The romance of the Oxford colleges

Exeter is the College for whose founder’s soul the author of this work is particularly bound to pray; and he hereby renders grateful homage to the memory of the Bishop of Exeter and Lord High Treasurer of England in the sorry reign of Edward II., whose benefaction he enjoyed in the character of a Stapledon scholar. If he says but little about Walter de Stapledon, that is because there is little to be said, except that he was a good bishop and a King’s man who lost his head in the King’s cause, being charged with the defence of London when the King fled to Wales, with the result that he was seized by the mob and brought to the block in Cheapside.

His period was one in which it was thought proper to combine the patronage of learning with the patronage of a particular locality. He wished the scholars, and also the Fellows, of his College to be taken from the counties of Devon and Cornwall; and his patriotic injunctions were faithfully observed until the University commissioners interfered, happily leaving a certain number of West Country scholars, but condemning the West Country fellowships to extinction. The last of the West Country Fellows was the Rev. Charles Boase, who piloted the present writer through the ceremony of matriculation, and concerning whom a statistician with a pencil once computed that he talked in the course of a single evening, on sixty-seven learned subjects, ranging from the Chemistry of Agriculture to the Philosophy of the Unconditioned.

Commoners, however, have followed where scholars led the way; and Exeter has always been recognised as the particular College of West Countrymen. Even the connection between Blundell’s School, Tiverton, and Balliol has not broken down its claims to this distinction. In “Westward Ho” we find Frank Leigh, as a matter of course, sent there from the Bideford Grammar School; and one of the characters in “Tom Jones” went there, equally as a matter of course, from Taunton, in the dark days in which the College was reputed to be given over to “nothing but drunkenness and duncery.”

The College was, at that melancholy period, known, equally with Merton, as a Whig College; and one of the rectors is said to have carried democratic principles to the point of marrying the daughter of the College cook. It distinguished itself, at one of the borough elections, by inviting Whig voters not only to pass through the College quadrangle on their way to the poll, but also to taste the College beer while passing. For several days, it is said, the Hall was filled with “a smoking, drinking, expectorating crowd,”—a spectacle which it is indeed difficult to conjure up in the decorous circumstances of contemporary academic life.

But let that pass. The interest of a college—of Exeter as of any other college—depends, not upon the proceedings of the vulgar herd, but upon its association with names which have left a trail of glory behind them. In the days when Exeter was, as Wood says, “debauched by a drunken governor,” and in the days immediately before and immediately after that deplorable debauchery, the most conspicuous Exeter names are hardly names which the plain man recognises at the first glance; but the nineteenth century introduces names worthy of remark in more than one department of endeavour.

Let “Parson Jack” come first.

To students of the Clergy List he is the Reverend John Russell, Perpetual Curate of Swymbridge. To the West Country he is “Parson Jack”—the hunting parson who kept the hounds and defied the Bishop who bade him give up keeping them: a man, no doubt, of more energy than intellect, but a clergyman—he would not have thanked any one for calling him a priest—whose parishioners carefully minded what he said, holding, it may be, that so good a judge of a horse must be an equally good judge of a religion.

Parson Jack won no laurels for his College in the schools, being contented with a pass degree; but it is said that the supper-party at which he bade the College farewell was the noisiest supper-party ever given within College walls, and that, as this chronicler knows, is saying a good deal. For, if he had not distinguished himself at his books, he had at least distinguished himself with his fists, in circumstances graphically described by his biographer.

A certain gentleman-commoner named Gordon, addicted to the society of out-college men, had, it appears, been boasting in hall of the superior prowess “with the gloves” of some friends of his at Christ Church. A certain Denne, lately from Eton, withstood him, saying: “Bring your three best men from Christ Church to my rooms, and if they can only stand up in a fair set-to against three of Exeter, we’ll give your heroes full credit for all you say of them, but not till then.”

