Part 7

But he did not foresee. Or perhaps it would be juster to say that he foresaw, and provided for, too much. The world moved, and New College could not move with it because it was tied up and entangled. The restrictions on the diversions of the students did not, of course, matter much. They could be, and were, ignored, when it was recognised that they were obsolete and unprofitable. The limitation of the choice of students to a narrow field, and the provision of an income for them for life whether they worked or were idle, had more pernicious consequences. It condemned New College, in spite of the magnificence of its buildings, to insignificance in the life of the University; and it now makes the task of the historian in search of interesting _alumni_ an extremely hard one.

Nowadays, let it be ungrudgingly admitted, New College is prosperous and successful. Its scholars, and also its Fellows, have distinguished themselves in many ways, and have won particular distinction in the highest walks of journalism. Mr. Buckle, the editor of the _Times_, was a scholar of New College, and so was Mr. E. T. Cook, who successively edited the _Pall Mall Gazette_, the _Westminster Gazette_, and the _Daily News_. Mr. W. L. Courtney, whose signature is familiar to every reader of the _Daily Telegraph_, was a Fellow; as was also Viscount Milner, a journalist before he became a pro-consul. In literature, too, the College has been represented by Lionel Johnson—one of the most subtle and delicate poets of our generation, though one whose course was brief like that of Young Marcellus.

But all those names are modern names, occurring subsequently to the cutting of the entanglement by the University Commissioners. To plunge into the past is to plunge into a very different state of things. We quickly get back to a time when it was justly said of New College that it had “golden scholars, silver bachelors, and leaden masters”—a time when the College was famous, not for its output of learning, but for its consumption of negus. There was once a dispute as to the comparative merits of the negus of New College and of All Souls; and a jury of Queen’s and Brasenose men who were invited to decide the question gave a unanimous verdict in favour of the New College recipe. Balliol, where Southey drank so much negus, was not in the competition.

The notable New College names in this dark age, and in the ages hardly less dark which preceded it, are names which mean little to the University and less to the community at large. There are the names of some respectable divines among them, and even the names of some more than respectable bishops—two, for instance, of the seven who stood up against James II; but there is hardly a single name which burns like a beacon; as does, say, the name of Shelley at University, or the name of Dr. Johnson at Pembroke.

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There is Sydney Smith; but of his Oxford career hardly anything is known except that he had to get through it on an allowance of £100 a year, and consequently could not afford to play his part in the dissipations of the day. He took his degree a year before Southey came into residence at Balliol, “got into debt to buy books,” and formed such a poor opinion of his _alma mater_ that he never, throughout the remainder of his life, ceased to sneer at her. When, for example, the Honours Schools were instituted, he wrote:

“If Oxford is become at last sensible of the miserable state to which it was reduced, as everybody else was out of Oxford, and if it is making serious efforts to recover from the degradation into which it was plunged a few years past, the good wishes of every respectable man must go with it.”

And when he heard that a lady of his acquaintance was sending her son to Oxford, his comment was:

“I feel for her about her son at Oxford, knowing, as I do, that the only consequences of a University education are the growth of vice and the waste of money.”

On which the only reasonable comment is that, if Sydney Smith had been at another college, he might have written less vituperatively.

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Another name which arouses some, though only a mild, interest is that of Sir Henry Wotton, the diplomatist, who ended by becoming Provost of Eton. He was not on the foundation, but was a gentleman commoner—though few gentlemen commoners were permitted to enter at New College—and it may be hoped that he behaved better there than he did afterwards, when he lived, for a while, in the house of Isaac Casaubon, at Geneva. He was the great scholar’s “paying guest”; and he not only went away without paying, but pledged his host’s credit for the horse on which he took his departure. Casaubon ultimately got the money, but not until he had written to nearly every classical scholar in Europe to expose Wotton’s outrageous behaviour.

For the rest the stories which centre around New College are mainly about celebrities whose celebrity is purely local. It would be possible, of course, if reverence did not forbid, to speak at some length on the alleged Spoonerisms of Canon Spooner; but most of those stories are probably untrue. It cannot be true, for instance, that Canon Spooner, at a dinner-party inadvertently stuck his fork into the white hand of the lady sitting next to him, murmuring, “Excuse me, I think that is my bread.” It is still less credible that Canon Spooner, when a lady of his family was seeing him off at the railway-station, gave the lady sixpence in mistake for the porter, and kissed the porter in mistake for the lady. And who believes that Canon Spooner, setting out to propose the health of “our dear old Queen,” found himself proposing the health of “our queer old Dean” instead? The trail of the mythmaker is over all these anecdotes; and indeed it is said that the fabrication of “Spoonerisms” is a favourite undergraduate diversion on Sunday afternoons.

