The Dons
Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses
NOEL ANNAN

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1999

Copyright © Noel Annan 1999

Noel Annan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780002570749

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DEDICATION

To Francis Haskell

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

I: The Dons Create an Intellectual Aristocracy

II: The Genesis of the Modern Don – William Buckland

III: The Charismatic Don – John Henry Newman

IV: Benjamin Jowett and the Balliol Tradition

V: The Don as Scholar – Frederic Maitland

VI: The Pastoral Don – The Ethos of King’s

VII: The Trinity Scientists – J. J. and Rutherford

VIII: The Don as Wit – Maurice Bowra

IX: The Don as Performer – George Rylands

X: The Don as Dilettante – John Sparrow

XI: The Don as Magus – Isaiah Berlin

XII: Women Dons in Cambridge

XIII: The Don as Administrator

XIV: ‘Down with Dons’

Annexe: The Intellectual Aristocracy

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

Anyone who writes about Oxford and Cambridge owes a debt to the scholars who wrote the history of those universities and of their individual colleges. But I owe a special debt of gratitude to the memorialists – those like Mark Pattison and William Tuckwell at Oxford and Leslie Stephen and the American, Charles Bristed, at Cambridge – who left us their personal impression of what life was like there in times gone by and of the dons whom they remembered. This book is not for the experts: they will know the references all too well. It is for the common reader.

I had another reason for writing about dons. Nearly forty-five years ago I was asked to contribute to a volume of essays to mark G. M. Trevelyan’s seventy-fifth birthday. My subject was one which I hoped would give him pleasure: the intermarriage between some families – for instance the Trevelyans, Macaulays and Arnolds – that created what I called an intellectual aristocracy. That essay has long been out of print and not easily accessible. Furthermore, it did not sit easily with the other chapters. But if you are interested in the ramifications of these families, you will find the detail of their intermarriage in the Annexe at the end of the book.

Dons are so often stereotyped. I wanted to show what a variety of dons there are, all of them memorable, all exhibiting different talents. Of course, there were others it would have been right to include. G. M. Trevelyan was one. In my first term at Cambridge he invited me to tea, and at the end of my last term before I graduated he wrote me a peremptory, almost illegible note telling me to come next morning and read aloud to him the papers I had written on my special subject – he said they were illegible. Later, when I was Provost of King’s and he was almost blind, I used to read poetry to him – the old favourites, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Meredith. Sometimes, sobbing with emotion, he would join me and declaim some of the hundreds of lines he knew by heart. But David Cannadine wrote an admirable memoir of Trevelyan that says so much of what needs to be said.

Then there was Keynes, whom I got to know during the war, but no less than three biographies of him exist as well as countless articles. Indeed, I could have chosen Roy Harrod, Keynes’s first biographer. At Oxford they played a game where you have to describe people in words of one syllable. The winner was the word for Harrod: ‘don’. Harrod was a great writer of notes to his colleagues, within the Establishment but always willing to advance unorthodox opinions, a critic of the tutorial which, he thought, was being used for spoon-feeding; yet none was more loyal to Oxford’s rituals or more insistent on a don’s obligations to his pupils. A tutorial should correct ‘points of style, presentation, logic, modes of criticising authorities studied etc.’ His ingenious and quirky mind enlivened the high table at Christ Church.

I had an excuse for omitting two influential dons, F. R. Leavis and Michael Oakeshott, since I had written at length on each in Our Age. But why omit towering scientists like Florey and Todd? Or one of Oxford’s most revered scholars in classics, John Beazley, who brought order into the study of Attic vases? Or socialist thinkers like G. D. H. Cole or ‘Sage’ Bernal? Or miraculous eccentrics such as the professor of Modern Greek at Oxford, R. M. Dawkins, remembered for his cackle of laughter and keen interest in flagellomania?

I would have liked to have included more scientists. When I returned to Cambridge after the war one of the scientists who became my special friend was Victor Rothschild. He did research on spermatozoa in the zoology lab, but although a fellow of Trinity he did not teach and left the university to become chief scientific adviser to Royal Dutch Shell. I had made a rule for myself not to write about the living and I therefore did not choose Alan Hodgkin, Nobel Prizeman and Master of Trinity, who died only as this book was ready to go to press. The others were in the molecular biology unit – Max Perutz, Sidney Brenner and Francis Crick, the discoverer, with Jim Watson, of the structure of DNA, all still happily alive. I failed to persuade Francis to allow his name to go forward for a fellowship at King’s. He would not join any society with a chapel: to do so would have been to connive at error; and King’s undeniably had a chapel.

