The romance of the Oxford colleges

Edward II.’s almoner, Adam de Brome, obtained his charter for the foundation of a new College at Oxford in 1324. Originally called the House, or Hall, of the Blessed Mary at Oxford, it took the name of Oriel from La Oriole—a tenement included in the premises. Among its endowments was included the advowson and rectory of the Church of St. Mary—a fact of which we shall perceive the importance as we proceed. It was a small College, and a poor one, but it was to have its hour of signal intellectual pre-eminence, though not until the early days of the nineteenth century. Before that time the noteworthy names are scarce.

The most noteworthy of them all, if one could be sure of one’s facts, would be that of Sir Walter Raleigh. Sir Walter is said to have been an Oriel man, and one likes to think that he was—if only to furnish an Elizabethan Oriel precedent for Cecil Rhodes; but the proofs offered are inconclusive. Of the undisputed alumni of the darker ages the greatest was Bishop Butler, of the “Analogy”—a precedent, perhaps, if one is looking for precedents, for those Oriel “Noetics” of whom we shall have to speak; but Oriel owes more to Butler than Butler owed to Oriel. He is a witness—like Gibbon of Magdalen and Adam Smith of Balliol—to the inefficiency of Oxford teaching in the eighteenth century.

“We are obliged,” Butler wrote, “to mis-spend so much time here in attending frivolous lectures and unintelligible disputations that I am quite tired out with such a disagreeable way of trifling.”

He also threatened to leave Oxford and migrate to Cambridge, though, as the historian of Oriel writes, “it saves the blushes of an Oxonian to reflect that the migration was never carried out.” That is all that can be said, however, for that is all that is known; so we will leave Butler, and hasten on to the really interesting epoch.

The fame of Oriel, at the time when Oriel was famous, depended upon the distinction of its Fellows. The Statutes allowed more latitude to the electors there than at most of the other colleges. They were not restricted in their choice to their own men, to their founders’ kin, or, except in the case of a few specific fellowships, to candidates from particular counties. A few happy selections made the tuition exceptionally efficient. The reputation for efficiency attracted a steady supply of good men. The attraction was the greater because the electors chose for themselves, on principles of their own, and were but little, if at all, influenced by records of successes gained in other examinations. The ideal man for them, they said, was a man whose mind was “an instrument and not a receptacle”; and they often, for that reason, preferred men who had taken seconds to men who had taken firsts, and their preference was generally justified by developments. Whately, Newman, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, and Richard Hurrell Froude all took seconds, and became Fellows of Oriel.

An Oriel fellowship became, in that way, like a Balliol scholarship, the real “blue riband” of the University. It marked a man, not as a precocious scholar, but as an intellectual force—a man who was expected to make his mark on thought. Oriel, in consequence, came to be recognised as a great intellectual centre—the seething source of the new ideas which Oxford would presently diffuse through England. That was the great and golden age of the Oriel Common-room. It began under Provost Eveleigh, who was jointly concerned with the Master of Balliol and the Dean of Christ Church in the institution of the Honours Schools. It continued under Coplestone, who resigned to become Bishop of Llandaff in 1826. It came to an end, some time in the forties, under Hawkins.

The golden age, however, ought really to be divided into three golden ages, which ran into each other, but must here be glanced at separately. The first period is that of the so-called “Noetics,” who had Whately for their prophet and leader. The second is that of the Tractarians—the period when the influence, first of Keble and then of John Henry Newman, was paramount. The third, following on the secession of some of the Tractarians to Rome, and the defeat, so far as Oxford was concerned, of those who remained in the Church of England, may be called the period of the Honest Doubters. The names belonging to it, which all the world knows, are those of Clough and Matthew Arnold. First, then, of the “Noetics.”

The word “Noetic” has gone out of use. Our own generation hardly knows what it means; and perhaps its meaning was not very precise, even when it was bandied freely. If we render it “Intellectuals”—with a capital I—we shall get as near to it as we need to go; but we must also remember that the Noetics flattered themselves on being, above all things, logicians. It was a common saying, in the Oxford of their time, that the Oriel Common-room “stank of logic.”

