The romance of the Oxford colleges

A Queen’s man observed lounging in the portico of his own College is spoken of by Little Mr. Bouncer in “Verdant Green” as thus “openly confessing his shame”; and the playful criticism doubtless mirrors the public opinion of a period when social distinctions were marked by more outward signs than at present.

There were, and indeed there still are, at Queen’s a considerable number of scholarships and exhibitions tenable only by youths educated at certain specified North Country grammar schools. Religion and sound learning may or may not have flourished in these remote educational establishments, but they certainly were not, in past times, schools of polished manners. Civilisation, as it were, filtered through to them, leaving a good many of its graces in the filter. The undeniable virtues of their alumni were of the rugged order. They asserted themselves in the broad accents of the fells and dales, and, in the matter of dress, they supported the home industries of provinces in which the art of tailoring was in its infancy. Such is the inwardness of Little Mr. Bouncer’s comment, set forth as expressing the view of the “very gentlemanly set of men” of the early Victorian Brasenose.

All that, however, is ancient history. Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis, is doubtless the well-warranted reflection of the Queen’s men of to-day. The old traditions which they still keep alive fall under the head, not of manners, but of customs. There is the custom, for instance, of blowing a trumpet to signify that dinner is ready; there is the custom of using the founder’s horn as a loving-cup on gaudy days; there is the Bursar’s custom of presenting every guest, on New Year’s Day, with a needle threaded with silk, and wishing him prosperity in the formula, “Take this and be thrifty.” Finally there is the Christmas Day custom, which never fails to get a paragraph in the papers, of bringing in the boar’s head to the accompaniment of music.

To this last custom, of course, a story is attached, which may or may not be true. A scholar of Queen’s, we are told, went, in the remote past, for a walk on Shotover, and there met a wild boar, which charged him. Instead of running away, he thrust the Aristotle which he was reading down the beast’s throat and choked it; and then he cut off its head and brought it home for supper—an heroic act, emblematical of the triumph of scholarship over brute force, which was duly celebrated in a canticle, still sung every Christmas night in the College hall while the butler is bringing in the delicacy, and running thus:

Such is the carol which, at Queen’s, links the present with the past; and if any reader desires a more modern song on the same subject, he may find one in “The Oxford Sausage.” It may suffice to quote the last three stanzas:

This boar’s head story is, beyond question, the most picturesque item in the Queen’s annals. In more recent times the College has twice been seriously damaged by fire, and each of the two outbursts invites a marginal comment. One of them originated in the bursary, and was attributed by the wits to the action of the Bursar in cooking the accounts. On the occasion of the other, the Provost nearly perished in the flames as a concession to dignity and decorum. The Fellows and scholars, who had fled into the quadrangle, missed him, and wondered what had become of him. He had, in fact, lingered in the blazing building to complete his toilet. He did not emerge from it, like the others, in his night-gear, but in his wig, and cap and gowns, and bands, and complete ecclesiastical trappings. A magnificent spectacle truly! Having conjured it up, we may turn back and call the roll of the names of which Queen’s is most justly proud.

The eponymous Queen of the College was Philippa of Hainault, the consort of Edward III., whose chaplain and confessor was the founder. It followed, most naturally, that Edward the Black Prince was for a time a student there, though no legends, whether of his studies or his diversions, have been handed down. It was, at any rate, on quite other fields than those of learning that the Black Prince was to win his fame; and the first serious Queen’s man whose reputation really counts is Wiclif.

Queen’s, it is true, has no exclusive claim to him. He was also, for a period, Master of Balliol, and, for another period, Master of Canterbury Hall—an extinct establishment on the site of the present Canterbury Quad, at Christ Church. He is further said, though on doubtful evidence, to have been, for a while, a Fellow of Merton. The brief years, however, during which he occupied rooms at Queen’s were among the most important of his life; for to those years belong the preparation and inauguration of the first of the Oxford Movements.

Personal details are almost entirely lacking—personal details are nearly always to seek in the biographies of the great men of the Middle Ages. It may be that Wiclif was the student who thrust the Aristotle down the throat of the wild boar. It may also be—and, on the whole, it is quite as likely—that he was not. There is no evidence either way, and the probabilities are nicely balanced. But he was, at any rate, the Morning Star of the Reformation. He translated the Bible; he stood up against the Pope; and he called upon the laity to reform the clergy. Nor was that all. He also missed preferment through his zeal, and organised “poor preachers” to spread the light which he had kindled.

Oxford, indeed, was in those days the only available centre for the dissemination of a new idea. The light of Paris had temporarily paled, and the light of Cambridge had hardly yet begun to shine; so that Oxford was the most important of the stages in the pilgrimage of a wandering scholar. Then, if ever, there was reason to hope that what Oxford thought to-day England would think to-morrow. The machinery for bringing this result about existed, and Wiclif set it in motion, “pressing the button,” as we moderns say, in his room at Queen’s. The excesses of disciples who joyously predicted the coming of a day when “priests’ heads would be as cheap as sheeps’” no doubt outran his intentions; but it is worth while, in view of current political conflicts, to note that this first Oxford Movement was the occasion of an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the House of Lords to usurp the privileges of the House of Commons.

