Lectures and Essays

by Goldwin Smith

ALFREDUS REX FUNDATOR

A few weeks ago an Oxford College celebrated the thousandth anniversary of its foundation by King Alfred. [Footnote: We keep the common spelling, though AElfred is more correct. It is impossible, in deference to antiquarian preciseness, to change the spelling of all these names, which are now imbedded in the English classics.]

The college which claims this honour is commonly called University College, though its legal name is Magna Aula Universitatis. The name "University College" causes much perplexity to visitors. They are with difficulty taught by the friend who is lionizing them to distinguish it from the University. But the University of Oxford is a federation of colleges, of which University College is one, resembling in all respects the rest of the sisterhood, being, like them, under the federal authority of the University, retaining the same measure of college right, conducting the domestic instruction and discipline of its students through its own officers, but sending them to the lecture rooms of the University Professors for the higher teaching, and to the University examination rooms to be examined for their degrees. The college is an ample and venerable pile, with two towered gateways, each opening into a quadrangle, its front stretching along the High Street, on the side opposite St. Mary's Church. The darkness of the stone seems to bespeak immemorial antiquity, but the style, which is the later Gothic characteristic of Oxford, and symbolical of its history, shows that the buildings really belong to the time of the Stuarts. "That building must be very old, Sir," said an American visitor to the master of the college, pointing to its dark front. "Oh, no," was the master's reply, "the colour deceives you; that building is not more than two hundred years old." In invidious contrast to this mass, debased but imposing in its style, the pedantic mania for pure Gothic which marks the Neo-catholic reaction in Oxford, and which will perhaps hereafter be derided as we deride the classic mania of the last century, has led Mr. Gilbert Scott to erect a pure Gothic library. This building, moreover, has nothing in its form to bespeak its purpose, but resembles a chapel. Over the gateway of the larger quadrangle is a statue, in Roman costume, of James II.; one of the few memorials of the ejected tyrant, who in his career of reaction visited the college and had two rooms on the east side of the quadrangle fitted up for the performance of mass. Obadiah Walker, the master of the college, had turned Papist, and became one of the leaders of the reaction, in the overthrow of which he was involved, the fall of his master and the ruin of his party being announced to him by the boys singing at his window—"Ave Maria, old Obadiah." In the same quadrangle are the chambers of Shelley, and the room to which he was summoned by the assembled college authorities to receive, with his friend Hogg, sentence of expulsion for having circulated an atheistical treatise. In the ante-chapel is the florid monument of Sir William Jones. But the modern divinities of the college are the two great legal brothers, Lord Eldon and Lord Stowell, whose colossal statues fraternally united are conspicuous in the library, whose portraits hang side by side in the hall, whose medallion busts greet you at the entrance to the Common Room. Pass by these medallions, and look into the Common Room itself, with panelled walls, red curtains, polished mahogany table, and generally cozy aspect, whither after the dinner in hall the fellows of the college retire to sip their wine and taste such social happiness as the rule of celibacy permits. Over that ample fire-place, round the blaze of which the circle is drawn in the winter evenings, you will see the marble bust, carved by no mean hand, of an ancient king, and underneath it are the words Alfredus Rex Fundator.

Alas! both traditions—the tradition that Alfred founded the University of Oxford, and the tradition that he founded University College—are devoid of historical foundation. Universities did not exist in Alfred's days. They were developed centuries later out of the monastery schools. When Queen Elizabeth was on a visit to Cambridge, a scholar delivered before her an oration, in which he exalted the antiquity of his own university at the expense of that of the University of Oxford. The University of Oxford was roused to arms. In that uncritical age any antiquarian weapon which the fury of academical patriotism could supply was eagerly grasped, and the reputation of the great antiquary Camden is somewhat compromised with regard to an interpolation in Asser's Life of Alfred, which formed the chief documentary support of the Oxford case. The historic existence of both the English universities dawns in the reign of the scholar king, and the restorer of order and prosperity after the ravages of the conquest and the tyranny of Rufus—Henry I. In that reign the Abbot of Croyland, to gain money for the rebuilding of his abbey, set up a school where, we are told, Priscian's grammar, Aristotle's logic with the commentaries of Porphyry and Averroes, Cicero and Quintilian as masters of rhetoric, were taught after the manner of the school of Orleans. In the following reign a foreign professor, Vacarius, roused the jealousy of the English monarchy and baronage by teaching Roman law in the schools of Oxford. The thirteenth century, that marvellous and romantic age of mediaeval religion and character, mediaeval art, mediaeval philosophy, was also the palmy age of the universities. Then Oxford gloried in Groseteste, at once paragon and patron of learning, church reformer and champion of the national church against Roman aggression; in his learned and pious friend, Adam de Marisco; and in Roger Bacon, the pioneer and proto-martyr of physical science. Then, with Paris, she was the great seat of that school philosophy, wonderful in its subtlety as well as in its aridity, which, albeit it bore no fruit itself, trained the mind of Europe for more fruitful studies, and was the original product of mediaeval Christendom, though its forms of thought were taken from the deified Stagyrite, and it was clothed in the Latin language, though in a form of that language so much altered and debased from the classical as to become, in fact, a literary vernacular of the Middle Ages. Then her schools, her church porches, her very street corners, every spot where a professor could gather an audience, were thronged with the aspiring youth who had flocked, many of them begging their way out of the dark prison-house of feudalism, to what was then, in the absence of printing, the sole centre of intellectual light. Then Oxford, which in later times became from the clerical character of the headships and fellowships the great organ of reaction, was the great organ of progress, produced the political songs which embodied, with wonderful force, the principles of free government, and sent her students to fight under the banner of the university in the army of Simon de Montfort.