An earlier Warden, Dr. Shuttleworth, is famous for a remarkable poem which he composed while a Winchester boy—an Address to Learning, which ends with the often-quoted lines:

“Make me, O Sphere-descended Queen, A Bishop, or at least a Dean.”

His prayer was answered, and he became Bishop of Chichester, and, in that capacity, made Manning an Archdeacon. He was, however, an opponent of the Ritualists, and so formidable a one that his death was saluted by Pusey as “a visible token of God’s presence in the Church of England”; whence it appears that Pusey worshipped a God whom he believed to be capable of killing off Broad Churchmen in order that High Churchmen might be spared the embarrassment of meeting them in controversy.

A few stories of Shuttleworth, and a few other stories of other New College notables of the same generation, may be found in Mr. Tuckwell’s entertaining “Reminiscences of Oxford.” There is the story, for instance, of Lancelot Lee, the incumbent of the College living of Wootton, near Woodstock.

“Coming out of church one day, he found two disreputable vagabonds in the churchyard.

“‘What are you doing here?’

“‘Oh, sir, we are seeking the Lord.’

“‘Seeking the Lord, are you? Do you see those stocks? That is where the Lord will find you if you stay here another minute.’”

Then there is the story of Christopher Erle, who held a living in Buckinghamshire, in the immediate vicinity of Lord Rothschild’s estate. It seemed to Erle, as it has since seemed to Mr. Lloyd George, that it was possible to have “too much of Lord Rothschild,” and he suppressed him:

“It was Erle’s whim to dress carelessly; and the plutocrat, walking one day with a large party and meeting his Rector in the parish, had the bad taste to handle his sleeve and say, ‘Rather a shabby coat, Parson, isn’t it?’ Erle held it up to him—‘Will you buysh? Will you buysh?’ There ensued an _exitus Israel_, and Erle walked on, chuckling and victorious.”

But perhaps the most characteristic of the stories is that of the highway robbery:

“Some men were going to the Abingdon ball; and in the common-room the conversation turned on a highway robbery recently perpetrated near Wheatley. The ball-goers talked valiantly of their own courage, contemptuously of brigand dangers; their fly was announced, and off they drove. Coming home, they were stopped in a dark part of Bagley Wood by two masked men, one of whom held the horses’ heads, while his mate pointed a pistol into the fly with the conventional highwayman’s demand. Meekly our gallant travellers surrendered money, watches, jewellery. One pleaded for a ring which had belonged to his old mother; the deceased lady was consigned to Tartarus, the ring was taken, and the marauders rode away. Great commiseration was shown to the victims when they told their tale, great activity displayed by the police; until on going into Hall the next afternoon, they saw lying in a heap on the centre of the high table the abstracted valuables, including the maternal ring, while mounting guard over them was a broken candle-stick which had done duty as a pistol. The two practical jokers had ridden to the wood, tied their horses to the trees, waited for the travellers, and played the wild Prince Poins.”

And so forth; for all the best New College stories are stories of that sort—stories of which the heroes are jesters or eccentrics rather than men of light and leading. The future, no doubt, will be much richer in intellectual glory; but the College has had but a short time in which to assert itself since the University Commissioners released it from William of Wykeham’s Statutes.

LINCOLN COLLEGE

A small College with many outstanding names—Mr. D. S. MacColl and his Newdigate—“Shifter” of the “Sporting Times”—A reminiscence of “Shifter”—John Wesley and the Methodists—Wesley’s meeting with Beau Nash of Bath—Mark Pattison—His early connection with the Tractarians—His abandonment of superstition—His great learning—His treatment of undergraduates.

For a small College—and it has always been one of the smallest—Lincoln is associated with a goodly list of outstanding names, notable in very diverse departments of endeavour. Mr. D. S. MacColl, of the National Gallery, is, perhaps, the most distinguished of its recent representatives. He won the Newdigate; and is said to have won it, as Dean Burgon did, by the supreme merit of a single line. Burgon’s striking line was, as all the world remembers:

“A rose-red city—half as old as time.”

To do full justice to Mr. MacColl’s line one must also quote the few lines which precede it:

“But better still, in slumber-slanting ease, To be beside the falling of the seas, To listen and to listen till the tune Of all the life of all the afternoon Deepens to one note of a long distress— _The monotone of everlastingness_.”

To quote Mr. MacColl, however, is to begin at the end. There are earlier names which also scintillate with varying degrees of brilliance, and make their appeal to hero-worshippers of various temperaments. The most remarkable are those of John Wesley, “Ideal” Ward, more commonly associated with Balliol, where he held a fellowship until his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Mark Pattison, Lord Morley, Cotter Morrison, and “Shifter.”