Universities have endured hard times since government decided to move to mass higher education, none more so than the elite institutions I knew so well in London – University College, Imperial College and the London School of Economics – and the leading civic universities. It is these places, with Oxford and Cambridge, that are the guardians of intellectual life. Over thirty years ago I tried to put into words what such places exist to do. They cannot teach the qualities that people need in politics and business. Nor can they teach culture and wisdom, any more than theologians teach holiness, or philosophers goodness or sociologists a blueprint for the future. They exist to cultivate the intellect. Everything else is secondary. Equality of opportunity to come to the university is secondary. The matters that concern both dons and administrators are secondary. The need to mix classes, nationalities and races together is secondary. The agonies and gaieties of student life are secondary. So are the rules, customs, pay and promotion of the academic staff and their debates on changing the curricula or procuring facilities for research. Even the awakening of a sense of beauty or the life-giving shock of new experience, or the pursuit of goodness itself – all these are secondary to the cultivation, training and exercise of the intellect. Universities should hold up for admiration the intellectual life. The most precious gift they have to offer is to live and work among books or in laboratories and to enable the young to see those rare scholars who have put on one side the world of material success, both in and outside the university, in order to study with single-minded devotion some topic because that above all seems important to them. A university is dead if the dons cannot in some way communicate to the students the struggle – and the disappointments as well as the triumphs in that struggle – to produce out of the chaos of human experience some grain of order won by the intellect. That is the end to which all the arrangements of the university should be directed.

I still believe that this is the principle that should govern Oxford and Cambridge and our élite universities.

CHAPTER ONE The Dons Create an Intellectual Aristocracy

The word ‘don’ carries many meanings, quite a number of them ironical. Some use it loosely to mean anyone who holds a post at a university, but well into the twentieth century it meant something more precise. ‘Don’ did not immediately suggest a creative scholar or a professeur of a particular subject, still less a privatdozent. A don was not expected to be an intellectual nor yet a man with a passion for general ideas. No: essentially he was a teacher and a fellow of an Oxford or Cambridge college; a teacher who stood in a peculiar relation to his pupils in that they came to his rooms individually each week and were taught by him personally. And since these pupils were men of his own college, his first allegiance was not to the university but to his college – to the close-knit society whose members had elected him. To the other fellows he was bound by ties of special loyalty and affection – sometimes, of course, by the no less binding ties of enmity and loathing which led to feuds and vendettas within the society,

It was only in late Victorian days that election to fellowships and university posts at Oxford and Cambridge began to be made on merit; and even then, merit could be determined by numbers of tests which were by no means all strictly academic. Was he, it could be asked, a good college man, sociable, willing to share in due course in the administration of the college, a potential bursar, tutor or dean? Was he a man of character as well as intellect, for he was educating the next generation who were to be the clergymen, statesmen and gentlemen of England?

In the early years of the nineteenth century before the ancient universities were reformed everything depended on patronage and few were ashamed to admit it. ‘I don’t know what we’re coming to,’ said Canon Barnes of Christ Church in the 1830s. ‘I’ve given Studentships to my sons, and to my nephews, and to my nephew’s children, and there are no more of my family left. I shall have to give them by merit one of these days.’ An old fellow of Merton was urged to award a fellowship to the candidate who had done best in the examinations. ‘Sir, I came here to vote for my old friend’s son, and vote for him I shall, whatever the examiners may say.’ To appoint by merit had echoes of the French Revolution. Had not Napoleon declared that every soldier carried a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and look what ruffians Junot, Augereau and Ney were. Wellington per contra defended the system of officers in the army purchasing their commissions since, as gentlemen of England, they could be depended upon to be loyal as well as brave. Patronage was the passport to getting on in life. The venerable Dr Routh, President of Magdalen, who died in 1854 in his hundredth year, was in no doubt: ‘Take my advice, sir,’ he said to an undergraduate destined for Parliament; ‘choose some powerful patron, sir, and stick to him – stick to him always, sir, that is the only way.’* Today it is not the only way. Men and women can rise on their own merits; but, if they are honest and reflect, how many will admit that someone – a friend of their family, a teacher skilled in writing testimonials or an employer or senior colleague who took a shine to them – gave them their chance?

In the ancient universities, in which the majority of fellows were clergymen, patronage affected professorships, canonries and country livings to which, if a fellow decided to marry, he could be appointed. In those days politics were more concerned with religion, and which prime minister was in office mattered because patronage was often in his gift. Readers of Trollope’s Barchester Towers will remember how the fall of the Conservative ministry dashed Archdeacon Grantly’s hopes of being made bishop and the preferment went to Dr Proudie. Tories could be expected to appoint High Churchmen, the Whigs to prefer liberals or what came to be called Broad Churchmen. But it was not as simple as that. How staunch a Protestant was a candidate? Was he stalwart against Catholic Emancipation? Routh was a High Churchman and the only head of a college to support John Henry Newman when Newman declared that Anglican beliefs were not inconsistent with Roman dogma, but he opposed Sir Robert Peel when Peel stood for the chancellorship of Oxford because Peel had finally brought himself to vote for Catholic Emancipation.*

What kind of don did this system of patronage throw up? Writing at the end of the nineteenth century William Tuckwell, a fellow of New College, thought they fell into four categories: cosmopolitan, ornamental, mere – and learned. The cosmopolitan don, intelligent but worldly, would be found in London as often as Oxford, seeing that the political interests of his friends at Westminster were reflected in elections to posts in Oxford and pari passu that patronage by cabinet ministers flowed into the right channels in the university. The ornamental don held university offices. He became a proctor and looked forward to offers of succulent benefices in the Church. He was therefore so cushioned by genial company and emoluments that further effort on his part was not required and he added nothing to learning. Preferment in the Church was what occupied his mind. But if he failed to get it he might die as senior fellow of his college, renowned for his nose for a vintage. Or he became an eccentric whom younger fellows boasted of having known.

