Part 3

Decidedly it is not in anecdotes such as these that the greatness of Jenkyns comes out. But he took his position as Head of a college very seriously, at a time when most Heads of colleges preferred their wine, their ease, or their theology; and he was an astoundingly good judge alike of a competent tutor and of a clever undergraduate. Hence his success. The Balliol tutors, in his time, were the best. They taught the men, with rare exceptions, instead of worrying them about “movements”; and the Balliol scholarship became, at this time, the blue riband for which the chief public schools most eagerly competed. Presumably it is so still; and it certainly was so when, after the colourless interlude of Scott, Jowett succeeded to the Mastership in 1870.

* * * * *

Jowett’s is the one name of supreme and outstanding consequence in Balliol annals. He was elected to a scholarship there from St. Paul’s School in 1836; he was promoted to a fellowship while still an undergraduate; he became a tutor of the College at the age of twenty-five; he continued to be associated with its fortunes, without a break, until his death in 1893. He not only did more than any other man to make Balliol just what Balliol is; he also aspired, as he said, to “inoculate England with Balliol.”

In that ambition he succeeded, for Balliol under Jowett was a nursery of almost every kind of talent. Perhaps it was weak in divinity—it was a Balliol man, according to the story, who told the examiner that Gamaliel was “a hill at the foot of which Paul was brought up”—but it surpassed all the other colleges in its “output” of statesmen, pro-consuls, professors, and men of letters. Mr. Asquith, Lord Lansdowne, and Lord Peel are Balliol men; so are Lord Milner and Lord Curzon. Balliol has largely staffed the Universities of Scotland. At Jowett’s funeral seven of the pall-bearers were Heads of Oxford houses who had been at Balliol, and the list of Balliol representatives in recent and contemporary literature includes the names of A. C. Swinburne, John Addington Symonds, Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. W. H. Mallock, Mr. J. A. Godley, Canon Beeching, Mr. Anthony Hope Hawkins, and the late G. W. Steevens—“the Balliol prodigy,” as they called him—who became a journalist and succeeded in sounding a new note on the brazen trumpet of the _Daily Mail_. One could easily extend the list, but to what end? We have no need of further witnesses.

Jowett, as the table of results proves, was a great educator, and a great organiser and director of education, but he was also something more than that—a great personality, who fought a hard fight and won it, wearing down opposition and smiling down detraction.

He was not a particularly great scholar. “Hullo! Another howler!” is said to have been the refrain occasionally uttered automatically in his presence by friends to whom he submitted the manuscript of his translations of Plato and Thucydides; and it was maliciously said that his appointment to the Regius Professorship of Greek was a case of the “endowment of research”—a pecuniary inducement held out to him to learn the language. Nor was he a great philosopher, or, in spite of “Essays and Reviews” and the Commentary on the Epistle to the Thessalonians, a great divine. But he was, nevertheless, emphatically a great man, who grew into a great institution. One could not hear of Oxford without hearing of him; one could not live at Oxford without feeling that his presence pervaded it. He was, in the end, the very _genius loci_, and one would no more have spoken disrespectfully of him than of the Equator.

It is said to have been Mrs. Grote who christened him “the cherub.” His bust in the Bodleian certainly looks like the bust of a cherub, and the sound of his voice was like a cherub’s chirp. It gave one the impression of an innocent man who had never known anything of the passionate temptations which distract the young, and for whom all the riddles of the painful earth could be solved, without reference to such passions, by the dry light of intellect alone. He seemed to come down to breakfast from a higher plane of thought—an intellectual tribunal before which his guests were summoned, and from which there was no appeal. He was criticism—as a rule destructive criticism—incarnate. His praise was approbation from Sir Hubert Stanley; his blame could make the cleverest man feel a fool.

It followed that he could not be widely popular. Criticism, especially if it be unemotional, is not very popular as a literary art, and is still less popular as a social accomplishment; and though, if we may believe the biographers, the Master was not really unemotional, he generally contrived to seem to be so, being, in fact, very shy, and very much afraid of his emotions. One may think of him most justly, perhaps, as a man full of the milk of human kindness, but profoundly conscious that milk makes a mess when it boils over, and firmly resolved to prevent that catastrophe by keeping it in a refrigerator. He gave generously out of his later abundance, and with a positive shrinking from advertisement. But he did not suffer fools gladly, and he could even snub the deserving, if they gave him the opportunity, in the knock-down style of Dr. Johnson.

Nor was he an equally sound critic of all kinds of intellectual promise. He divined, for instance, the potentialities of Mr. Asquith, but failed to discern those of Mr. Andrew Lang. “Asquith is sure to succeed, he is so direct,” was his verdict on the former; but to the latter, as Mr. Lang has himself recorded, he tendered the advice: “Don’t write as if you were writing for a penny paper.” And there is a story of a scholar of the eighties, now an eminent teacher of youth, who shall be nameless here, who suffered even more severely at his hands.

