STAIRCASE, CHRIST CHURCH.
The Universities being the regular finishing schools of the gentry and the professions, men who had passed through them became eminent in after life, but they owed little or nothing to the University. Only in this way can Oxford lay claim to the eminence of Bishop Butler, Jeremy Bentham, or Adam Smith, while Gibbon is her reproach. The figures of Lord Eldon and Lord Stowell, whose ponderous twin statues sit side by side in the Library of University College, were more academical, especially that of Lord Stowell, who was Tutor of his College, and held a lectureship of Ancient History. Here and there a Tutor of the better stamp, no doubt, would try to do his duty by his pupils. A rather pathetic interest attaches to Richard Newton, who tried to turn Hart Hall into a real place of education, and had some distinguished pupils, among them Charles Fox. But the little lamp which he had kindled went out in the uncongenial air. On the site, thanks to the munificence of Mr. Baring, now stands Hertford College. Johnson's residence at Pembroke College was short, and his narrative shows that it was unprofitable, though his High Church principles afterwards made him a loyal son and eulogist of the University. One good effect the interdiction of marriage had. It kept up a sort of brotherhood, and saved corporate munificence from extinction by the private interest of fathers of families. As the College revenues increased, building went on, though after the false classical fashion of the times and mostly for the purpose of College luxury. Now rose the new quadrangle of Queen's, totally supplanting the mediæval College, and the new buildings at Magdalen and Corpus. A plan is extant, horrible to relate, for the total demolition of the old quadrangle of Magdalen, and its replacement by a modern palace of idleness in the Italian style. To this century belong Peckwater and Canterbury quadrangles, also in the classical style, the first redeemed by the Library which fills one side of the square, and which has a heavy architectural grandeur as well as a noble purpose. To the eighteenth century we also mainly owe the College gardens and walks as we see them; and the gardens of St. John's, New College, Wadham, Worcester, and Exeter, with the lime walk at Trinity and the Broadwalk—now unhappily but a wreck—at Christ Church, may plead to a student's heart for some mitigation of the sentence on the race of clerical idlers and wine-bibbers, who, for a century, made the University a place, not of education and learning, but of dull sybaritism, and a source, not of light, but of darkness, to the nation. It is sad to think how different the history of England might have been had Oxford and Cambridge done their duty, like Harvard and Yale, during the last century.
At the end of the last or beginning of the present century came the revival. At the end of the last century Christ Church had some brilliant classical scholars among her students, though the great scene of their eminence was not the study but the senate. The portraits of Wellesley and Canning hang in her Hall. In the early part of the present century the general spirit of reform and progress, which had been repressed during the struggle with revolutionary France, began to move again over the face of the torpid waters. Eveleigh, Provost of Oriel, led the way. At his College and at Balliol the elections to Fellowships were free from local or genealogical restrictions. They were now opened to merit, and those two Colleges, though not among the first in wealth or magnificence, attained a start in the race of regeneration which Balliol, being very fortunate in its Heads, has since in a remarkable manner maintained. The examination system of Laud had lacked a motive power, and had depended, like his policy, on his fiat instead of vital force. There was no sufficient inducement for the examiner to be strict or for the candidate to excel. The motive power was now supplied by a list of honours in classics and mathematics, and among the earliest winners in the first class in both schools was Robert Peel.
CHRIST CHURCH—FRONT.
Scarcely, however, had the University begun to awake to a new life, when it was swept by another ecclesiastical storm, the consequence of its unhappy identification with clericism and the State Church. The liberal movement which commenced after the fall of Napoleon and carried the Reform Bill, threatened to extend to the religious field, and to withdraw the support of the State from the Anglican Church. This led the clergy to look out for another basis, which they found in the reassertion of High Church and sacerdotal doctrines, such as apostolical succession, eucharistical real presence, and baptismal regeneration. Presently the movement assumed the form of a revival of the Church of the Middle Ages, such as High Church imagination pictured it, and ultimately of secession to Rome. Oxford, with her mediæval buildings, her High Church tradition, her half-monastic Colleges, and her body of unmarried clergy, became the centre of the movement. The Romanising tendencies of Tractarianism, as from the "Tracts for the Times" it was called, visible from the first, though disclaimed by the leaders, aroused a fierce Protestant reaction, which encountered Tractarianism both in the press and in the councils of the University. The Armageddon of the ecclesiastical war was the day on which, in a gathering of religious partisans from all sections of the country which the Convocation House would not hold, so that it was necessary to adjourn to the Sheldonian Theatre, Ward, the most daring of the Tractarian writers, after a scene of very violent excitement, was deprived of his degree. This was the beginning of the end. Newman, the real leader of the movement, though Pusey, from his academical rank, was the official leader, soon recognised the place to which his principles belonged, and was on his knees before a Roman Catholic priest, supplicating for admission to the Church of Rome. A ritualistic element remained, and now reigns, in the Church of England; but the party which Newman left, bereft of Newman, broke up, and its relics were cast like drift-wood on every theological or philosophical shore. Newman's poetic version of mediæval religion, together with the spiritual graces of his style and his personal influence, had for a time filled the imaginations and carried away the hearts of youth, while the seniors were absorbed in the theological controversy, renounced lay studies, and disdained educational duty except as it might afford opportunities of winning youthful souls to the Neo-Catholic faith. Academical duty would have been utterly lost in theological controversy, had it not been for the Class List, which bound the most intellectual undergraduates to lay studies by their ambition, and kept on foot a staff of private teachers, "coaches," as they were called, to prepare men for the examinations, who did the duty which the ecclesiastical Fellows of the University disdained. The Oxford movement has left a monument of itself in the College founded in memory of Keble, the gentle and saintly author of "The Christian Year." It has left an ampler monument in the revival of mediæval architecture at Oxford, and the style of new buildings which everywhere meet the eye. The work of the Oxford Architectural Society, which had its birth in the Neo-Catholic movement, may prove more durable than that movement itself. Of the excess to which the architectural revival was carried, the new Library at University College, more like a mediæval Chapel than a Library, is a specimen. It was proposed to give Neo-Catholicism yet another monument by erecting close to the spot where Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley died for truth, the statue of Cardinal Newman, the object of whose pursuit through life had been, not truth, but an ecclesiastical ideal. Of the reaction against the Tractarian movement the monument is the memorial to the Protestant martyrs Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley, the subscription for which commenced among the Protestants who had come up to vote for the condemnation of Ward, and which Tractarians scornfully compared to the heap of stones raised over the body of Achan.