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It was a question, earnestly considered, whether “Shifter” should be mentioned in these pages. The question was finally put to a representative assemblage of literary men—only a minority of them from Oxford; and the answer was unanimously in the affirmative. The name of “Shifter,” it was agreed, was by no means to be treated as if it had been “writ in water.” If it had ceased to be a household word, at any rate it was remembered. His case was interesting, if only because he had arrived at fame by a road not commonly travelled by modern Oxford men; and there were those, it was felt, who would learn, with a sort of scandalised astonishment, that “Shifter” was once Goldberg of Lincoln.

The present writer once met “Shifter,” and discovered that the vogue of his pseudonym filled him with genuine pride. The meeting-place was a printing office in the purlieus of Fleet Street. A diminutive man of rather drowsy manner was sitting at the end of a long, bare table, engaged in slow and careful literary composition. An impatient boy was carrying off the sheets of his copy as he finished them. He looked up with affability, yet with an air of self-importance, at the new arrival, and introduced himself. “You know who I am, don’t you?” he said. “I’m ‘Shifter.’ I’m writing the Office Boy’s Diary”; and there followed an invitation to partake of refreshment with him, after his task was concluded. The invitation was accepted, and there ensued some talk of Oxford—a place which, in those rather sordid surroundings, seemed very far away.

Oxford, in fact, used to figure, from time to time, in “Shifter’s” contributions to the sporting press. He liked to describe himself as the _enfant terrible_ returning to the respectable bosom of _alma mater_ and creating a sensation there. He spoke, in particular, of a “respectable brother,” in residence at another College, whom he used to visit—and to shock. The stock story was that he stayed out all night, and came back to College with the milk, and threatened to report the milkman to the College authorities for neglecting to mix rum with it.

Probably the story was untrue—such stories generally are. It reads like the humorous invention of a “fanfaron of vice.” Of “Shifter’s” actual career at Lincoln there are few authentic records except that he wore plum-coloured clothes, and slopped about the quad in slippers. He might easily, it is said, have been a good scholar if he had been industrious; he was a very tolerable scholar in spite of his lack of industry, as, indeed, were a good many members of the original team driven by the famous “Master” of the pink _Sporting Times_. But the “Master” showed a good many clever young men how the “fanfaron of vice” could make a living out of the fanfaronade. Goldberg of Lincoln was one of the cleverest of the young men who learnt the “Master’s” cynical lesson. He blossomed into “Shifter,” and his name was more often in the mouths of men than those of many worthier persons.

It is tempting to moralise; but the temptation shall be resisted—or very nearly so. “Shifter” was not, after all, an absolutely unique Oxford product. One can find Oxford parallels and Oxford precedents for his case. There are several precedents in Elizabethan Oxford, among the wits who came to town, and wrote for the stage, and died young as the result of too much tavern life—George Peele of Christ Church, for example. “Shifter” also died young, not, one fears, because the gods loved him, being of the same year as Oscar Wilde, and Mr. A. D. Godley, and Mr. L. R. Farnell, and Dr. Horton, the Hampstead preacher. His appeal, it must be granted, was to the lower elements in our fallen nature; but at least he appealed to them wittily, and not like the vulgarians of the _Winning Post_. _Sit terra levis!_ One may wish that for him, though one would not wish it for them; and then one may pass on, striking a pleasant note of contrast, to the very different case of John Wesley.

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Let us be fair to Wesley. Above all, let us avoid the easy error of supposing that we shall be helped to draw the picture of his manner and deportment by visiting the nearest Wesleyan chapel and listening to any Wesleyan minister who may happen to conduct the service there.

The modern Wesleyan organisation is democratic in a sense in which the Church of England is not. Its ministers are mostly men of the people, fluent but shallow, good biblical scholars but not otherwise highly educated, and lacking in social polish. Their accents are often broad; their gesticulations are often violent; they are skilled in exhorting the lower orders in language which the lower orders understand.

Perhaps that is as it should be; perhaps their limitations are included among the sources of their strength. Their congregations often think so, and say so. One may sometimes hear Wesleyan Church members accounting for their preference for Wesleyan places of worship on the express ground that Wesleyan ministers are not, as they themselves choose to put it, “gentlemen.” The priest of the Church of England, they aver, patronises the artisan and small shopkeeper and keeps them at a distance. The Wesleyan minister treats them as his brothers and sisters, and takes tea with them, in a friendly way, in their back parlours. As the arrangement pleases him, and pleases them, no one else is called upon to criticise it. The matter is only mentioned here for the purpose of removing a possible misapprehension and pointing out that Wesley of Lincoln was not that sort of Wesleyan.

