The romance of the Oxford colleges

There are two questions which every visitor to Brasenose can be relied upon to ask: What, he will demand, is the origin of the eponymous nose? And what are the rights of the story about the Hell Fire Club and its ghost?

As regards the nose, two doctrines have gained currency. The first is contained in the works of the French traveller, Dr. Sorbière:

“I shall not take upon me,” writes the Doctor, “to describe all the colleges to you. There is one at whose gate I saw a great brazen nose, like Punchinello’s vizard. I was also told they call it ‘Brasen-Nose College,’ and that John Duns Scotus taught here, in remembrance of which they set up the sign of his nose at the gate.”

The other explanation is to be found in that entertaining classic, “Verdant Green”:

“Mr. Larkyns,” we there read, “drew Verdant’s attention to the brazen nose that is such a conspicuous object over the entrance gate. ‘That,’ said he, ‘was modelled from a cast of the principal feature of the first Head of the College, and so the College was named Brazen-nose. The nose was formerly used as a place of punishment for any misbehaving Brasenosian, who had to sit upon it for two hours.... These punishments were so frequent that they gradually wore down the nose to its present small dimensions.’”

It is hardly necessary to add that Dr. Sorbière, as well as Mr. Verdant Green, was hoaxed. The nose seems originally to have been a knocker of no importance, though, at a later date, it came to be regarded almost as a fetish or a mascot, and acquired an accretion of legend. When, in the year 1334, some members of Brasenose Hall (which preceded Brasenose College) migrated from Oxford to Stamford, in Lincolnshire, because Oxford was too riotous a place to suit their tastes, they took the knocker with them. The students who stayed in Oxford procured another nose in place of it; but the nose which had gone astray was bought back by the College, 656 years after its removal, and now embellishes the dining-hall.

That point cleared up, we may go on to the story of the Hell Fire Club and the ghost.

The Brasenose Hell Fire Club was an imitation of the more famous Hell Fire Club of Medmenham Abbey. It flourished from 1828 to 1834, and its raison d’être was the defiance of religion and mortality. The meetings were held in the various members’ rooms. The members sat at a table with a vacant chair at the head of it—the theory being that their chairman was the invisible but omnipresent Enemy of Mankind—and they drank hard and competed with one another in blasphemous declamation and the telling of indecorous stories. The dons, it appears, had some vague inkling of their proceedings, but no precise information on which it was possible for them to act. They did not know how the Club differed from other wine clubs, nor had they a list of its members; but the truth was to be revealed to them in a sudden and dramatic manner.

One of the Brasenose dons had been dining with the dons of Exeter—in the Senior Common-room of which College an excellent port is dispensed—and his way home took him along Brasenose Lane, which, as strangers will remark, is one of the darkest and loneliest thoroughfares in Oxford. On one side of it is the forbidding façade of Brasenose itself, with savage iron bars fastened across all the windows to prevent undergraduates from climbing out of them and seeking adventures at unseemly hours; on the other side is the high, blank wall of the Exeter Fellows’ garden.

The hour was midnight, and as the don pursued his solitary way he heard sounds of revelry—and then sounds which were not of revelry—proceeding from a room on the ground floor in which the members of the Hell Fire Club were assembled. He was startled; he stopped; he looked up, and saw an astounding and appalling spectacle. The first figure which met his eyes was that of Beelzebub, the Prince of Darkness—blue fire, and horns, and hoofs, and all; and then he perceived that Beelzebub was not alone. An undergraduate, well known to the don as a mauvais sujet, was in his grip, struggling, resisting, with agony and terror in his face, while the Evil One dragged his body in mocking triumph through the bars.

Doubting the evidence of his senses, the don took to his heels and ran all the way to the College gate. He knocked and was admitted, and staggered, in an almost fainting condition, into the porch. At the same time there was a cry and a rush of men from one of the rooms on the right of the quadrangle. They came from a meeting of the Hell Fire Club, with the news that the owner of the rooms in which the session had been held had suddenly fallen dead—of apoplexy, as one gathers—in the midst of a blasphemous tirade.

