Part 2

He began by writing, under an assumed name, to strangers—the most grave and reverend strangers whom he thought likely to reply to him—submitting brief abstracts of Hume’s arguments, and appealing for assistance in rebutting them. If the person to whom he wrote “took the bait,” says Hogg, Shelley “would fall upon the unwary disputant and break his bones.” Once, it is said, by pretending to be a woman, he lured a bishop into controversy, and handled him as the impertinent have delighted to handle the pompous from the beginning of the world. It was splendid fun, he thought, but it would be still better fun if he could “get a rise” out of the Vice-Chancellor, the Proctors, the Regius Professors, and the Heads of colleges and halls. So, Hogg agreeing, he and Hogg put their heads together, and “The Necessity of Atheism” was produced, and advertised in the _Oxford Herald_ of February 9, 1811, and copies of it were posted to several of the dons, “with the compliments of Mr. Jeremiah Stukeley.”

Nor was that all. There was the off-chance that the dons, scenting a practical joke, might ignore the outrage, and Shelley, avid of publicity, was determined to compel them to take notice. So he came down, with a bundle of his pamphlets under his arm, to Messrs. Munday and Slatter’s shop—the very shop in which an indulgent parent had given out that his “printing freaks” were to be encouraged. He wished those pamphlets, he said, to be offered for sale at sixpence each; he wished them to be well displayed on the counter and in the window; in order that the window might be dressed properly, he proposed to dress it himself.

He did so with an obliging readiness which overwhelmed the amiable bookseller’s assistant. In a minute or two “The Necessity of Atheism” was displayed in Messrs. Munday and Slatter’s shop, much as the first number of a new magazine with a gaudy cover might be displayed on one of the railway bookstalls to-day.

It remained so displayed for about twenty minutes; and then the Rev. John Walker, a Fellow of New College, passed the shop, looked into the window to see what new publications had arrived, read the title of Shelley’s pamphlet, and, after being surprised and shocked, was moved to action. He walked into the shop, demanded the proprietors, and gave them peremptory instructions:

“Mr. Munday, and Mr. Slatter! What is the meaning of this?”

“We beg pardon, sir. We really didn’t know. We hadn’t examined the publication personally. But, of course, now that our attention is drawn to it——”

“Now that your attention is drawn to it, Mr. Munday and Mr. Slatter, you will be good enough to remove all the copies of it that lie on your counter and in your window, and to take them out into your back kitchen and there burn them.”

Such was the dialogue, as one can reconstruct it from Mr. Slatter’s recollections, contained in a letter addressed to Robert Montgomery, the poet.

Mr. Walker, of course, had no legal right to give the instructions which he gave. From the strictly legal point of view, he was ordering a man over whom he had no jurisdiction to destroy property which did not belong to him; he would never have presumed to give such orders in, say, Mr. Hatchard’s shop in Piccadilly. At Oxford, however, his foot was firmly planted on his native heath, and Messrs. Munday and Slatter knew it. He might speak to the Vice-Chancellor; and the Vice-Chancellor might forbid undergraduates to deal at their establishment. So they were all bows and smiles and obsequious anxiety to oblige.

“By all means, Mr. Walker. An admirable idea, sir! Just what we were ourselves on the point of suggesting. You may rely on us to carry out your wishes.”

“You will be good enough to carry them out in my presence. I will accompany you to your kitchen for that purpose.”

“That will be very good of you, Mr. Walker. It will be a great honour to our kitchen. Will you please walk this way, sir?”

So the holocaust was effected; and Messrs. Munday and Slatter begged Shelley to call on them, and told him what they had been obliged to do.