The mere don referred to the bulk of the fellows, tutors who took the undergraduates in their college through Latin and Greek texts, up in arms at any attempt by the professors to deflect their pupils to attend professorial lectures. A mere don might well be voted in as head of a house, the compromise candidate when the supporters of the two abler rivals produced a deadlock by their intransigence. He would then preside ‘with a late-married wife as uncouth and uneducated as he … respecting no man in the University and respected by no man out of it’. There were indeed some roughnecks among the heads or others, such as the Rector of Lincoln, Edward Tatham, a stickler for Anglican orthodoxy and hater of dissenters, whose violence of language did his cause more harm than good. In a two-and-a-half-hour sermon he declared that he wished ‘all the Jarman critics at the bottom of the Jarman Ocean’. Yet there were fine heads of houses, among them Tatham’s opponent, Cyril Jackson, the Dean of Christ Church, Richard Jenkyns of Balliol and later the liberal reformer Francis Jeune of Pembroke.

Tuckwell’s fourth category was the learned don. The days had passed since Gibbon could portray the dons as stupefied by their dull and deep potations while supinely enjoying the gifts of their founder. A few were certainly learned and edited classical texts. Many more were quick and elegant versifiers in Latin and Greek. Common room talk was peppered with Latin tags; some could even pun in Greek. Arthur Ridding not only described the Duke of Wellington lying in state as ‘splendide mendax’ but, seeing a wretched horse, scarcely more than skin and bones, hauling a barge along the tow-path of a canal, muttered ‘to pathos’ (towpath ’oss). There was the good-natured Henry ‘Horse’ Kett, whose long face so resembled a horse’s head that undergraduates filled his snuff-box with oats. Realising that many undergraduates found the compulsory questions on Aristotelian logic beyond their powers, ‘Horse’ Kett wrote a book called Logic Made Easy. His fellow examiner Edward Copleston at once wrote a devastating riposte and headed his pamphlet with the Virgilian warning about never trusting a Greek even with a gift in his hands: ‘Aliquis latet error; Equo ne credite, Teucri’ (Some trick here; don’t trust the horse, Trojans). But although Oxford scholars read German commentaries on classical texts, they could not be compared to the German classical scholars, at that time the finest in the world.

Out of these learned dons there emerged an intellectual aristocracy. Dons formed dynasties. When Frederic Maitland married the sister of H. A. L. Fisher, later to be Warden of New College, he became a nephew of Julia Stephen, the wife of Leslie Stephen and mother of Virginia Woolf, and counted among his other cousins the Oxford scholars F. H. and A. C. Bradley, and the headmaster of Rugby W. W. Vaughan, a member of another clan of dons. Maitland’s daughter was to marry a don.*

What was happening was that certain families of a serious cast of mind intermarried and their children became scholars and teachers, joining those at Oriel and Balliol in Oxford, or at Trinity and St John’s in Cambridge. They led the movement for academic reform within the universities and became the first professors of the new civic academies; and their achievements as headmasters at Shrewsbury or Harrow or Rugby were watched by the professional classes, eager to educate their sons well at schools where they mixed with those of the lesser aristocracy or gentry. When these sons in turn came to marry, what was more natural than to choose a wife from the families of their fathers’ friends whose fortune and upbringing matched their own?

They were a new status group. Sociologists distinguish a social group from a social class. These families were not concerned with the means of production and creation of wealth. What marked them off was not wealth but standing. A section of the Victorian middle class rose to positions of influence and respect as a range of posts passed out of the gift of the nobility into their hands. They naturally ascended to positions where academic and cultural policy was made. In literary life they were the backbone of the Victorian intellectual periodicals. In public service they were strongest in the Indian and home civil service rather than in diplomacy, which for long was too expensive for them and attracted the sons of the upper classes; but once diplomats could support themselves on their salary they began to invade the foreign service.

