The romance of the Oxford colleges

For a small College—and it has always been one of the smallest—Lincoln is associated with a goodly list of outstanding names, notable in very diverse departments of endeavour. Mr. D. S. MacColl, of the National Gallery, is, perhaps, the most distinguished of its recent representatives. He won the Newdigate; and is said to have won it, as Dean Burgon did, by the supreme merit of a single line. Burgon’s striking line was, as all the world remembers:

To do full justice to Mr. MacColl’s line one must also quote the few lines which precede it:

To quote Mr. MacColl, however, is to begin at the end. There are earlier names which also scintillate with varying degrees of brilliance, and make their appeal to hero-worshippers of various temperaments. The most remarkable are those of John Wesley, “Ideal” Ward, more commonly associated with Balliol, where he held a fellowship until his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Mark Pattison, Lord Morley, Cotter Morrison, and “Shifter.”

It was a question, earnestly considered, whether “Shifter” should be mentioned in these pages. The question was finally put to a representative assemblage of literary men—only a minority of them from Oxford; and the answer was unanimously in the affirmative. The name of “Shifter,” it was agreed, was by no means to be treated as if it had been “writ in water.” If it had ceased to be a household word, at any rate it was remembered. His case was interesting, if only because he had arrived at fame by a road not commonly travelled by modern Oxford men; and there were those, it was felt, who would learn, with a sort of scandalised astonishment, that “Shifter” was once Goldberg of Lincoln.

The present writer once met “Shifter,” and discovered that the vogue of his pseudonym filled him with genuine pride. The meeting-place was a printing office in the purlieus of Fleet Street. A diminutive man of rather drowsy manner was sitting at the end of a long, bare table, engaged in slow and careful literary composition. An impatient boy was carrying off the sheets of his copy as he finished them. He looked up with affability, yet with an air of self-importance, at the new arrival, and introduced himself. “You know who I am, don’t you?” he said. “I’m ‘Shifter.’ I’m writing the Office Boy’s Diary”; and there followed an invitation to partake of refreshment with him, after his task was concluded. The invitation was accepted, and there ensued some talk of Oxford—a place which, in those rather sordid surroundings, seemed very far away.

Oxford, in fact, used to figure, from time to time, in “Shifter’s” contributions to the sporting press. He liked to describe himself as the enfant terrible returning to the respectable bosom of alma mater and creating a sensation there. He spoke, in particular, of a “respectable brother,” in residence at another College, whom he used to visit—and to shock. The stock story was that he stayed out all night, and came back to College with the milk, and threatened to report the milkman to the College authorities for neglecting to mix rum with it.

Probably the story was untrue—such stories generally are. It reads like the humorous invention of a “fanfaron of vice.” Of “Shifter’s” actual career at Lincoln there are few authentic records except that he wore plum-coloured clothes, and slopped about the quad in slippers. He might easily, it is said, have been a good scholar if he had been industrious; he was a very tolerable scholar in spite of his lack of industry, as, indeed, were a good many members of the original team driven by the famous “Master” of the pink Sporting Times. But the “Master” showed a good many clever young men how the “fanfaron of vice” could make a living out of the fanfaronade. Goldberg of Lincoln was one of the cleverest of the young men who learnt the “Master’s” cynical lesson. He blossomed into “Shifter,” and his name was more often in the mouths of men than those of many worthier persons.

It is tempting to moralise; but the temptation shall be resisted—or very nearly so. “Shifter” was not, after all, an absolutely unique Oxford product. One can find Oxford parallels and Oxford precedents for his case. There are several precedents in Elizabethan Oxford, among the wits who came to town, and wrote for the stage, and died young as the result of too much tavern life—George Peele of Christ Church, for example. “Shifter” also died young, not, one fears, because the gods loved him, being of the same year as Oscar Wilde, and Mr. A. D. Godley, and Mr. L. R. Farnell, and Dr. Horton, the Hampstead preacher. His appeal, it must be granted, was to the lower elements in our fallen nature; but at least he appealed to them wittily, and not like the vulgarians of the Winning Post. Sit terra levis! One may wish that for him, though one would not wish it for them; and then one may pass on, striking a pleasant note of contrast, to the very different case of John Wesley.

Let us be fair to Wesley. Above all, let us avoid the easy error of supposing that we shall be helped to draw the picture of his manner and deportment by visiting the nearest Wesleyan chapel and listening to any Wesleyan minister who may happen to conduct the service there.

The modern Wesleyan organisation is democratic in a sense in which the Church of England is not. Its ministers are mostly men of the people, fluent but shallow, good biblical scholars but not otherwise highly educated, and lacking in social polish. Their accents are often broad; their gesticulations are often violent; they are skilled in exhorting the lower orders in language which the lower orders understand.

Perhaps that is as it should be; perhaps their limitations are included among the sources of their strength. Their congregations often think so, and say so. One may sometimes hear Wesleyan Church members accounting for their preference for Wesleyan places of worship on the express ground that Wesleyan ministers are not, as they themselves choose to put it, “gentlemen.” The priest of the Church of England, they aver, patronises the artisan and small shopkeeper and keeps them at a distance. The Wesleyan minister treats them as his brothers and sisters, and takes tea with them, in a friendly way, in their back parlours. As the arrangement pleases him, and pleases them, no one else is called upon to criticise it. The matter is only mentioned here for the purpose of removing a possible misapprehension and pointing out that Wesley of Lincoln was not that sort of Wesleyan.