Here ended the reign of ecclesiasticism, of the Middle Ages, and of religious exclusion. The collision into which Romanising Oxford had been brought with the Protestantism of the British nation, probably helped to bring on the revolution which followed, and which restored the University to learning, science, and the nation. The really academical element in the University invoked the aid of the national government and Legislature. A Royal Commission of Inquiry into the state of the University and its Colleges was appointed, and though some Colleges closed their muniment rooms, and inquiry was obstructed, enough was revealed in the Report amply to justify legislative reform and emancipation. An act of Parliament was passed which set free the University and Colleges alike from their mediæval statutes, restored the University Professoriate, opened the Fellowships to merit, and relaxed the religious tests. The curriculum, the examination system, and the honour list were liberalised, and once more, as in early times, all the great departments of knowledge were recognised and domiciled in the University. Science, long an exile, was welcomed back to her home at the moment when a great extension of her empire was at hand. Strictly professional studies, such as practical law and medicine, could not be recalled from their professional seats. Elections to Fellowships by merit replaced election by local or school preferences, by kinship, or by the still more objectionable influences which at one time had been not unfelt. Colleges which had declined the duty of education, which had been dedicated to sinecurism and indolence, and whose quadrangles had stood empty, were filled with students, and once more presented a spectacle which would have gladdened the heart of the Founder. A Commission, acting on a still more recent Act of Parliament, has carried the adaptation of Oxford to the modern requirements of science and learning further than the old Commission, which acted in the penumbra of mediæval and ecclesiastical tradition, dared. The intellectual Oxford of the present day is almost a fresh creation. Its spirit is new; it is liberal, free, and progressive. It is rather too revolutionary, grave seniors say, so far as the younger men are concerned. This is probably only the first forward bound of recovered freedom, which will be succeeded in time by the sober pace of learning and scientific investigation. Again, as in the thirteenth century, the day of Grosseteste and Simon de Montfort, Oxford is a centre of progress, instead of being, as under the later Stuarts, the stronghold of reaction. Of the College revival, the monuments are all around in the new buildings, for which increasing numbers have called, and which revived energy has supplied. Christ Church, New College, Magdalen, Merton, Balliol, Trinity, University have all enlarged their courts, and in almost every College new life has been shown by improvement or restoration. Of the reign of mediævalism the only trace is the prevalence in the new buildings of the mediæval style, which architectural harmony seemed to require, though the new buildings of Christ Church and Trinity are proofs of a happy emancipation from architectural tradition. The University revival has its monument in the new examination Schools in High Street, where the student can no longer get his degree by giving the meaning of Golgotha and the name of the Founder of University College. There are those who, like Mark Pattison, look on it with an evil eye, regarding the examination system as a noxious excrescence and as fatal to spontaneous study and research; though they would hardly contend that spontaneous study and research flourished much at Oxford before the revival of examinations, or deny that since the revival Oxford has produced the fruits of study and research, at least to a fair extent. The restoration of science is proclaimed by the new Museum yonder; a strange structure, it must be owned, which symbolises, by the unfitness of its style for its purpose, at once the unscientific character of the Middle Ages, and the lingering attachment of Oxford to the mediæval type. Of the abolition of the religious tests, and the restoration of the University to the nation, a monument is Mansfield College for Congregationalists, a vision of which would have thrown an orthodox and Tory Head of a College into convulsions half a century ago. Even here the mediæval style of architecture keeps its hold, though the places of Catholic Saints are taken by the statues of Wycliffe, Luther, John Knox, Whitefield, and Wesley. By the side of Mansfield College rises also Manchester College for Independents, in the same architectural style. Neither of them, however, is in the Oxford sense a College; both are places of theological instruction.
GATE TOWER AND CLOISTERS, MAGDALEN.