“We are really very sorry, Mr. Shelley. We really could not help ourselves. Mr. Walker was so very firm in the matter; and even in your own interest, you know——”

_Et cetera._ There was to be no further publicity for Shelley through the instrumentality of the booksellers; and as no one was likely to trouble about the authorship of an anonymous brochure which had been reduced to ashes, that would have been the end of the matter if Shelley had not circulated his pamphlet through the post. But then he _had_ so circulated it, and the covering “compliments of Jeremiah Stukeley” were very obviously in his hand-writing; and the recipients of the presentation copies, who included every bishop on the bench, were saying that something really ought to be done; and the dons were not only willing but anxious, and not only anxious but eager, to lay hold of the handle which Shelley had given them.

He was a “Stinks Man,” and he was a rowdy man; he made malodorous chemical experiments, and he was impertinent when he was “ragged.” The Senior Common-room was not going to stand atheism or any other nonsense from such a man as that. So Shelley was sent for “with the Dean’s compliments”—those compliments of evil omen—and the rest of the story may best be told in the words of that Mr. Ridley already quoted, who is a less prejudiced witness than Hogg.

“It was announced one morning at a breakfast party towards the end of the Lent Term,” writes Mr. Ridley, “that Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had recently become a member of University College, was to be called before a meeting of the common-room for being the supposed author of a pamphlet called ‘The Necessity of Atheism.’ This anonymous work, consisting of not many pages, had been studiously sent to most of the dignitaries of the University and to others more or less connected with Oxford. The meeting took place the same day, and it was understood that the pamphlet, together with some notes sent with it, in which the supposed author’s hand-writing appeared identified with that of P. B. S., was placed before him. He was asked if he could or would deny the obnoxious production as his. No direct reply was given either in the affirmative or negative.

“Shelley having quitted the room, T. J. Hogg immediately appeared, voluntarily on his part, to state that, if Shelley had anything to do with it, he (Hogg) was equally implicated, and desired his share of the penalty, whatever was inflicted. It has always been supposed that Hogg wrote the Preface.

“Towards the afternoon a large paper bearing the College seal, and signed by the Master and Dean, was affixed to the hall door, declaring that the two offenders were publicly expelled from the college _for contumacy in refusing to answer certain questions put to them_. The aforesaid two had made themselves as conspicuous as possible by great singularity of dress, and by walking up and down the centre of the quadrangle, as if proud of their anticipated fate,”—and, in modern times, they would doubtless have driven to the station in triumph on the roofs of hansoms, escorted by a long procession of uproarious admirers, though, as it was, they went away quietly on the coach.

That is all; for the subsequent picture of Mr. Timothy Shelley, M.P., pursuing his peccant son to his London lodging, sending out for a bottle of port, and reading aloud extracts from Paley’s “Evidences of Christianity” while he drank it, belongs to Shelley’s Life, but not to Oxford history.

* * * * *

Robert Montgomery, of Lincoln, who tried to compensate by the piety of his sentiments for his lack of distinction as a poet, has recorded his opinion that the offenders thoroughly deserved their punishment. “Strange and unnatural as it may appear,” he writes, “there are many in Oxford who think that a University, based on the immortal truths of the Gospel, ought not to license or encourage blasphemy, however gilded by genius.”

No doubt there are many, not in Oxford only but elsewhere as well, who agree that this limitation of the functions of Universities is desirable. The general proposition, at any rate, shall not be disputed here. Jowett himself, an advanced thinker if the Church of England ever included one, appears to have endorsed it when circumstances brought him face to face with an undergraduate who declined to attend chapel on the ground that he did not believe in a God. “If you do not believe in a God by eight o’clock to-morrow morning, you will be sent down,” the Master of Balliol is said to have chirruped on that occasion; and it is difficult to applaud his keen sense of the necessity of discipline and condemn that of the Master of University.

It does not follow, however, that it is necessary to take the grave Robert Montgomery’s solemn view of Shelley’s offence. His case was not that of the conscientious and convinced blasphemer, but rather that of a practical joker who over-reached himself and accepted martyrdom rather than confess that he had been joking. And that, one concludes, was the view of those later dignitaries of the college who permitted the erection of a monument to Shelley within the college precincts—albeit in a dark corner of those precincts, only to be reached by way of an obscure passage which looks as if it led to a coal-hole wherein an unwary visitor would run a serious risk of being arrested and charged with loitering with intent to commit a felony.

