The romance of the Oxford colleges

Balliol is the tangible and enduring product of one of the most interesting of the abuses (as Protestants esteem them) of the Roman Catholic religion.

The story begins on the day on which Robert of Balliol—a lord of many lands in the North of England—“got drunk,” as the chronicler puts it, “in a manner unbecoming his station in life,” and insulted the Bishop of Durham. It is resumed on the day on which Robert apologised to the Bishop, and consented to do penance. The Bishop then “birched him in the presence of the populace on the steps of the cathedral,” and sent him forth with a tingling cuticle and an injunction to make amends for his fault by spending money on a benevolent undertaking. So he hired a house for the accommodation of sixteen poor scholars of Oxford, and allowed them eightpence a day each for their expenses. After his death, his widow, the Lady Devorguilla of Balliol, bearing no malice against the Bishop for his treatment of her husband—having reason to know, perhaps, that it had done him good—supplemented the endowment by a further substantial donation.

Such were the picturesque beginnings of the College in the reign of Henry III. Other gifts and legacies enriched its chest from time to time. The Snell Exhibitions connected it with the University of Glasgow. The Blundell Endowment introduced a steady flow of scholars from Tiverton. But the college remained unimportant. Its great period—a period which began under the mastership of Dr. Parsons and culminated under the mastership of Benjamin Jowett—belongs to the nineteenth century. Before that time it has no history worth relating; and the few great men who, by accident, went there to be educated, owed nothing to their tutors, but were left to educate themselves as best they could.

Adam Smith, who was up from 1740 to 1746, was the greatest of them; and, if Adam Smith’s ghost still haunts the Balliol quadrangles, we may be quite sure that it is an ungrateful and a growling ghost.

He was one of the Snell Exhibitioners above-mentioned; and the Snell Exhibitioners of the eighteenth century had a very uncomfortable time. They came from Scotland; and the College took Dr. Johnson’s view of Scotsmen, regarding them as pauper aliens, who ought to be repatriated, and “smugs,” unfit to mix with civilised mankind. The worst rooms in the college were invariably allotted to them by the dons; and their weird accents and barbarous dress were the subject of the ribald mirth of undergraduates.

Things got, indeed, to such a pass, at one time, that the Exhibitioners sent a formal complaint to Glasgow, and Glasgow made formal representations to the Master of the College; but the Master’s answer was unsatisfactory and curt. He said that he did not particularly want the Snell Exhibitioners at Balliol and would raise no objection if they liked to transfer themselves to another college. He even went so far as to suggest that perhaps they would feel more at home at Hertford; and as the hint was not taken, his relations with them continued to be strained.

Such was the tone of the college when Adam Smith’s name was entered on the books. The only friend whom he made there was Douglas, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury, a Snell Exhibitioner like himself. We know little of the circumstances of his career except that he habitually took tar-water as a remedy for “an inveterate scurvy and shaking of the head”; that undergraduates gibed at him for his poverty, exhorting him to gorge himself in the hall on the ground that his long-delayed chance of eating a full meal had come to him at last; and that a don reprimanded him for reading Hume’s “Treatise on Human Nature” and confiscated the pernicious book. It is not much; but it is enough to lead us to expect to find him regarding his University with feelings of disgust and contempt; and there is abundant evidence that he did so.

Adam Smith, indeed, is a far more convincing witness than Gibbon, who was at Magdalen a few years after he had gone down, of the deplorable state of learning at Oxford in the eighteenth century. He was older; he was longer in residence; he was more anxious to learn. But he sought in vain, he says, for “the proper means of being taught the sciences which it is the proper business of these incorporated bodies to teach”; and his generalisation about the college tutors is that “every man consented that his neighbour might neglect his duty provided he himself were allowed to neglect his own.” Moreover he passed one criticism on Oxford which is a delightful variant on a more famous utterance of another Balliol man of a later date.