They were not a narrow professoriate. They could not be when most fellowships had to be vacated on marriage or the holder required to take holy orders. True to the traditional role of Oxford and Cambridge, which was to educate men for service in Church and State, they overflowed into the new professions. The days when Addison could define the professions as divinity, law and physic were past. Not only were the old professions expanding to include attorneys and apothecaries, but the establishment in 1828 of the Institution of Civil Engineers to further ‘the art of directing the Great Sources of Power in Nature for the use and convenience of mankind’ marked the rise of a new kind of professional man. Members of these intellectual families became the new professional civil servants at a time when government had become too complicated and technical to be handled by the ruling class and their dependants. They became school inspectors or took posts in the museums or were appointed secretaries of philanthropic societies; or they edited or wrote for the periodicals or entered publishing houses; or, as journalists ceased to be hacks scribbling in Grub Street, they joined the staff of The Times. Thus they gradually spread over the length and breadth of English intellectual life, criticising the assumptions of the ruling class above them and forming the opinions of the upper middle class to which they belonged.

This intellectual aristocracy was not an intelligentsia, a term which, Russian in origin, suggests the shifting, shiftless members of revolutionary or literary cliques who have cut themselves adrift from the moorings of family. The English intellectual élite, wedded to gradual reform of accepted institutions and able to move between the worlds of speculation and government, was stable. That it was so – that it was unexcitable and, to European minds, unexciting – was in part due to the influence of these academic families.

Why was this so? One reason was that, although they supplanted the placemen or kinsmen of the nobility and gentry, quite a number of them were in fact related to the gentry and even at a few removes from the nobility. Numbers of dons and at one time the headmasters of Eton, Radley and Rugby were connected to the Lytteltons. The Stanleys of Alderley keep cropping up in the family trees and connect with the Lubbocks and the Buxtons. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper descends from Barbara Villiers, the mistress of Charles II, and is connected with a viceroy of India and with Robert Brand, the fellow of All Souls and member of Milner’s kindergarten* after the South African war. Arthur Balfour, the Prime Minister and nephew of the Marquess of Salisbury, was the brother-in-law of the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick and of the physicist and Nobel Prizeman Lord Rayleigh; and one of his nieces married a Trevelyan. The Trevelyans and Stracheys were cadet branches of old West Country families with baronetcies created in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Babingtons, who were Leicestershire country squires, were not the only family to trace their descent from a Duchess of Norfolk who was a great-great-granddaughter of Edward I: so could the Cripps family, the Venns, the Thorntons and the Plowdens – even, improbably, among her remote descendants were Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant. Henry Thornton, the leader of the Clapham Sect, smiled satirically at his brother’s breakfast party for Queen Charlotte and her daughter in his exquisitely embellished villa. ‘We are all City people and connected with merchants and nothing but merchants on every side,’ he said; and the subsequent failure of his brother, who died under an assumed name in New York, may have seemed like a judgement on such luxurious display. All the same the Thorntons were cousins of the Earl of Leven and could trace their descent to the last of the Plantagenets, ‘false, fleeting, perjur’d Clarence’.

Nevertheless they did not think of themselves, whatever their connections, as being part of the ruling class and the established circles of power. Nor did the nobility or upper gentry think of them as equals. When, in one of Trollope’s political novels, Lady Mary Palliser pleads with her father, the Duke of Omnium, to be permitted to marry Frank Tregear, she argues: ‘He is a gentleman.’ ‘So is my private secretary,’ replies the duke. ‘The curate of the parish is a gentleman, and the medical man who comes here from Bradstock, the word is too vague to carry any meaning that ought to be serviceable …’ The word ‘gentleman’ became in Victorian times a subject of dialectical enquiry and nerve-racking embarrassment. Newman and Huxley both redefined it to meet the needs of their status group and the realities of a new age. To have been to a public school was not a necessary qualification; but to have been to a university, or by some means to have acquired professional status, was. Political necessity did not oblige them, as so often in France, to polarise themselves and identify with the party of order or the party of liberty; nor, as in Russia, to face the consequences of living beneath a despotism; nor, like professors in Germany, to become State officials. They formed a barrier to the jingoism and aggressive philistinism at the turn of the century. For the most part they preferred the manners of Asquith and Balfour to those of Lloyd George or Lord Hugh Cecil, though there were some stalwart Tories among them. The question of Home Rule for Ireland and later the rise of the Labour Party pushed some of the radicals among them to the right in late Victorian times.

Did these families at their zenith exert a stultifying effect upon English intellectual life by monopolising important posts? Did they exclude a new class who, unbeneficed and indignant, ate out their hearts in the wilderness? Some think so. They produced a disproportionately large number of eminent men and women, but it is also true that they produced men of sound but not outstanding ability who reached the front ranks of science and scholarship because they had been trained in their families and at school to turn their upbringing to account. The heyday of their influence probably came in the early years of this century until the 1930s, when the number of academic and editorial posts rose. As the BBC, the British Council and Arts Council, the media and other cultural institutions were set up and expanded, the number of posts multiplied far faster than the progeny of these families; and after the Second World War their members were spread very thin over the crust of British intellectual life. The charge of monopoly at any time is farfetched; but that they had influence and used it is undeniable.

