The romance of the Oxford colleges

The belief currently entertained about Jesus College in the other colleges is that the Principal, the Fellows, the Scholars, and the Commoners—to say nothing of the porter, the cook, and the scouts—are all alike called Jones. It is also generally understood that such Christian names as David and Llewellyn occur too frequently to be of any use for the denotation of individuals, with the result that it is only possible to distinguish a given Jones from other Joneses by means of a reference to his personal idiosyncrasies. “I mean,” people say, “the Mr. Jones who ...” &c.

Legends of that sort, though seldom literally true, are seldom quite devoid of foundation in fact; and the best thing to do is to take a census. It appears from Foster’s “Alumni Oxonienses” that, between 1715 and 1886, there were 716 Joneses at Oxford, and that 299 of them were Joneses of Jesus. Jesus, that is to say, whose just share of Joneses would be one twenty-first, has, as a matter of fact, educated rather less than one-half and rather more than one-third of the total number of Joneses available. Yet, by one of those curious ironies which make life interesting, it so happens that the greatest of the Oxford Joneses—Sir William Jones, to wit—was not at Jesus, but at University, and that the most memorable of the Jesus ghosts are not the ghosts of Joneses, but of a Vaughan, a Nash, a Green, and a Morris, while only one Jones has ever risen to the dignity of Principal.

So much for statistics. They are very interesting, but they do not carry us very far. Our next step must be to picture Jesus—not the present Jesus, of course, but the unreformed Jesus of old times—as a horrible example of the evil (or perhaps it would be better to say the undesirable limitations) of what may be called “hole-and-corner” educational endowments.

Jesus has always been, in a special sense, the Welshman’s college—a Welsh enclave, as it were, in the midst of England. Benefactors made it so by confining their benefactions to Welshmen; and one may feel that this was a mistaken policy without speaking disrespectfully of Welshmen—which has always, since Shakespeare’s time, been a dangerous thing to do. The results have been somewhat like those which Matthew Arnold deplored in the case of special schools for the education of the sons of licensed victuallers and commercial travellers. The Welshmen brought their own atmosphere to Oxford and formed their own circle there. Their peculiarities, instead of being toned down, were crystallised; and their many excellent qualities were consequently lost upon Oxford. Men of other colleges gazed at them, as it were, across a social gulf, and regarded them pretty much as they might have regarded Wild Men from Borneo.

Nor did the Welshmen often bridge the social gulf by means of intellectual achievement. They might have done so if they had been fairly representative of Wales; but they were not. Jesus suffered more than almost any other college from the dog-in-the-manger policy of theologians in high places. While the College was the preserve of Welshmen, the University was the preserve of members of the Church of England; and Wales, as all the world knows, is a citadel of Nonconformity. The intellect of Wales, therefore, was not justly represented at Jesus; while the intellect of England, Scotland, and Ireland was hardly represented there at all.

It followed that even the people who regarded the religion at Jesus as “true” could not allow that the learning there was “sound.” Fellowships were frequently awarded to men who had taken only third or fourth-class honours. The scholars could learn no more than the Tutors could teach them; and the list of alumni is singularly lacking in distinction. A list of sixteen bishops can, indeed, be made out—with not a Jones among them; and there have been a good many Cymric lexicographers, Cymric grammarians, and Cymric antiquaries. But such names as a non-Cymric public values are very scarce indeed. Archbishop Ussher—he who computed that the world must have been created in the year 4004 B.C.—had some connection with the College, though the precise nature of that connection cannot be discovered; and then comes Henry Vaughan—the poet who called himself “the Silurist,” because the country in which he lived and worked was the ancient territory of the Silures.

Henry Vaughan is a charming religious poet, with a vein of mysticism. The Reverend Alexander Grosart has written his life in a prose style of his own, which suggests a careful man picking his way across a muddy road in patent-leather shoes. But the life, when written, amounts to very little. Hardly anything is known of the poet except that he began to study law, but afterwards became a country doctor, and practised in Brecknockshire; and the most interesting statement made concerning him is that, when the war between King and Parliament broke out, he suffered a short term of imprisonment as a royalist, but afterwards went home and “followed the pleasant paths of poetry and philology.”

