Part 14

Having had its day, Saint John’s was never again to be so pre-eminent a college as under Laud’s administration. Intellectually, it was to be surpassed by Balliol; socially it was to be surpassed by Christ Church. The Methodism of the eighteenth century was to have no repercussion within its walls. Ecclesiastically—though Mark Pattison speaks of it as “corroded with ecclesiasticism”—it was never to attain to the interest of Oriel. It fell, in short, with the fall of Charles I., into that place in “the ruck” from which it is given to few colleges to emerge for more than a little while.

One distinction which may be claimed for the days of its obscurity is that, once, it had a soldier for its President. President Mews had attained the rank of captain during the Civil War, and it is related that, while President, he lent the horses from his stable to draw the royal artillery at the Battle of Sedgmoor, and himself not only watched the engagement from the top of a hill, but gave advice as to the tactics—an example which we may expect to see followed by Professor Spenser Wilkinson (whose college was Merton) if ever the necessity should arise.

Another incident which diversified the annals of the College in the latter part of the seventeenth century was a visit from the Dutch Admiral Tromp. He is described by a contemporary as “a drunken greasy Dutchman”; but he did not get drunk alone. A drinking match was arranged by Dr. John Speed of Saint John’s, and five or six others, “as able men as himself.” It is recorded that, though the contest was a severe one, the Oxonians triumphed, and at the close of a merry evening, the ancient mariner was conveyed to his lodgings in a wheelbarrow.

And so forth, there being no other name on which it is necessary to pause until we come to that of Dean Mansel.

* * * * *

Mansel is the divine whom Herbert Spencer claimed for his philosophical ancestor. He had, he said, carried the speculations of Mansel a step further—that was how he had arrived at the agnosticism expounded in “First Principles.” Whether the one philosopher’s conclusions are really deducible from the other philosopher’s premises is a thorny question about which the mere historian may be contented to leave theologians and metaphysicians wrangling. For him it is enough that Mansel was a notable figure—a philosopher whom the average undergraduate of his period forgave freely for being incomprehensible because he was so unmistakably pugnacious.

In his examination for his degree, Mansel distinguished himself by arguing with his examiner, before an admiring audience, and putting him to shame; and Dean Burgon’s “Twelve Good Men” contains a delightful description of the delivery of his controversial Bampton Lectures. He was much too deep, Burgon tells us, for his congregation—not one in a hundred of them understood a word of what he was saying. But they understood, in a general way, what he was about.

“He was, single-handed, contunding a host of unbelievers—some with unpronounceable names and unintelligible theories; and sending them flying before him like dust before the wind. And _that_ was quite enough for _them_. It was a kind of gladiatorial exhibition which they were invited to witness: the unequal odds against the British lion adding greatly to the zest of the entertainment; especially as the noble animal was always observed to remain master of the field in the end. But, for the space of an hour, there was sure to be some desperate hard fighting, during which they knew that Mansel would have to hit both straight and hard: and _that_ they liked. It was only necessary to look at their Champion to be sure that _he_ also sincerely relished his occupation; and this completed their satisfaction. So long as he was encountering his opponents’ reasoning, his massive brow, expressive features, and earnest manner suggested the image of nothing so much as resolute intellectual conflict, combined with conscious intellectual superiority. But the turning-point was reached at last. He would suddenly erect his forefinger. This was the signal for the decisive final charge. Resistance from that moment was hopeless. Already were the enemy’s ranks broken. It only remained to pursue the routed foe into some remote corner of Germany and to pronounce the Benediction.”

Truly there must have been theological giants in the land in those days; and the spectacle must have been even more sublime than that of Tatham of Lincoln contributing to Christian apologetics his famous wish that he might see “all the German critics at the bottom of the German Ocean.” And the curious thing is that, when Mansel was not confounding the Teuton metaphysicians, he was engaged in building himself up a second reputation as the most brilliant punster in the English language. Burgon credits him with the delightful saying—sometimes attributed to Douglas Jerrold—that “dogmatism is the maturity of puppyism”; and Burgon, in fact, fills several pages with Mansel’s puns, setting them forth with a gusto which may partially explain and justify the criticism once passed on Burgon himself, to the effect that “buffoonery was his forte and piety his foible.”

JESUS COLLEGE

Statistics concerning the Joneses of Jesus—A Welsh _enclave_—Rarity of great names at Jesus—Henry Vaughan the “Silurist”—Sir Lewis Morris—Beau Nash—John Richard Green.

The belief currently entertained about Jesus College in the other colleges is that the Principal, the Fellows, the Scholars, and the Commoners—to say nothing of the porter, the cook, and the scouts—are all alike called Jones. It is also generally understood that such Christian names as David and Llewellyn occur too frequently to be of any use for the denotation of individuals, with the result that it is only possible to distinguish a given Jones from other Joneses by means of a reference to his personal idiosyncrasies. “I mean,” people say, “the Mr. Jones who ...” &c.

