My Autobiography: A Fragment

by F. Max Müller

And yet with all this, and while we are told that those who attended lectures were laughed at, it seems strange that the best divines, and lawyers, and politicians of the first half of our century, some of whom we may have known ourselves, must have been formed under that system. We can hardly believe that it was as bad as here described, and we must remember that much of the Memoirs of this Scotch lady can have been written from memory only, and long after the time when she and her sister lived at University College. Life there, no doubt, may have been very dull, as there were no other young ladies at Oxford, and it cannot have been very amusing for these young girls to dine with sixteen Heads of Houses, all in wide silk cassocks, scarves and bands, one or two in powdered wigs, so that, as we are told, they often went home crying. All intercourse with the young men was strictly forbidden, though it seems to have been not altogether impossible to communicate, from the garden of the Master’s Lodge, with the young men bending out of the college windows, or climbing down to the gardens.

One of these young men, who was at University College at the same time, might certainly not have been considered a very desirable companion for these two Scotch girls. It was no other than Shelley. What they say of him does not tell us much that is new, yet it deserves to be repeated. “Mr. Shelley,” we read, “afterwards so celebrated, was half crazy. He began his career with every kind of wild prank at Eton. At University he was very insubordinate, always infringing some rule, the breaking of which he knew could not be overlooked. He was slovenly in his dress, and when spoken to about these and other irregularities, he was in the habit of making such extraordinary gestures, expressive of his humility under reproof, as to overset first the gravity and then the temper of the lecturing tutor. When he proceeded so far as to paste up atheistical squibs on the chapel doors, it was considered necessary to expel him privately, out of regard to Sir Timothy Shelley, the father, who came up at once. He and his son left Oxford together.”

No one would recognize in this picture the University of Oxford, as it is at present. Nous avons changé tout cela might be said with great truth by the Heads of Houses, the Professors, and Fellows of the present day. And yet what the Highland lady, or rather the Highland girl, describes, refers to times not so long ago but that some of the men we have known might have lived through it. How this change came about I cannot tell, though I can bear testimony to a few survivals of the old state of things.

The Oxford of 1848 was still the Oxford of the Heads of Houses and of the Hebdomadal Board. That board consisted almost entirely of Heads of Houses, and a most important board it was, considering that the whole administration of the University was really in its hands. The colleges, on the other hand, were very jealous of their independence; and even the authority of the Proctors, who represented the University as such, was often contested within the gates of a college. It is wonderful that this old system of governing the University through the Heads of Houses should have gone on so long and so smoothly. Having been trusted by the Fellows of his own society with considerable power in the administration of his own college, it was supposed that the Head would prove equally useful in the administration of the University. A Head of a House became at once a member of the Council. And, on the whole, they managed to drive the coach and horses very well. But often when I had to take foreigners to hear the University Sermon, and they saw a most extraordinary set of old gentlemen walking into St. Mary’s in procession, with a most startling combination of colours, black and red, scarlet and pink, on their heavy gowns and sleeves, I found it difficult to explain who they were. “Are they your professors?” I was asked. “Oh, no,” I said, “the professors don’t wear red gowns, only Doctors of Divinity and of Civil Law, and as every Head of a House must have something to wear in public, he is invariably made a Doctor.” I remember one exception only, and at a much later time, namely, the Master of Balliol, who, like Canning at the Congress of Vienna, considered it among his most valued distinctions never to have worn the gown of a D.C.L. or D.D. It is well known that when Marshal Blücher was made a Doctor at Oxford he asked, in the innocence of his heart, that General Gneisenau, his right-hand man, might at least be made a chemist. He certainly had mixed a most effective powder for the French army under Napoléon.

“But,” my friend would ask, “have you no Senatus Academicus, have you no faculties of professors such as there are in all other Christian universities?” “Yes and no,” I said. “We have professors, but they are not divided into faculties, and they certainly do not form the Senatus Academicus, or the highest authority in the University.”

It seems very strange, but it is nevertheless a fact, that as soon as a good tutor is made a professor, he is considered of no good for the real teaching work of the colleges. His lectures are generally deserted; and I could quote the names of certain professors who afterwards rose to great eminence, but who at Oxford were simply ignored and their lecture-rooms deserted. The real teaching or coaching or cramming for examination is left to the tutors and Fellows of each college, and the examinations also are chiefly in their hands. Many undergraduates never see a professor, and, as far as the teaching work of the University is concerned, the professorships might safely be abolished. And yet, as I could honestly assure my foreign friends, the best men who take honour degrees at Oxford are quite the equals of the best men at Paris or Berlin. The professors may not be so distinguished, but that is due to a certain extent to the small salaries attached to some of the chairs. England has produced great names both in science and philosophy and scholarship, but these have generally drifted to some more attractive or lucrative centres. When I first came to Oxford one professor received £40 a year, another £1,500, and no one complained about these inequalities. A certain amount of land had been left by a king or bishop for endowing a certain chair, and every holder of the chair received whatever the endowment yielded. The mode of appointing professors was very curious at that time. Often the elections resembled parliamentary elections, far more regard being paid to political or theological partisanship than to scientific qualifications. Every M.A. had a vote, and these voters were scattered all over the country. Canvassing was carried on quite openly. Travelling expenses were freely paid, and lists were kept in each college of the men who could be depended on to vote for the liberal or the conservative candidate. Imagine a professor of medicine or of Greek being elected because he was a liberal! Some appointments rested with the Prime Minister, or, as it was called, the Crown; and it was quoted to the honour of the Duke of Wellington, that he, when Chancellor of the University, once insisted that the electors should elect the best man, and they had to yield, though there were electors who would declare their own candidate the best man, whatever the opinion of really qualified judges might be. All this election machinery is much improved now, though an infallible system of electing the best men has not yet been discovered. One single elector, who is not troubled by too tender a conscience, may even now vitiate a whole election; to say nothing of the painful position in which an elector is placed, if he has to vote against a personal friend or a member of his own college, particularly when the feeling that it is dishonourable to disclose the vote of each elector is no longer strong enough to protect the best interests of the University.