Wesley of Lincoln, who had been at Charterhouse and Christ Church before his election to a Lincoln Fellowship, was a gentleman and a scholar, in the fullest sense of the words. He had as much of the Oxford manner as had been invented in his time, and he was rather a reserved than an effervescent man. One must picture him, to picture him rightly, as a kind of High Church don, of studious habits and ascetic inclinations, a little more anxious than the other dons to enroll undergraduates as his disciples. One finds his closest counterpart in modern times, not in any of the tub-thumpers of any of the denominational tabernacles, but in some of the Canons of Christ Church—say Canon Pusey, or Canon King, or Canon Liddon. He was the kind of man, in short, who, in slightly different circumstances, might have inaugurated, not an evangelical revival, but a Tractarian Movement.

In order to understand him, one has to understand, not only the England, but also the Oxford of the eighteenth century. It is not necessary to enter into the alleged “aridity” of that century; but it is important to remember that it was a century in which spiritual problems were very generally waved aside. And the tendencies of the country as a whole were reflected in an exaggerated shape at Oxford.

Oxford was comfortable, and was taking no thought for the morrow. The dons, being well provided for, liked to sit in coffee-houses and read the papers, indolently jeering at the House of Hanover. It did not occur to them to concern themselves with the salvation of their souls or of the souls of their pupils. It hardly even occurred to them to concern themselves with the education of their pupils. Gibbon’s tutor, remembering that he had a salary to receive but forgetting that he had a duty to perform, was, in spite of the exceptions which can be adduced, a typical don of the date. Indifferentism, in short, was the note; and enthusiasm, at Oxford, was regarded as the abomination of desolation standing where it ought not.

Such was the scene on which Wesley entered. He came from a country parsonage where, in spite of the general trend of theological thought, the lamp of piety had been kept burning. It was more natural to him to work than to be idle, and he was keenly conscious that he had a soul to be saved. He did not quite know how to save it; but he had picked up hints from the writings of Thomas à Kempis, Jeremy Taylor, and John Law. On the whole he was inclined to think that the way of salvation lay in doing as the Churchmen did, only more so, in redeeming the time by industry, and in sedulously observing the ritual prescriptions of the Book of Common Prayer.

He made the acquaintance of a small group of like-minded men. He, and his brother Charles, and George Whitefield (of Pembroke), and James Hervey (of his own College), who was to win fame by meditating among the tombs, and one or two others, formed a Club. The rules of the Club, which was called, in derision, the Holy Club, were merely to the effect that the members must order their lives regularly, discharge all their duties punctually, and receive the Sacrament at appointed intervals. Because they were thus men of method, they were nicknamed Methodists. The name had no more recondite origin than that. The actual thing—the spiritual point of view distinctive of Methodism—was of later date. The young Fellow of Lincoln and “those about” him were only feeling their way to it. Far from being Dissenters, they were better Churchmen than their neighbours; their purpose was not to rouse the country but to rouse the Church.

Wesley, moreover, was, at this date, an Oxonian of the type that clings to Oxford. He could not bear the thought of “going down,” even for the purpose of taking a cure of souls. It was put to him that he ought, for family reasons, to take over his father’s country living; but he raised objections—just the sort of objections which it is natural for an Oxford man to raise. He knew, he said, of “no other place under heaven, save Oxford, where I can always have at hand half a dozen persons of my own judgment and engaged in the same studies.” The sociability, that is to say, of Oxford appealed to him. He enjoyed his position as the sovereign ruler of a small coterie, even though that coterie was unpopular with the rest of the University.

The University, in truth, had no case against the Methodists. If they were zealots, they were not, as yet, schismatics. There was nothing to be said against them except that they rose early, kept regular hours, received the Sacrament as often as possible, visited the prisoners and the sick, and lived economically in order that they might be able to afford to be charitable—proceedings which it must have been exceedingly difficult for other Churchmen to indict. Yet the University did, as a matter of fact, dislike them; and its displeasure was justified by Dr. Johnson, and was manifested in a variety of ways. “They were not fit,” said Johnson, in his robust and ponderous way, “to be in the University of Oxford. A cow is a very good animal in the field, but we turn her out of a garden.” And there were others who said that the conduct of the Methodists was only excusable if it could be assumed that they were mad; others, again, who pelted them with mud when they were on their way to church. It is worth while to remember that it was in the days when Oxford was entirely in the hands of the orthodox that communicants were pelted with mud near the porch of Saint Mary’s Church as a protest against the strictness of their religious observances.

