The romance of the Oxford colleges

The founders were Nicholas Wadham and Dorothy, his widow. Nicholas accumulated the funds, and Dorothy applied them after his death, at her discretion, in accordance with his wishes. The discreet and delightful Wadham Gardens are said to have been due to her initiative; and she also had the happy thought of exempting Fellows of the College from the disconcerting necessity of taking Holy Orders. Though one knows little else of her, one cannot but be prepossessed in her favour by the beautiful euphony of her name. Mistress Dorothy Wadham—it is a name which falls on the ear like the soft melody of silver bells.

The date of the Charter is 1610—an early year in the reign of the comic King who loved learning almost as much as he hated tobacco. Its Jacobean architecture is a serene and perfect poem in grey stone, though the grass in the quadrangle which contrasts so effectively with the grey was added by one of the Wardens at a later time. It seems natural and proper that it should have been the College of the two greatest of the Oxford architects—Sir Christopher Wren and T. G. Jackson. It is also the College of Admiral Blake, Nicholas Love, the regicide, Thomas Sydenham, the physician, Speaker Onslow, the “wicked” Earl of Rochester, Lord Chancellor Westbury, who won his scholarship as a prodigy of fourteen in “jacket and frills,” Dean Church, who, according to Mark Pattison, was elected to an Oriel Fellowship on account of his “moral beauty,” Father Maconochie of Saint Alban’s, Holborn, those great athletes, Messrs. T. A. Cook (now the editor of the Field) and C. B. Fry, Mr. F. E. Smith, and many other men of note.

It is of the others that we will speak here, prefacing comment with the remark that Wadham has been successively a Whig College, an Evangelical College, a Positivist College—and also the College of the man who launched the latest of the Oxford Movements, and the College which was the scene of the last of the really historic Oxford “rags.” It may clear the ground if one begins by saying a word about the “rag.”

The “rag” occurred as recently as 1880; and one must not pretend to disentangle the rights and wrongs of it with the precision of a scientific historian. In a general way, however, one may say that it originated in an attempt on the part of authority to tighten the reins of discipline at a time when pride at success on the river had made the College restive. So first there were skirmishes, and then there was a battle royal.

A bonfire seems, as usual, to have been the first overt act; and the lighting of a bonfire on the grass—that beautifully kept Wadham grass—is an act no more to be condoned by the historian than by the dons. The answer to it—surely a justifiable answer—was the prohibition of the annual College Concert. But then tempers were lost, and fur began really to fly. The wrath of the junior members of the College was vented upon “Unbelieving Dick”—a don so called because he professed himself sceptical of the articles of the Christian Faith. There was a sudden irruption of youth, flown with insolence and wine, into Unbelieving Dick’s apartments at the dead of night. Unbelieving Dick had no power to eject his visitors, and no time to dress in order to receive them. He fled, it is related, across the quadrangle in his night-shirt—for none, in those days, wore pyjamas—pursued with missiles and howls of execration.

Things, it was evident, could not be allowed to rest there. The ring-leaders must be discovered and an example must be made. An appeal to them to surrender themselves, however, met with no response; and the dons presently engaged the services of a detective. The detective was himself detected, and was severely punished under the pump. It only remained for the dons to play their last card and send the whole College down. They did so. Wadham, in the Autumn Term of 1880, was a howling wilderness, with only a few freshmen in residence—a sorrowful spectacle indeed for Dorothy Wadham, if she looked down on it from another world. The rehabilitation of the College, though since fully accomplished, was only a gradual process.

And now we will leave the rag, and speak of the religious (and irreligious) history of Wadham.

Religion, as has been said, appears at Wadham chiefly in the form of Evangelicalism. The College was the stronghold, or the hotbed—whichever be the better word—of Evangelicalism in the fiery days of the Tractarian Movement. Warden Symons, who ruled over it from 1831 to 1871, appears to have conformed, so far as a scholar could, to the type which one associates with missionary meetings, tea, hassocks, and well buttered crumpets. His wife held prayer meetings in the drawing-room, and kept a “missionary cow,” the proceeds of whose milk—supplied to undergraduates at specially high terms—were allocated to the propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts. He himself altered the hour of the services in the Wadham Chapel for the express purpose of preventing his young men from attending Newman’s sermons at Saint Mary’s. On one occasion he knocked at the door of Newman’s retreat at Littlemore and asked if he might be shown over the monastery. “We have no monastery here,” was the reply; and the door was slammed in his face.

The Warden’s scorn of ceremonial observance was illustrated by his manner of receiving the contents of the collection plate at the Communion Service. It was his habit simply to shovel the money into his pocket and walk off with it; and this brusque and indecorous proceeding naturally furnished the basis of a legend. The Warden, it was said, had annexed the offertory as a perquisite of his office, and exhorted undergraduates to generosity in order to gain his private ends. “Gentlemen,” he was reported to have said, “must really give a little more liberally; I have been quite out of pocket by the last two or three collections.” It was not true, of course; but it served him right. Every Warden becomes the hero of the myths that he deserves. And, no doubt, it was largely in consequence of the saponaceous slovenliness of Wadham religion that, whereas the serious undergraduates of other colleges went over to Rome, the serious undergraduates of Wadham, and the serious dons too, went over to Paris and joined Comte in erecting Temples of Humanity on the ruins of the Temples of God.