The story is told by the Rev. F. G. Lee in his “Glimpses of the Supernatural.” It was current in his own Oxford days, Mr. Lee says, “on what could not but be regarded as good authority.” It is still current, whatever be the value of the authority, and is invariably recalled whenever a College debating society discusses the motion, “That this House believes in ghosts.” Probably, since the ghost does not appear in the record of the circumstances preserved in the Vice-Principal’s Register, the supernatural element in the story is a later accretion, due to the mythopœic faculty of youth; but the sudden death of the member of the Hell Fire Club is history.

Even that fact, indeed, has sometimes been denied by rationalising sceptics, who have gone so far as to declare that there was no death in the College in the year in which the Hell Fire Club was wound up; but the death of Edward Leigh Trafford, the member in question, is duly chronicled in the Register above referred to, and the present writer has even heard a contemporary witness, an aged clergyman whose acquaintance he made in a hotel smoking-room, relate that the dead man’s coffin was solemnly laid out in the College hall, and that all the undergraduates in residence were paraded before it, and warned of the judgment by which sinners might at any hour be overtaken.

Another Brasenose Club, hardly less famous than the Hell Fire Club, and much more worthy of fame, is the Phœnix. It is sometimes said that the Phœnix was so called because it rose from the ashes of the Hell Fire Club; but that is a mistake. The Phœnix is the older society of the two, dating from 1781 or 1782, and is, in fact, the oldest social club in the University. Its traditions, though convivial, are seemly. Many of its members have risen to high places, alike in the University and in Church and State. Five of its original twelve members, indeed, became Fellows of Colleges; and one of its later members, Frodsham Hodson, became Principal of Brasenose, and so great a man that, according to Mark Pattison, when he returned to College after the Long Vacation, he drove the last stage into Oxford with post horses, lest it should be said that “the first Tutor of the first College of the first University of the world entered it with a pair.”

Other members of the Phœnix were Bishop Heber, R. H. Barham, the author of “Ingoldsby Legends,” and the late Dean Hole. The names are of high repute, a testimonial in themselves; and we probably shall not be wrong in saying that it is characteristic of the tone of Brasenose that the most intellectual as well as the least intellectual of its alumni, its clerical as well as its sporting prodigies, have seen no harm in filling, or in emptying, the flowing bowl. That, at any rate, has been one of the characteristics of the College, though not, of course, the only one.

“A very gentlemanly set” is the appreciation of Brasenose men in “Verdant Green”; and as the author of “Verdant Green” speaks of an undergraduate of another College as “openly confessing his shame” by displaying himself in the porch of that College, we may take it that he was not using words at random but affirming a proposition which he was prepared to defend in argument. Most of the men, in fact, have belonged to good and well-to-do families in the northern counties, and have exhibited both the qualities and the limitations to be expected from such an origin.

They have been terribly in earnest about athletic and other sports, but they have seldom been very much in earnest about anything else. Their scholarship, when they have been scholarly, has been more often graceful than profound; and, in the matter of religion, they have shown a disposition to save themselves the trouble of thinking by taking the conventional for granted, accepting the religion provided for them in the spirit in which one accepts the plat du jour at a restaurant, but accepting it in a hearty spirit, without feeling that it implied any obligation to pull long faces or to mortify the flesh. We may find an exception to the rule in the case of Robertson of Brighton, of whom more presently; but if we desire an example of it, we may find one in the case of Dean Hole.