It was at breakfast, and the conversation flagged, as it was a little apt to do when parties of undergraduates breakfasted with the Master. The scholar tried to stimulate it by a literary remark which he hoped might give the silent Master something to talk about. “Master,” he ventured, “I have been reading Matthew Arnold’s poems, and I think he is a great poet.” There was a dead silence while the company waited for the Master to follow up the theme. “We all think so, Mr. X.,” he piped in his high treble, and it was felt that he could not have blanketed the conversation more effectively if he had left the room, slamming the door behind him.

“If you have nothing more sensible to say than that, you had better be silent altogether,” is another of his recorded repartees to some one who remarked upon the weather; and one could make a long list of similar retorts of deadly finality behind which the Master entrenched himself. He probably did not know how much they hurt, but fought, not aggressively, but in self-defence, being sensitive, and fearing to be drawn, having a lively recollection of cases in which men had tried to draw him by arguing, in their weekly essays, in favour of atheism or anarchism, or setting any other sort of pitfall into which it would be pleasant to see one in authority stumbling. At all events men seem to have accepted his severe rejoinders in that spirit, and to have had too profound a reverence for his high intellectual standards to resent their rude practical application. If they did not suffer a rebuff from him gladly, at least they suffered it, as something inherent in the mysterious nature of things, something the reason for which might thereafter, if they were patient, be revealed to them.

For Jowett was not only a great man, but also, like most great men, a great enigma. Many wondered, and perhaps no one ever knew, how he reconciled his position with his conscience. He had subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, and then he had disproved them, or a good many of them, and then he had subscribed to them again. He had attached no condition to his second subscription of them except the simple one, “if you will give me a new pen.” There was also a story current, though it is probably untrue, as it is also told of Theodore Hook, of St. Mary Hall, that he offered to sign forty Articles if the signature of thirty-nine did not suffice.

Why did he do these things? What remnant of belief remained to him after he had done them? By what chain of argument was he bound to his office as a clergyman of the Church of England? Those were the problems posed, but he would have been a bold man who ventured to press the Master for the solutions.

His chief interests, at this stage, indeed, were rather practical than speculative. He gave large house parties of people who had succeeded in life. He bought an organ, and arranged for the Balliol Sunday evening concerts. He shortened the chapel services, saying—or so it is said—that if one could praise God adequately in half an hour, it was an absurd waste of time to devote three-quarters of an hour to the proceeding. He allowed Oxford to have a theatre—a thing forbidden by the pious wisdom of the men of old. He quoted “_sat prata biberunt_,” and negotiated for the drainage of the Oxford swamps.

He also preached, of course, and his sermons were always interesting, and sometimes pleasingly satirical, as when he smote Renan and Farrar with a double stroke, expressing his desire to read a Life of Christ which should be neither “sentimental” nor “picturesque”; but it could hardly be said that they settled the vexed question of his personal attitude towards the creeds which he recited without taking them too seriously or the formulæ which he manipulated with a sort of spiritual sleight-of-hand.

Possibly he argued that, as no clergyman ever believed all the Articles of the Christian Faith, one clergyman had as good a right as another to pick and choose among them. Or he may have felt that for a man to quit the Church merely because he had demonstrated some of its propositions to be erroneous was as ridiculous as for a doctor to take down his brass plate merely because he had discovered a new treatment of a disease at which the old-fashioned practitioners shook their heads. But, if that was his view, he never uttered it, preferring to go his own way, possessing his own soul and guarding his own secret.

One could almost see him guarding it; so that our last glimpse may be of a quaint-looking little old man in evening dress trotting through the parks in that unusual costume on a Sunday afternoon: an arresting figure, with venerable white hair, a beautifully fresh pink face, and the seal of inscrutable mystery on his forehead.

MERTON COLLEGE

Antiquity of Merton—The model of subsequent foundations—Friction between the University and the town—The great “town and gown row” of 1354—The scholars of Merton save the University—The wardenship of Sir Henry Savile—The visit of Queen Elizabeth—Oxford during the Civil War—Queen Henrietta Maria at Merton—How Merton ceased to be a reading college—Scandalous proceedings in the gardens—Mandell Creighton and Lord Randolph Churchill.

Though in this work, as in the Oxford University Calendar, Merton stands third among the colleges, there is a sense in which the first place may be claimed for it. Both University and Balliol got their endowments at a slightly earlier date, but Merton was the first College to be launched, in 1264, a year before the meeting of the first English Parliament, as a self-governing corporation.

