What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

I fear that I profited very little by his tuition at Alban Hall, doubtless chiefly from my own fault and idleness. But other causes contributed also to the result. The classical lectures were such as I had left a long way behind me. No study on my part was necessary to hold my own in the lecture-room by the side of my fellows in the team. Yet, of course, it was easy for such a teacher as Whately to perceive that I was trusting to Winchester work rather than to his instruction. And naturally this did not please him. I think too that he had a prejudice against public schools in general, and that for some reason or other he disliked Winchester in particular. I remember his saying to me once—though I totally forget on what occasion—“We don’t want any New College ways here, sir!” I told him that I feared I did not deserve the compliment of being supposed capable of bringing any such there. And the reply failed to mollify him.

Those who are old enough to remember anything of the social aspects of Oxford at that day, and indeed any who have read the excellent biography of Archbishop Whately by his daughter, know that he was exceedingly unpopular among “the dons,” his contemporaries. This was due partly to the opinions he held on matters social, political, and religious, partly to those which prejudiced minds far inferior to his own supposed him to hold, but partly also to his own personal ways and manners. I think I know, and indeed I think I knew when I was his pupil, enough of the fibre and calibre of his mind to feel sure that he was greatly the intellectual superior to most of those of similar position around him. And I suppose that the world in general has by this time come to the conclusion that in respect of most of those opinions, which were then most obnoxious to the world in which he lived, Whately was right and his adversaries wrong. But he was not the man to win acceptance for new ideas in any society. The temper of his mind was in a high degree autocratical. He was born to be a benevolent and beneficent despot. His daughter, speaking of the painful experiences that awaited him when he became Archbishop of Dublin, says that “opposition was painful to his disposition.”

Doubtless the Principal of Alban Hall, thoroughly congenial to him as was at that time the social atmosphere of the common room of his own Oriel, would have felt himself much out of his element in most of the common rooms of Oxford. I remember a dear old man, Dr. Johnson, of Magdalen, who was greatly beloved by his own society, and an universal favourite with all who knew him. He was a high, though not altogether dry, right divine man (divino rightly spelled, be it understood, and not with an “e,” as in jure de vino), and used to maintain that the lineal descendants of the last Stuarts were still the rightful sovereigns of England. Sometimes a knot of youngsters would cluster around him, with, “But now, Dr. Johnson, do you really and truly believe that the present Duke of Modena is your lawful sovereign?” “Well, boy,” the doctor would say when thus pressed, “after dinner I do.”

This was not the sort of man whom Whately would have tolerated, for though full of wit, as I have said, he was utterly devoid of any tincture of humour.

Those were the days when it used to be said that the rule at Magdalen respecting preferment tenable together with a fellowship, was, “Hold your tongue, and you may hold any thing else.”

It was supposed, I remember, at that day that there was to a certain special degree an antagonism and dislike between him and Dr. Shuttleworth, the Warden of New College. There was a story current to the effect that the brusquerie of the Principal of Alban Hall was upon one occasion exhibited in an offensive manner in the drawing-room of the Warden of New College, when not only men but ladies were present. Whately had a habit of sitting in all sorts of uncouth postures on his chair. He would balance himself, while nursing one leg over the knee of the other, on the two hind legs of his chair, or even on one of them, and was indulging in gymnastics of this sort when the leg of the chair suddenly snapped, and he, a large and heavy man, rolled on the floor. He was a man of far too much real pith and aplomb to be unnecessarily disconcerted at such an accident. But the story ran that he manifested his disregard for it by simply tossing the offending and crippled chair into a corner, and taking another as he proceeded with what he was saying without one word of apology to his hostess.

If it was true that there was any such special feeling of antagonism between Whately and Shuttleworth it was a pity; for assuredly there were very few, if any, men among the heads of colleges of that day, better calculated by power and originality of mind, and in many respects by liberality of thinking, to understand and foregather with Whately than the Warden of New College.

Shuttleworth was, and had the reputation of being an especially witty man. And I consider Whately to have been the wittiest man I ever knew. But it is true that their wit was of a very different character. Whately was not a man fitted to shine in society, unless it were the society of those prepared by knowledge of and regard for him to recognise his undisputed right to be the acknowledged leader of it. Shuttleworth was, on the contrary, eminently calculated to contribute more than his share to the most brilliant social intercourse. He had, with abundance of solid sweetmeat at the bottom of the trifle, a sparkling store of that froth of wit which is most accepted as the readiest and pleasantest social small change. Whately’s wit was not of the kind which ever set any “table on a roar.” It was of that higher and deeper kind, which consists in prompt perception, not of the superficial resemblances in dissimilar things, but in the underlying resemblances disclosed only to the eye capable of appreciating at a glance the essential qualities and characteristics of the matter in hand. I have heard Whately deliciously witty at a logic or Euclid lecture.

An admirable specimen of this highest description of wit is given—among dozens of others indeed—by his daughter in her biography of him, which delighted me much when I read it, and which may be cited because it is very brilliant and may be given shortly. It will be found at the 38th page of the first volume of Miss Whately’s work. The Archbishop, writing of the controversy respecting the observance of the Sabbath, says, “This is a case in which men impose on themselves by the fallacy of the thaumatrope. On one side are painted (to obviate the absurdity of a probable law) the plain, earnest, and repeated injunctions to the Jews relative to their Sabbath; on the other side (to obviate the consequence of our having to keep the Jewish Sabbath) we have the New Testament allusions to the Christian assemblies on the first day of the week. By a repeated and rapid twirl these two images are blended into one picture in the mind. But a steady view will show that they are on opposite sides of the card.”

I remember a favourite saying of Whately’s to the effect that the difficulty of giving a good definition of anything increased in proportion to the commonness of the thing to be defined. And he would illustrate his dictum by saying “Define me a teacup!” A trial of the experiment will probably convince the experimenter of the correctness of Whately’s proposition.