What was the ethos of these families? What spiritual springs refreshed them? The first spring was evangelicalism, and though the faith in its purest form might fade, they were imbued with its principles. There was the sense of dedication, of living with purpose, or working under the eye, if not of the great Taskmaster, of their own conscience – that organ which evangelicalism magnified so greatly. They were filled with a sense of mission to improve the shining hour. They felt they had to account for their talents. They held themselves apart from a world given over to vanities which men of integrity rejected. These were the principles that inspired the Clapham Sect to which the Macaulays, Venns, Stephens and Thorntons belonged.

The second spring was philanthropy. Philanthropy linked the Clapham families with the Quaker families; the Gurneys, Frys, Gaskells, Hoares, Hodgkins, Foxes, Buxtons and Barclays had intermarried in the eighteenth century. As the Quakers became prosperous and began to play a larger part in the affairs of the world; as they turned from small traders into bankers and brewers; and as they began to own country houses and mixed with evangelical philanthropists or enlightened businessmen, many of them felt oppressed by the narrow bounds of the Society of Friends. The children of John Gurney of Earlham, a banker and country gentleman, had outgrown the simple narrow piety of their elders. They were a lively household and referred to the meeting house in Goat Lane, Norwich, as ‘that disgusting Goat’s’. One of the liveliest, Elizabeth Fry, suddenly experienced conversion and returned to the ways of the Society, but of her seven brothers and sisters who married, four knelt before the altar of a church. They were not alone in seceding. Mary Ann Galton left the Quakers for the Moravian Brothers, William Rathbone went over in 1805 to Unitarianism and James Wilson, the father-in-law of Walter Bagehot, ceased to attend Meeting in 1832 after marrying an Anglican. Small wonder that an appeal was made not to excommunicate members who married those of other religions.

The Quaker families also linked the evangelicals to the third group of philanthropists, the Unitarian or philosophic radical families. The Wedgwoods neither stemmed from a line of parsons nor did they breed them. Josiah Wedgwood of Maer, the son of the founder of the pottery, told his wife not to be uneasy about playing cards on Sunday, since she knew in her heart that it was not wrong. ‘I am rather afraid,’ he wrote, ‘of Evangelicalism spreading amongst us though I have some confidence in the good sense of the Maerites for keeping it out, or if it must come for having the disease in a very mild form.’ His first cousins, the Darwins, a singularly unreligious family, were equally untouched. They both belonged to the upper-middle-class world of Brougham and Mackintosh and the Edinburgh Review, a world which had ties with the cultivated French middle class. Their children made the Grand Tour and went to balls and race meetings. Yet if their manners were freer they were not very far removed from some of the children of Clapham; and Charles Darwin’s description of his uncle Josiah as ‘the very type of an upright man with the clearest judgment. I do not believe that any power on earth could have made him swerve an inch from what he considered the right course’, surely suggests that they had the same temperament as the descendants of the Evangelicals or Quakers,

In the 1860s two objectives vital to their class and, as they rightly thought, vital to their country, united them. They worked tirelessly for intellectual freedom within the universities which, they thought, should admit anyone irrespective of his religious beliefs. They also worked for the creation of a public service open to talent. If they can be said to have had a Bill of Rights it was the Trevelyan-Northcote report of 1854 on reform of the civil service, and their Glorious Revolution was achieved in 1870–71, when entry to public service by privilege, purchase of army commissions and the religious tests were abolished. From then on clever men could succeed through open competitive examination. What was more Macaulay had recommended that the examination for the Indian Civil Service should be designed for those who had taken high honours at the university. The change took time. Even after Victoria’s reign it was still possible to be nominated to a place in Whitehall, though one had to pass a formal examination after entry. Not until 1908 in the Home Office and 1911 in the Treasury were the values of the intellectual aristocracy – probity, loyalty, a rational system of promotion and detachment from party politics – enshrined. The workaholic bureaucrat was replacing civil servants like Trollope who expected to get three days’ hunting a fortnight. By the time of the First World War no formal obstacle remained to prevent the man of brains from becoming a gentleman. An intellectual aristocracy had formed.

Was this dangerous? George Meredith, whose novels were much admired by the discerning among the intellectual aristocracy, was among the first to use the term. But he did not use it as a term of praise. He used it to highlight the dangers of a meritocracy. In 1859 he wrote in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel:

How soothing it is to intellect – that noble rebel, as the Pilgrim has it – to stand, and bow, and know itself superior! This exquisite compensation maintains the balance: whereas that period anticipated by the Pilgrim, when science shall have produced an intellectual aristocracy, is indeed horrible to contemplate. For what despotism is so black as one the mind cannot challenge? ’Twill be an iron Age.

Meredith forgot that there are always countervailing forces in history. In the second half of the twentieth century the props that underpinned the meritocracy were shaken. Most of the grammar schools, which had so often been the first step on the ladder, became comprehensive schools; the examinations for the public service were altered to take account of the revolution in electronics and the computer age; and people learned to doubt how far scientists, economists and applied sociologists could plan and control the future.