Such a challenge, of course, could not be declined; and while Gordon was accepting it on behalf of his out-college friends, Jack Russell, overhearing the conversation, rose from his place and volunteered his services.

“Don’t forget me, Denne,” he said. “I’ll be one of the three, mind that, and the sooner we meet the better.”

So the meeting was arranged, and the result of it may best be given in the words of Russell’s biographer:

“Russell was deputed to open the ball, the antagonist selected to meet him being the second best of the Christ Church lot. It was a brisk set-to while it lasted, but evidently a one-sided affair from beginning to end; for Russell’s long reach, and quick, straight blows, which fell with tremendous thuds on his adversary’s visage, brought the trial to a close in little more than ten minutes.

“The latter, admitting himself over-matched, then declined the unequal contest; while Russell, self-reliant and still “fresh as paint,” refused to take off his gloves, calling stoutly for the next man to come on. Denne, however, interposed, and would have his turn; going in first with No. 1, then No. 3, and finally polishing them both off with as much ease as if they had been two old women.

“‘Now,’ said Russell, addressing Gordon aside, ‘I think you had better take your three fellows home; and don’t make such fools of them again.’”

Another hero who flourished at a slightly later date in the same field of prowess as Parson Jack was James Whitehead Peard. He had “the shoulders of a bull,” and when he played his part in one of those town and gown rows of which mention has just been made in the account of Merton, the town, with one accord, fled before him. He was to become Colonel Peard, to distinguish himself in a revolution in Italy, and to be known to the whole world as Garibaldi’s Englishman. At Exeter, however, he was principally a boating man. He rowed against Cambridge; and at a time when, as the Rev. J. Pycroft has related, “the dons held the boat in abhorrence and considered any man belonging to it as keeping rather questionable company,” he insisted that rowing was not only a manly but a moral recreation.

In proof of his claim, he submitted the rules of the Boating Club to Mr. Richards, then a tutor, and afterwards the Rector, pointing out that they forbade to men in training the indulgences which one is accustomed to couple in the pentameter line of elegiac verse as “Bacchus et alma Venus.” Whereupon Mr. Richards fell upon him crushingly.

“Exactly,” he said, “as I have always maintained. These rules show plainly and are a written confession of the wild character of the men for whom you can anticipate the necessity of such fines; no decent men would want such rules.”

Let us hope that modern boating men, at all events, are virtuous by instinct and need no laws to keep them so; and then let us cull a few other Exeter names, illustrious in other fields.

James Anthony Froude was elected a Fellow of Exeter from Oriel, in the days when the Tractarians seemed likely to succeed in their great task of turning Oxford upside down. More brilliant than industrious in those days, he had only taken a Second; but he had the clean-cut intellect which “penetrates through sophisms, ignores commonplaces, and gives to conventional illusions their true value,” and it was inevitable that, while looking for his way in life, he should come into violent collision with the Obscurantists. He did so on at least two notable occasions.

He began life in the shadow of his brother’s greater name and of the expectation that he would adopt his brother’s point of view and echo his brother’s opinions. Richard Hurrell Froude—a most imperious and dictatorial personage—had bullied him into seeming acquiescence in his doctrines. For the time being he presumably believed that he believed in them; and his vivid literary gifts marked him out as an ideal contributor to Newman’s projected series of “Lives of the Saints.” Newman wanted to establish the continuity of miracle within the Church; and he regarded Froude as a man credulous of miracles, and a dialectician capable of making out a good case for them. His instructions to his contributors were, not to try to find out whether the alleged miracles had really happened or not, but, in effect, to accept as many of them as a man could swallow without making himself too conspicuously ridiculous.