Wesley of Lincoln, who had been at Charterhouse and Christ Church before his election to a Lincoln Fellowship, was a gentleman and a scholar, in the fullest sense of the words. He had as much of the Oxford manner as had been invented in his time, and he was rather a reserved than an effervescent man. One must picture him, to picture him rightly, as a kind of High Church don, of studious habits and ascetic inclinations, a little more anxious than the other dons to enroll undergraduates as his disciples. One finds his closest counterpart in modern times, not in any of the tub-thumpers of any of the denominational tabernacles, but in some of the Canons of Christ Church—say Canon Pusey, or Canon King, or Canon Liddon. He was the kind of man, in short, who, in slightly different circumstances, might have inaugurated, not an evangelical revival, but a Tractarian Movement.

In order to understand him, one has to understand, not only the England, but also the Oxford of the eighteenth century. It is not necessary to enter into the alleged “aridity” of that century; but it is important to remember that it was a century in which spiritual problems were very generally waved aside. And the tendencies of the country as a whole were reflected in an exaggerated shape at Oxford.

Oxford was comfortable, and was taking no thought for the morrow. The dons, being well provided for, liked to sit in coffee-houses and read the papers, indolently jeering at the House of Hanover. It did not occur to them to concern themselves with the salvation of their souls or of the souls of their pupils. It hardly even occurred to them to concern themselves with the education of their pupils. Gibbon’s tutor, remembering that he had a salary to receive but forgetting that he had a duty to perform, was, in spite of the exceptions which can be adduced, a typical don of the date. Indifferentism, in short, was the note; and enthusiasm, at Oxford, was regarded as the abomination of desolation standing where it ought not.

Such was the scene on which Wesley entered. He came from a country parsonage where, in spite of the general trend of theological thought, the lamp of piety had been kept burning. It was more natural to him to work than to be idle, and he was keenly conscious that he had a soul to be saved. He did not quite know how to save it; but he had picked up hints from the writings of Thomas à Kempis, Jeremy Taylor, and John Law. On the whole he was inclined to think that the way of salvation lay in doing as the Churchmen did, only more so, in redeeming the time by industry, and in sedulously observing the ritual prescriptions of the Book of Common Prayer.

He made the acquaintance of a small group of like-minded men. He, and his brother Charles, and George Whitefield (of Pembroke), and James Hervey (of his own College), who was to win fame by meditating among the tombs, and one or two others, formed a Club. The rules of the Club, which was called, in derision, the Holy Club, were merely to the effect that the members must order their lives regularly, discharge all their duties punctually, and receive the Sacrament at appointed intervals. Because they were thus men of method, they were nicknamed Methodists. The name had no more recondite origin than that. The actual thing—the spiritual point of view distinctive of Methodism—was of later date. The young Fellow of Lincoln and “those about” him were only feeling their way to it. Far from being Dissenters, they were better Churchmen than their neighbours; their purpose was not to rouse the country but to rouse the Church.

Wesley, moreover, was, at this date, an Oxonian of the type that clings to Oxford. He could not bear the thought of “going down,” even for the purpose of taking a cure of souls. It was put to him that he ought, for family reasons, to take over his father’s country living; but he raised objections—just the sort of objections which it is natural for an Oxford man to raise. He knew, he said, of “no other place under heaven, save Oxford, where I can always have at hand half a dozen persons of my own judgment and engaged in the same studies.” The sociability, that is to say, of Oxford appealed to him. He enjoyed his position as the sovereign ruler of a small coterie, even though that coterie was unpopular with the rest of the University.

The University, in truth, had no case against the Methodists. If they were zealots, they were not, as yet, schismatics. There was nothing to be said against them except that they rose early, kept regular hours, received the Sacrament as often as possible, visited the prisoners and the sick, and lived economically in order that they might be able to afford to be charitable—proceedings which it must have been exceedingly difficult for other Churchmen to indict. Yet the University did, as a matter of fact, dislike them; and its displeasure was justified by Dr. Johnson, and was manifested in a variety of ways. “They were not fit,” said Johnson, in his robust and ponderous way, “to be in the University of Oxford. A cow is a very good animal in the field, but we turn her out of a garden.” And there were others who said that the conduct of the Methodists was only excusable if it could be assumed that they were mad; others, again, who pelted them with mud when they were on their way to church. It is worth while to remember that it was in the days when Oxford was entirely in the hands of the orthodox that communicants were pelted with mud near the porch of Saint Mary’s Church as a protest against the strictness of their religious observances.