What were these families like? It was the mark of most of them to remain almost exactly where they were placed in society. Josiah Wedgwood had a country house and had married a squire’s daughter, but the Wedgwoods were not a county family and they knew it. Their fortune rested on the pottery and not on land and during the past century and a half they have neither risen nor fallen in the social scale. The families that rose by business, especially the Quaker connections, were affluent enough to enable some of their children to pursue their scholarly studies in leisure; but they had neither the wealth nor the inclination to become magnates and were always liable to need to save a brother whose affairs had failed to prosper. In any event a fortune divided among forty grandchildren did not give the cadet branches the chance to live extravagantly. The Anglican families tended to be less well-to-do. Sound commercial principles were allied to ascetic habits. Even on their meagre stipends the poorer dons thrived and, as few of them were permitted to marry, they saved. Aged twenty-six Henry Sidgwick wrote to his mother from Trinity, ‘I find that I have saved £1,700 and hope to save £400 a year as long as I stay here: in spite of all my travelling, books and the extremely luxurious life that I can hardly help leading.’ A fortnight later he told her that he had opposed a college ball being held because ‘I consider it a most unseemly proceeding on the part of a charitable foundation for the purposes of education and of which the majority are clergymen and … especially as it will be a great expense, and you know my miserly tendencies.’ His luxurious life was evidently restrained.

Restrained because for Sidgwick, as for all of them, the purpose of life was to distinguish in conduct as well as in concept the sham from the genuine, appearance from reality. Appearances were to be exposed and these men were splendidly eccentric in Victorian society in not keeping them up. They groaned at the thought of formal receptions and preferred to wear rough clothes. The gentlemanly Arthur Benson, Sidgwick’s nephew, opined that a don should be well dressed in the style-before-last and obeyed this precept by wearing shapeless flannels. Their self-confidence forbade them to ape the manners of their superiors in rank and their clothes, like their pursuits, were a protest against the pastimes of the upper classes, which became increasingly more gaudy and expensive. They neither hunted nor had the money for vast battues of pheasants. Most of them had lost their roots in their soil and, cut off from country sports, had become town-dwellers. But they had not lost touch with Nature, whom they sought mountaineering in the Alps or on forty-mile tramps or with their botanical satchel and geologist’s hammer. Their manners lacked polish. Indeed they despised it as much as they despised the art of pleasing – that imperative accomplishment for those who enter politics or London society. But they did not become parochial or cut themselves off from London. Many of them lived there, and those who did not kept up with public affairs through dining clubs, where they met their cousins and brothers-in-law in the professions, or sometimes by themselves through participating in politics.

Their good manners appeared in their prose. At its worst it was lucid and free from scholarly jargon. They wrote with a sense of form, of drama, of the possibilities of language; and they wrote not for a scholarly clique but for the intelligent public at large whom they addressed confident that they would be understood. Moreover, their scholarly manners had an ease seldom evident in a parochial professoriate. They declined, with a few exceptions, to follow the pulverising style of German professors. Darwin and Maitland showed that it was possible to argue without breaking heads, and even such controversialists as Huxley were untainted by the odium clericum and distinguished between the charlatan and the wrong-headed. They valued independence and recognised it in others. Because they judged people by an exterior standard of moral and intellectual merit, they never became an exclusive clique and welcomed the penniless son of a dissenting minister as a son-in-law if they believed in his integrity and ability. Because their own proud standards were assured they tolerated a wide variety of belief. They might follow the French sociologist Auguste Comte, they were often followers of Mill, they might be agnostics, or they might continue to adhere to the Church of their fathers; but they respected each other’s beliefs, however deeply convinced that the beliefs were wrong. They were agreed on one characteristic doctrine: that the world could be improved by analysing the needs of society and calculating the possible course of its development.

They could be intimidating to meet. Intellectuals often are. Their sense of responsibility to reason was too great for them to appreciate spontaneous behaviour. Spontaneity is attractive, but its lack of rational consideration irritated them. They were bored by the superficiality of drawing-room gossip, and preferred to have their talk out rather than converse. As infants they had learnt by listening to their parents to extend their vocabulary and talk in grammatical sentences – of which the best known (to an enquiry after his toothache) was the four-year-old Macaulay’s ‘Thank you, madam, the agony is abated.’ When older they subconsciously apprehended from hearing discussions between their elders how to reason logically. They lived in houses in which books were part of existence and the intellect was prized. They developed inner resources for entertaining themselves which did not depend on the ordinary social accomplishments. Competitive examinations at the schools and universities sharpened their minds. Children who did not inherit their parents’ intellectual talents suffered unjustly by feeling that they had failed; children were expected to marry according to their parents’ lights. One who was on the point of marrying an actor was safely brought back to the fold to marry a don. The dedicated agnostic G. M. Trevelyan bore his daughter’s marriage to a scholarly clergyman like a man. But there were limits, and he told his son: ‘I want you to know that your mother and I wish you to be free to marry whom you will. But we will take it hard if she is a Roman Catholic.’

