Married and unmarried fellows.
Until the last quarter of the xix century fellows had to be bachelors. The rule against married officials was first relaxed, after the Reformation, in favour of heads of houses; Dr. Heynes, President of Queens’ in 1529, having been the first married Master.[336] Fifty years later the fellows of King’s complained that the wife of their provost had been seen taking the air on the sacred grass of the college court, where, nevertheless, her husband declared she could not have set her foot twice in her life. Early in George III.’s reign a movement was afoot among the fellows of a different character: in 1766 Betham of King’s writes to Cole that the university had been in a most violent flame: “young and old have formed a resolution of marrying”; “the scheme is—a wife and a fellowship with her.” In the “sixties” certain colleges began to admit married fellows, while in others a fellow might marry if he held university office, as professor or librarian. No fellowship nowadays is confined to unmarried men.
This is one of three radical changes which the university has undergone in the last thirty years. The abolition of the Religious Test Act which severed the strict connexion of our universities with the Church of England, the marriage of fellows, and the appointment of men not in clerical orders to fill the chief university and college offices, have gradually changed the face of university life, secularising it and socialising it, bestowing on it, definitely, a lay and undenominational character which is perhaps not so far from its primitive ideal as sticklers for the connexion of the universities with the Church would have us believe. It is no longer an advantage to be in orders at Cambridge: they do not help you to a fellowship for this is given to the best man in open competition; even heads of colleges need no longer be clergymen, and only one collegiate office, that of the dean, is still preferably bestowed on a parson. The results are curious. Clerical fellows are popular, but theology is a neglected subject in the big colleges and the theological chairs are not centres of influence. At the same time every college enjoys clerical patronage, which can be exercised in favour of its deserving sons; and every college, besides its dean, appoints chaplains for the maintenance of the chapel services.[337] Clerical fellows, it is true, are now in a minority, but there seems to be no reason why the clerical don should cease to abound, as he has always abounded, in our university cities. A university education has become more not less valuable for a clergyman now that it enables him to meet men whose beliefs differ widely from his own; now that the right to display an academic hood in church is no longer prized as its chief advantage.[338]
The combination room.
Among the ‘dons’ the centre of social life has always been the combination room. It represents that pledge of civilisation the with-drawing-room, the room contiguous to the banqueting-hall, where the pleasures of the spirit steal an advantage over the pleasures of the table. The rudeness which marked the period of the early renascence, from court to convent, in England, clung also to our academic life, and it is not till the last quarter of the xvi century that we find the fellows first provided with table napkins, and learn that the enterprising college which made the innovation exacted a fine of a penny from those who continued to wipe their fingers on the tablecloth. The temptation to this latter practice must indeed have been great; for the fork which made its appearance at the dawn of the renascence in France was unknown in England two hundred years later. It is only in the course of the next, the xviith, century that the combination room emerges as a more or less luxurious apartment; the subsequent addition of newspapers, magazines, and easy chairs marking in turn the rise of journalism and the higher standard of comfort. The dons of Charles II.’s time who had to be content with the “London Gazette” supplemented the lack of news by social clubs. “The Ugly Faces” club dined periodically in what was then the ugliest of college halls—Clare. “The Old Maids’ Club” flourished in the early xix century, with Baker the antiquary, Tonstall, and Conyers Middleton as members. The first “news letter” was however laid on the table of Kirk’s coffee-house in Charles’s reign. The first flying-coach, following the example of Oxford which had run a coach to London in one day, sped to the Capital in 1671.[339]
When the xix century opened there was no general society in Cambridge. It was more out of the way of polite England than Oxford, and many dons whose homes were at a distance spent the whole year in their colleges, emphasising the faults and therefore detracting from the virtues of small learned societies. The dons in the xvi century, say at S. John’s College, had been a brilliant company who bestowed as much on the Elizabethan age as they took from it: but the xviii century closed upon a period of dulness and reaction, in which the rudeness of material civilisation met a social uncouthness little calculated to recall the university of Spenser, of Burleigh, of Bacon. The intimacy between the fellows and their head was a thing of the past; the familiarity between scholar and don had been replaced by “donnishness” which kept the undergraduate at arm’s length; the blight of the artificial and stilted, the sterile and pompous aristocratism of just a century ago had settled down upon the university. Isolated in this eastern corner of England, just before the enormous impulse to travelling brought by railways, just after the cosmopolitan spirit which took even the Englishman abroad—the sense of a debt to Italy, of a continental comradeship—had finally ceased to exist, Cambridge dons at the dawn of the xix century had perhaps fathomed the lowest social depths. But before this century passed a social change more wonderful than the material changes around them metamorphosed university society. The unmannerly don married; and the sex which makes society, the sex which suffers no social deterioration when left to its own devices—the aristocratic sex—was introduced as the don’s helpmeet. More still—worse still—she was introduced in the same quarter of a century as what the weak-kneed among us cry out upon—his rival. It is the same donnish bachelor, separated by a gulph from the social amenities, wedded to ingrained habits and some eradicable prejudices, who suffered women to come to Cambridge and take what they could of the intellectual advantages he himself enjoyed. The historian of the great movements of the age we live in will record with interest this proof of the traditional open-mindedness which has never deserted the Cantabrigian, which has never failed to respond to the sacred dual claims of the age and the intellect.