BALLIOL COLLEGE

The birching of Robert of Balliol by the Bishop of Durham—He founds a College to make atonement for his fault—Insignificance of the College in early times—Snell Exhibitioners—Adam Smith—His scornful criticism of Oxford—Southey—His introduction to Coleridge of Jesus, Cambridge—Their joint dream of Pantisocracy—College “rags” in the dark days—The dawn of civilisation—Mastership of Parsons—Of Jenkyns—of Jowett—Jowett as tutor—His reforms—His conversation—His sermons—The inscrutable secret which he guarded.

Balliol is the tangible and enduring product of one of the most interesting of the abuses (as Protestants esteem them) of the Roman Catholic religion.

The story begins on the day on which Robert of Balliol—a lord of many lands in the North of England—“got drunk,” as the chronicler puts it, “in a manner unbecoming his station in life,” and insulted the Bishop of Durham. It is resumed on the day on which Robert apologised to the Bishop, and consented to do penance. The Bishop then “birched him in the presence of the populace on the steps of the cathedral,” and sent him forth with a tingling cuticle and an injunction to make amends for his fault by spending money on a benevolent undertaking. So he hired a house for the accommodation of sixteen poor scholars of Oxford, and allowed them eightpence a day each for their expenses. After his death, his widow, the Lady Devorguilla of Balliol, bearing no malice against the Bishop for his treatment of her husband—having reason to know, perhaps, that it had done him good—supplemented the endowment by a further substantial donation.

[Illustration: BALLIOL COLLEGE.

[To face p. 36.]

Such were the picturesque beginnings of the College in the reign of Henry III. Other gifts and legacies enriched its chest from time to time. The Snell Exhibitions connected it with the University of Glasgow. The Blundell Endowment introduced a steady flow of scholars from Tiverton. But the college remained unimportant. Its great period—a period which began under the mastership of Dr. Parsons and culminated under the mastership of Benjamin Jowett—belongs to the nineteenth century. Before that time it has no history worth relating; and the few great men who, by accident, went there to be educated, owed nothing to their tutors, but were left to educate themselves as best they could.

Adam Smith, who was up from 1740 to 1746, was the greatest of them; and, if Adam Smith’s ghost still haunts the Balliol quadrangles, we may be quite sure that it is an ungrateful and a growling ghost.

He was one of the Snell Exhibitioners above-mentioned; and the Snell Exhibitioners of the eighteenth century had a very uncomfortable time. They came from Scotland; and the College took Dr. Johnson’s view of Scotsmen, regarding them as pauper aliens, who ought to be repatriated, and “smugs,” unfit to mix with civilised mankind. The worst rooms in the college were invariably allotted to them by the dons; and their weird accents and barbarous dress were the subject of the ribald mirth of undergraduates.

Things got, indeed, to such a pass, at one time, that the Exhibitioners sent a formal complaint to Glasgow, and Glasgow made formal representations to the Master of the College; but the Master’s answer was unsatisfactory and curt. He said that he did not particularly want the Snell Exhibitioners at Balliol and would raise no objection if they liked to transfer themselves to another college. He even went so far as to suggest that perhaps they would feel more at home at Hertford; and as the hint was not taken, his relations with them continued to be strained.

Such was the tone of the college when Adam Smith’s name was entered on the books. The only friend whom he made there was Douglas, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury, a Snell Exhibitioner like himself. We know little of the circumstances of his career except that he habitually took tar-water as a remedy for “an inveterate scurvy and shaking of the head”; that undergraduates gibed at him for his poverty, exhorting him to gorge himself in the hall on the ground that his long-delayed chance of eating a full meal had come to him at last; and that a don reprimanded him for reading Hume’s “Treatise on Human Nature” and confiscated the pernicious book. It is not much; but it is enough to lead us to expect to find him regarding his University with feelings of disgust and contempt; and there is abundant evidence that he did so.