Oxford, Matthew Arnold has told us, is the home of “lost causes” and “impossible loyalties.” Adam Smith said pretty much the same thing, but he said it very differently, speaking of the most venerable of our seats of learning as “a sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find shelter and protection after they have been hunted out of every corner of the world.” The sentiments are practically identical; and there could be no more charming example of truth changing its aspect as men change their point of view.

The only other name which counts in the annals of eighteenth century Balliol is that of Southey, who was up in 1793.

He was by way of being a reading man; but though the dark ages were almost over and the dawn of civilisation was near at hand, the College did little, if anything, to direct his studies. “Mr. Southey,” said one of his tutors in a burst of candour, “you won’t learn anything from my lectures sir, so if you have any studies of your own, you had better pursue them.”

He did so. He rose at five in order to do so, quickening his diligence with “negus.” One suspects that he must have been drinking negus on the morning of the day on which he went on the river “in a little skiff which the least deviation from the balance would upset,” and “did not step exactly in the middle,” with the result that “the boat tilted up” and its occupant only saved himself from complete submersion by clinging to the side of a barge. The incident does certainly seem to give colour to his reflection that “temperance is much wanted at Oxford,” and that “the waters of Helicon are too much polluted by the wine of Bacchus.”

Nor did the studies pursued under the cheering influence of matutinal negus belong to the ordinary curriculum of the place. Southey neglected his Aristotle. He preferred, he says, “the brilliant colours of fancy, nature, and Rousseau” to “the positive dogmas of the Stagirite”; and though the Contrat Social may serve as a substitute for the “Politics,” the presumption is strong that Southey preferred “La nouvelle Héloise” which can by no means be regarded as a worthy alternative to the “Ethics.”

We may let that pass, however; and we may also let pass Southey’s denunciation of the “waste of wigs and wisdom” which he discerned among the dons and the “abandoned excess” which he detected among those undergraduates who did not rise early to drink negus. The importance of Southey’s Oxford career resides neither in these trifles nor even in his refusal to have his hair powdered by the college barber before sitting down to dinner. The most significant thing that happened to him was that he made the acquaintance of a young man from a neighbouring University—Mr. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, of Jesus College, Cambridge, who was introduced to him by a bookseller.

The young Cantab. and the young Oxonian took to each other at once, and proceeded to see visions and dream dreams in concert. Rousseau and the Revolutionists, with their cry of “Back to Nature!” and their belief in the “perfectibility of the human race,” appealed to their imagination and inspired it. The world, they agreed, was weary of the past. Why not escape from it? So they sat in Southey’s rooms at Balliol—no doubt with steaming tumblers of negus on the table—and discussed the ways and means of doing so.

America, of course, was to be the scene of the experiment. They would cross the Atlantic, and settle on the banks of the Susquehanna—how could they fail to be happy on the banks of a river with such a melodious name? Land, they had been informed, was cheap there. An American land agent had offered to sell them some, and had assured them that the danger alike from buffaloes and from mosquitoes was much exaggerated. So they would borrow money, and get married, and go there. They themselves would till the soil, and their wives should “cook and perform all domestic offices.” It would be delightful, Southey thought, “to go with all my friends; to live with them in the most agreeable and most honourable employment; to eat the fruits I have raised, and see every face happy around me; my mother sheltered in her declining years from the anxieties which have pursued her; my brothers educated to be useful and virtuous.”

It came to nothing. The Pantisocracy, as it was to be called, was never formed. Perhaps “the females of the party” did not take so kindly to the idea of cooking and domestic offices—far away from bonnet-shops—as had been expected; and there was, at any rate, the difficulty that the capital required was not forthcoming. But the dream was a generous one and sheds a golden glamour on the closing years of a dark age. Southey, whether one cares about his poetry or not, is the most engaging figure in eighteenth-century Balliol.