The Dean was an excellent and breezy person who, even as an octogenarian, gave one the impression of a young man rejoicing in his youth; but no one ever accused him of endangering his intelligence by over-taxing it, and he seems hardly to have been less at ease in Zion than at the jovial gatherings of the Phœnix. That is not only a critic’s view of him; it is also his own view of himself and his life, frankly expressed by him in both prose and verse. “The reading men,” he tells us in his delightful reminiscences, “were not, as a rule, such cheery companions as the men who rode, and drove, and played cricket, and wore gay clothing, and smoked fragrant regalias”; and when he drops into poetry, it is:—

The Dean also tells us that he went to Brasenose with a serious intention of studying, but soon found his energies diverted into other channels. He read hard for two terms; but one day he “met a friend in black velvet cap and scarlet coat, a bird’s-eye blue tie, buff kerseymere waistcoat, buck-skin breeches, and pale brown tops,” and the splendid spectacle aroused his envious ambition. He bought a horse, and wrote home for his pink. It came, and he enjoyed, and distinguished, himself in the hunting field; and his attitude towards the problems of the spiritual life became that which seems generally to have found favour at Brasenose.

Concerning the official attitude of Brasenose towards such matters he tells two good stories. Two Brasenose men, it appears, on two different occasions, being perplexed by religious doubts, ventured to lay their difficulties before their tutor. The poor man was amazed. Such a thing had never happened to him before in the whole course of his tutorial experience. He told one of the young men that his digestion was probably out of order, and that he had better see a doctor; he told the other that, if he cherished this desire for auricular confession, he had better join the Church of Rome. The Dean himself, one gathers, never laid himself open to any such rebuke; but his comments on the Romeward movement, of which he was a contemporary, are eloquent as to his religious mentality. The fish caught in the Roman net, he says, were so poor and flabby that a true sportsman would have thrown them back into the water.

So much for the jolly and Philistine Dean. It was worth while to dwell on him because he seems to represent, better than any other Brasenose man, the distinctive Brasenose point of view; but when we proceed to the task of praising famous men, there are other famous men whom it is more imperative to praise.

Bishop Heber is beyond question the most famous of them; and his Newdigate on “Palestine” is the most famous Newdigate ever written. That it is also the best will be disputed by admirers of Dean Burgon’s “Petra” and Mr. D. S. MacColl’s “Carthage,” not to mention Sir Rennell Rodd’s “Sir Walter Raleigh”; but that point of taste cannot be debated here. “Palestine” has, at any rate, been reprinted several times, and derives a special interest from the fact that it was amended at the suggestion of Sir Walter Scott. The story is an old one; but it must be repeated.

Scott was a friend of Heber’s half-brother, Richard, the book-collector—“Heber the magnificent,” he called him, “whose library and cellar are so superior to all others in the world.” Richard Heber took him to Oxford, and they went together to see Reginald Heber, whose poem had just won the prize.

“Scott observed,” says Lockhart, “that in the verses on Solomon’s Temple, one striking circumstance had escaped him, namely that no tools were used in the erection. Reginald retired for a few minutes to a corner of the room, and returned with the beautiful lines:

“No hammer fell, no ponderous axes rung,

Like some tall palm the mystic fabric sprung.

Majestic silence!”

It may be added that Heber was not only a serious but also a humorous poet. He wrote a satire called the Whippiad, and was also the author of a jeu d’esprit on the misfortunes of the Dean of the College, a gentleman nicknamed “Dr. Toe,” whose fiancée, a Miss Belle H——, jilted him and married a footman:

It will be agreed that there is something piquant and refreshing in the discovery that these lines are the product of the same pen that wrote “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains”; but even in that great missionary hymn by a missionary bishop the hand of the satirist has been detected. The hasty generalisation that, in the Orient, “only man is vile” is said to have found its way into a devotional composition because Heber discovered that a Cingalese tradesman had cheated him. If so, the interpolation may be accepted as a delightful example of what may be styled “the Brasenose touch.”

Reginald Heber’s brother Richard has already been mentioned; and there are those who would consider him a greater man than the Bishop. The Bishop, they would say, was only one bishop among many, whereas the bibliophile was the greatest bibliophile that the world has ever seen. He was less than sixty when he died, and he had already accumulated a library of 146,827 volumes, stored in six houses in various parts of England and the Continent. He was so occupied in collecting them that he quite forgot to dispose of them by will, and his executors had to sell them for the benefit of his estate. The sales extended over a period of three years, and the English sales alone realised £56,774. One gets a glimpse at the collection in the “Literary Reminiscences” of a brother bibliophile, Dr. T. F. Dibdin.