Froude accepted the commission; and there is no reason to doubt that he accepted it in good faith. The truth, however, was too strong for him; the evidence was too weak; and he had a turn for biting irony which he could not suppress. Saint Neot was his subject, and he ended his study with the remarkable sentence: “This is all, and perhaps rather more than all, that is known of the life of the blessed Saint Neot.” It was as if he had played a practical joke on Newman; and there were those who considered that to play practical jokes on Newman was almost as bad as laying a profane hand on the Ark of the Covenant. Newman himself was almost certainly of that opinion; but Protestantism “will out,” and Froude was a Protestant in grain, and was to become something more than a Protestant when he matured.

He first matured into a deacon of the Church of England; but that meant nothing. The College Fellows of those days took orders as normally as they took their degrees, and without making more ado about it. There was no more a question of a “call” to be a shepherd of souls than of a “call” to be a Master of Arts. In travelling so far, Froude was only travelling the common road. The desire to divagate from it did not come to him until later; and, even so, no one would have troubled much about his divagations if he had not chosen to divagate in print.

Like most of the other “honest doubters,” however, he could not keep his honest doubts to himself. He wrote and published “The Nemesis of Faith,” and then the fat was in the fire. The publication cost him his fellowship, and the book was burnt. The latter incident is famous, and has been magnified by legend. The belief prevails that there was a solemn and formal auto da fé under the direction of the University authorities. There was, in fact, only a private display of theological temper on the part of the Rev. William Sewell.

Sewell, afterwards the founder of Radley School, was a High Churchman, encompassed by all the limitations of that intellectual state. He was also a discursive lecturer who stood with his back to the fire, and made Aristotle’s “Ethics” or Virgil’s “Georgics” an excuse for propounding his opinions on matters of topical interest. He did not set out to talk about “The Nemesis of Faith,” but came to talk of it by accident, and then proceeded to denounce it with the vigour of a Quarterly or Saturday Reviewer. Finally he inquired whether any member of his audience possessed a copy of the book. One of them admitted that he did.

“Then bring it here, sir,” thundered Sewell.

It was brought; and Sewell stripped off the binding, tore the pages across, pitched the mutilated volume into the flames, and stood over it, thrusting at it with the poker until it was burnt to ashes.

Such was the actual occurrence, as related by Mr. Boase, who was present at the lecture at which it took place. There was no public holocaust, but only a spasmodic explosion of wrath on the part of a single excited theologian. The act, however, gained piquancy from the fact that Froude was Sewell’s colleague. The witnesses went out, and told what they had seen; and the story lost nothing in the telling. In after years, as we have seen, some of them recovered their historical consciences and reduced it to its true proportions; but, at the moment, they indulged their mythopœic faculties to their hearts’ content, and erected an enduring edifice of romance on a scanty foundation of fact.

And Froude, at any rate, had to go. The Rector and the Fellows asked him whether he would prefer to resign or to be turned out; and he elected to resign. The Visitor of the College—the Bishop of Exeter—applauded their action; and Froude’s father, the Archdeacon of Totnes, “conceiving,” as Mr. Herbert Paul puts it in his Life of Froude, “that the best remedy for free thought was short commons, stopped his son’s allowance.” Such was the message to him of “the last enchantments of the Middle Ages.”

Time passed. R. D. Blackmore, the immortal author of “Lorna Doone” took his degree at Exeter in the forties. He and Charles Reade, of Magdalen, of whom more in due course, are without dispute the two greatest novelists whom Oxford has yet produced; and there shall be no attempt here to prove that either of them was greater than the other. Has it not been written that, to a West Countryman, “Lorna Doone” is “almost as good as clotted cream”? Did not the author reply that he was too fond of clotted cream not to be gratified by the compliment, but also too fond of it to admit that any book whatever could successfully challenge comparison therewith? He was a modest man, however—so modest that hardly anything is known of him; and as no stories of his quiet passage through Exeter have been preserved, we may pass on to our next interesting names, which are those of William Morris and Edward Burne Jones.

They came up in 1853; and Morris’ biographer, Mr. J. W. Mackail, has given a good deal of offence by his supercilious account of the internal condition of Exeter at that period. Himself a Balliol man, he appears to take the view that outside Balliol there is no academical salvation.