The Archbishop of Canterbury proposed, the Lords passed, and the King assented to a law to the effect, broadly speaking, that the “poor preachers” should be arrested wherever found, and locked up in whatever house of detention was most convenient, until they gave such an account of themselves as satisfied Holy Church. The Commons represented that this so-called Statute was not a Statute, since it had not been laid before them. They demanded its withdrawal, and it was withdrawn; the privileges of the Lower House being thus asserted, in the interest of an Oxford Movement, as long ago as 1382.

Already at that date, however, the Movement had had its martyrs. Some Fellows of Queen’s had been expelled as Wicliffites in 1376; and it cannot be said that they had departed in a blaze of glory, for it appears that they had taken with them the common seal, and some jewels and other valuable property belonging not to them, but to the College. That, too, may have been a picturesque proceeding; but the details are obscure, and the subject cannot be discussed with profit.

Wiclif, of course, is eminent not only as a Reformer, but also as a man of letters. His version of the Bible helped, no less than Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” to fix the English language; and so we are led on, by a natural transition, to mention Wycherly, the dramatist, who was also a Queen’s man, and Addison, and William Collins, the poet, who were both tempted by the offer of demyships to migrate from Queen’s to Magdalen, and Tickell, who contributed to Steele’s Spectator—Steele himself being a Merton man—and William Mitford, the historian of Greece, and Jeremy Bentham, whose “mark of everlasting light,” being “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” could hardly be said to be “above the howling senses’ ebb and flow,” and Francis Jeffrey, the founder of the Edinburgh Review, and Walter Pater, who is more interesting than any of them.

Jeremy Bentham is, perhaps, most memorable as the third of the great trio of Oxonians who have “shown up” the inefficiency of Oxford University teaching in the eighteenth century. The comments of Adam Smith on that branch of the subject have already been quoted; those of Gibbon will have to be quoted presently; those of Bentham, of Queen’s, may as well be quoted now. He learnt at Oxford, he said, nothing except “mendacity and insincerity.” He found his tutor, Joseph Jefferson, morose—“a sort of Protestant monk,” who even forbade him to play the innocent game of battledore and shuttlecock. His lectures, and the lectures of the other tutors also, were “foolish,” teaching only “something of logical jargon”; and Bentham listened even to the law lectures of the great Blackstone, Fellow of All Souls, “with rebel ears.” Moreover, he tells us that he was afraid of encountering ghosts on the solitary staircases of the College.

His own ghost, dreading other ghosts, is indeed one of the gloomiest that one meets at Oxford. The pursuit of the greatest happiness of the greatest number had not, in his college days, begun; and there was but little happiness for “number one.” Bentham went up too young—he was only thirteen; he was kept short of money, and he was badly dressed. “I wish you would let me come home very soon,” he wrote to his father, “for my clothes are dropping off my back”; and happiness is often a shy fugitive when chased by a ragged man in the midst of more fashionably attired companions. Indeed, the one service which Oxford rendered Jeremy Bentham was to cure him of a taste for gambling. “They always,” he says, “forced me to pay when I lost; and, as I could never get the money when I won, I gave up the habit”—a statement which sheds a queerly lurid light upon the conduct of the gamesters of Queen’s in the year 1761. They seem to have bullied this lad of thirteen somewhat in the style of Flashman in “Tom Brown.” We can only pity him, and leave him.

Of Pater, of course, there will be more to be said when we come to Brasenose, where he won his fellowship and made his name. Even at Queen’s, however, where his undergraduate days were passed, he did not fail to make some mark. He was conspicuous, among other things, for ugliness—an ugliness so extreme that it excited the sympathetic attention of his friends, who formed themselves into a Committee to Consider what could be Done for the Improvement of Pater’s Personal Appearance. A suggestion that he should buy a new hat was discarded on the ground that he could not be expected to wear his hat in bed. What was wanted, it was agreed, was an irremovable addition to his features; and the Committee, after taking all available evidence, reported in favour of a moustache. The moustache, when ultimately grown, was at least a palliative. It was no longer necessary for Pater, when examining himself in the mirror, to exclaim that he would give ten years of his life to be better looking. He acquired, according to Mr. Edmund Gosse, the aspect of a benevolent dragon.

His intellectual outlook, however, was already beginning, even in those days, to divide attention with his physical features. He combined a sceptical disdain for the doctrines of the Church of England with an æsthetic sympathy for its ritual; and he made no secret of either the sympathetic or the intellectual attitude. His friends were interested, intrigued, and ultimately excited. They watched his spiritual development, much as Lausanne watched the spiritual development of Sainte-Beuve, when he was lecturing there on the Jansenists, and Vinet was expected to convert him to Protestantism. Some of them even ended by quarrelling with him and renouncing him.

The trouble was that, having gone up to Oxford with a view of taking Orders, he still proposed to take them, in spite of his effaced beliefs. Others had done so, he said, so why should not he? And, suiting the action to the argument, he asked the Bishop of London to ordain him.

The Bishop, not being in his confidence, was aware of no reason why he should not do so; but Pater’s friend, McQueen—who is only famous because he was Pater’s friend—resolved to stop the crime. He sought advice on the matter from Canon Liddon, then Principal of St. Edmund Hall; and Liddon’s answer was: “Write to the Bishop of London. You might be able to prevent ordination, and if not you will have delivered your soul.” He did write, and he did prevent ordination; and no doubt it was well, for Pater’s sake no less than for the sake of the Church, that ordination was prevented. Having said that, we will leave Pater until we meet him again at Brasenose.