They had their limitations, as every close-knit class must have. Their response to art was at best uncertain. Literature, of course, was in their bones. The poetry and prose of Greece and Rome had been their discipline, and that of their own country filled their leisure hours. They were the first to admire Meredith and Browning and to dethrone Byron for Wordsworth. Goethe and the German poets were admired primarily for the moral precepts which their works embodied. French culture was another matter. Lady Strachey, her children gathered about her, might rise from her seat in the railway carriage as the train steamed into the Gare du Nord and bow to the great city, the mistress of European civilisation, but such a gesture was rare. Matthew Arnold went as far as most were prepared to go in admiring French culture and he made strong reservations. The Parisian haute bourgeoisie combined a passion for general ideas with an interest in the arts, the theatre and opera, in a way which was impossible for them. Their experience of the visual arts was meagre. Beautiful objects and elegant rooms were not to them necessities: their comfortable ugly houses in Kensington, Bayswater and north Oxford, rambling, untidy, full of gloryholes and massive furnishings and staffed by two or three despairing servants, were dedicated to utility, not beauty. Some may have bought some good pieces of furniture, a very few of the more prosperous may have invested in Italian primitives, others were affected by the Pre-Raphaelites, but in the main they groped after artistic fashion in a manner inconsistent with their natural self-confidence.

To this there were exceptions. When Philip Webb, Norman Shaw and Bodley began to design houses, not in ponderous stucco or bewildering gothic, but in the potpourri of styles which came to be known as Queen Anne, some members of the intellectual aristocracy responded. Henry Sidgwick at Cambridge and the philosopher T. H. Green at Oxford both commissioned houses designed in the new style of sweetness and light, with bay windows, verandas, inglenooks and crannies crammed with a clutter of objects intended to delight the eye and interest the mind. Girton College was built as a spartan, spare building in the Tudor-gothic style of Waterhouse, everything geared to proving that women could compete on equal terms with men. But Sidgwick got his friend Champneys to design Newnham in the Queen Anne style: the students’ rooms were papered with Morris wallpaper, and his wife, the first Principal, insisted that the corridors should have windows on both sides for cheerfulness. Indeed there were always a handful of them who self-consciously kept up with new styles in the visual arts which, even if the effort was not spontaneous, was a good deal better than sinking into complacent philistinism. Still, many of them inherited the old evangelical distrust of beauty as a temptress, unsusceptible to the kind of analysis of which they were accomplished masters. That distrust inhibited them in their dealings with art. A fashionably dressed wife would not only have been an extravagance but an act of submission to worldly vanity: and the Pre-Raphaelite cloaks and dresses which had been donned as a homage to beauty and a protest against the world of upper-class fashion degenerated in some cases into thick woollen stockings and flannel petticoats, which were proudly worn as a badge of financial and spiritual austerity. By the end of the century there was a slight staidness, a satisfaction, a lack of spontaneity and intellectual adventure, even a touch of philistinism in the face of new forms of art; and some of their descendants, such as Samuel Butler or the Bloomsbury group, satirised these failings.

The artist’s vision was not theirs. Nor was the artist’s world; critical of conventions as they might be, they emphatically did not live in Bohemia. Pleasure was identified with happiness, and happiness by both their favourite philosophers, Mill and Green, with self-realisation. There could be family jollity, but exuberance, raciness and high spirits escaped them. They were a little too far removed from the battle of keeping a job and exercising the arts of getting a better, a little too severe on inconsequential behaviour, fully to understand human nature. Nor was this surprising; those who have clear ideas on what life ought to be always have difficulty in reconciling themselves to what it is. Considering that their hearts were set on transforming the old universities into institutions of education and research, their genial and tolerant regard for the older generation of dons was remarkable. Their goals nevertheless were so clear and their purpose so single-minded that they were apt to sacrifice other valuable things to achieve them. Self-realisation was not always extended to those gifted and capital creatures their wives. Fortunately for their husbands these wives were trained to self-sacrifice.

Great as their influence was in politics and intellectual life in the middle of the century, perhaps it was even more important at the end. For then the restraints of religion and thrift and accepted class distinctions started to crumble and English society to rock as money flooded into it and affected its values. The class war, not merely between labour and owners but between all social strata of the middle and upper classes, began in earnest. The intellectual aristocracy were one of the few barriers which resisted these forces. They insisted that honesty and courtesy were valuable; and they continued to set before the young unworldly ideals. They suggested that if public life was inseparable from spiritual ignominy, another life devoted to unravelling the mysteries of mind, matter and heart was to be desired.

