Oxford and Her Colleges: A View from the Radcliffe Library

by Goldwin Smith

MAGDALEN COLLEGE, FROM STREET.

In the interval between the foundation of New College and the revolution, religious and intellectual, which we call the Reformation, were founded Lincoln, All Souls', Magdalen, and Brasenose. Lincoln, All Souls', and Brasenose lie immediately round us, close to what was the centre of academical life. Magdalen we recognise in the distance by the most beautiful of towers. Lincoln was theological, and was peculiar in being connected with two of the Churches of Oxford, which its members served, and the tithes and oblations of which formed its endowment. Its Founder, Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, had as a graduate resident at Oxford been noted for sympathy with the Wycliffites. But when he became Bishop of Lincoln, the fact dawned upon him that the Scriptures too freely interpreted were dangerous. He went over to the Reaction, burned Wycliffe's body, and determined to found a little college of true students in theology, who would "defend the mysteries of the sacred page against those ignorant laics who profaned with swinish snouts its most holy pearls." His successor, Bishop Rotherham, being of the same mind, carried forward the work, and gave the College statutes enjoining the expulsion of any Fellow convicted of favouring in public or in private heretical tenets, and in particular the tenets of "that heretical sect lately sprung up which assails the sacraments, diverse orders and dignities, and properties of the Church." Rotherham had evidently a keen and just sense of the fact, that with the talismanic sacraments of the Church were bound up its dignity and wealth. The two orthodox prelates would have stood aghast if they could have foreseen that their little College of true theologians would one day number among its Fellows John Wesley, and that Methodism would be cradled within its walls. They would not less have stood aghast if they could have foreseen that such a chief of Liberals as Mark Pattison, would one day be its Rector. The history of these foundations is full of lessons for benefactors who fancy that they can impress their will upon posterity.

All Souls' was designed by its Founder, Archbishop Chicheley, ad orandum as well as ad studendum; it was to serve the purpose of a chantry not less than of a College. The sculptured group of souls over the gateway in High Street denotes that the Warden and Fellows were to pray for the souls of all Christian people. But particularly were they to pray for the souls of "the illustrious Prince Henry, late King of England, of Thomas, Duke of Clarence, and of all the Dukes, Earls, Barons, Knights, Esquires, and others who fell in the war for the Crown of France." Of that unhappy war Chicheley had been the adviser; and seeing the wreck which his folly, or, if the suspicion immortalised by Shakespeare is true, his selfish policy, as the head of a bloated Establishment threatened with depletion, had wrought, he may well have felt the sting of conscience in his old age. The figures in the new reredos of the Chapel tell the story of the foundation.

Magdalen was the work of Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester and Chancellor of Henry VI., another statesman-prelate who turned from the political storm to found a house of learning. Of all the houses of learning in England, perhaps of any country, that which Waynflete founded is the loveliest, as he will say who stands in its cloistered and ivy-mantled quadrangle, either beneath the light of the summer's sun or that of the winter's moon. Some American architect, captivated by the graces of Magdalen, has reproduced them in his plan for a new University in California. Those courts, when newly built, were darkened by the presence of Richard III. Waynflete came to Oxford to receive the king; and this homage, paid by a saintly man, seems to show that in those fierce times of dynastic change, Richard, before the murder of his nephews, was not regarded as a criminal usurper, perhaps not as a usurper at all. The tyrant was intellectual. In him, as still more notably in Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, nicknamed for his cruelty the Butcher, but literary and a benefactor to the University, was something like an English counterpart of the mixture in the Italian Renaissance of culture with licentiousness and crime. But as he sat beside Waynflete in the Hall wooing popularity by apparent attention to the exercises, Richard's thoughts probably were far away. A red rose among the architectural ornaments is found to have been afterwards painted white. It changed, no doubt, with fortune, when she left the red for the white rose. A new relation between College and University is inaugurated by the institution at Magdalen of three Readers to lecture to the University at large.

ST. JOHN'S PULPIT.

Magdalen College, First Quadrangle.

The old quadrangle of Brasenose remains much as it was left by its co-founders, a munificent Bishop and a pious Knight. It is of no special historic interest, and its importance belongs to later times. It absorbed several Halls, the sign of one of which was probably the brazen nose which now adorns its gate, and so far it marks an epoch.