That is a proposition which we need not turn aside to discuss at any length. It is neither to be desired nor to be expected that all the colleges of the University should resemble each other like peas in a pod; and it is not to be denied that there are some functions which Balliol fulfils better than Exeter. It dry nurses its men with more success, takes greater pains to make them conform to a type, and then lays itself out to magnify the type to scale. The result is conspicuous in the higher ranks of the most efficient Civil Service that the world has ever seen. It is an excellent system for its purpose; but it has its limitations, and is not equally suitable for all men, as even Jowett recognised.

Jowett doubted whether, if a poet came to Balliol, Balliol “would be able to hold him.” But Balliol held Swinburne; and the real danger is rather lest Balliol should turn a poet into a Judge of the High Court, or a stiff and starched Permanent Under-Secretary. Perhaps it would be a good thing for many poets to be thus transfigured; but it is not good for all of them; and it would not have been good for William Morris. What Morris wanted was to be left alone and not worried by pastors and masters who “generalise” and try to compel exceptional men to walk in conventional paths. Whatever may be the case now, Exeter was, in no distant past, a College in which a man might go his own way without excessive admonition; and William Morris was indubitably one of the successes of the system.

His tutor described him as “a rather rough and unpolished youth who exhibited no special literary tastes or capacity but had no difficulty in mastering the usual subjects of examination.” The opinion which he, on his part, entertained of tutors generally was not more flattering. “The name of ‘don,’” says his biographer, “was used by him as a synonym for all that was narrow, ignorant, and pedantic.” But the dons did him a good turn, though neither he nor they knew it at the time, by not going out of their way to disturb his view of them, their interests, and pursuits.

Except for Burne Jones, indeed, he had hardly a friend in his own College. With the reading men and with the uproarious men—and Exeter has always had its share of these—he had equally little in common. Men called him “Topsy” on account of his uncombed woolly head of hair; he accepted the nickname and was not to be driven by it into tidiness. Art, and beauty, and antiquities, were the things which interested him; and Oxford was for him, not a seat of learning, but “a vision of grey-roofed houses, and a long, winding street, and the sound of many bells.”

His rooms were in Hell Quad, and his favourite diversion was talking. Burne Jones tells how, on one occasion, “Morris came tumbling in and talked incessantly for the next seven hours and a half.” Most of his talking, however, was done at Pembroke, where he had two great friends: Faulkner, the mathematician who is said to have been ploughed in Divinity for including the Prophet Isaiah in a list of the Twelve Apostles, and Dixon, afterwards Canon Dixon, the pre-Raphaelite poet. He paid his tribute to the influence of his ecclesiastical surroundings by talking of devoting his entire private fortune of £900 a year to the foundation of a monastery; but he happily was wise in time. And presently his friends discovered his genius, though the dons did not.

“He’s a big poet,” Burne Jones one day exclaimed.

“Who is?”

“Why, Topsy.”

So he took his degree, and went down; and the rest of his career does not concern us, except for the beginnings of his association with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was brought up to Oxford to decorate the ceiling of the Union Debating Hall. He and Morris and Burne Jones were always together in Rossetti’s rooms in George Street; and a fourth member of their coterie was Swinburne of Balliol, the poet whom Balliol “held.”

They talked and talked interminably. Their talks were the beginning of that pre-Raphaelitism which was, in due course, to develop (or to degenerate) into the Æsthetic Movement; and the most picturesque incident of their alliance took place when they set out together to accept an invitation to dine at Christ Church.

Morris, who had with difficulty been persuaded to dress for the banquet, happened to remove his hat, and it was then discovered that the connection between art and letters was symbolised by an enormous daub of blue paint on his hair. But for that accident, and the hurried visit to the barber which followed it, he would have sat at high table, illuminated like a saintly figure in a missal or a stained-glass window.