It took me some time before I could gain an insight into all this. The old system passed away before my very eyes, not without evident friction between my different friends, and then came the difficulty of learning to understand the working of the new machinery which had been devised and sanctioned by Parliament. Reformers arose even among the Heads of Houses, as, for instance, Dr. Jeune, the Master of Pembroke College, who was credited with having rajeuni l’ancienne université. But he was by no means the only, or even the chief actor in University reform. Many of my personal friends, such as Dr. Tait, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rev. H. G. Liddell, afterwards Dean of Christ Church, Professor Baden-Powell, and the Rev. G. H. S. Johnson, afterwards Dean of Wells, with Stanley and Goldwin Smith as Secretaries, did honest service in the various Royal and Parliamentary Commissions, and spent much of their valuable time in serving the University and the country. I could do no more than answer the questions addressed to me by the Commissioners and by my friends, and this is really all the share I had at that time in the reform of the University, or what was called Germanizing the English Universities. At one time such was the unpopularity of these reformers in the University itself that one of them asked one of the junior professors to invite him to dinner, because the Heads of Houses would no longer admit him to their hospitable boards.

Certainly to have been a member of the much abused Hebdomadal Board, and a Head of a College in those pre-reform days must have been a delightful life. Before the days of agricultural distress the income of the colleges was abundant; the authority of the Heads was unquestioned in their own colleges; not only undergraduates, but Fellows also had to be submissive. No junior Fellow would then have dared to oppose his Head at college meetings. If there was by chance an obstreperous junior, he was easily silenced or requested to retire. The days had not yet come when a Master of Trinity ventured to remark that even a junior Fellow might possibly be mistaken. Colleges seemed to be the property of the Heads, and in some of them the Fellows were really chosen by them, and the rest of the Fellows after some kind of examination. The management of University affairs was likewise entirely in the hands of the Heads of Colleges, and it was on rare occasions only that a theological question stirred the interest of non-resident M.A.s, and brought them to Oxford to record their vote for or against the constituted authorities. Men like the Dean of Christ Church, Dr. Gaisford, the Warden of Wadham, Dr. Parsons, and the Provost of Oriel, Dr. Hawkins, were in their dominions supreme, till the rebellious spirit began to show itself in such men as Dr. Jeune, Professor Baden-Powell, A. P. Stanley, Goldwin Smith and others.

Nor were there many very flagrant abuses under the old régime. It was rather the want of life that was complained of. It began to be felt that Oxford should take its place as an equal by the side of foreign Universities, not only as a high school, but as a home of what then was called for the first time “original research.” There can be no question that as a teaching body, as a high school at the head of all the public schools in England, Oxford did its duty nobly. A man who at that time could take a Double First was indeed a strong man, well fitted for any work in after life. He would not necessarily turn out an original thinker, a scholar, or a discoverer in physical science, but he would know what it was to know anything thoroughly. To take honours at the same time in classics and mathematics required strength and grasp, and the effort was certainly considerable, as I found out when occasionally I read a Greek or Latin author with a young undergraduate friend. What struck me most was the accurate knowledge a candidate acquired of special authors and special books, but also the want of that familiarity with the language, Greek or Latin, which would enable him to read any new author with comparative ease. The young men whom I knew at the time they went in for their final examination, were certainly well grounded in classics, and what they knew they knew thoroughly.

The personal relations existing between undergraduates and their tutors were very intimate. A tutor took a pride in his pupils, and often became their friend for life. The teaching was almost private teaching, and the idea of reading a written lecture to a class in college did not exist as yet. It was real teaching with questions and answers; while lectures, written and read out, were looked down upon as good enough for professors, but entirely useless for the schools. The social tone of the University was excellent. Many of the tutors and of the undergraduates came of good families, and the struggle for life, or for a college living, or college office, was not, as yet, so fierce as it became afterwards. College tutors toiled on for life, and certainly did their work to the last most conscientiously. There was perhaps little ambition, little scheming or pushing, but the work of the University, such as the country would have it, was well done. If the Honour-Lists were small, the number of utter failures also was not very large.