The quiet and sombre old quadrangle of Corpus Christi lies yonder, by the side of Merton, much as its Founder left it. Now we have come to the real dawn of the English Renaissance, a gray dawn which never became a very bright day; for in England, as in Germany and other Teutonic countries, reawakened and emancipated intellect turned to the pursuit of truth rather than of beauty, and the great movement was less a birth of literature and of art than of reformation in religion. This is the age of Grocyn, the teacher of Greek; of Linacre, the English Hippocrates; of Colet, the regenerator of education; of Sir Thomas More, who carried culture to the Chancellorship of the realm, and whose "Utopia" proclaims the growth of fresh aspirations and the opening of a new era in one way, as Rabelais did in another. Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, uncle of Henry VI., had perhaps opened the epoch at Oxford by his princely gift of books, in which the Renaissance literature was strongly represented, and which was the germ of the University Library. Soon Erasmus will visit Oxford and chant in elegant Latin the praises of the classical and cultured circle which he finds there. Now rages the war between the humanists of the new classical learning, called the Greeks, and its opponents, the Trojans, who desired to walk in the ancient paths, and who, though bigoted and grotesque, were, after all, not far wrong in identifying heresy with Greek, since the study of the New Testament in the original was subversive of the mediæval faith. Again, as in the cases of Merton, Wykeham, and Waynflete, a statesman-prelate turns in old age from the distractions of State to found a house of learning. Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, was the chief counsellor and diplomatist of Henry VII., in whose service he had no doubt passed anxious hours and trodden dark paths. It may have been partly for the good of his soul that he proposed to found a house in Oxford for the reception of young monks from St. Swithin's Priory in Winchester while studying in Oxford. He was diverted from that design, and persuaded to found a College instead, by his friend Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exeter, who is represented as saying, "What, my Lord, shall we build houses and provide livelihoods for a company of bussing monks whose end and fall we ourselves may live to see? No, no. It is more meet, a great deal, that we should have care to provide for the increase of learning and for such as by their learning shall do good in the Church and Commonwealth." Supposing the prognostication embodied in these words genuine, they show that to an enlightened Bishop the dissolution of the Monasteries seemed inevitable. The statutes of Foxe's College are written in a style which affects the highest classical elegance. They elaborate throughout the metaphor of a bee-hive with its industrious insects and its store of intellectual honey. They embody the hopes of the Renaissance and depict a College of the Humanities. There is to be a Reader in Greek, and for the subjects of his lectures a long list of great Greek authors is assigned. There is to be a Reader of Latin, for whose lectures a similar list of Latin authors is given, and who is to keep "barbarism," that mortal sin in the eyes of a devotee of the Renaissance, out of the hive. Theology is not forgotten. The Founder pays a due, possibly somewhat conventional, tribute to its surpassing importance. Of this, also, there is a Professor, but its guides in interpreting Scripture are not to be the mediæval textbooks, such as Aquinas and the Master of the Sentences, but the Greek and Latin Fathers, including the daring Origen and Augustine the favourite of Luther. The Readers are to lecture not to the College only, but to the University at large, a new provision, connecting the College with the University, which hardly took effect till very recent times. One of the first Readers was the learned Spaniard, Juan Luis Vives, whose appointment bespoke the cosmopolitan character of the humanist republic of letters. The statutes were signed by the Founder with a trembling hand eight months before his death, so that only in imagination did he see his literary bees at work.

Yonder to the south is Tom Tower, where hangs the great bell, which, "swinging slow with sullen roar," was heard by Milton at Forest Hill. It was tolled a hundred and one times for the hundred and one students of Wolsey's House. The Tower, or Cupola, was the work, not of Wolsey but of Wren. Around the great quadrangle over which it rises are seen the lines for cloisters which were never built. The balustrade on the top of the quadrangle is an alien work of modern times. The Church of St. Frydeswide's Monastery does duty as the College Chapel, in place of the grand Chapel in the perpendicular style, which, had the Founder's plan taken effect, would have stood there. Moreover, that which should have been wholly a College is made to serve and to expend a part of its power as the Chapter of the Diocese of Oxford, lending its Chapel as the Cathedral, a niggardly arrangement which has been productive of strained relations between occupants of the See and Heads of the College. Ample and noble are the courts of Wolsey. Worthy of his magnificence is the great Hall, the finest room, barring Westminster Hall, in England, and filled with those portraits of Alumni, which, notwithstanding the frequency of pudding sleeves, form the fairest tapestry with which hall was ever hung. But it all falls short of Wolsey's conception. Had Wolsey's conception been fulfilled, Ipswich would have been a nursery of scholars for Cardinal College, as Winchester was for New College, and Eton for King's College, Cambridge. The Cardinal was an English Leo X. in morals, tastes, perhaps in beliefs; a true Prince, not of the Church but of the Renaissance. For him, perhaps, as for Foxe, it was a refreshment to turn from public life, full, as it must have been, of care and peril for the Vizier of a headstrong and capricious despot, to the calm happiness of seeing his great College rise, and gathering into it the foremost of teachers and the flower of students. But in the midst of his enterprise the sky of the Renaissance became overcast with clouds, and the storm of religious revolution, which had long been gathering, broke. Forewarnings of the storm Wolsey had received, for he had found that in opening his gates to the highest intellectual activity he had opened them to free inquiry and to heterodoxy. Himself, too, had set the example of suppressing monasteries, though he did this not for mere rapine or to gorge his parasites, but to turn useless and abused endowments to a noble use. Wolsey all but drew his foundation down with him in his fall. The tyrant and his minions were builders of nothing but ruin. Christ Church, as at last it was called, was threatened with confiscation and destruction, but was finally spared in its incomplete condition, appropriated by Henry as his own foundation, and dedicated to the honour of the king, whose portrait, in its usual attitude of obtrusive self-conceit, occupies in the Hall the central place, where the portrait of the Cardinal should be. The Cardinal's hat, on the outer wall of the house, is left to speak of the true Founder. That the College was to be called after its Founder's name, not, like the Colleges of Wykeham and Waynflete, after the name of a Saint, seems a symptom of the pride which went before Wolsey's fall.