Part 6

So he went his way—another of the prophets, though by no means the last of them, whom Oxford has first cast out with unimpeachable solemnity, and then regretted and made an idol of. No one needs to be told that he is the “Thyrsis” of Matthew Arnold’s famous poem; but a passage from “Thyrsis”—a passage which conjures up the picture of the Honest Doubter taking his honest doubts very seriously, eating his heart out, unable, as yet, to attain to that “Stoic-Epicurean acceptance of life” which was the ultimate philosophy of his friend—may fittingly conclude this section:

“It irk’d him to be here, he could not rest. He loved each simple joy the country yields, He loved his mates; but yet he could not keep, For that a shadow lour’d on the fields, Here with the shepherds and the silly sheep. Some life of men unblest He knew, which made him droop, and fill’d his head. He went, his piping took a troubled sound Of storms that rage outside our happy ground; He could not wait their passing; he is dead.”

And so we leave him, and come to Cecil Rhodes; and it seems as though we had taken a very long journey indeed.

* * * * *

Rhodes went up to Oriel, with some South African experience behind him, in 1873. He rowed for Oriel, in 1873, spent his long vacations at the Cape, and ultimately took a pass degree. To the Dean who warned him that he might be ploughed if he persisted in cutting his lectures, he replied, “Oh, I promise you I’ll manage it. Leave me alone, and I shall pull through.” And the Dean left him alone, and in due course he did pull through. It is also recorded of him that he looked so little like an Oxonian that he was able to deceive even the Proctor. This is the story as he told it:

“The Proctor,” he said, “took off his cap to me with the utmost politeness, and I did the same to him. ‘Well, sir,’ said the Proctor to me, ‘your name and college?’ ‘My name is Rhodes,’ I replied, ‘and I have just come here from the Cape of Good Hope, and am making a short stay in Oxford; and now, sir, may I ask your name and college?’”

Whereupon the Proctor apologised for what he supposed to be his mistake, and Cecil Rhodes escaped unfined.

That is practically the only story that there is to be told of Cecil Rhodes’s undergraduate days; and it would, of course, be superfluous to relate how Oriel benefited by his will. One of the statements in that will, however, was to the effect that he regarded the Oriel dons as “children” in matters of finance; and if a man’s will were the proper place for pleasant anecdotage, he might have illustrated and supported that allegation by an Oriel story.

Once upon a time, it is recorded, the Bursar discovered an inexplicable deficiency in his accounts of something between £1,800 and £1,900. He knew that he had not embezzled the money, but he did not see how his balance-sheet was to be explained to the auditors except on the hypothesis that he had done so. In his distress he took his accounts to the Common-room, and asked his colleagues to check the figures. They did so, pored over them, and could find nothing wrong in them, until, at last, the Provost solved the mystery.

“Good gracious!” he exclaimed. “Don’t you see what you’ve done?”

“No, Mr. Provost, I don’t see any mistake.”

“Why, on the liability side you’ve added the date of the year to the pounds, shillings, and pence!”

QUEEN’S COLLEGE

What little Mr. Bouncer said of Queen’s—The inwardness of his criticism—The boar’s head and the canticle—Another song on the same subject—The Provost and the alarm of fire—The Black Prince at Queen’s—Wiclif at Queen’s—The first of the Oxford Movements inaugurated by his poor preachers—Later times—Jeremy Bentham—Walter Pater.

A Queen’s man observed lounging in the portico of his own College is spoken of by Little Mr. Bouncer in “Verdant Green” as thus “openly confessing his shame”; and the playful criticism doubtless mirrors the public opinion of a period when social distinctions were marked by more outward signs than at present.

There were, and indeed there still are, at Queen’s a considerable number of scholarships and exhibitions tenable only by youths educated at certain specified North Country grammar schools. Religion and sound learning may or may not have flourished in these remote educational establishments, but they certainly were not, in past times, schools of polished manners. Civilisation, as it were, filtered through to them, leaving a good many of its graces in the filter. The undeniable virtues of their _alumni_ were of the rugged order. They asserted themselves in the broad accents of the fells and dales, and, in the matter of dress, they supported the home industries of provinces in which the art of tailoring was in its infancy. Such is the inwardness of Little Mr. Bouncer’s comment, set forth as expressing the view of the “very gentlemanly set of men” of the early Victorian Brasenose.

[Illustration: QUEEN’S COLLEGE CHAPEL.

[To face page 106.]

