Part 15

A bonfire seems, as usual, to have been the first overt act; and the lighting of a bonfire on the grass—that beautifully kept Wadham grass—is an act no more to be condoned by the historian than by the dons. The answer to it—surely a justifiable answer—was the prohibition of the annual College Concert. But then tempers were lost, and fur began really to fly. The wrath of the junior members of the College was vented upon “Unbelieving Dick”—a don so called because he professed himself sceptical of the articles of the Christian Faith. There was a sudden irruption of youth, flown with insolence and wine, into Unbelieving Dick’s apartments at the dead of night. Unbelieving Dick had no power to eject his visitors, and no time to dress in order to receive them. He fled, it is related, across the quadrangle in his night-shirt—for none, in those days, wore pyjamas—pursued with missiles and howls of execration.

Things, it was evident, could not be allowed to rest there. The ring-leaders must be discovered and an example must be made. An appeal to them to surrender themselves, however, met with no response; and the dons presently engaged the services of a detective. The detective was himself detected, and was severely punished under the pump. It only remained for the dons to play their last card and send the whole College down. They did so. Wadham, in the Autumn Term of 1880, was a howling wilderness, with only a few freshmen in residence—a sorrowful spectacle indeed for Dorothy Wadham, if she looked down on it from another world. The rehabilitation of the College, though since fully accomplished, was only a gradual process.

And now we will leave the rag, and speak of the religious (and irreligious) history of Wadham.

* * * * *

Religion, as has been said, appears at Wadham chiefly in the form of Evangelicalism. The College was the stronghold, or the hotbed—whichever be the better word—of Evangelicalism in the fiery days of the Tractarian Movement. Warden Symons, who ruled over it from 1831 to 1871, appears to have conformed, so far as a scholar could, to the type which one associates with missionary meetings, tea, hassocks, and well buttered crumpets. His wife held prayer meetings in the drawing-room, and kept a “missionary cow,” the proceeds of whose milk—supplied to undergraduates at specially high terms—were allocated to the propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts. He himself altered the hour of the services in the Wadham Chapel for the express purpose of preventing his young men from attending Newman’s sermons at Saint Mary’s. On one occasion he knocked at the door of Newman’s retreat at Littlemore and asked if he might be shown over the monastery. “We have no monastery here,” was the reply; and the door was slammed in his face.

The Warden’s scorn of ceremonial observance was illustrated by his manner of receiving the contents of the collection plate at the Communion Service. It was his habit simply to shovel the money into his pocket and walk off with it; and this brusque and indecorous proceeding naturally furnished the basis of a legend. The Warden, it was said, had annexed the offertory as a perquisite of his office, and exhorted undergraduates to generosity in order to gain his private ends. “Gentlemen,” he was reported to have said, “must really give a little more liberally; I have been quite out of pocket by the last two or three collections.” It was not true, of course; but it served him right. Every Warden becomes the hero of the myths that he deserves. And, no doubt, it was largely in consequence of the saponaceous slovenliness of Wadham religion that, whereas the serious undergraduates of other colleges went over to Rome, the serious undergraduates of Wadham, and the serious dons too, went over to Paris and joined Comte in erecting Temples of Humanity on the ruins of the Temples of God.

* * * * *

Those were the days in which it was said that Wadham was governed by a Trinity consisting of Three Persons and No God; but the three persons in question are differently identified by different cynics. The names of Richard Congreve, Edmund Spencer Beesley, and Mr. Frederic Harrison are those most commonly mentioned; but Mr. Harrison has stated, in an autobiographical note, that he did not definitely adopt the Positivist Religion until some years after he had gone down. It does not matter—or, at all events, it does not matter very much. Wadham, in fact, has harboured several generations of Positivists, so that there generally have been at least three heads there which the caps fitted, right down to the time of the Unbelieving Dick whose misadventures have been referred to; and they all acknowledged Richard Congreve as their spiritual father.

He was a Rugby boy who acted, for a time, as a Rugby Master. His case may be taken as a fresh exemplification of that “moral seriousness” of which Rugby boasts. The beliefs in which he had been brought up slipped away from him; but he continued to respect the sacred impulse of the human heart which impels people to dress in their best and go somewhere to be edified on Sundays. Just as Comte had arranged for them to do so in Paris, so he arranged for them to do so in Lamb’s Conduit Street; and so, at a later date, Mr. Frederic Harrison arranged for them to do so in Fetter Lane. Really intellectual people, he felt, having passed beyond theology and beyond metaphysics, might nevertheless kneel to Humanity—that abstraction of what was noblest in their noblest selves—and invoke Saints carefully selected from

“The choir invisible Of the immortal dead who live again In lives made better by their presence.”