Provost Eveleigh, whom we have mentioned, was not exactly a Noetic himself, but it was his policy which brought the Noetics together at Oriel. He was the first Provost who insisted that the College should make a proper use of its freedom in the choice of Fellows. The tendency of the times was to use that freedom to serve the ends of private friendship, and bring clubbable and convivial men together. Eveleigh took the line that intellectual distinction was of more account than good manners or geniality in social intercourse. There were those who said that, by doing so, he made the Oriel Common-room a bear-garden; but that is only a way of saying that it focussed heat as well as light.

Coplestone, afterwards Bishop of Llandaff, Hampden, afterwards Bishop of Hereford, Whately, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin, Arnold of Rugby, Hawkins, presently to be Provost, Baden-Powell, Savilian Professor of Geometry—these are the principal Noetic names. They formed no definite school of thought; they had no common body of doctrine. Some of them were more noetic than others, and one or two of them ended by relapsing into reactionary ways. Some of them, again, were very polished, while others were very rough diamonds. But they were, all of them, very clever, and knew it, and liked other people to know it. They brought the dry light of logic to bear upon ecclesiastical and other conundrums. Liberals in theology, equally contemptuous of High Church aridity and oleaginous Evangelicanism, they liked to express their Liberalism in terms of robust and aggressive common sense.

Arnold and Whately are perhaps the only two of them whose names now live; and Arnold, of course, made his fame elsewhere than at Oxford. Whately, however, was a tutor at Oriel for a considerable time, and afterwards became Principal of St. Alban Hall. He was a Bohemian of Bohemians, an eccentric of eccentrics, the least donnish of dons, and the most carelessly defiant of all academical etiquette. The Provost of Oriel, who hated tobacco, was once shocked to discover him on the roof of Oriel, smoking a cigar among the leads.

In costume, too, as well as in conduct, Whately outraged the prejudices of his fellow-men. It is related that, when there were holes in his archiepiscopal silk stockings he neither bought new ones nor sent the old ones to be darned, but tried to conceal the deficiencies by affixing black sticking-plaster to his calves. At a time when other dons were never seen in Christ Church meadows except in cap and gown, he walked there in his ordinary attire—described as consisting of “pea-green coat, white waistcoat, stone-coloured shorts, flesh-coloured stockings.” He took a number of dogs with him on his walks, and trained them to climb trees and drop into the Cherwell; and when Coplestone accompanied him, as he sometimes did, that very dignified man was quite appalled by his proceedings.

“Whately,” said Coplestone in a pained tone, “really forgot himself during our walk this afternoon; he actually, while in sight of other passengers, picked up a stone and threw it at a bird.”

In the lecture-room, again, Whately’s deportment was all his own. He lectured, lying on his back, on a sofa, with his legs dangling over the end of it, puffing a large pipe. It was in that attitude, no doubt, that he delivered himself of his famous aphorism that “woman is a creature that cannot reason and pokes the fire from the top”—an alleged example, of course, of definition per genus et differentiam. As for his deportment at the breakfast-table, it is recorded that “he would scatter tea-leaves over the table while he talked, and made rings on the tablecloth with the wet bottom of his teacup”; while an account of his demeanour in drawing-rooms may be borrowed from Mr. Tuckwell’s “Reminiscences of Oxford”:

“I remember,” Mr. Tuckwell writes, “my mother’s terror when he came to call. She had met him in the house of newly-married Mrs. Baden-Powell, who had filled her drawing-room with the spider-legged chairs just then coming into fashion. On one of these sat Whately, swinging, plunging, and shifting on his seat while he talked. An ominous crack was heard; a leg of the chair had given way; he tossed it on to the sofa without comment, and impounded another chair.”