The darkness of the dark age at Balliol could be illustrated by many anecdotes of many “rags.” On one occasion the Dean was ragged—though it does not appear that he was put on the bonfire, as once happened, in quite recent times, to the Dean of an adjacent college. On another occasion some Balliol Jacobites celebrated the birthday of Cardinal York by sallying forth into the streets and ragging every notable Hanoverian whom they met, including a Canon of Windsor, and cheering for King James III.—an offence for which, after the Master had let them off with a Latin imposition, they were brought to trial in the Court of King’s Bench, and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour.

It was exploits of that order, and not any idle impulse to play upon words, which first caused Balliol men to be spoken of as Men of Belial. They were of frequent occurrence, and the bad name which they gave the College was not redeemed by any intellectual distinction; but presently, in 1798, Dr. Parsons became Master, and then a memorable change began. Dr. Parsons organised the tutorial system, and cast his vote for throwing Balliol fellowships open to outsiders. He also collaborated with the Provost of Oriel and the Dean of Christ Church in the institution of the Honours Schools, in which firsts were presently taken by two very remarkable Balliol men, Sir William Hamilton, the philosopher, and J. G. Lockhart, the author of the Life of Scott. And then came Dr. Jenkyns.

Undoubtedly Jenkyns was a great man, as much greater than Parsons as Jowett was to be greater than himself. Judging him by results, one is led irresistibly to that conclusion. Yet how he managed to be so great, and to accomplish such results, is a perplexing puzzle; for among all the stories of him which have been preserved there is hardly one in which he does not cut a grotesque and undignified figure.

There is the story, for example, of his encounter with Blaydes of Balliol, who was afterwards to change his name to Calverley. Blaydes, it is said, was taking ladies over the college, and wished to show them all the lions. “That,” he said, pointing, “is the Master of Balliol’s study window”; and he picked up a stone and threw it. The missile went crashing through the glass, and an angry countenance became visible, glaring through the aperture. “And that, I rather fancy,” Blaydes continued calmly, “is the Master of Balliol himself.”

Then there is the story of Jenkyns’s passage of arms with Sir William Hamilton. Sir William, it is related, coming hurriedly out of his room, discovered Jenkyns listening at the keyhole. Furious at this prying curiosity, he clutched the spy by his coat collar, lifted him over the balustrade, and held him howling in mid-air. Then, having terrified him sufficiently, he lifted him back again, and apologised: “Good gracious, sir! I’m so sorry, but I had no idea that it would possibly be you!”

Finally, since there is no room for all the stories, one may recall, on Jowett’s authority, the story of Jenkyns’s comic sermon. He gave out the text, “The sin that doth so easily beset us”; and then he dropped into bathos. “I mean,” he explained in severe and acid tones, “the habit of contracting debts.” The undergraduates looked at each other and wondered. Had the Master actually said this thing, or had he only seemed to say it? They realised, at last, that he had actually said it; and then, for the first and only time in its history, the walls of the College chapel shook with the inextinguishable laughter of an insolvent congregation. It was several minutes, Jowett tells us, before the preacher could proceed with his discourse.

Decidedly it is not in anecdotes such as these that the greatness of Jenkyns comes out. But he took his position as Head of a college very seriously, at a time when most Heads of colleges preferred their wine, their ease, or their theology; and he was an astoundingly good judge alike of a competent tutor and of a clever undergraduate. Hence his success. The Balliol tutors, in his time, were the best. They taught the men, with rare exceptions, instead of worrying them about “movements”; and the Balliol scholarship became, at this time, the blue riband for which the chief public schools most eagerly competed. Presumably it is so still; and it certainly was so when, after the colourless interlude of Scott, Jowett succeeded to the Mastership in 1870.

Jowett’s is the one name of supreme and outstanding consequence in Balliol annals. He was elected to a scholarship there from St. Paul’s School in 1836; he was promoted to a fellowship while still an undergraduate; he became a tutor of the College at the age of twenty-five; he continued to be associated with its fortunes, without a break, until his death in 1893. He not only did more than any other man to make Balliol just what Balliol is; he also aspired, as he said, to “inoculate England with Balliol.”

