inquisitive about him. He was a feature—an institution; and he belongs to literary history.

Probably no undergraduate ever attracted more attention while still an undergraduate, or left a more enduring trail of legend behind him when he went down. He understood, as the pre-Raphaelites whom he succeeded had not understood it, the great art of posing—the art of challenging attention, not for what he had done but for what he was. He was the first to expound the art of life as the art of “existing beautifully.” The conception appealed to the âmes sensibles and the vain—especially, no doubt, to the vain whose vanity had no raison d’être in the way of visible achievement. It supplied them with passwords and shibboleths; and it filled Oxford with a long, limp, languishing procession of mild-eyed enthusiasts, who preferred the easy morals of Greece to the stern code of Palestine, and took their leader far more seriously than he took himself.

His sayings were quoted, and anecdotes of his strange doings were passed round. One heard, and talked, of the blue china which he “lived up to” in the most æsthetically furnished rooms in Oxford, and of his discovery of the “utter” loveliness of sunflowers. One was particularly proud of the stories of his contemptuous treatment of the Professor of Poetry. Principal Shairp, it was said, had read over his prize poem with him and suggested alterations. He had listened with the politeness of a potentate negotiating with a rival potentate, and had then printed his poem without adopting a single one of the proposed amendments.

There was a time when he was “ragged” on account of his eccentricities, but he was ragged in vain. On one occasion eight stalwart Philistines bound him with ropes and trailed him along the ground to the top of a hill. Instead of losing his temper, he expressed himself as lost in admiration of the view. After that, it seems to have been felt that he had earned his right to be eccentric. At all events, the Philistines troubled him no more. He had founded his school. It continued to flourish for some years after his departure, and to feed itself upon stories of his sayings and doings in the wider world.

There were the stories, for instance, of his lecturing tour in America. He had gone “to carry culture to a continent,” but he had been “disappointed with the Atlantic Ocean.” There was the story of his comment on the case of the man—a brother poet named John Barlas—who was reported to have gone mad as the result of reading the Bible. “When I think,” said Oscar, “of all the harm that book has done I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.” And, finally, there were the innumerable stories which identified him with Du Maurier’s Postlethwaite. A feeble follower of his—one of those who ultimately suffered martyrdom for the cause—was ridiculed in the Union, in the course of the debate above referred to, as “the least of all the a-Postlethwaites and scarce worthy to be called an a-Postlethwaite.”

Afterwards, of course—but why dwell upon what happened afterwards?

Wilde’s biographer, Mr. Sherard, suggests that he was “to a very large extent a victim of the Oxford educational system, of the Oxford environment.” He supports his view by the statement that Oxford “produces side by side the saint, the sage, and the depraved libertine,” and “sends men to Parnassus or to the public-house, to Latium or the lenocinium.” But that will not do at all; for precisely the same thing might be said, with equal truth, of any curriculum through which large masses of young men pass, or any environment which they frequent. The descent to Avernus is easy, and hell has many gates quite as accessible from the seats of ignorance as from the seats of learning.

“With my brain,” Oscar Wilde once said in later life, “I might have become anything that I chose.”

Undoubtedly he might; and it is a great tragedy that he chose so ill; but it would be a gross injustice to hold Oxford responsible for his choice. Oxford, as we have seen, did its best to curb his wantonness by trailing him on the ground to the top of a hill; and even when he was no longer in statu pupillari, Oxford planned a second effort for his salvation.

He was at Oxford, on a visit to a friend at University College on the night of the riot, already spoken of, which put the Æsthetic Movement down. He had even accepted, for that night, an invitation to the rooms of a Magdalen disciple; and the plot had been laid to seize him, and submit him, together with his disciple, to the discipline of the College pump. One of the conspirators privately warned him of his danger, and he made an excuse, and stayed away.

Perhaps, if he had gone, the pump would have saved him from himself; but that, after all, is an idle speculation.