It was while Whately was a tutor of Oriel that Newman was elected a Fellow, and the two men saw a good deal of each other. Newman, in those days, might have been described, as Lord Morley during his Lincoln days has been described by one of his unauthorised biographers, as “somewhat of a mooning evangelical.” He had lately been converted, in strict accordance with the evangelical programme; and Whately decided to take him in hand, wake him up, and teach him to think for himself. He did so, though with results quite different from those which he anticipated; for he was not other-worldly enough for Newman. Newman thought that he lacked spirituality and inwardness—that he had too much common sense and too large an appetite. He preferred the influence of the saintly Keble and the “bright and beautiful” Richard Hurrell Froude; and so he set out, first as a disciple, presently as a leader, on the long, straight road to Rome.

This brings us, of course, to the Tractarian Movement; and we will glance, though space hardly suffers us to do more, at the part which Oriel played in it.

Keble, Newman, Pusey, Richard Hurrell Froude—those are the great Oriel names in this connection, though Pusey, at the time when he joined the alliance, had left Oriel and become a Canon of Christ Church. Keble, if one may draw invidious distinctions, was the saintliest of them, Newman the most eloquent, Pusey the most learned, Richard Hurrell Froude the most energetic. But for Pusey’s learning, the Movement might never have taken seriously; but for Froude’s activity, it might never have been started.

Whether Froude had any firm intellectual grip on religious problems may be questioned; but there can be no disputing that he was a very strong man, and a very practical man, and a man who descended into the fray, filled with the joy of battle. He reminds one, a little, mutatis mutandis, of the “boss” in American politics, directing and controlling the “machine.” “Here,” one seems to hear him saying, “is something movable—let us have a Movement. Here is a ball—let us set it rolling.” And he did set the ball rolling, and it continued to roll, long after his premature death, at the age of thirty-three, had saddened his fellow-workers.

The Church, as it seemed to this little company, was being assailed by dangers, alike from without and from within. It was neither sufficiently respected nor sufficiently worthy of respect. Erastianism and Indifferentism were in the air. There was a tendency, among Churchmen as well as laymen, to regard the Church, not as a Catholic Apostolic institution of Divine origin, but as “a branch of the Civil Service.” Bishops had been mobbed in the riots which attended the passing of the Great Reform Bill. A Liberal Statesman had presumed to warn bishops to “set their house in order.” Superfluous bishoprics in Ireland—bishoprics supported at the expense of a conquered people who did not want them—were being suppressed; and that act of justice and common sense was the “last straw.” Keble thundered at justice and common sense as “national apostasy.” His thunder was the signal for the Movement, and its first overt act.

What, then, did the Tractarians want? The complete definition of their aims must be left to theological controversialists, and a layman can only presume to sketch the roughest outline of their objects.

They insisted, in a general way, that the Church of England was the creation, not of Parliament, but of God—that it was the duty of the State to recognise the Church, and do it homage, and back it up, but that these obligations carried with them no corresponding right to dictate to the Church, or to interfere with it in any way. In doubtful matters of doctrine the Church must decide and the State must accept its decisions. The Church was the repository of truth, guaranteed by apostolic succession, the sole interpreter of the teaching of the Bible, and of its own traditions and formulæ; and the true interpretation of those traditions and formulæ was—the interpretation which John Keble, John Henry Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey, and Richard Hurrell Froude chose to give them.

The logical weakness of the position was obvious. The Tractarians were not the Church, but only members, more or less worthy, of the rank and file of the Church. Oriel College had no more right than Exeter Hall to define the doctrines of the Church. The doctrines of the Church had been defined, once for all, by Act of Parliament; and there was no authority within the Church empowered, even by ecclesiastical law, to define the definitions. It needed a secular tribunal to “dismiss hell with costs,” as other English Churchmen were presently to discover; and a Church possessing the authority which the Tractarians thought that a Church ought to have was only to be found at Rome.