In that ambition he succeeded, for Balliol under Jowett was a nursery of almost every kind of talent. Perhaps it was weak in divinity—it was a Balliol man, according to the story, who told the examiner that Gamaliel was “a hill at the foot of which Paul was brought up”—but it surpassed all the other colleges in its “output” of statesmen, pro-consuls, professors, and men of letters. Mr. Asquith, Lord Lansdowne, and Lord Peel are Balliol men; so are Lord Milner and Lord Curzon. Balliol has largely staffed the Universities of Scotland. At Jowett’s funeral seven of the pall-bearers were Heads of Oxford houses who had been at Balliol, and the list of Balliol representatives in recent and contemporary literature includes the names of A. C. Swinburne, John Addington Symonds, Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. W. H. Mallock, Mr. J. A. Godley, Canon Beeching, Mr. Anthony Hope Hawkins, and the late G. W. Steevens—“the Balliol prodigy,” as they called him—who became a journalist and succeeded in sounding a new note on the brazen trumpet of the Daily Mail. One could easily extend the list, but to what end? We have no need of further witnesses.

Jowett, as the table of results proves, was a great educator, and a great organiser and director of education, but he was also something more than that—a great personality, who fought a hard fight and won it, wearing down opposition and smiling down detraction.

He was not a particularly great scholar. “Hullo! Another howler!” is said to have been the refrain occasionally uttered automatically in his presence by friends to whom he submitted the manuscript of his translations of Plato and Thucydides; and it was maliciously said that his appointment to the Regius Professorship of Greek was a case of the “endowment of research”—a pecuniary inducement held out to him to learn the language. Nor was he a great philosopher, or, in spite of “Essays and Reviews” and the Commentary on the Epistle to the Thessalonians, a great divine. But he was, nevertheless, emphatically a great man, who grew into a great institution. One could not hear of Oxford without hearing of him; one could not live at Oxford without feeling that his presence pervaded it. He was, in the end, the very genius loci, and one would no more have spoken disrespectfully of him than of the Equator.

It is said to have been Mrs. Grote who christened him “the cherub.” His bust in the Bodleian certainly looks like the bust of a cherub, and the sound of his voice was like a cherub’s chirp. It gave one the impression of an innocent man who had never known anything of the passionate temptations which distract the young, and for whom all the riddles of the painful earth could be solved, without reference to such passions, by the dry light of intellect alone. He seemed to come down to breakfast from a higher plane of thought—an intellectual tribunal before which his guests were summoned, and from which there was no appeal. He was criticism—as a rule destructive criticism—incarnate. His praise was approbation from Sir Hubert Stanley; his blame could make the cleverest man feel a fool.

It followed that he could not be widely popular. Criticism, especially if it be unemotional, is not very popular as a literary art, and is still less popular as a social accomplishment; and though, if we may believe the biographers, the Master was not really unemotional, he generally contrived to seem to be so, being, in fact, very shy, and very much afraid of his emotions. One may think of him most justly, perhaps, as a man full of the milk of human kindness, but profoundly conscious that milk makes a mess when it boils over, and firmly resolved to prevent that catastrophe by keeping it in a refrigerator. He gave generously out of his later abundance, and with a positive shrinking from advertisement. But he did not suffer fools gladly, and he could even snub the deserving, if they gave him the opportunity, in the knock-down style of Dr. Johnson.

Nor was he an equally sound critic of all kinds of intellectual promise. He divined, for instance, the potentialities of Mr. Asquith, but failed to discern those of Mr. Andrew Lang. “Asquith is sure to succeed, he is so direct,” was his verdict on the former; but to the latter, as Mr. Lang has himself recorded, he tendered the advice: “Don’t write as if you were writing for a penny paper.” And there is a story of a scholar of the eighties, now an eminent teacher of youth, who shall be nameless here, who suffered even more severely at his hands.