The bequest of William of Durham, which resulted in the foundation of University, was in its origin merely a pension fund, and John of Balliol, in the first instance, only paid for the support of scholars in a hired house. Walter de Merton, on the contrary, began at once to build and to legislate, and his Statutes were the model of the Statutes of subsequent foundations, not only at Oxford, but at Cambridge also. The founder of Peterhouse, the first of the Cambridge colleges, expressly decreed that the Peterhouse students were to live according to “the rule of the scholars of Merton at Oxford.”

It follows that the history of Merton is more closely connected than that of any other college with the earliest turmoils—which were many; and the historian of Merton may properly begin with a glance at those brawls which a later civilisation came to know as “town and gown rows.”

* * * * *

Discord between the town and the University began as soon as the University became important and powerful, and it owed its origin, not to incompatibility of temper between undergraduates and bargees, but to the mutual jealousies of conflicting jurisdictions, ill-defined and therefore liable to clash. Nowadays, of course, the object of the authorities on both sides—the police on the one hand and the proctors on the other—is to keep the peace between the combatants. In the Middle Ages the seniors were as pugnacious as the juniors, and joined as ferociously in the affrays.

Theoretically it was the function of the town to prevent, or punish, breaches of the peace by townsmen, while the University had a similar responsibility with regard to breaches of the peace by gownsmen; but when townsmen and gownsmen fell out, each authority resented the interference of the other. That was one cause of friction, and further friction occurred in connection with disputed points of sanitation and hygiene. The gownsmen objected to the sale of stinking fish and to the brewing of beer from water contaminated by sewage; the townsmen thought the objection fastidious, and were very angry when the University appealed to the King to interfere with these time-honoured customs. Hence constant bickerings, and a frequent exchange of abusive language; hence ultimately open war and that bloody Battle of Saint Scholastica’s Day, in which the townsmen found the scholars of Merton their most formidable foes.

The trouble began in a tavern, on February 10, 1354. Some scholars who were drinking there found fault with the wine, and the vintner said that it was quite good enough wine for them. The scholars then threw the wine at the vintner’s head, and the vintner called his friends and neighbours to the rescue. They rang the bell of the Church of Saint Martin at Carfax, and the populace, summoned by that tocsin, shot at the scholars with bows and arrows. The Chancellor of the University—the Lord Curzon of Kedleston of his epoch—appeared upon the scene, ingeminating peace where there was no peace, and he also was shot at. Then the bell of the University Church of Saint Mary began to ring, and the gownsmen gathered, and the _mêlée_ became general and lasted until the setting of the sun. No one was killed; the gownsmen got the best of it, and the Chancellor supposed that the riot was over. He issued a proclamation bidding the scholars go to their lectures as usual on the following day.

They went, but found the townsmen lying in wait for them. Reinforcements—two thousand peasants carrying an ominous black flag—had swarmed into the city from Cowley, Headington, and Hinksey. The Carfax tocsin pealed out a second time, just after the dinner hour, and the tocsin of Saint Mary’s responded as before. The townsmen, with their bucolic allies, not only assailed the scholars in the streets, but pursued them into their lodgings, inns, and halls, beating down the doors with improvised battering-rams, killing all the gownsmen they could catch, and stealing or destroying all the property that they could lay their hands on.

The Friars came out, carrying their huge crucifix and chanting their Litany, to try to compose the strife, but their intervention was in vain. They themselves became the objects of the popular fury, and one scholar was struck down even while clinging to the crucifix. Other scholars were followed into the churches and massacred at the foot of the altar. Dead bodies were flung on to dunghills, the wounded were hailed to prison, and even torture was not spared. “The crown of some chaplains,” says the chronicler, “viz., all the skin so far as the tonsure went, these diabolical imps flayed off in scorn of their clergy.”

At last the University could resist no more. The gownsmen began to flee into the country—all save the scholars of Merton. These had their solid walls behind which they could retire. Withdrawing to their college, while the town triumphed without—the sole representatives of learning in a deserted city which the Bishop had laid under an interdict—they waited for the day of vengeance and redress of grievances.

It came. The King sent down a special commission to investigate the matter. The Mayor of Oxford and his bailiffs were sent to prison; the sheriff was removed from office; and presently the town was further humiliated by the bestowal of fresh privileges upon the University authorities. They thenceforward, and not the townsmen, were to decide whether fish stank, and if they decided that it did, they were to send it to the hospital for the consumption of the sick. In addition to this privilege, they were to receive pecuniary compensation for the damage done in the riot, and their supremacy was in various other ways established on a firm constitutional basis.

Merton, that is to say, saved the University at an hour when, but for Merton, the townsmen would have wiped it out, and its clerks would have been dispersed over the face of the country.