It was in the thirteenth century that University College was really founded. The founder was William of Durham, an English ecclesiastic who had studied in the University of Paris. The universities were, like the church, common to all the natives of Latin Christendom, that ecclesiastical and literary federation of the European States, which, afterwards broken up by the Reformation, is now in course of reconstruction through uniting influences of a new kind. William of Durham bequeathed to the University a fund for the maintenance of students in theology. The university purchased with the fund a house in which these students were maintained, and which was styled the Great Hall of the University, in contra-distinction to the multitude of little private halls or hospices in which students lived, generally under the superintendence of a graduate who was their teacher. The hall or college was under the visitorship of the University; but this visitorship being irksome, and a dispute having arisen in the early part of the last century whether it was to be exercised by the University at large, in convocation, or by the theological faculty only, the college set up a claim to be a royal foundation of the time of King Alfred, the reputed founder of the University, and thus exempt from any visitorship but that of the Crown. It was probably not very difficult to convince a Hanoverian court of law that the visitorship of an Oxford college ought to be transferred from the Jacobite university to the Crown; and so it came to pass that the Court of King's Bench solemnly ratified as a fact what historical criticism pronounces to be a baseless fable. The case in favour of William of Durham as the founder is so clear, that the antiquaries are ready to burst with righteous indignation, and one almost enjoys the intensity of their wrath.

The Great Hall of the University was not, when first founded, a perfect college. It was only a house for some eight or ten graduates in arts who were studying divinity. The first perfect college was founded by Walter de Merton, the Chancellor of Henry III., to whom is due the conception of uniting the anti-monastic pursuit of secular learning with monastic seclusion and discipline, for the benefit of that multitude of young students who had hitherto dwelt at large in the city under little or no control, and often showed, by their faction fights and other outrages, that they contained the quintessence of the nation's turbulence as well as of its intellectual activity and ambition. The quaint old quadrangle of Merton, called, nobody seems to know why, "Mob" Quad, may be regarded as the cradle of collegiate life in England, and indeed in Europe.

Still University College is the oldest foundation of learning now existing in England; and therefore it may be not inappropriately dedicated to the memory of the king who was the restorer of our intellectual life as well as the preserver of our religion and our institutions. Mr. Freeman, as the stern minister of fact, would, no doubt, cast down the bust of Alfred from the Common Room chimney-piece and set up that of William of Durham, if a likeness of him could be found, in its place. But it may be doubted whether William of Durham, if he were alive, would do the same.

Marcus Aurelius, Alfred and St. Louis, are the three examples of perfect virtue on a throne. But the virtue of St. Louis is deeply tainted with asceticism; and with the sublimated selfishness on which asceticism is founded, he sacrifices everything and everybody—sacrifices national interests, sacrifices the lives of the thousands of his subjects whom he drags with him in his chimerical crusades—to the good of his own soul. The Reflections of Marcus Aurelius will be read with ever increasing admiration by all who have learned to study character, and to read it in its connection with history. Alone in every sense, without guidance or support but that which he found in his own breast, the imperial Stoic struggled serenely, though hopelessly, against the powers of evil which were dragging heathen Rome to her inevitable doom. Alfred was a Christian hero, and in his Christianity he found the force which bore him, through calamity apparently hopeless, to victory and happiness.

It must be owned that the materials for the history of the English king are not very good. His biography by Bishop Asser, his counsellor and friend, which forms the principal authority, is panegyrical and uncritical, not to mention that a doubt rests on the authenticity of some portions of it. But in the general picture there are a consistency and a sobriety, which, combined with its peculiarity, commend it to us as historical. The leading acts of Alfred's life are, of course, beyond doubt. And as to his character, he speaks to us himself in his works, and the sentiments which he expresses perfectly correspond with the physiognomy of the portrait.

We have called him a Christian hero. He was the victorious champion of Christianity against Paganism. This is the real significance of the struggle and of his character. The Northmen, or, as we loosely term them, the Danes, are called by the Saxon chroniclers the Pagans. As to race, the Northman, like the Saxon, was a Teuton, and the institutions, and the political and social tendencies of both, were radically the same.