Legends of that sort, though seldom literally true, are seldom quite devoid of foundation in fact; and the best thing to do is to take a census. It appears from Foster’s “Alumni Oxonienses” that, between 1715 and 1886, there were 716 Joneses at Oxford, and that 299 of them were Joneses of Jesus. Jesus, that is to say, whose just share of Joneses would be one twenty-first, has, as a matter of fact, educated rather less than one-half and rather more than one-third of the total number of Joneses available. Yet, by one of those curious ironies which make life interesting, it so happens that the greatest of the Oxford Joneses—Sir William Jones, to wit—was not at Jesus, but at University, and that the most memorable of the Jesus ghosts are not the ghosts of Joneses, but of a Vaughan, a Nash, a Green, and a Morris, while only one Jones has ever risen to the dignity of Principal.

So much for statistics. They are very interesting, but they do not carry us very far. Our next step must be to picture Jesus—not the present Jesus, of course, but the unreformed Jesus of old times—as a horrible example of the evil (or perhaps it would be better to say the undesirable limitations) of what may be called “hole-and-corner” educational endowments.

Jesus has always been, in a special sense, the Welshman’s college—a Welsh _enclave_, as it were, in the midst of England. Benefactors made it so by confining their benefactions to Welshmen; and one may feel that this was a mistaken policy without speaking disrespectfully of Welshmen—which has always, since Shakespeare’s time, been a dangerous thing to do. The results have been somewhat like those which Matthew Arnold deplored in the case of special schools for the education of the sons of licensed victuallers and commercial travellers. The Welshmen brought their own atmosphere to Oxford and formed their own circle there. Their peculiarities, instead of being toned down, were crystallised; and their many excellent qualities were consequently lost upon Oxford. Men of other colleges gazed at them, as it were, across a social gulf, and regarded them pretty much as they might have regarded Wild Men from Borneo.

Nor did the Welshmen often bridge the social gulf by means of intellectual achievement. They might have done so if they had been fairly representative of Wales; but they were not. Jesus suffered more than almost any other college from the dog-in-the-manger policy of theologians in high places. While the College was the preserve of Welshmen, the University was the preserve of members of the Church of England; and Wales, as all the world knows, is a citadel of Nonconformity. The intellect of Wales, therefore, was not justly represented at Jesus; while the intellect of England, Scotland, and Ireland was hardly represented there at all.

It followed that even the people who regarded the religion at Jesus as “true” could not allow that the learning there was “sound.” Fellowships were frequently awarded to men who had taken only third or fourth-class honours. The scholars could learn no more than the Tutors could teach them; and the list of _alumni_ is singularly lacking in distinction. A list of sixteen bishops can, indeed, be made out—with not a Jones among them; and there have been a good many Cymric lexicographers, Cymric grammarians, and Cymric antiquaries. But such names as a non-Cymric public values are very scarce indeed. Archbishop Ussher—he who computed that the world must have been created in the year 4004 B.C.—had some connection with the College, though the precise nature of that connection cannot be discovered; and then comes Henry Vaughan—the poet who called himself “the Silurist,” because the country in which he lived and worked was the ancient territory of the Silures.

* * * * *

Henry Vaughan is a charming religious poet, with a vein of mysticism. The Reverend Alexander Grosart has written his life in a prose style of his own, which suggests a careful man picking his way across a muddy road in patent-leather shoes. But the life, when written, amounts to very little. Hardly anything is known of the poet except that he began to study law, but afterwards became a country doctor, and practised in Brecknockshire; and the most interesting statement made concerning him is that, when the war between King and Parliament broke out, he suffered a short term of imprisonment as a royalist, but afterwards went home and “followed the pleasant paths of poetry and philology.”

Some will, no doubt, denounce him, on that account, as a poor, mean-spirited person; but there are no known facts on which to base the charge. Fighting, after all, is not an end in itself; and a man may refrain from fighting, not because he is afraid of being killed, but because he does not feel strongly enough to desire to kill the people who do not share his opinions. A mystic, full of the belief that God is manifested in all His creatures—King’s men and Parliament men alike—might well sigh for quiet in the midst of civic storms, and prefer to realise his Pantheism in a lonely place rather than draw the sword and let himself be carried away by evil passions which his heart told him were unprofitable and vain.

The Silurist was, we may take it, a “God-intoxicated” man, and one on whom the intoxication exercised a narcotic rather than an exciting influence: a man, therefore, not to be roused from meditative torpor by the thought that the King’s rights or the people’s liberties were in peril. He could see visions and dream dreams which were worth infinitely more to him than any of the objects of contention between Cavaliers and Roundheads. He not only fancied that he could see—he actually saw:

“Dear, beauteous death! the jewel of the just, Shining nowhere, but in the dark; What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust; Could man out-look that mark!