Adam Smith, indeed, is a far more convincing witness than Gibbon, who was at Magdalen a few years after he had gone down, of the deplorable state of learning at Oxford in the eighteenth century. He was older; he was longer in residence; he was more anxious to learn. But he sought in vain, he says, for “the proper means of being taught the sciences which it is the proper business of these incorporated bodies to teach”; and his generalisation about the college tutors is that “every man consented that his neighbour might neglect his duty provided he himself were allowed to neglect his own.” Moreover he passed one criticism on Oxford which is a delightful variant on a more famous utterance of another Balliol man of a later date.

Oxford, Matthew Arnold has told us, is the home of “lost causes” and “impossible loyalties.” Adam Smith said pretty much the same thing, but he said it very differently, speaking of the most venerable of our seats of learning as “a sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find shelter and protection after they have been hunted out of every corner of the world.” The sentiments are practically identical; and there could be no more charming example of truth changing its aspect as men change their point of view.

* * * * *

The only other name which counts in the annals of eighteenth century Balliol is that of Southey, who was up in 1793.

He was by way of being a reading man; but though the dark ages were almost over and the dawn of civilisation was near at hand, the College did little, if anything, to direct his studies. “Mr. Southey,” said one of his tutors in a burst of candour, “you won’t learn anything from my lectures sir, so if you have any studies of your own, you had better pursue them.”

He did so. He rose at five in order to do so, quickening his diligence with “negus.” One suspects that he must have been drinking negus on the morning of the day on which he went on the river “in a little skiff which the least deviation from the balance would upset,” and “did not step exactly in the middle,” with the result that “the boat tilted up” and its occupant only saved himself from complete submersion by clinging to the side of a barge. The incident does certainly seem to give colour to his reflection that “temperance is much wanted at Oxford,” and that “the waters of Helicon are too much polluted by the wine of Bacchus.”

Nor did the studies pursued under the cheering influence of matutinal negus belong to the ordinary curriculum of the place. Southey neglected his Aristotle. He preferred, he says, “the brilliant colours of fancy, nature, and Rousseau” to “the positive dogmas of the Stagirite”; and though the _Contrat Social_ may serve as a substitute for the “Politics,” the presumption is strong that Southey preferred “_La nouvelle Héloise_” which can by no means be regarded as a worthy alternative to the “Ethics.”

We may let that pass, however; and we may also let pass Southey’s denunciation of the “waste of wigs and wisdom” which he discerned among the dons and the “abandoned excess” which he detected among those undergraduates who did not rise early to drink negus. The importance of Southey’s Oxford career resides neither in these trifles nor even in his refusal to have his hair powdered by the college barber before sitting down to dinner. The most significant thing that happened to him was that he made the acquaintance of a young man from a neighbouring University—Mr. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, of Jesus College, Cambridge, who was introduced to him by a bookseller.

The young Cantab. and the young Oxonian took to each other at once, and proceeded to see visions and dream dreams in concert. Rousseau and the Revolutionists, with their cry of “Back to Nature!” and their belief in the “perfectibility of the human race,” appealed to their imagination and inspired it. The world, they agreed, was weary of the past. Why not escape from it? So they sat in Southey’s rooms at Balliol—no doubt with steaming tumblers of negus on the table—and discussed the ways and means of doing so.

America, of course, was to be the scene of the experiment. They would cross the Atlantic, and settle on the banks of the Susquehanna—how could they fail to be happy on the banks of a river with such a melodious name? Land, they had been informed, was cheap there. An American land agent had offered to sell them some, and had assured them that the danger alike from buffaloes and from mosquitoes was much exaggerated. So they would borrow money, and get married, and go there. They themselves would till the soil, and their wives should “cook and perform all domestic offices.” It would be delightful, Southey thought, “to go with all my friends; to live with them in the most agreeable and most honourable employment; to eat the fruits I have raised, and see every face happy around me; my mother sheltered in her declining years from the anxieties which have pursued her; my brothers educated to be useful and virtuous.”