Dr. Dibdin had long been Richard Heber’s friend, and, hearing of his unexpected death, he hastened to his house in Pimlico, and was admitted to the room in which he lay in his coffin.

“And then,” he writes, “the room in which he had breathed his last! It had been that of his birth. The mystic veil, which for twenty-five years had separated me from this chamber, and which the deceased would never allow me, nor any one else, to enter, was now effectually drawn aside by the iron hand of Death. I looked around me with amazement. I had never seen rooms, cupboards, passages, and corridors so choked, so suffocated with books. Treble rows were there, double rows were there. Hundreds of slim quartos—several upon each other—were longitudinally placed over thin and stunted duodecimos, reaching from one extremity of a shelf to another. Up to the very ceiling the piles of volumes extended, while the floor was strewed with them in loose and numerous heaps.”

A marvellous spectacle truly, and a case to be quoted whenever it is said that all Brasenose men are obtuse to the charms of literature, though, of course, it may be said that Richard Heber was not a typical Brasenose man. Yet we may find the Brasenose touch in the statement already quoted from Scott, that his fine taste in books was combined with an equally fine taste for port and claret; and if we continue to seek that touch through the later history of the College, we may find it in the fact that Dean Milman, another of the great men of Brasenose and a winner of the Newdigate, began his literary career by producing a play at a London theatre, and we may further find it in the one story which survives of the Oxford career of the Rev. Richard Harris Barham.

The piety of the author of the “Ingoldsby Legends” is described by his biographer as “unostentatious.” It was, in fact, so little ostentatious while he was at Brasenose that he was “sent for” to explain his too frequent absence from the College chapel.

“The fact is, sir,” urged his pupil, “you are too late for me.”

“Too late?” repeated the tutor in astonishment.

“Yes, sir—too late. I cannot sit up till seven o’clock in the morning; I am a man of regular habits, and unless I get to bed by four or five at latest I am really fit for nothing next day.”

If any one desired still further examples of the Brasenose touch, he might have them by studying the career of Sir Tatton Sykes, that excellent Yorkshire sportsman who used to breakfast off “a jug of new milk and an immense apple-pie,” who broke stones to give him an appetite, thrashed impertinent bargees for his amusement, and seldom missed a day’s hunting till he had passed his seventy-sixth birthday, and lived to be ninety-one. It so happens, however, that though Sir Tatton was classed with York Minster and Fountains Abbey as one of the three great marvels of his native county, his residence at Oxford has left no trail of legend; so that we must leave him and pass on to the two eminent men of whom it may fairly be said that, though they were in Brasenose, they were not of it. They are F. W. Robertson—“Robertson of Brighton”—and Walter Pater.

F. W. Robertson seems to have resembled the mass of Brasenose men in one circumstance only: he took a pass degree. No doubt he would have obtained high honours if he had sought them; but, like John Richard Green, of Jesus, he did not seek them, and this may therefore be the proper place in which to recall the untrue story that when, in the least intellectual period of the history of Brasenose, the name of some commoner was, by some accident, placed in a class list, the other commoners proceeded to punish him under the pump as a violator of the unwritten law.

For the rest, F. W. Robertson, while at Brasenose, resembled neither the average Brasenosian nor the F. W. Robertson of later days. He was the Broad Church philosopher in the making, but he was not yet the Broad Church philosopher fully made. His views, according to Mr. Stopford Brooke, were “those of the Evangelical school, with a decided leaning to moderate Calvinism.” He organised “a society for the purposes of prayer and conversation on the Scriptures,” but it languished and died, and he was “chilled by the apathy and coldness of Oxford.”