“If a star were confin’d into a tomb, Her captive flames must needs burn there; But when the hand that lock’d her up gives room, She’ll shine through all the sphere!”

One does not picture the man who wrote those lines galloping about with a sword in his hand and charging with the drunken troopers who followed Rupert of the Rhine. One could not so picture him if one would, and one would not if one could. He was of a finer as well as a more sober temper than any of those roystering men-at-arms; and in his “Retreate” he anticipated Wordsworth’s more famous “Intimations of Immortality.” Perhaps it is not without significance that he and Wordsworth both divined that “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,” and that “Heaven lies about us in our infancy,” in an age in which progress seemed to have called a halt while wild men cut each other’s throats.

All that, however, has nothing to do with the career of Vaughan the Silurist at Jesus; and, indeed, there is nothing to be said on that branch of the subject, except that Vaughan left the University without taking his degree. The only other Jesus poet worthy of remark—one has named, of course, Lewis Morris—not only took his degree, but also took firsts in Moderations and in Greats, and won the Chancellor’s Prize for an essay on “The greatness and decline of Venice,” and would have been elected to a fellowship if he had not been disqualified by the possession of private means. “Perhaps,” writes the official historian of Jesus, “what the College lost the rest of the world may have gained by this disqualification.”

It may be so. Yet Sir Lewis Morris has left it on record that he wrote most of his poetry on the underground railway before it was electrified; and if the atmosphere of Jesus was less inspiring than that of the unreformed District Line, it must have been more uninspiring than that of any of the other colleges. The essential thing is, however, that Morris did write his poetry, and gained his knighthood, and was at one time a possible poet laureate.

He had been much admired. His admirers had, at one time, numbered tens, if not hundreds of thousands; and if the laureateship had fallen vacant then, it would probably have been given to him amid acclamations. It fell vacant too late, however, and was allowed to remain vacant too long to please him. The demand for his poetical services was not vociferous. It even seemed to him that he was the victim of a conspiracy of silence; and he said as much to Oscar Wilde.

“Oscar,” he asked, “what would you advise me to do in the face of this conspiracy of silence?”

“I would advise you to join the conspiracy,” was his brother poet’s cruel reply.

* * * * *

Another—and one may even venture to say an unexpected—Jesus man was Beau Nash, the uncrowned King of Bath: the autocratic dandy who directed the etiquette of the Bath Assembly Rooms, where he ordered Duchesses to take off their aprons and noblemen to take off their boots. All things considered, it seems improbable that Beau Nash was very much like the other Jesus men, or that the other Jesus men were very much like Beau Nash; and it may be added that the example which he set them was not an example which it would have been good for them to follow.

The Beau, like the Silurist, left Oxford without a degree, after having demonstrated, as his biographer, Dr. Oliver Goldsmith of Trinity College, Dublin, puts it, that “though much might be expected from his genius, nothing could be hoped from his industry.” And Dr. Goldsmith continues:

“The first method Mr. Nash took to distinguish himself at college was not by application to study, but by his assiduity in intrigue. In the neighbourhood of every University there are girls who, with some beauty, some coquetry, and little fortune, lie upon the watch for every raw amorous youth more inclined to make love than to study. Our Hero was quickly caught, and went through all the mazes of a college intrigue before he was seventeen; he offered marriage, the offer was accepted, but the whole affair coming to the knowledge of his tutors, his happiness, or perhaps his future misery, was prevented, and he was sent home from college, with necessary advice to him and proper instructions to his father.”

His case, if correctly reported, is a warning to those young men of the present day—supposing that there still are such—who listen to the lure of the siren in the photographer’s shop; but the exactitude of the narrative has been disputed. A contemporary reviewer of Dr. Goldsmith’s work had heard from a Fellow of Jesus that “Mr. Nash, being too volatile to relish the sober rules of a college life, took the opportunity of receiving his quarter’s returns, and went off, leaving a debt behind him of about three pounds eighteen shillings, which remains undischarged on the College books to this day.” Which of the two stories is the true one it is, at this distance of time, impossible to say; but the records which remain of the Beau’s volatility do certainly indicate a manner of life for which a University city was no proper setting.

In the days before he went to Bath and found his _métier_, he earned his living in very curious ways, but chiefly by undertaking, for a wager, to do some ridiculous thing. One of his feats, accomplished from this pecuniary motive, was to strip himself naked and ride through the streets of a village on the back of a cow. That, it will be generally admitted, is a thing which it is better to do in the remote country than in the High, or the Broad, or even the Turl.

* * * * *

Next—and perhaps last—on the roll of Jesus celebrities comes the name of John Richard Green, the historian of the English People; and his debt to Jesus—and even to Oxford—does not seem to have been a heavy one.