And there we may leave them, for the story of Methodism is much too long a story to be repeated. How Wesley presently ceased to make broad his phylacteries, and suddenly awoke to a sense of the supreme importance of the “inward witness” to the Christian propositions, and founded the vast organisation which numbered 12,000,000 adherents before his death—all this is written in innumerable biographies and need not be re-written here. Here it is enough to indicate the personality of the man: to point out that he was no ranter, but a don on whom Oxford had set its mark—a scholar, quiet, reserved, and dignified, though with an immense fund of strength and energy in reserve. And perhaps one may conclude with a story of his passage of arms with another Oxford man of a very different type—a passage of arms in which his quick wit and dignified demeanour easily won him the victory.

The place was Bath, and the time was near the beginning of Wesley’s missionary journeys. A certain Nash of Jesus was there—the Nash of Jesus whom the world knows as Beau Nash, the King of Bath. The two men met on a narrow pavement, and one of them had to make way for the other.

“I never make way for a fool,” said Nash of Jesus, insolently holding his ground.

“Don’t you? I always do,” replied Wesley of Lincoln, quietly stepping on one side; and the world is agreed that it was Wesley of Lincoln who got the best of that encounter.

And now leaving Wesley, we will evoke the memory of another notable Lincoln man, Mark Pattison, so long the Rector of the College.

Mark Pattison won his Lincoln fellowship from Oriel; and he resembled Wesley in beginning life as a High Churchman. He was Newman’s curate, and, being much attached to Newman, very nearly accompanied, or followed, him into the Church of Rome. He only failed to do so, according to the commonly accepted story, because he missed the train, or the omnibus, or whatever conveyance it was by which he had arranged to travel to the place appointed for his “reception.” While waiting for the next train or omnibus, it is said, he changed his mind and decided to remain, provisionally at all events, a member of the Church of England. Nominally he remained a member of the Church of England until the end; but it was an open secret, confirmed by statements in his “Memoirs,” that he believed in nothing in particular and did not believe very profoundly even in that. He is one of the many men who have been credited with the pregnant saying: “Nothing is new, and nothing is true, but it doesn’t matter much.”

His reasons for not formally quitting the Church in which he had ceased to believe need not detain us. He is said to have said that, as he had taken Orders in good faith, he felt entitled to retain them through all beliefs and none instead of facing an unpleasant alternative; but it shall be left to casuists to estimate the value of that casuistry. The really interesting thing to note is that, in later life, he looked upon the years in which he had been religious in almost exactly the same light as that in which the Methodists of whom we have been speaking looked upon the years prior to their assurance of salvation. He came to think that as a Christian—and more particularly as a Puseyite—he had lived in outer darkness; and he despised, and almost hated, himself for having done so.

“Fanaticism,” he says, “was laying its deadly grip around me.” He speaks of his “fury of zeal” and his “abject prostration of mind” and his “degrading superstition,” and of the “time-wasting and mind-drowning occupation” in which he was involved by his too close attention to his devotional exercises. He adds that he once “got so low by fostering a morbid state of conscience as to go to confession to Dr. Pusey”; and he continues:

“Years afterwards it came to my knowledge that Pusey had told a fact about myself, which he got from me on that occasion, to a friend of his, who employed it to annoy me.”

Presently, however, he began to discover that the Puseyites were “not intellectually equal companions,” and that Newman himself was a man of limited philosophical acquirements—a man to whom “all the grand development of human reason from Aristotle down to Hegel was a sealed book.” So, though there was a struggle—due to “that profound pietistic impression which lay like lead upon my understanding”—reason got its way, and Pattison’s intelligence evolved. There was a day when he called on James Anthony Froude, desiring “to sympathise with his scepticism for the purpose of helping him through it”; but presently he travelled on the same road that Froude had taken, and travelled farther on it. The Tractarian became an Essayist and Reviewer. The Essayist and Reviewer came to regard all religions as vain guesses at the answer of an unanswerable riddle.

He enjoyed, in his later years, one of those great University reputations which, recognised by instinct, and admitted by universal assent, do not require to be based on visible or tangible achievement. It was commonly assumed that he knew everything, not only on his own subject, but on all subjects; also that he had thought out all problems and was only restrained from throwing light on them because he despised his fellow-creatures and resented their impertinent curiosity. He was too much absorbed, in fact, in his thoughts to pay much attention to his duties; and he ended his pilgrimage as a somewhat weird figure—somewhat of an enigma to the old and a formidable terror to the young.

Undergraduates, in particular, were too often the objects of a scorn which he was at no pains to hide. The undergraduates of his own College lived in an agony of apprehension lest he should ask them to go for walks with him; and it cannot be said that their fears were altogether without warrant. He did not speak when walking, but waited to be spoken to; and the consequences of speaking to him were incalculable—not unlike the consequences of trying to make friends with some strange and dangerous wild beast.

There is a stock story of an undergraduate who ventured to break the embarrassing silence by contrasting the irony of Sophocles with the irony of Euripides; but he only discovered that the irony of the Rector of Lincoln was greater than either. “Quote, sir, quote,” was the Rector’s only rejoinder; and as the timorous youth was not prepared with a quotation, nothing further was said, on either side, on any subject, for the remainder of the afternoon. But the undergraduate who confined himself to simple topics which he did understand—the state of the weather, for example—was handled still more roughly. “If that is all you have to say, you are not a very intelligent young man,” was the retort with which the Rector closured him.