At a later date there was to be trouble among the Positivists—an outburst of heresy, schism, and dissent. Comte, it turned out, was not the easiest Master for rational and self-respecting disciples to follow blindly. He had been in a lunatic asylum and was supported by the voluntary offerings of the faithful. Fully persuaded that he who preached the gospel was entitled to live by the gospel, he solicited contributions and quarrelled with subscribers whose contributions seemed to him inadequate. Moreover, being separated from his wife, he fell in love with a lady who had been separated from her husband, and insisted upon incorporating his romance in his religious system. The worship of Humanity in general might, he claimed, be most happily symbolised by the specific worship of Clotilde de Vaux.

His relations with Clotilde de Vaux were, his biographers tell us, “pure.” No doubt they had his word for it, and perhaps they also had hers; but that detail cannot have mattered much to any one except the philosopher and his affinity. To be called upon to worship another man’s affinity, whatever the precise nature of his relations with his affinity, is always a strain upon devout allegiance. It proved so in this instance. There was a split, broadly speaking, between the Positivists who had a sense of humour and the Positivists who had none; but we need not enter into the rights and wrongs of the disruption. Enough to note the fact, and to note also that, so far as England is concerned, Positivism has been an Oxford Movement which Wadham has practically monopolised.

* * * * *

This brings us to the last of the Oxford Movements, with which Wadham is also very definitely associated—the Social Movement which succeeded the Æsthetic Movement, in or about the year 1884.

Something has already been said about it in the Magdalen chapter which related the æsthetic collapse. The principal thing to be added here is that the man who had most to do with the launching of it was Barnett of Wadham, who had taken a Second in History in 1865, and was then the incumbent of Saint Jude’s, Whitechapel.

Other forces were, indeed, indirectly at work. Sir Walter Besant’s advocacy of a People’s Palace in “All Sorts and Conditions of Men” was one. Mr. George R. Sims’s tract entitled “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London” was another. Here, at all events, were the elements of stir, if not of movement in the narrow sense—the vague suggestion that “something ought to be done,” and that the people who had culture owed a debt of some sort to the people who were trying to get along without it. Barnett of Wadham, with many earnest helpers from other colleges, focussed the Movement at Oxford in a memorable speech delivered in the Union Debating Hall.

The only hope for the East End of London, it was then laid down, was for Oxford men to colonise it. They alone, or almost alone, possessed the secret of culture. A number of them, therefore, must settle there, and set good examples, illuminating Whitechapel by their shining influence. Forthwith they jumped at the idea, and carried it out, almost in the twinkling of an eye. Toynbee Hall was the result, and Barnett of Wadham, now Canon Barnett, was its first Warden.

Oxford, in those days, was, it must be admitted, a very serious University indeed—as serious a University as even the Rugby men could have wished to see it. Even unbelievers took to going to church, and gravely envisaged the question whether a lack of belief was really a sufficient excuse for not taking Holy Orders. The _Oxford Magazine_ became the ponderous organ of the seriously minded, and, for a season, no sermon was too tedious to be reported verbatim in its columns, until one day there appeared a protest in the shape of a rhymed letter to the editor:

“Mr. Editor, surely some lightness of touch Would be not unbecoming your famed magazine. Of lectures and sermons you give us too much; Toynbee Hall gets to pall, and I _loathe_ Bethnal Green.”

The author of those lines was Mr. Quiller Couch of Trinity, whom the world knows as “Q.” The immediate effect of them was to clear the air at Oxford; though Mr. Barnett’s Oxonian procession continued to carry the lamps of culture down the Mile End Road, with results which, according to the latest reports, are eminently satisfactory.

PEMBROKE COLLEGE

Broadgates Hall—Its illustrious and fashionable _alumni_—The Hall becomes Pembroke College—Dr. Johnson at Pembroke—He rags the servitors and argues with the dons—His “spirited refusal of an eleemosynary supply of shoes”—He shows Hannah More over the College—George Whitefield at Pembroke—His relations with the Methodists and his religious excitability.

In the eyes of the average visitor to Pembroke, one fact outweighs all other facts in importance. Pembroke was the college of Dr. Johnson. It is much more profitable to tell a visitor that than to dwell on the circumstances in which Pembroke College grew out of the earlier Broadgates Hall.

Broadgates Hall, it is true, had cut a considerable figure in the early social history of Oxford. Christ Church men who could not be accommodated in the House often had rooms there—a fact which the modern Christ Church men should remember when they are tempted to their traditional gibe: “Is that Pembroke? I always thought that was where the Christ Church coals were kept.” John Pym, too, the great Parliamentary leader, was at Broadgates Hall; and the Hall was “a nest of singing birds” long before the greatest of her sons claimed that distinction for Pembroke. George Peele, Francis Beaumont (of the Beaumont and Fletcher combination), and Sir Fulke Greville were all poets of Broadgates Hall; but it is not easy to arouse the curiosity of the visitor concerning them. He keeps most of his curiosity for Dr. Johnson; and if he has any curiosity left over, he bestows it upon George Whitefield, the Methodist preacher.