His place among the historians is undoubtedly better assured than the place of Lewis Morris among the poets; but as an undergraduate he did not shape so well. Instead of taking first class honours, he only took a pass degree; instead of writing a prize essay, he wrote for a local paper. His tutors thought him idle, and his contemporaries had some reason to complain of him. He was part author of a satire—the “Gentiad,” an imitation of the “Dunciad”—which ridiculed some of the characteristics of Jesus men. This brought him unpopularity, and he passed through Oxford without making many friends.

One good and great friend, however, he did make, almost by accident; and that story may be best told in the words of the Life by Leslie Stephen:

“During his University career Arthur Penrhyn Stanley was Professor of Ecclesiastical History. Green, during his last term, went accidentally into the lecture-room where Stanley was discoursing upon the Wesleys. The lecture fascinated him, and he never missed another. In one lecture Stanley concluded with the phrase, ‘_Magna est veritas et prævalebit_, words so great that I could almost prefer them to the motto of our own University, _Dominus illuminatio mea_.’ As Stanley left the room, Green, who had been deeply interested, exclaimed, ‘_Magna est veritas et prævalebit_ is the motto of the town!’ Stanley was much pleased, invited his young admirer to walk home with him, and asked him to dinner. The day appointed was early in November (1859), and the ‘town and gown’ riots of the period made the passage through the streets rather hazardous. ‘How could you come at all?’ asked Stanley. ‘Sir,’ replied Green in the words of Johnson, ‘it is a great honour to dine with the Canons of Christ Church.’”

The friendship thus formed was of great importance to Green. It put heart into him, as he afterwards told Stanley, at a time when he “found no help in Oxford theology,” and was apparently the influence which stimulated him to the point of taking orders. Afterwards, of course, he found that Oxford theology was not the only theology which puzzled instead of satisfying his intelligence. He had very little of the theological mentality, and he had a severe historical conscience. He could neither believe what he knew to be untrue, nor could he pretend to believe it; and consequently—but that has nothing to do with Jesus College.

* * * * *

And so the Jesus pageant passes—a pageant in which, as we see, the apparently inevitable name of Jones does not appear.

WADHAM COLLEGE

Nicholas and Dorothy Wadham—A miscellaneous list of Wadham men—The story of the great Wadham “Rag”—Wadham Evangelicalism—Stories of Warden Symons—The Wadham Positivists—“Three Persons and no God”—Richard Congreve—Comte, Clotilde de Vaux, and the Positivist schism—The last Oxford Movement—Canon Barnett and Toynbee Hall.

The founders were Nicholas Wadham and Dorothy, his widow. Nicholas accumulated the funds, and Dorothy applied them after his death, at her discretion, in accordance with his wishes. The discreet and delightful Wadham Gardens are said to have been due to her initiative; and she also had the happy thought of exempting Fellows of the College from the disconcerting necessity of taking Holy Orders. Though one knows little else of her, one cannot but be prepossessed in her favour by the beautiful euphony of her name. Mistress Dorothy Wadham—it is a name which falls on the ear like the soft melody of silver bells.

[Illustration: WADHAM COLLEGE.

[To face p. 267.]

The date of the Charter is 1610—an early year in the reign of the comic King who loved learning almost as much as he hated tobacco. Its Jacobean architecture is a serene and perfect poem in grey stone, though the grass in the quadrangle which contrasts so effectively with the grey was added by one of the Wardens at a later time. It seems natural and proper that it should have been the College of the two greatest of the Oxford architects—Sir Christopher Wren and T. G. Jackson. It is also the College of Admiral Blake, Nicholas Love, the regicide, Thomas Sydenham, the physician, Speaker Onslow, the “wicked” Earl of Rochester, Lord Chancellor Westbury, who won his scholarship as a prodigy of fourteen in “jacket and frills,” Dean Church, who, according to Mark Pattison, was elected to an Oriel Fellowship on account of his “moral beauty,” Father Maconochie of Saint Alban’s, Holborn, those great athletes, Messrs. T. A. Cook (now the editor of the _Field_) and C. B. Fry, Mr. F. E. Smith, and many other men of note.

It is of the others that we will speak here, prefacing comment with the remark that Wadham has been successively a Whig College, an Evangelical College, a Positivist College—and also the College of the man who launched the latest of the Oxford Movements, and the College which was the scene of the last of the really historic Oxford “rags.” It may clear the ground if one begins by saying a word about the “rag.”

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The “rag” occurred as recently as 1880; and one must not pretend to disentangle the rights and wrongs of it with the precision of a scientific historian. In a general way, however, one may say that it originated in an attempt on the part of authority to tighten the reins of discipline at a time when pride at success on the river had made the College restive. So first there were skirmishes, and then there was a battle royal.