Some will, no doubt, denounce him, on that account, as a poor, mean-spirited person; but there are no known facts on which to base the charge. Fighting, after all, is not an end in itself; and a man may refrain from fighting, not because he is afraid of being killed, but because he does not feel strongly enough to desire to kill the people who do not share his opinions. A mystic, full of the belief that God is manifested in all His creatures—King’s men and Parliament men alike—might well sigh for quiet in the midst of civic storms, and prefer to realise his Pantheism in a lonely place rather than draw the sword and let himself be carried away by evil passions which his heart told him were unprofitable and vain.

The Silurist was, we may take it, a “God-intoxicated” man, and one on whom the intoxication exercised a narcotic rather than an exciting influence: a man, therefore, not to be roused from meditative torpor by the thought that the King’s rights or the people’s liberties were in peril. He could see visions and dream dreams which were worth infinitely more to him than any of the objects of contention between Cavaliers and Roundheads. He not only fancied that he could see—he actually saw:

One does not picture the man who wrote those lines galloping about with a sword in his hand and charging with the drunken troopers who followed Rupert of the Rhine. One could not so picture him if one would, and one would not if one could. He was of a finer as well as a more sober temper than any of those roystering men-at-arms; and in his “Retreate” he anticipated Wordsworth’s more famous “Intimations of Immortality.” Perhaps it is not without significance that he and Wordsworth both divined that “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,” and that “Heaven lies about us in our infancy,” in an age in which progress seemed to have called a halt while wild men cut each other’s throats.

All that, however, has nothing to do with the career of Vaughan the Silurist at Jesus; and, indeed, there is nothing to be said on that branch of the subject, except that Vaughan left the University without taking his degree. The only other Jesus poet worthy of remark—one has named, of course, Lewis Morris—not only took his degree, but also took firsts in Moderations and in Greats, and won the Chancellor’s Prize for an essay on “The greatness and decline of Venice,” and would have been elected to a fellowship if he had not been disqualified by the possession of private means. “Perhaps,” writes the official historian of Jesus, “what the College lost the rest of the world may have gained by this disqualification.”

It may be so. Yet Sir Lewis Morris has left it on record that he wrote most of his poetry on the underground railway before it was electrified; and if the atmosphere of Jesus was less inspiring than that of the unreformed District Line, it must have been more uninspiring than that of any of the other colleges. The essential thing is, however, that Morris did write his poetry, and gained his knighthood, and was at one time a possible poet laureate.

He had been much admired. His admirers had, at one time, numbered tens, if not hundreds of thousands; and if the laureateship had fallen vacant then, it would probably have been given to him amid acclamations. It fell vacant too late, however, and was allowed to remain vacant too long to please him. The demand for his poetical services was not vociferous. It even seemed to him that he was the victim of a conspiracy of silence; and he said as much to Oscar Wilde.

“Oscar,” he asked, “what would you advise me to do in the face of this conspiracy of silence?”

“I would advise you to join the conspiracy,” was his brother poet’s cruel reply.

Another—and one may even venture to say an unexpected—Jesus man was Beau Nash, the uncrowned King of Bath: the autocratic dandy who directed the etiquette of the Bath Assembly Rooms, where he ordered Duchesses to take off their aprons and noblemen to take off their boots. All things considered, it seems improbable that Beau Nash was very much like the other Jesus men, or that the other Jesus men were very much like Beau Nash; and it may be added that the example which he set them was not an example which it would have been good for them to follow.