Let us consider Dr. Johnson first.

* * * * *

Johnson went up in 1728; but his career was brief—about fourteen months from start to finish. Carlyle says he was a servitor; but he was, in fact, a commoner. A friend who offered him financial help did not fulfil his promise. His father fell into financial difficulties, and he had to go home, leaving his caution money to defray his dues.

Old Michael Johnson brought him up, and took him to call upon his tutor. He astonished the common-room, after a modest silence, by interjecting a quotation from Macrobius, thus proving himself to be precocious and well-read, though he was not to turn out to be the sort of model scholar whom the donnish mind approves. Laziness was to be his besetting vice through life. He was already lazy while an undergraduate; and he shared with many men of meaner intelligence a disposition to cut his lectures, and to excuse himself on grounds which the lecturers could not but regard as inadequate. Of the Christ Church man it has been written by an Oxford humourist that “he goeth not to lectures, for he saith: ‘How can a man lecture in bags cut like that?’” Johnson was guilty of a more outspoken rudeness. Summoned to account for his absence from the classroom, he explained that he had been skating on Christ Church meadows. Fined for his neglect of the obligation, he said: “Sir, you have sconced me twopence for a lecture that was not worth a penny.” And the biography continues:

“BOSWELL: That, Sir, was great fortitude of mind.

“JOHNSON: No, Sir; stark insensibility.”

He was poor; but the picture of his poverty has sometimes been overdrawn. His account for battells, which remains in the College archives, shows that he had enough to eat and drink, and that, in that important respect, at all events, he lived on the same scale as the majority of his compeers. Nor did his lack of means compel him to an isolated and unsociable existence. He joined with the other commoners in ragging the servitors whose duty it was to knock at the doors of commoners and ascertain whether they were in their own rooms at the appointed hour. He hunted them down the stairs, it is recorded, “with the noise of pots and candlesticks”; and there are contemporary recollections which show him to have been somewhat of a leader of men.

“I have heard,” wrote Bishop Percy, “from some of his contemporaries, that he was generally to be seen lounging at the College Gate with a circle of young students round him, whom he was entertaining with wit, and keeping from their studies, if not spiriting them up to rebellion against the College discipline, which in his maturer years he so much extolled. He would not let these idlers say ‘prodigious’ or otherwise misuse the English tongue.”

Dr. Adams, too, then a tutor, and afterwards Master of the College, told Boswell that Johnson, as an undergraduate, was “a gay and frolicsome fellow,” and was “caressed and loved by all about him”; but Boswell proceeds:

“When I mentioned to him this account, he said: ‘Ah, Sir, I was mad and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for frolick. I was miserably poor, and I thought to fight my way by my literature and my wit; so I disregarded all power and all authority.’”

Very likely, however, that recollection was coloured by later memories of the struggle for bread in Grub Street. Between the manifestations of bitterness and frolic the average undergraduate can, as a rule, discriminate; and Pembroke was not a rich man’s college. The pangs of poverty only became intense when Johnson crossed the road to Christ Church, to see his friend Taylor. Then contrast made him conscious of his shabbiness. As Boswell writes:

“Mr. Bateman’s lectures were so excellent that Johnson used to come and get them at second hand from Taylor, till his poverty being so extreme that his shoes were worn out, and his feet appeared through them, he saw that this humiliating circumstance was perceived by the Christ Church men, and he came no more. He was too proud to accept of money, and somebody having set a pair of new shoes at his door, he threw them away with indignation.”

This “spirited refusal of an eleemosynary supply of shoes,” as Boswell calls it, is the best known of all the stories of Johnson’s Oxford career; but there is no evidence that the memory of the incident mortified him in after life. He never vilified Oxford, as did Gibbon and Adam Smith. On the contrary he was always proud to remember that he was an Oxford man; he spoke very highly of the tutors whose instruction he had neglected; and he delighted to revisit the University in his prosperous and famous period. We have a graphic account of one such visit from the pen of Hannah More:

“Who do you think is my principal cicerone in Oxford? Only Dr Johnson! And we do so gallant it about! You cannot imagine with what delight he showed me every part of his own College, nor how rejoiced Henderson looked to make one of the party. Dr. Adams had contrived a very pretty piece of gallantry. We spent the day and evening at his house. After dinner Johnson begged to conduct me to see the College; he would let no one show it me but himself. ‘This was my room; this Shenstone’s.’ Then, after pointing out all the rooms of the poets who have been of his College, ‘In short,’ he said, ‘we were a nest of singing-birds. Here we walked, there we played at cricket.’ He ran over with pleasure the history of the juvenile days he passed there.”