All that, however, is ancient history. _Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis_, is doubtless the well-warranted reflection of the Queen’s men of to-day. The old traditions which they still keep alive fall under the head, not of manners, but of customs. There is the custom, for instance, of blowing a trumpet to signify that dinner is ready; there is the custom of using the founder’s horn as a loving-cup on gaudy days; there is the Bursar’s custom of presenting every guest, on New Year’s Day, with a needle threaded with silk, and wishing him prosperity in the formula, “Take this and be thrifty.” Finally there is the Christmas Day custom, which never fails to get a paragraph in the papers, of bringing in the boar’s head to the accompaniment of music.

* * * * *

To this last custom, of course, a story is attached, which may or may not be true. A scholar of Queen’s, we are told, went, in the remote past, for a walk on Shotover, and there met a wild boar, which charged him. Instead of running away, he thrust the Aristotle which he was reading down the beast’s throat and choked it; and then he cut off its head and brought it home for supper—an heroic act, emblematical of the triumph of scholarship over brute force, which was duly celebrated in a canticle, still sung every Christmas night in the College hall while the butler is bringing in the delicacy, and running thus:

“The boar’s head in hand bear I, Bedecked with bays and rosemary. And I pray you, my masters, merry be yee, _Quot estis in convivio_.

_Caput apri defero,_ _Reddens laudes Domino._

The boar’s head, as I understand, Is the bravest dish in all the land, And thus bedecked with a gay garland Let us _servire cantico_.

_Caput apri defero,_ _Reddens laudes Domino._

In memory of ye King of Bliss Which on this day to be served is _In Reginensi atrio_.

_Caput apri defero,_ _Reddens laudes Domino._”

Such is the carol which, at Queen’s, links the present with the past; and if any reader desires a more modern song on the same subject, he may find one in “The Oxford Sausage.” It may suffice to quote the last three stanzas:

“So dreadful this bristle-backed foe did appear, You’d have sworn he had got the wrong pig by the ear, But instead of avoiding the mouth of the beast, He rammed in a volume and cried—_Græcum est_.

In this gallant action such fortitude shewn is, As proves him no coward, or tender Adonis, No armour but logic, by which we may find, That logic’s the bulwark of body and mind.

Ye squires, that fear neither hills nor rough rocks, And think you’re full wise when you outwit a fox, Enrich your poor brains and expose them no more, Learn Greek and seek glory from hunting the boar. Derry down, down, down, derry down.”

This boar’s head story is, beyond question, the most picturesque item in the Queen’s annals. In more recent times the College has twice been seriously damaged by fire, and each of the two outbursts invites a marginal comment. One of them originated in the bursary, and was attributed by the wits to the action of the Bursar in cooking the accounts. On the occasion of the other, the Provost nearly perished in the flames as a concession to dignity and decorum. The Fellows and scholars, who had fled into the quadrangle, missed him, and wondered what had become of him. He had, in fact, lingered in the blazing building to complete his toilet. He did not emerge from it, like the others, in his night-gear, but in his wig, and cap and gowns, and bands, and complete ecclesiastical trappings. A magnificent spectacle truly! Having conjured it up, we may turn back and call the roll of the names of which Queen’s is most justly proud.

* * * * *

The eponymous Queen of the College was Philippa of Hainault, the consort of Edward III., whose chaplain and confessor was the founder. It followed, most naturally, that Edward the Black Prince was for a time a student there, though no legends, whether of his studies or his diversions, have been handed down. It was, at any rate, on quite other fields than those of learning that the Black Prince was to win his fame; and the first serious Queen’s man whose reputation really counts is Wiclif.

Queen’s, it is true, has no exclusive claim to him. He was also, for a period, Master of Balliol, and, for another period, Master of Canterbury Hall—an extinct establishment on the site of the present Canterbury Quad, at Christ Church. He is further said, though on doubtful evidence, to have been, for a while, a Fellow of Merton. The brief years, however, during which he occupied rooms at Queen’s were among the most important of his life; for to those years belong the preparation and inauguration of the first of the Oxford Movements.

Personal details are almost entirely lacking—personal details are nearly always to seek in the biographies of the great men of the Middle Ages. It may be that Wiclif was the student who thrust the Aristotle down the throat of the wild boar. It may also be—and, on the whole, it is quite as likely—that he was not. There is no evidence either way, and the probabilities are nicely balanced. But he was, at any rate, the Morning Star of the Reformation. He translated the Bible; he stood up against the Pope; and he called upon the laity to reform the clergy. Nor was that all. He also missed preferment through his zeal, and organised “poor preachers” to spread the light which he had kindled.

Oxford, indeed, was in those days the only available centre for the dissemination of a new idea. The light of Paris had temporarily paled, and the light of Cambridge had hardly yet begun to shine; so that Oxford was the most important of the stages in the pilgrimage of a wandering scholar. Then, if ever, there was reason to hope that what Oxford thought to-day England would think to-morrow. The machinery for bringing this result about existed, and Wiclif set it in motion, “pressing the button,” as we moderns say, in his room at Queen’s. The excesses of disciples who joyously predicted the coming of a day when “priests’ heads would be as cheap as sheeps’” no doubt outran his intentions; but it is worth while, in view of current political conflicts, to note that this first Oxford Movement was the occasion of an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the House of Lords to usurp the privileges of the House of Commons.

