“E’en Balaam’s ass
If he could pay the fee, would pass,”
sang the poet. Lecturers ceased to lecture; Readers did not read. In many colleges scholars succeeded to fellowships almost as a matter of course, and tutors were as slow to enforce, as “Gentlemen Commoners” would have been swift to resent, any study or discipline as part of the education of a Beau or Buck. Though Oriel produced Bishop Butler, for Oxford was still the home of genius as well as of abuses, the observance of religion dwindled down to a roll-call. And corrupt resignations of fellowships, by which the resigning fellow nominated his successor, in return for a fee, were paralleled in the city by wholesale corruption at elections. The mayor and aldermen in 1768 even had the effrontery to propose to re-elect their representatives in Parliament for £7500, the amount of the municipal debt! This bargain, in spite of a reprimand from the Speaker and a committal to Newgate for five days, they succeeded in striking with the Duke of Marlborough and Lord Abingdon.
For the rest, it was the age of periwigs and patches, of coffee-houses and ale, of wine and common rooms, of pipes and newsletters, of a University aping the manners of London and Bath in Merton College Gardens or the race-course of Woodstock.
Bucks and Bloods were succeeded by the Smarts, whose beautiful existences Terræ Filius has described for us. Called by the servitor at six, they tumbled out of bed, their heads reeling with the last night’s debauch, to attend a chapel service. For the habit of early rising was still in vogue, and though a Smart might rise late, his lateness seems early to us. For it was held disgraceful to be in bed after seven, though carried there over-night drunk but not disgraced. But the Smart’s breakfast was scarce over by ten; a few notes on the flute, a glance at the last French comedy, and in academic undress he is strolling to Lyne’s coffee-house. There he indites a stanza or a billet-doux to the reigning Sylvia of the town; then saunters for a turn in the park or under Merton wall, while the dull regulars, as Amherst has it, are at dinner in hall according to statute. Dinner in his rooms and an hour devoted to the elaborate business of dress, and the Smart is ready to sally forth in silk-lined coat with laced ruffles at breast and wrist, red stockings and red-topped Spanish leather shoes, and laced hat or square cap most rakishly cocked. So emerging from his rooms, with tripping gait and jaunty dangle of his clouded amber-headed cane, he is about to pay a visit to the coffee-house or parade before the windows of a Toast when he stops to jeer at some ragged servitor of Pembroke, a Samuel Johnson perhaps, going round shamefacedly in worn-out shoes to obtain second-hand the lectures of a famous Christ Church tutor, or a George Whitefield, wrestling with the devil in Christ Church walks, or hesitating to join the little band of Methodists who, with Charles and John Wesley of Christ Church and Lincoln at their head, are making their way through a mocking crowd to receive the Sacrament at S. Aldate’s, S. George’s in the Castle or S. Mary’s.
But the Smart cares for none of these things. Sublimely confident in his own superiority he passes on; drinks a dram of citron at Hamilton’s, and saunters off at last to chapel to show how genteelly he dresses and how well he can chaunt. Next he takes a dish of tea with some fair charmer, with whom he discusses, with an infinite nicety of phrase, whether any wears finer lace or handsomer tie-wigs than Jack Flutter, cuts a bolder bosh than Tom Paroquet, or plays ombre better than Valentine Frippery. Thereafter he escorts her to Magdalen walks, to Merton or Paradise gardens; sups and ends the night, loud in song, deep in puns, put or cards, at the Mitre. Whence, having toasted his mistress in the spiced cup with the brown toast bobbing in it, he staggers home to his college, “a toper all night as he trifles all day.”
Meantime certain improvements were taking place in the city. Under the Commissioners Act (1771) the streets were widened and paved, and most of the walls and gates removed—Bocardo along with them. Turnpike Roads and the Enclosures Acts led to the disappearance of the highwaymen, by whom coaches, ere railways took the place of the “flying coach,” which first went to London in one day “with A. W. in the same coach” (1669), had so frequently been held up near Oxford. Curiously enough highwaymen were most popular with the fair sex, and the cowardly ruffians occasionally returned the compliment so far as to allow them to ransom their jewels with a kiss. Dumas, the prince of highwaymen, after capturing a coachful of ladies, was satisfied with dancing a coranto with each in turn upon the green. He was executed at Oxford. He had maintained his nonchalance to the end; played “Macheath” in the prison, and threw himself off at the gallows without troubling the hangman. It was not death, he declared, but being anatomised that he feared. And, lest their hero should be put to so useful a purpose, a large body of bargemen surrounded the scaffold, carried off the body in triumph to the parish church and buried it in lime forthwith.