It came to nothing. The Pantisocracy, as it was to be called, was never formed. Perhaps “the females of the party” did not take so kindly to the idea of cooking and domestic offices—far away from bonnet-shops—as had been expected; and there was, at any rate, the difficulty that the capital required was not forthcoming. But the dream was a generous one and sheds a golden glamour on the closing years of a dark age. Southey, whether one cares about his poetry or not, is the most engaging figure in eighteenth-century Balliol.

The darkness of the dark age at Balliol could be illustrated by many anecdotes of many “rags.” On one occasion the Dean was ragged—though it does not appear that he was put on the bonfire, as once happened, in quite recent times, to the Dean of an adjacent college. On another occasion some Balliol Jacobites celebrated the birthday of Cardinal York by sallying forth into the streets and ragging every notable Hanoverian whom they met, including a Canon of Windsor, and cheering for King James III.—an offence for which, after the Master had let them off with a Latin imposition, they were brought to trial in the Court of King’s Bench, and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour.

It was exploits of that order, and not any idle impulse to play upon words, which first caused Balliol men to be spoken of as Men of Belial. They were of frequent occurrence, and the bad name which they gave the College was not redeemed by any intellectual distinction; but presently, in 1798, Dr. Parsons became Master, and then a memorable change began. Dr. Parsons organised the tutorial system, and cast his vote for throwing Balliol fellowships open to outsiders. He also collaborated with the Provost of Oriel and the Dean of Christ Church in the institution of the Honours Schools, in which firsts were presently taken by two very remarkable Balliol men, Sir William Hamilton, the philosopher, and J. G. Lockhart, the author of the Life of Scott. And then came Dr. Jenkyns.

* * * * *

Undoubtedly Jenkyns was a great man, as much greater than Parsons as Jowett was to be greater than himself. Judging him by results, one is led irresistibly to that conclusion. Yet how he managed to be so great, and to accomplish such results, is a perplexing puzzle; for among all the stories of him which have been preserved there is hardly one in which he does not cut a grotesque and undignified figure.

There is the story, for example, of his encounter with Blaydes of Balliol, who was afterwards to change his name to Calverley. Blaydes, it is said, was taking ladies over the college, and wished to show them all the lions. “That,” he said, pointing, “is the Master of Balliol’s study window”; and he picked up a stone and threw it. The missile went crashing through the glass, and an angry countenance became visible, glaring through the aperture. “And that, I rather fancy,” Blaydes continued calmly, “is the Master of Balliol himself.”

Then there is the story of Jenkyns’s passage of arms with Sir William Hamilton. Sir William, it is related, coming hurriedly out of his room, discovered Jenkyns listening at the keyhole. Furious at this prying curiosity, he clutched the spy by his coat collar, lifted him over the balustrade, and held him howling in mid-air. Then, having terrified him sufficiently, he lifted him back again, and apologised: “Good gracious, sir! I’m so sorry, but I had no idea that it would possibly be you!”

Finally, since there is no room for all the stories, one may recall, on Jowett’s authority, the story of Jenkyns’s comic sermon. He gave out the text, “The sin that doth so easily beset us”; and then he dropped into bathos. “I mean,” he explained in severe and acid tones, “the habit of contracting debts.” The undergraduates looked at each other and wondered. Had the Master actually said this thing, or had he only seemed to say it? They realised, at last, that he had actually said it; and then, for the first and only time in its history, the walls of the College chapel shook with the inextinguishable laughter of an insolvent congregation. It was several minutes, Jowett tells us, before the preacher could proceed with his discourse.