The Archbishop of Canterbury proposed, the Lords passed, and the King assented to a law to the effect, broadly speaking, that the “poor preachers” should be arrested wherever found, and locked up in whatever house of detention was most convenient, until they gave such an account of themselves as satisfied Holy Church. The Commons represented that this so-called Statute was not a Statute, since it had not been laid before them. They demanded its withdrawal, and it was withdrawn; the privileges of the Lower House being thus asserted, in the interest of an Oxford Movement, as long ago as 1382.

Already at that date, however, the Movement had had its martyrs. Some Fellows of Queen’s had been expelled as Wicliffites in 1376; and it cannot be said that they had departed in a blaze of glory, for it appears that they had taken with them the common seal, and some jewels and other valuable property belonging not to them, but to the College. That, too, may have been a picturesque proceeding; but the details are obscure, and the subject cannot be discussed with profit.

* * * * *

Wiclif, of course, is eminent not only as a Reformer, but also as a man of letters. His version of the Bible helped, no less than Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” to fix the English language; and so we are led on, by a natural transition, to mention Wycherly, the dramatist, who was also a Queen’s man, and Addison, and William Collins, the poet, who were both tempted by the offer of demyships to migrate from Queen’s to Magdalen, and Tickell, who contributed to Steele’s _Spectator_—Steele himself being a Merton man—and William Mitford, the historian of Greece, and Jeremy Bentham, whose “mark of everlasting light,” being “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” could hardly be said to be “above the howling senses’ ebb and flow,” and Francis Jeffrey, the founder of the _Edinburgh Review_, and Walter Pater, who is more interesting than any of them.

Jeremy Bentham is, perhaps, most memorable as the third of the great trio of Oxonians who have “shown up” the inefficiency of Oxford University teaching in the eighteenth century. The comments of Adam Smith on that branch of the subject have already been quoted; those of Gibbon will have to be quoted presently; those of Bentham, of Queen’s, may as well be quoted now. He learnt at Oxford, he said, nothing except “mendacity and insincerity.” He found his tutor, Joseph Jefferson, morose—“a sort of Protestant monk,” who even forbade him to play the innocent game of battledore and shuttlecock. His lectures, and the lectures of the other tutors also, were “foolish,” teaching only “something of logical jargon”; and Bentham listened even to the law lectures of the great Blackstone, Fellow of All Souls, “with rebel ears.” Moreover, he tells us that he was afraid of encountering ghosts on the solitary staircases of the College.

His own ghost, dreading other ghosts, is indeed one of the gloomiest that one meets at Oxford. The pursuit of the greatest happiness of the greatest number had not, in his college days, begun; and there was but little happiness for “number one.” Bentham went up too young—he was only thirteen; he was kept short of money, and he was badly dressed. “I wish you would let me come home very soon,” he wrote to his father, “for my clothes are dropping off my back”; and happiness is often a shy fugitive when chased by a ragged man in the midst of more fashionably attired companions. Indeed, the one service which Oxford rendered Jeremy Bentham was to cure him of a taste for gambling. “They always,” he says, “forced me to pay when I lost; and, as I could never get the money when I won, I gave up the habit”—a statement which sheds a queerly lurid light upon the conduct of the gamesters of Queen’s in the year 1761. They seem to have bullied this lad of thirteen somewhat in the style of Flashman in “Tom Brown.” We can only pity him, and leave him.

* * * * *

Of Pater, of course, there will be more to be said when we come to Brasenose, where he won his fellowship and made his name. Even at Queen’s, however, where his undergraduate days were passed, he did not fail to make some mark. He was conspicuous, among other things, for ugliness—an ugliness so extreme that it excited the sympathetic attention of his friends, who formed themselves into a Committee to Consider what could be Done for the Improvement of Pater’s Personal Appearance. A suggestion that he should buy a new hat was discarded on the ground that he could not be expected to wear his hat in bed. What was wanted, it was agreed, was an irremovable addition to his features; and the Committee, after taking all available evidence, reported in favour of a moustache. The moustache, when ultimately grown, was at least a palliative. It was no longer necessary for Pater, when examining himself in the mirror, to exclaim that he would give ten years of his life to be better looking. He acquired, according to Mr. Edmund Gosse, the aspect of a benevolent dragon.