In due course the most logical of them realised that fact and ’verted. They only worked their way slowly, however, to their conclusion; and, in the meantime, remaining within the Church of England, they engaged in vigorous propagandism. Their views were spread partly by the famous Tracts from which they derived their name, partly by means of Newman’s sermons in St. Mary’s Church, partly by their personal influence over their juniors—partly also by their readiness to take the lead in the persecution of the “unsound.” They were in the thick of the fight over Hampden’s preferment, by Lord Melbourne, to the Regius Professorship of Divinity; and it was one of them who denounced Hampden in a sermon as “this atrocious professor” because he had proposed the opening of the University to Nonconformists. Evidently they were too conscious of meaning well to care to mince their words.

Space forbids us to follow all the vicissitudes of their fortunes. Enough to say that they made rapid progress at first, but presently ran upon the rocks. There was a beauty in their holiness which aroused widespread and sympathetic interest; it was generally recognised that they were making religion poetical; but points were discovered in their doctrines, as they developed them, which a Protestant people could not accept even from the saintliest of men. When they came to recommending “reserve” in the communication of religious knowledge, and argued, in the notorious Tract 90, that the language of the Thirty-nine Articles was compatible with Roman tenets, there was an outcry through the length and breadth of England. Arnold of Rugby called them “Malignants,” and other theologians called them other names, not less offensive. Shouts of “No Popery!” assailed them; and, in the midst of the din, the more clear-sighted of them discerned how hopelessly impossible was the position which they had occupied.

There was no way of escape for them from the Erastian net. Whatever the Church of England ought to be, it actually was, among other things, a branch of the Civil Service. The Tractarians were merely junior members of the Civil Service, trying to ride rough-shod over the senior members; and the heads of departments—which is to say the bishops—had no intention of allowing their subordinates to dictate to them. They would neither follow the Tractarians, nor allow the Tractarians to push them along in front. On the contrary, they snubbed the Tractarians, called them to order, exhorted them to sit down and hold their tongues, and practically stopped the publication of the Tracts.

Nor is it easy to see what else they could have done. The Church of England, by the very nature of its constitution, lacked a spiritual head exercising jurisdiction in matters of faith. It could not, even in theory, obtain such a spiritual head without the sanction of King, Lords, and Commons; it could not hope, in practice, to obtain such a spiritual head by any means whatsoever. If individual members of the Church of England tried to recognise, or set up, such a head on their own responsibility, they would cease to be members of the Church of England, and would become Dissenters—just as much Dissenters as those Congregationalists and Methodists and Baptists for whose exclusion from the Universities they had fought with such bigoted bitterness. The only Church so constituted that it could legislate for itself in spiritual matters, binding its own members, and expelling them if they refused to be bound, was the Church of Rome.

That discovery was the rock on which the Tractarian Movement split. Its more logical adherents, scorning compromise, and “damning consequences,” pursued the road to Rome. Others, like Pusey and Keble, held back in the Church of England by the chain of old associations, either made the best of things, or gravely pretended that the Church was something which it was not. Others, like Mark Pattison, who had found his Tractarian opinions an obstacle to his election to a fellowship, relapsed into Indifferentism, and rejoiced that preoccupation with religion had ceased to stand in the way of that sound learning which it was the main business of a University to promote.

So that, so far as Oxford in general and Oriel in particular were concerned, the Movement came to an end. It was, indeed, still to exercise a certain æsthetic influence throughout the country, and it was to colour the churchmanship of such bishops as Samuel Wilberforce, of such statesmen as Gladstone, of such lawyers as Lord Selborne, of such newspaper proprietors as Beresford Hope of the Saturday Review. It was also to stimulate the ritualistic innovations which brought about the Public Worship Regulation Act, and the persecution, and passive resistance, of the Rev. Arthur Tooth. But Oxford—the intellectual Oxford which counted—had done with it, and was to give itself over to Liberalism and Honest Doubt instead.

The most notable of the Honest Doubters, Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough, have already been mentioned. They were Arnold of Rugby’s most brilliant pupils, and the pick of the Balliol scholars of their period. Jowett once told John Addington Symonds that Clough was the only man of his acquaintance whom he knew for certain to be a man of genius. On Matthew Arnold’s remarkable talents and originality, no Oxford man, writing for Oxford men, feels it in the least necessary to insist. Yet both Arnold and Clough missed their firsts; and the blame for their failure is commonly, and not altogether unjustly, attributed to the Tractarians.