That one can understand and believe. Oxford has been a place of many enthusiasms, many of them of a religious character, but private initiative in religious matters, however devout, has never been encouraged there. That sort of thing has always struck Oxford as odd, and even a little disrespectful towards the ample official provision of the means of grace. We saw the attitude exemplified when we spoke about the experiences of the Wesleys at Lincoln, and there is a characteristic story of a snub administered by the Head of a college to an undergraduate who had taken to preaching at the corners of the streets.

The young man challenged the Head with what he thought would prove an awkward question. What answer would he be able to make, he asked, if his Divine Master reproached him on the Day of Judgment for having neglected this means of diffusing a knowledge of the gospel truth? But the Head was equal to the occasion. “You need have no anxiety about that,” he replied; “I myself will take the entire responsibility.”

Robertson, one recognises, was the last man likely to feel at home in an atmosphere in which some things were not only said, but said as a matter of course, and approved. Probably they were heard with more approval at Brasenose than at most other colleges; and Robertson appears to have been hardly less out of his element there than was Nathaniel Hawthorne at Brook Farm. In one field of Oxford activity, indeed, he did distinguish himself. He was one of the orators of the Union Debating Society, where he maintained against John Ruskin, then of Christ Church, that the theatre was not an influence for good. “Pray for me,” he appealed to the man sitting next to him when he rose, rather nervously, to make his speech. But it cannot be said that he was, either in that or in any other respect, a typical Brasenose man.

Still less was Walter Pater a typical Brasenose man.

Pater came to Brasenose as a Fellow from Queen’s, where he had been a Scholar. For a time he was a lecturer and tutor, and all the stories indicate that, in engaging in those activities, he made a false start in life. A pupil coming to him for advice as to his reading was recommended to read the whole of Plato and the whole of Kant—which, from the point of view of the examinations, was almost the worst counsel that could have been given to him. His chief contribution to metaphysical thought is said to have been an expression of opinion that Plato was “not such a fool as he looked.” His attitude towards the discipline of the College was illustrated by a commendation of the bonfires which destroyed the statue of Cain and Abel, on the ground that they “lit up the spire of St. Mary’s so beautifully.” He once was one of the adjudicators in a prize essay competition, but when asked by the other adjudicators for his opinion, he replied that he could only remember that one of the essayists was called Sanctuary, and that Sanctuary had impressed him as a remarkably euphonious name.

In spite of this, however—and even to some extent because of it—Pater cut a considerable figure, and exercised a considerable influence, in the Oxford of his day; and he became the hero of almost as many legends as either Jowett or Mark Pattison. Mr. Edmund Gosse, as has been mentioned, graphically described his personal appearance as that of “a benevolent dragon.” All the world knows that he was the “Mr. Rose” of Mr. Mallock’s “New Republic,” and his place may be defined as that of the link between the pre-Raphaelites and the Æsthetes.

The note in his work which found the most eager listeners was the note of artistic Epicureanism; the place in which it was most definitely sounded was the “Conclusion” of the “Studies in the History of the Renaissance.” There was the exhortation to “burn always with a hard gem-like flame”; there was the eulogy of “great passions” as the source of a “quickened sense of life”; there was the declamation on the best way of making the most of life, leading up to the announcement that “the wisest” spend it “in art and song”; there, finally, was the view of art “professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.”

The essay containing those precepts became the gospel of a considerable number of young men, and it was an insidiously dangerous gospel. The proclamation of it in a company of money-grubbers might, indeed, have some force, but, as a matter of fact, the audience which had least need of it was precisely the audience which heard it most gladly. It appeared to them to set a seal upon a holy alliance between debauchery and art; and whereas few of them were much concerned about art, a great many of them were deeply interested in debauchery. Debauchery, they now gathered, was being held up to admiration as the duty which lay nearest to them. They recognised it as an easy and agreeable duty, and they made haste to discharge it.

Perhaps that was not precisely what Pater meant. He said that it was not, and he ultimately struck the passage out lest it should “mislead some of the young men into whose hands it might fall.” But he might nevertheless have found it difficult to reply effectively to any controversialist who urged that, if he had not meant what he had been taken to mean he could not have meant anything at all.