His intellectual outlook, however, was already beginning, even in those days, to divide attention with his physical features. He combined a sceptical disdain for the doctrines of the Church of England with an æsthetic sympathy for its ritual; and he made no secret of either the sympathetic or the intellectual attitude. His friends were interested, intrigued, and ultimately excited. They watched his spiritual development, much as Lausanne watched the spiritual development of Sainte-Beuve, when he was lecturing there on the Jansenists, and Vinet was expected to convert him to Protestantism. Some of them even ended by quarrelling with him and renouncing him.

The trouble was that, having gone up to Oxford with a view of taking Orders, he still proposed to take them, in spite of his effaced beliefs. Others had done so, he said, so why should not he? And, suiting the

## action to the argument, he asked the Bishop of London to ordain him.

The Bishop, not being in his confidence, was aware of no reason why he should not do so; but Pater’s friend, McQueen—who is only famous because he was Pater’s friend—resolved to stop the crime. He sought advice on the matter from Canon Liddon, then Principal of St. Edmund Hall; and Liddon’s answer was: “Write to the Bishop of London. You might be able to prevent ordination, and if not you will have delivered your soul.” He did write, and he did prevent ordination; and no doubt it was well, for Pater’s sake no less than for the sake of the Church, that ordination was prevented. Having said that, we will leave Pater until we meet him again at Brasenose.

NEW COLLEGE

William of Wykeham—A self-educated man—His liberality and his elaborate statutes—The College depressed by too much Founder’s kin—“Golden Scholars, Silver Bachelors, and Leaden Masters”—Notable new College men—Sydney Smith—Sir Henry Wotton—Canon Spooner and “Spoonerisms”—Stories of Warden Shuttleworth and others.

William of Wykeham, the founder of New College, was perhaps the greatest pluralist in the history of the Church. Ecclesiastical benefices were heaped upon him in unexampled profusion as the reward for services in no sense of an ecclesiastical character. He served his King chiefly as a Clerk of the Works—or perhaps one should say as a Chief Commissioner of the Works—at Windsor and elsewhere; and the King, instead of paying him an adequate salary, bestowed upon him prebends, canonries, deaneries, and archdeaconries. No fewer than nine prebends were given to him in a single year; he received three more prebends a year or two afterwards. While holding them, he also held at least one deanery and two archdeaconries, as well as several livings; and in the end he became Bishop of Winchester. The story that he established himself in the royal esteem by persuading his niece to become the King’s mistress may be the calumnious invention of a later age; but it is evident, at any rate, that he was more a man of the world than a Churchman, and only found that godliness was great gain because he combined it with other qualities.

[Illustration: NEW COLLEGE CLOISTERS AND TOWER.

[To face page 118.]

He was not himself a University man, but had left school early and entered a notary’s office. Perhaps he was the more deeply impressed with the value of “educational advantages” because he had enjoyed so few of them. There are men who admire learning for that reason, just as there are those who despise it on the ground that it unfits a youth for walking in the wily paths of commerce; and William of Wykeham admired it sufficiently to endow it in the grand style and on a great scale, like the Rockefellers and the Johns Hopkinses of a later age and a newer continent. He endowed Winchester School as well as New College—the former to feed the latter, and “Manners makyth man” to be the motto of both; and he gave his foundation both more elaborate buildings and more elaborate Statutes than any previous college had had, with the result that Wiclif sneered at him as a man “wise of building castles or worldly doing, though he cannot read well his psalter.”

While the Warden of Merton lived in a “lodging” and kept only four horses, the Warden of New College was to keep six horses and have a house to himself. That was one of the founder’s splendid provisions. He also provided that there should be no fewer than five Deans and three Bursars; and he made many minor stipulations which have had an enduring influence upon University development. His sense that his soul stood in sore need of the prayers of the faithful impelled him to prescribe that daily attendance at the chapel services—Masses, of course, in those days—should be compulsory. He believed in a simple and serious life, and therefore forbade his scholars to play games. Not only “wrestlings, dances, jigs,” &c., were forbidden by his regulations, but the prohibition extended to games of “ball” and games of chess; while the interests of morality were safeguarded by the direction that the College laundress should be “of such age and condition that no sinister suspicion can, or ought to, fall on her.” Finally, by enacting that there should be special teaching in the College in addition to the teaching provided by the University, he foreshadowed what is known as the “tutorial system.”

The Statutes, it must be admitted, were, on the whole, in advance of the times in which they were drafted. The founder had clear and, in the main, sound ideas on the subject of educational reform. He understood, for one thing, that classical Latin was better than monkish Latin; and he understood that, in order to shape students as he wished, it was necessary to catch them young. That was the significance of the linked endowment of the College and the School; and no doubt it seemed to William of Wykeham only an act of common justice that, in the selection of recipients of his bounty, a preference should be shown to “founders’ kin.”