At length, after the Age of Reason and Materialism, came the Age of Revival and Romance. The spirit of mediævalism summoned up by Sir Walter, was typified in Oxford architecture by Sir Gilbert Scott and Pugin. In the University the beginning of a new order of things, which was to end in throwing open the Universities to the whole Empire and rendering them on every side efficient places of education, was begun in 1800 by the system of Honours Lists, long advocated by reformers like John Eveleigh of Oriel and brought into being by the energy of Cyril Jackson, Dean of Christ Church, and Parsons, Master of Balliol. The work of nationalising the Universities was developed by the two University Commissions and by that “Extension” movement, of which the pioneer was William Sewell, a remarkable tutor of Exeter, who, in 1850, urged that “It may be impossible to bring the masses to the University, but may it not be possible to carry the University to the masses?” This development of the University, which must ever be closely connected with the name of Dr Jowett, Master of Balliol, and has received a further significance from the last testament of Cecil Rhodes, of Oriel, is illustrated on every side by new buildings; by the Indian Institute, the Nonconformist colleges, Mansfield and Manchester, the Women’s Halls, the Science Buildings and the new foundation of Hertford College, grafted on that of old Hart Hall and Magdalen Hall by Mr Baring. Intellectually the spirit of revolt produced by the French Revolution at the beginning of this period, is illustrated by the careers of Shelley and Landor, and the musical lyrics of Swinburne; the deep questionings prompted by the Tractarian Movement are voiced in the poems of Clough, Keble and Arnold. For in the first half of the nineteenth century there was a revival of spirituality, and men followed the lead, not of a Wycliffe, an Erasmus or a Wesley, but of Keble, Pusey and Newman. Oriel College, whose fellowships were confined neither to members of the college nor, in most cases, to candidates from certain places, was the centre whence men like Hurrell Froude, Keble’s pupil, preached their doctrine of reaction; men who, finding the Church of England in a very parlous state, counselled a return to what was best in mediævalism, and, protesting against the Protestantism of the English Church, taught Newman to look with admiration towards the Church of Rome. The name of Keble and the impulse which he gave to Anglicanism are commemorated in Keble College; the prominence of the chapel, which contains Holman Hunt’s “Light of the World,” and the arrangement of the buildings emphasise the fact that it was founded to provide the poorer members of the Church of England with higher education on Church lines.
The revival of mediævalism in Religion was echoed by a revival of mediævalism in Art. John Ruskin, who had matriculated at Christ Church in 1836, lectured intermittently as Slade Professor of Art from 1870 till 1884. William Morris, “poet, artist, paper-hanger and socialist,” came up to Exeter in 1853 and there, in intimate friendship with Sir Edward Burne-Jones, looked out upon “the vision of grey-roofed houses and a long winding street and the sound of many bells,” which was, for him, Oxford. The two friends have left behind them signs of their genius in the famous tapestry at Exeter Chapel and in the windows of the Cathedral; whilst at Corpus and in the Schools the great teacher gathered round him a circle of enthusiastic young men, and like an Abelard, Wycliffe, Wesley or Newman in the religious world, so advised and inspired them with his social and artistic gospel, that when, in pursuance of the old monastic principle “laborare est orare,” he called upon them to mend a farmer’s road at Hincksey, they laid aside their bats and oars, and marched, with the professor at their head, to dig with spade and shovel. Out of such inspiration grew the various University Settlements in the East End of London, inaugurated by Arnold Toynbee.
Oxford owes much to the stimulating if incoherent teaching and the generosity of John Ruskin,[40] but architecturally his influence was responsible for several bad buildings in the would-be Venetian style—the Christ Church New Buildings and the Natural History Museum in the parks, for instance, proving deplorably enough that the critic was no creator.
Last, but not least, it is good to be able to record that City and University have gradually settled their differences. The new Municipal Buildings and the Town Hall in S. Aldate’s would seem, by their deliberate variety of styles, to give municipal sanction to every style of architecture that can be found in the University, and to look back upon the history of the town, and of the learned institution with which for good and evil it has been so closely connected, with no ungracious feeling.