PEMBROKE COLLEGE
Broadgates Hall—Its illustrious and fashionable alumni—The Hall becomes Pembroke College—Dr. Johnson at Pembroke—He rags the servitors and argues with the dons—His “spirited refusal of an eleemosynary supply of shoes”—He shows Hannah More over the College—George Whitefield at Pembroke—His relations with the Methodists and his religious excitability.
In the eyes of the average visitor to Pembroke, one fact outweighs all other facts in importance. Pembroke was the college of Dr. Johnson. It is much more profitable to tell a visitor that than to dwell on the circumstances in which Pembroke College grew out of the earlier Broadgates Hall.
Broadgates Hall, it is true, had cut a considerable figure in the early social history of Oxford. Christ Church men who could not be accommodated in the House often had rooms there—a fact which the modern Christ Church men should remember when they are tempted to their traditional gibe: “Is that Pembroke? I always thought that was where the Christ Church coals were kept.” John Pym, too, the great Parliamentary leader, was at Broadgates Hall; and the Hall was “a nest of singing birds” long before the greatest of her sons claimed that distinction for Pembroke. George Peele, Francis Beaumont (of the Beaumont and Fletcher combination), and Sir Fulke Greville were all poets of Broadgates Hall; but it is not easy to arouse the curiosity of the visitor concerning them. He keeps most of his curiosity for Dr. Johnson; and if he has any curiosity left over, he bestows it upon George Whitefield, the Methodist preacher.
Let us consider Dr. Johnson first.
Johnson went up in 1728; but his career was brief—about fourteen months from start to finish. Carlyle says he was a servitor; but he was, in fact, a commoner. A friend who offered him financial help did not fulfil his promise. His father fell into financial difficulties, and he had to go home, leaving his caution money to defray his dues.
Old Michael Johnson brought him up, and took him to call upon his tutor. He astonished the common-room, after a modest silence, by interjecting a quotation from Macrobius, thus proving himself to be precocious and well-read, though he was not to turn out to be the sort of model scholar whom the donnish mind approves. Laziness was to be his besetting vice through life. He was already lazy while an undergraduate; and he shared with many men of meaner intelligence a disposition to cut his lectures, and to excuse himself on grounds which the lecturers could not but regard as inadequate. Of the Christ Church man it has been written by an Oxford humourist that “he goeth not to lectures, for he saith: ‘How can a man lecture in bags cut like that?’” Johnson was guilty of a more outspoken rudeness. Summoned to account for his absence from the classroom, he explained that he had been skating on Christ Church meadows. Fined for his neglect of the obligation, he said: “Sir, you have sconced me twopence for a lecture that was not worth a penny.” And the biography continues:
“Boswell: That, Sir, was great fortitude of mind.
“Johnson: No, Sir; stark insensibility.”
He was poor; but the picture of his poverty has sometimes been overdrawn. His account for battells, which remains in the College archives, shows that he had enough to eat and drink, and that, in that important respect, at all events, he lived on the same scale as the majority of his compeers. Nor did his lack of means compel him to an isolated and unsociable existence. He joined with the other commoners in ragging the servitors whose duty it was to knock at the doors of commoners and ascertain whether they were in their own rooms at the appointed hour. He hunted them down the stairs, it is recorded, “with the noise of pots and candlesticks”; and there are contemporary recollections which show him to have been somewhat of a leader of men.
“I have heard,” wrote Bishop Percy, “from some of his contemporaries, that he was generally to be seen lounging at the College Gate with a circle of young students round him, whom he was entertaining with wit, and keeping from their studies, if not spiriting them up to rebellion against the College discipline, which in his maturer years he so much extolled. He would not let these idlers say ‘prodigious’ or otherwise misuse the English tongue.”
Dr. Adams, too, then a tutor, and afterwards Master of the College, told Boswell that Johnson, as an undergraduate, was “a gay and frolicsome fellow,” and was “caressed and loved by all about him”; but Boswell proceeds:
“When I mentioned to him this account, he said: ‘Ah, Sir, I was mad and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for frolick. I was miserably poor, and I thought to fight my way by my literature and my wit; so I disregarded all power and all authority.’”
Very likely, however, that recollection was coloured by later memories of the struggle for bread in Grub Street. Between the manifestations of bitterness and frolic the average undergraduate can, as a rule, discriminate; and Pembroke was not a rich man’s college. The pangs of poverty only became intense when Johnson crossed the road to Christ Church, to see his friend Taylor. Then contrast made him conscious of his shabbiness. As Boswell writes:
“Mr. Bateman’s lectures were so excellent that Johnson used to come and get them at second hand from Taylor, till his poverty being so extreme that his shoes were worn out, and his feet appeared through them, he saw that this humiliating circumstance was perceived by the Christ Church men, and he came no more. He was too proud to accept of money, and somebody having set a pair of new shoes at his door, he threw them away with indignation.”
This “spirited refusal of an eleemosynary supply of shoes,” as Boswell calls it, is the best known of all the stories of Johnson’s Oxford career; but there is no evidence that the memory of the incident mortified him in after life. He never vilified Oxford, as did Gibbon and Adam Smith. On the contrary he was always proud to remember that he was an Oxford man; he spoke very highly of the tutors whose instruction he had neglected; and he delighted to revisit the University in his prosperous and famous period. We have a graphic account of one such visit from the pen of Hannah More:
“Who do you think is my principal cicerone in Oxford? Only Dr Johnson! And we do so gallant it about! You cannot imagine with what delight he showed me every part of his own College, nor how rejoiced Henderson looked to make one of the party. Dr. Adams had contrived a very pretty piece of gallantry. We spent the day and evening at his house. After dinner Johnson begged to conduct me to see the College; he would let no one show it me but himself. ‘This was my room; this Shenstone’s.’ Then, after pointing out all the rooms of the poets who have been of his College, ‘In short,’ he said, ‘we were a nest of singing-birds. Here we walked, there we played at cricket.’ He ran over with pleasure the history of the juvenile days he passed there.”