They came into residence in the midst of the Movement, and spent too much of their time in considering whether they could move with it or not. Clough, in particular, was, for a time, conscious of the attraction, and felt himself, as he put it, “like a straw drawn up the draught of a chimney.” He was not, indeed, drawn very far—a pupil of Arnold’s hardly could be. His mind was so constituted that “religion which has grown incongruous with intelligence” appealed to his credulity in vain. He shrugged his shoulders and withdrew—but not before he had devoted to the doctrine of the apostolical succession many precious hours which were due to the Ethics of Aristotle. The result was the painful surprise which the class list had in store for him—a surprise which seems to warrant the saying that the great Tractarian leader was not only a second-class man himself, but was the cause of second classes in others.

The winning of an Oriel fellowship redeemed Clough’s failure as it had redeemed Newman’s. Like Newman, he became a tutor of the College; and his connection with it, like Newman’s, was severed by the development of his theological opinions. Newman had believed too much for Oriel, and Clough believed too little. “I have given our Provost notice,” he presently wrote to Arnold, “of my intention to leave his service at Easter. I feel greatly rejoiced to think that this is my last term of bondage in Egypt.” And he went on, speculating as to his prospects: “One may do worse than hire oneself out as a common labourer; ’tis at any rate honester than being a teacher of Thirty-nine Articles.”

So he went his way—another of the prophets, though by no means the last of them, whom Oxford has first cast out with unimpeachable solemnity, and then regretted and made an idol of. No one needs to be told that he is the “Thyrsis” of Matthew Arnold’s famous poem; but a passage from “Thyrsis”—a passage which conjures up the picture of the Honest Doubter taking his honest doubts very seriously, eating his heart out, unable, as yet, to attain to that “Stoic-Epicurean acceptance of life” which was the ultimate philosophy of his friend—may fittingly conclude this section:

And so we leave him, and come to Cecil Rhodes; and it seems as though we had taken a very long journey indeed.

Rhodes went up to Oriel, with some South African experience behind him, in 1873. He rowed for Oriel, in 1873, spent his long vacations at the Cape, and ultimately took a pass degree. To the Dean who warned him that he might be ploughed if he persisted in cutting his lectures, he replied, “Oh, I promise you I’ll manage it. Leave me alone, and I shall pull through.” And the Dean left him alone, and in due course he did pull through. It is also recorded of him that he looked so little like an Oxonian that he was able to deceive even the Proctor. This is the story as he told it:

“The Proctor,” he said, “took off his cap to me with the utmost politeness, and I did the same to him. ‘Well, sir,’ said the Proctor to me, ‘your name and college?’ ‘My name is Rhodes,’ I replied, ‘and I have just come here from the Cape of Good Hope, and am making a short stay in Oxford; and now, sir, may I ask your name and college?’”

Whereupon the Proctor apologised for what he supposed to be his mistake, and Cecil Rhodes escaped unfined.

That is practically the only story that there is to be told of Cecil Rhodes’s undergraduate days; and it would, of course, be superfluous to relate how Oriel benefited by his will. One of the statements in that will, however, was to the effect that he regarded the Oriel dons as “children” in matters of finance; and if a man’s will were the proper place for pleasant anecdotage, he might have illustrated and supported that allegation by an Oriel story.

Once upon a time, it is recorded, the Bursar discovered an inexplicable deficiency in his accounts of something between £1,800 and £1,900. He knew that he had not embezzled the money, but he did not see how his balance-sheet was to be explained to the auditors except on the hypothesis that he had done so. In his distress he took his accounts to the Common-room, and asked his colleagues to check the figures. They did so, pored over them, and could find nothing wrong in them, until, at last, the Provost solved the mystery.

“Good gracious!” he exclaimed. “Don’t you see what you’ve done?”

“No, Mr. Provost, I don’t see any mistake.”

“Why, on the liability side you’ve added the date of the year to the pounds, shillings, and pence!”