It was at breakfast, and the conversation flagged, as it was a little apt to do when parties of undergraduates breakfasted with the Master. The scholar tried to stimulate it by a literary remark which he hoped might give the silent Master something to talk about. “Master,” he ventured, “I have been reading Matthew Arnold’s poems, and I think he is a great poet.” There was a dead silence while the company waited for the Master to follow up the theme. “We all think so, Mr. X.,” he piped in his high treble, and it was felt that he could not have blanketed the conversation more effectively if he had left the room, slamming the door behind him.

“If you have nothing more sensible to say than that, you had better be silent altogether,” is another of his recorded repartees to some one who remarked upon the weather; and one could make a long list of similar retorts of deadly finality behind which the Master entrenched himself. He probably did not know how much they hurt, but fought, not aggressively, but in self-defence, being sensitive, and fearing to be drawn, having a lively recollection of cases in which men had tried to draw him by arguing, in their weekly essays, in favour of atheism or anarchism, or setting any other sort of pitfall into which it would be pleasant to see one in authority stumbling. At all events men seem to have accepted his severe rejoinders in that spirit, and to have had too profound a reverence for his high intellectual standards to resent their rude practical application. If they did not suffer a rebuff from him gladly, at least they suffered it, as something inherent in the mysterious nature of things, something the reason for which might thereafter, if they were patient, be revealed to them.

For Jowett was not only a great man, but also, like most great men, a great enigma. Many wondered, and perhaps no one ever knew, how he reconciled his position with his conscience. He had subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, and then he had disproved them, or a good many of them, and then he had subscribed to them again. He had attached no condition to his second subscription of them except the simple one, “if you will give me a new pen.” There was also a story current, though it is probably untrue, as it is also told of Theodore Hook, of St. Mary Hall, that he offered to sign forty Articles if the signature of thirty-nine did not suffice.

Why did he do these things? What remnant of belief remained to him after he had done them? By what chain of argument was he bound to his office as a clergyman of the Church of England? Those were the problems posed, but he would have been a bold man who ventured to press the Master for the solutions.

His chief interests, at this stage, indeed, were rather practical than speculative. He gave large house parties of people who had succeeded in life. He bought an organ, and arranged for the Balliol Sunday evening concerts. He shortened the chapel services, saying—or so it is said—that if one could praise God adequately in half an hour, it was an absurd waste of time to devote three-quarters of an hour to the proceeding. He allowed Oxford to have a theatre—a thing forbidden by the pious wisdom of the men of old. He quoted “sat prata biberunt,” and negotiated for the drainage of the Oxford swamps.

He also preached, of course, and his sermons were always interesting, and sometimes pleasingly satirical, as when he smote Renan and Farrar with a double stroke, expressing his desire to read a Life of Christ which should be neither “sentimental” nor “picturesque”; but it could hardly be said that they settled the vexed question of his personal attitude towards the creeds which he recited without taking them too seriously or the formulæ which he manipulated with a sort of spiritual sleight-of-hand.

Possibly he argued that, as no clergyman ever believed all the Articles of the Christian Faith, one clergyman had as good a right as another to pick and choose among them. Or he may have felt that for a man to quit the Church merely because he had demonstrated some of its propositions to be erroneous was as ridiculous as for a doctor to take down his brass plate merely because he had discovered a new treatment of a disease at which the old-fashioned practitioners shook their heads. But, if that was his view, he never uttered it, preferring to go his own way, possessing his own soul and guarding his own secret.

One could almost see him guarding it; so that our last glimpse may be of a quaint-looking little old man in evening dress trotting through the parks in that unusual costume on a Sunday afternoon: an arresting figure, with venerable white hair, a beautifully fresh pink face, and the seal of inscrutable mystery on his forehead.