That may be, indeed, the language of a man whose undergraduate days had been passed in poverty; but it assuredly is not the language of a man whose poverty had made life unbearable in the manner which Carlyle suggests. Johnson, it is hardly to be doubted, enjoyed himself at Oxford as much as his constitutional tendency to melancholia ever permitted him to enjoy himself anywhere; and one may even conjecture that the condition of his shoe-leather was as much due to untidiness as to indigence. To find a Pembroke man who was really poor, and really miserable and morbid, we have to turn to the case of that eminent Methodist divine, the Reverend George Whitefield.

* * * * *

Whitefield came up just after Johnson had gone down; and there was one interesting link between them—a link which also associates them with that eminent Magdalen man, the historian of the Roman Empire. They both read, and were affected by, Law’s “Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life”; and Law had been tutor to Gibbon’s father and was to end his days as a sort of domestic chaplain to one of Gibbon’s aunts. It is curious to observe how differently his exhortations influenced the minds of the three men.

Gibbon devotes a good deal of space, in his Autobiography, to Law’s “theological writings which our domestic connection has tempted me to peruse”; and he holds the scales with a rigid impartiality. Law’s “sallies of religious frenzy,” he says, “must not be allowed to extinguish the praise which is due to Mr. William Law as a wit and a scholar.” He thinks that, “had not his vigorous mind been clouded by enthusiasm, he might be ranked with the most agreeable and ingenious writers of the times.” His conclusion is that:

“If he finds a spark of piety in his reader’s mind, he will soon kindle it to a flame; and a philosopher must allow that he exposes, with equal severity and truth, the strange contradiction between the faith and practice of the Christian world.”

Gibbon, that is to say, looks at Law solely with the eye of a literary critic, damns him with faint praise, but leaves his propositions unexamined as childish conceptions which he has long since put away, and does not propose to be concerned with any more. His tone is that of a head-master who praises, while he corrects, a set of Latin verses. Johnson read the book, expecting it to afford him ribald amusement, but was “over-matched” by it, and even frightened by it some distance along the road which leads to religious mania. Whitefield read it with real Methodistical enthusiasm.

* * * * *

About the Oxford Methodists in general enough has already been said in the chapter on Lincoln; but Whitefield is of sufficient importance to be detached from the group and considered separately.

He was not the originator of the movement, though he came to be a force in it. The Wesleys were several years his seniors, and had set Methodism going before he came into residence. But though he was their disciple he was hardly of their type. They were scholars, gentlemen, and organisers. He was a man of the people, half-educated, brought up in the tap-room of his mother’s inn, a religious demagogue, a rhetorician, whose mouth, foaming with sanctimonious phrases, suggests the froth on the tankards of his mother’s beer. The dignity which compels even those who differ from the Wesleys to respect them was entirely wanting in Whitefield. He emerged from his humble station with the defects of his origin clinging to him, and he never shook them off. It is impossible to think of him as a man whom one would have liked to know at Oxford. It is, indeed, difficult to think of him as anything but mad.

His position at Pembroke was that of a servitor; and he was the exaggerated type of the “pi-man” of his period. He had no joy in his youth, and no power of concealing his abject terror of hell-fire. He made himself conspicuous about it; it is not too much to say that he made himself ridiculous. Here are a few extracts from his own admissions on the subject:

“I always chose the worst sort of food, though my place furnished me with variety. I fasted twice a week. My apparel was mean. I thought it unbecoming a penitent to have his hair powdered. I wore woollen gloves, a patched gown, and dirty shoes.”

“Satan used to terrify me much, and threatened to punish me if I discovered his wiles. It being my duty, as servitor, in my turn to knock at the gentlemen’s doors by ten at night, to see who were in their rooms, I thought the devil would appear to me every stair I went up. And he so troubled me when I lay down to rest that, for some weeks, I scarce slept above three hours at a time.... Whole days and weeks have I spent in lying prostrate on the ground and begging for freedom from those proud hellish thoughts that used to crowd in upon and distract my soul.”

“It was suggested to me that Jesus Christ was among the wild beasts when He was tempted, and that I ought to follow His example; and being willing, as I thought, to imitate Jesus Christ, after supper I went into Christ Church walk, near our college, and continued in silent prayer under one of the trees for near two hours, sometimes lying flat on my face, sometimes kneeling upon my knees, all the while filled with fear and concern lest some of my brethren should be overwhelmed with pride. The night being stormy, it gave me awful thoughts of the day of judgment. I continued, I think, until the great bell rung for retirement to the College, not without finding some reluctance in the natural man against staying so long in the cold.”

And so forth. All things considered, it is not surprising that the “polite students,” as Whitefield calls them, laughed, and even “threw dirt,” or that his tutor advised him to take medicine. Academic authorities are seldom sympathetic towards undergraduates who, as Whitefield did, neglect their studies for their devotions—presumably because the religious uneasiness of their pupils seems to them a reflection on their own assured composure.