The Beau, like the Silurist, left Oxford without a degree, after having demonstrated, as his biographer, Dr. Oliver Goldsmith of Trinity College, Dublin, puts it, that “though much might be expected from his genius, nothing could be hoped from his industry.” And Dr. Goldsmith continues:

“The first method Mr. Nash took to distinguish himself at college was not by application to study, but by his assiduity in intrigue. In the neighbourhood of every University there are girls who, with some beauty, some coquetry, and little fortune, lie upon the watch for every raw amorous youth more inclined to make love than to study. Our Hero was quickly caught, and went through all the mazes of a college intrigue before he was seventeen; he offered marriage, the offer was accepted, but the whole affair coming to the knowledge of his tutors, his happiness, or perhaps his future misery, was prevented, and he was sent home from college, with necessary advice to him and proper instructions to his father.”

His case, if correctly reported, is a warning to those young men of the present day—supposing that there still are such—who listen to the lure of the siren in the photographer’s shop; but the exactitude of the narrative has been disputed. A contemporary reviewer of Dr. Goldsmith’s work had heard from a Fellow of Jesus that “Mr. Nash, being too volatile to relish the sober rules of a college life, took the opportunity of receiving his quarter’s returns, and went off, leaving a debt behind him of about three pounds eighteen shillings, which remains undischarged on the College books to this day.” Which of the two stories is the true one it is, at this distance of time, impossible to say; but the records which remain of the Beau’s volatility do certainly indicate a manner of life for which a University city was no proper setting.

In the days before he went to Bath and found his métier, he earned his living in very curious ways, but chiefly by undertaking, for a wager, to do some ridiculous thing. One of his feats, accomplished from this pecuniary motive, was to strip himself naked and ride through the streets of a village on the back of a cow. That, it will be generally admitted, is a thing which it is better to do in the remote country than in the High, or the Broad, or even the Turl.

Next—and perhaps last—on the roll of Jesus celebrities comes the name of John Richard Green, the historian of the English People; and his debt to Jesus—and even to Oxford—does not seem to have been a heavy one.

His place among the historians is undoubtedly better assured than the place of Lewis Morris among the poets; but as an undergraduate he did not shape so well. Instead of taking first class honours, he only took a pass degree; instead of writing a prize essay, he wrote for a local paper. His tutors thought him idle, and his contemporaries had some reason to complain of him. He was part author of a satire—the “Gentiad,” an imitation of the “Dunciad”—which ridiculed some of the characteristics of Jesus men. This brought him unpopularity, and he passed through Oxford without making many friends.

One good and great friend, however, he did make, almost by accident; and that story may be best told in the words of the Life by Leslie Stephen:

“During his University career Arthur Penrhyn Stanley was Professor of Ecclesiastical History. Green, during his last term, went accidentally into the lecture-room where Stanley was discoursing upon the Wesleys. The lecture fascinated him, and he never missed another. In one lecture Stanley concluded with the phrase, ‘Magna est veritas et prævalebit, words so great that I could almost prefer them to the motto of our own University, Dominus illuminatio mea.’ As Stanley left the room, Green, who had been deeply interested, exclaimed, ‘Magna est veritas et prævalebit is the motto of the town!’ Stanley was much pleased, invited his young admirer to walk home with him, and asked him to dinner. The day appointed was early in November (1859), and the ‘town and gown’ riots of the period made the passage through the streets rather hazardous. ‘How could you come at all?’ asked Stanley. ‘Sir,’ replied Green in the words of Johnson, ‘it is a great honour to dine with the Canons of Christ Church.’”

The friendship thus formed was of great importance to Green. It put heart into him, as he afterwards told Stanley, at a time when he “found no help in Oxford theology,” and was apparently the influence which stimulated him to the point of taking orders. Afterwards, of course, he found that Oxford theology was not the only theology which puzzled instead of satisfying his intelligence. He had very little of the theological mentality, and he had a severe historical conscience. He could neither believe what he knew to be untrue, nor could he pretend to believe it; and consequently—but that has nothing to do with Jesus College.

And so the Jesus pageant passes—a pageant in which, as we see, the apparently inevitable name of Jones does not appear.