That may be, indeed, the language of a man whose undergraduate days had been passed in poverty; but it assuredly is not the language of a man whose poverty had made life unbearable in the manner which Carlyle suggests. Johnson, it is hardly to be doubted, enjoyed himself at Oxford as much as his constitutional tendency to melancholia ever permitted him to enjoy himself anywhere; and one may even conjecture that the condition of his shoe-leather was as much due to untidiness as to indigence. To find a Pembroke man who was really poor, and really miserable and morbid, we have to turn to the case of that eminent Methodist divine, the Reverend George Whitefield.
Whitefield came up just after Johnson had gone down; and there was one interesting link between them—a link which also associates them with that eminent Magdalen man, the historian of the Roman Empire. They both read, and were affected by, Law’s “Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life”; and Law had been tutor to Gibbon’s father and was to end his days as a sort of domestic chaplain to one of Gibbon’s aunts. It is curious to observe how differently his exhortations influenced the minds of the three men.
Gibbon devotes a good deal of space, in his Autobiography, to Law’s “theological writings which our domestic connection has tempted me to peruse”; and he holds the scales with a rigid impartiality. Law’s “sallies of religious frenzy,” he says, “must not be allowed to extinguish the praise which is due to Mr. William Law as a wit and a scholar.” He thinks that, “had not his vigorous mind been clouded by enthusiasm, he might be ranked with the most agreeable and ingenious writers of the times.” His conclusion is that:
“If he finds a spark of piety in his reader’s mind, he will soon kindle it to a flame; and a philosopher must allow that he exposes, with equal severity and truth, the strange contradiction between the faith and practice of the Christian world.”
Gibbon, that is to say, looks at Law solely with the eye of a literary critic, damns him with faint praise, but leaves his propositions unexamined as childish conceptions which he has long since put away, and does not propose to be concerned with any more. His tone is that of a head-master who praises, while he corrects, a set of Latin verses. Johnson read the book, expecting it to afford him ribald amusement, but was “over-matched” by it, and even frightened by it some distance along the road which leads to religious mania. Whitefield read it with real Methodistical enthusiasm.
About the Oxford Methodists in general enough has already been said in the chapter on Lincoln; but Whitefield is of sufficient importance to be detached from the group and considered separately.
He was not the originator of the movement, though he came to be a force in it. The Wesleys were several years his seniors, and had set Methodism going before he came into residence. But though he was their disciple he was hardly of their type. They were scholars, gentlemen, and organisers. He was a man of the people, half-educated, brought up in the tap-room of his mother’s inn, a religious demagogue, a rhetorician, whose mouth, foaming with sanctimonious phrases, suggests the froth on the tankards of his mother’s beer. The dignity which compels even those who differ from the Wesleys to respect them was entirely wanting in Whitefield. He emerged from his humble station with the defects of his origin clinging to him, and he never shook them off. It is impossible to think of him as a man whom one would have liked to know at Oxford. It is, indeed, difficult to think of him as anything but mad.
His position at Pembroke was that of a servitor; and he was the exaggerated type of the “pi-man” of his period. He had no joy in his youth, and no power of concealing his abject terror of hell-fire. He made himself conspicuous about it; it is not too much to say that he made himself ridiculous. Here are a few extracts from his own admissions on the subject:
“I always chose the worst sort of food, though my place furnished me with variety. I fasted twice a week. My apparel was mean. I thought it unbecoming a penitent to have his hair powdered. I wore woollen gloves, a patched gown, and dirty shoes.”
“Satan used to terrify me much, and threatened to punish me if I discovered his wiles. It being my duty, as servitor, in my turn to knock at the gentlemen’s doors by ten at night, to see who were in their rooms, I thought the devil would appear to me every stair I went up. And he so troubled me when I lay down to rest that, for some weeks, I scarce slept above three hours at a time.... Whole days and weeks have I spent in lying prostrate on the ground and begging for freedom from those proud hellish thoughts that used to crowd in upon and distract my soul.”
“It was suggested to me that Jesus Christ was among the wild beasts when He was tempted, and that I ought to follow His example; and being willing, as I thought, to imitate Jesus Christ, after supper I went into Christ Church walk, near our college, and continued in silent prayer under one of the trees for near two hours, sometimes lying flat on my face, sometimes kneeling upon my knees, all the while filled with fear and concern lest some of my brethren should be overwhelmed with pride. The night being stormy, it gave me awful thoughts of the day of judgment. I continued, I think, until the great bell rung for retirement to the College, not without finding some reluctance in the natural man against staying so long in the cold.”
And so forth. All things considered, it is not surprising that the “polite students,” as Whitefield calls them, laughed, and even “threw dirt,” or that his tutor advised him to take medicine. Academic authorities are seldom sympathetic towards undergraduates who, as Whitefield did, neglect their studies for their devotions—presumably because the religious uneasiness of their pupils seems to them a reflection on their own assured composure.