* * * * *

As Merton was, through the scenes above described, the first college to be interesting, so, too, it was the first college to rise to conspicuous dignity, and enjoy the glories of a golden age. The supreme position achieved by Christ Church towards the end of the eighteenth and by Balliol in the middle of the nineteenth century, was won by Merton in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, under the Wardenship of Sir Henry Savile, and at the time when the founder of the Bodleian Library was a Fellow of the College.

It may be that Savile’s name has not echoed down the corridors of time quite as loudly as the names of some other Oxford men; but it is kept alive by the Savilian Professorships, and one may fix his position fairly well by saying that he was at once the Jowett and the Liddell of his generation. He was, that is to say, a great scholar and a great teacher; a great innovator and a man of great personal prestige; a link between the academic world and the world of action; the sort of man whom kings delighted to honour. Elizabeth honoured him, and so also did James I.

It was Savile who entertained Elizabeth on her visit to Oxford in 1592. He presided over the disputations held in her honour in Saint Mary’s Church, and delivered a ringing panegyric on her reign with the inevitable reference to the British triumph over the Armada: “_Tuis auspiciis Hispania Anglum non vidit nisi victorem, Anglia Hispanum nisi captivum_.” It was after enjoying his hospitality at Merton that her Majesty, as she rode away, paused on Shotover, and “looking wistfully towards Oxford,” said: “Farewell, farewell, dear Oxford! God bless thee and increase thy sons in number, holiness, and virtue!”

Elizabeth furthermore made Savile Provost of Eton—an office which he held concurrently with the Merton Wardenship. She gave him the office in spite of the fact that the Statutes reserved it for clergymen, and that Savile was a layman. He suggested to her Majesty that Statutes could not bind a sovereign, and her Majesty agreed with him, and it was while he was Provost of Eton that he entertained James I. and was made a baronet.

The Fellows of Merton of those days were already far removed from their early condition of “poor scholars.” They could hold their own at Court, and were well qualified to serve their country as ambassadors. Elizabeth sent one Merton man as Ambassador to Madrid, and another to Venice, Switzerland, and France; but the College did not lose touch with learning because it had gained touch with affairs. Sir Thomas Bodley, as all the world knows, returned from his travels to found the library which bears his name, and Savile assisted in the preparation of the Authorised Version of the Bible, produced an edition of St. Chrysostom which cost him £8,000, and founded the Professorships of Geometry and Astronomy in order that the multitude might no longer think “that the most useful branches of Mathematicks were spells and her professors limbs of the devil.”

He is said to have been a “very severe governor”—one whose students “hated him for his austerity.” He preferred the plodding and persevering to the brilliant. “If I would look for wits,” he said, “I would go to Newgate. There be the wits.” And there is a story of his own assiduous devotion to his studies, which probably illustrates the attitude of a good many homely wives towards learned husbands.

“He was so sedulous,” we read, “at his study that his lady thereby thought herself neglected, and coming to him one day as he was in his study, saluted him thus: ‘Sir Henry, I would I were a book too, and then you would a little more respect me.’ Whereto, one standing by replied, ‘Madam, you must then be an almanack, that he might change every year.’ Whereat she was not a little displeased.”

Those were the great days; but the times were to be more exciting when the Civil War broke out, and Oxford, after the battle of Edgehill, became the Royalist headquarters, garrisoned by the royal troops, surrounded by fortifications which townsmen and gownsmen helped to build, and beleaguered, more or less—at first rather less than more, but finally rather more than less—by the Parliamentary forces under Fairfax, who threw a bridge over the Cherwell, near Marston, and mounted a battery on Headington Hill.

One cannot pause to tell that story at length, or draw that picture in detail; but a stray fact or two will indicate what Oxford in general and Merton College in particular then looked like.

Soldiers were, of course, encamped wherever there was room for them. The New College cloisters were turned into an arsenal, and a powder factory was established at Osney. New Inn Hall was the mint at which the College plate was being melted down and coined into money. A line of earthworks ran from Folly Bridge across Christ Church Meadows. Parliament—the Royalist section of Parliament, that is to say—met in the House of Convocation. Prisoners of war were stowed away, and very nearly starved, in the castle in which Queen Maud had once been beleaguered by King Stephen. Charles I. held his Court at Christ Church, and Queen Henrietta Maria held hers at Merton, the two royal apartments being connected by a secret passage.

It followed, therefore, that Merton was the centre of the light side of war. The Warden, Nathaniel Brent, was a Parliamentarian, and was absent,

## acting as Judge-Marshal in the Parliamentary Army; William Harvey, of

Caius College, Cambridge, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, was thrust into his place; and Merton, having accepted him under protest, lived joyously, doing its best to entertain the Queen and her ladies, who, on their part, did their best to be gracious to Merton. “_Tota Academia morbo castrensi afflicta_” is one Mertonian’s summing up; but that is a grumbler’s unkind way of putting it.