Those were the days in which it was said that Wadham was governed by a Trinity consisting of Three Persons and No God; but the three persons in question are differently identified by different cynics. The names of Richard Congreve, Edmund Spencer Beesley, and Mr. Frederic Harrison are those most commonly mentioned; but Mr. Harrison has stated, in an autobiographical note, that he did not definitely adopt the Positivist Religion until some years after he had gone down. It does not matter—or, at all events, it does not matter very much. Wadham, in fact, has harboured several generations of Positivists, so that there generally have been at least three heads there which the caps fitted, right down to the time of the Unbelieving Dick whose misadventures have been referred to; and they all acknowledged Richard Congreve as their spiritual father.

He was a Rugby boy who acted, for a time, as a Rugby Master. His case may be taken as a fresh exemplification of that “moral seriousness” of which Rugby boasts. The beliefs in which he had been brought up slipped away from him; but he continued to respect the sacred impulse of the human heart which impels people to dress in their best and go somewhere to be edified on Sundays. Just as Comte had arranged for them to do so in Paris, so he arranged for them to do so in Lamb’s Conduit Street; and so, at a later date, Mr. Frederic Harrison arranged for them to do so in Fetter Lane. Really intellectual people, he felt, having passed beyond theology and beyond metaphysics, might nevertheless kneel to Humanity—that abstraction of what was noblest in their noblest selves—and invoke Saints carefully selected from

At a later date there was to be trouble among the Positivists—an outburst of heresy, schism, and dissent. Comte, it turned out, was not the easiest Master for rational and self-respecting disciples to follow blindly. He had been in a lunatic asylum and was supported by the voluntary offerings of the faithful. Fully persuaded that he who preached the gospel was entitled to live by the gospel, he solicited contributions and quarrelled with subscribers whose contributions seemed to him inadequate. Moreover, being separated from his wife, he fell in love with a lady who had been separated from her husband, and insisted upon incorporating his romance in his religious system. The worship of Humanity in general might, he claimed, be most happily symbolised by the specific worship of Clotilde de Vaux.

His relations with Clotilde de Vaux were, his biographers tell us, “pure.” No doubt they had his word for it, and perhaps they also had hers; but that detail cannot have mattered much to any one except the philosopher and his affinity. To be called upon to worship another man’s affinity, whatever the precise nature of his relations with his affinity, is always a strain upon devout allegiance. It proved so in this instance. There was a split, broadly speaking, between the Positivists who had a sense of humour and the Positivists who had none; but we need not enter into the rights and wrongs of the disruption. Enough to note the fact, and to note also that, so far as England is concerned, Positivism has been an Oxford Movement which Wadham has practically monopolised.

This brings us to the last of the Oxford Movements, with which Wadham is also very definitely associated—the Social Movement which succeeded the Æsthetic Movement, in or about the year 1884.

Something has already been said about it in the Magdalen chapter which related the æsthetic collapse. The principal thing to be added here is that the man who had most to do with the launching of it was Barnett of Wadham, who had taken a Second in History in 1865, and was then the incumbent of Saint Jude’s, Whitechapel.

Other forces were, indeed, indirectly at work. Sir Walter Besant’s advocacy of a People’s Palace in “All Sorts and Conditions of Men” was one. Mr. George R. Sims’s tract entitled “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London” was another. Here, at all events, were the elements of stir, if not of movement in the narrow sense—the vague suggestion that “something ought to be done,” and that the people who had culture owed a debt of some sort to the people who were trying to get along without it. Barnett of Wadham, with many earnest helpers from other colleges, focussed the Movement at Oxford in a memorable speech delivered in the Union Debating Hall.

The only hope for the East End of London, it was then laid down, was for Oxford men to colonise it. They alone, or almost alone, possessed the secret of culture. A number of them, therefore, must settle there, and set good examples, illuminating Whitechapel by their shining influence. Forthwith they jumped at the idea, and carried it out, almost in the twinkling of an eye. Toynbee Hall was the result, and Barnett of Wadham, now Canon Barnett, was its first Warden.

Oxford, in those days, was, it must be admitted, a very serious University indeed—as serious a University as even the Rugby men could have wished to see it. Even unbelievers took to going to church, and gravely envisaged the question whether a lack of belief was really a sufficient excuse for not taking Holy Orders. The Oxford Magazine became the ponderous organ of the seriously minded, and, for a season, no sermon was too tedious to be reported verbatim in its columns, until one day there appeared a protest in the shape of a rhymed letter to the editor:

The author of those lines was Mr. Quiller Couch of Trinity, whom the world knows as “Q.” The immediate effect of them was to clear the air at Oxford; though Mr. Barnett’s Oxonian procession continued to carry the lamps of culture down the Mile End Road, with results which, according to the latest reports, are eminently satisfactory.