For them, too, it was a period of change. In the 1880s the ban on married dons was removed and many who in the past would have been forced to vacate their fellowships and pursue their studies elsewhere or find a different source of income were able to remain at Oxford and Cambridge. As a result more of them became dons. They also became relatively poorer as taxation and the standard of living rose. A young don such as A. L. Smith, who later became Master of Balliol, the son of an unsuccessful civil engineer and one of a family of nineteen surviving children, had a hard time in making ends meet. Stipends which had been tolerable for a bachelor were inadequate for a married man, especially as the agricultural depression reduced college revenues that in great part came from farm rents.

By no means all the dons mentioned in this book belonged to these families. But these families were at the heart of creating an academic profession that could match the achievements of their colleagues on the Continent and in America.

* Martin Joseph Routh (1755–1854), President of Magdalen College, Oxford (1791); remembered for his advice to a young scholar: ‘Always verify your references.’

* An election to the chancellorship was a political event of importance. In 1809 the chancellorship fell vacant. The Protestant vote was split between Lord Eldon (who was Lord Liverpool’s candidate) and the Duke of Beaufort, an old High Churchman. So the election was won through skilful canvassing by Lord Grenville, who had concealed until the last moment that he was in favour of Catholic Emancipation. The contest impaled the Dean of Christ Church, Dr Hall, on the horns of an excruciating dilemma. He was beholden to two patrons, Liverpool and Grenville. Liverpool, his old pupil, had procured the deanery for him. Grenville had made him Regius professor of divinity. What was he to do? Hall felt bound to tell Liverpool that he could not guarantee to deliver the Christ Church vote, where Grenville had a considerable following. Liverpool never forgave him and the canons of Christ Church, who had been appointed by Liverpool, cut him dead; his finances fell into confusion; until at last Liverpool offered him not a bishopric, but the deanery of Durham and then only on condition that he left Oxford to reside in Durham. He accepted and promptly went abroad.

* If you want to follow the ramifications of the intermarriage of these families, please turn to the Annexe at the end of the book.

* The group of able young men from Oxford and Toynbee Hall who helped Milner reorganise and pacify South Africa after the Boer War.

CHAPTER TWO The Genesis of the Modern Don – William Buckland

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Oxford and Cambridge were Church of England communities in which most dons were clergymen. Oxford was regarded as a bastion of the Church at which every undergraduate had to sign on entry the Thirty-Nine Articles of faith and many expected to take holy orders on graduating. Why then were they studying Aristotle’s logic instead of theology? Why, asked that liberal clergyman Sydney Smith, were tutors so afraid that ‘mental exertion must end in religious scepticism’? A liberal don answered him. Edward Copleston was to become Provost of Oriel and the heart of liberal opinion within the university, a man known to be in favour of mental exertion. ‘There is one province of education,’ he wrote, ‘indeed in which we are slow in believing that any discoveries can be made. The scheme of revelation we think is closed, and we expect no new light on earth to break in upon us.’ The scheme of revelation was expounded from the pulpit. That was the point of sermons. For the first thirty years of the century all teaching, so the future tutor and Master of Balliol Jowett recollected, supported the doctrine of authority, and Oxford was another bulwark against the insidious ideas of the French Revolution. It was safer to train the mind on the writings of Greek and Latin authors. Modern studies encouraged speculation and political controversy, so the classics took priority. Science was not neglected. Posts were established and filled in chemistry, mineralogy and geology. When Thomas Gaisford became Dean of Christ Church, he insisted that all undergraduates should attend a course on physics and be examined on it. The Regius professors of modern history lectured on political economy and a chair was created in that subject. Oriel under Copleston’s influence set its own examination for fellowships, designed to test intelligence as well as syntactical exactness. Gaisford discouraged Christ Church men from entering for honours; and the future Lord Derby, who won prizes and later, while Prime Minister, translated the Iliad, left Christ Church without a degree.

None of these initiatives prospered. At the beginning of the century a former Dean of Christ Church, Cyril Jackson, had got the university to accept an honours system of examination in classics and mathematics. Undergraduates were classed according to merit. In 1808 Robert Peel was the first man to achieve a ‘double first’ in classics and maths; Gladstone followed him in 1831. The advocates of a broad education regarded the honours schools as irrelevant, but they were to be defeated. To get a first was the first step to winning your way in the world. In most colleges it was the passport to a fellowship. If it was not the dawn, it was the first light of meritocracy.

Most of the professors in science were impresarios for their subjects. They did not do experimental work; their task, they believed, was to tell their audience what had already been discovered. They supplemented the theology of the Church of England by providing new proofs of God’s design – not as meticulous as those of Newton but still evidence that ‘in all His works most wonderful, Most sure in all His ways’, as Newman’s hymn asserted. Nevertheless, there was one professor who lived in an apartment in Christ Church – which is at once a college and a cathedral – set aside for the canons, a clergyman unlike the orthodox run of canons. Christ Church was the citadel of the High and Dry party within the Church of England and this canon was a liberal latitudinarian. What was more he was a geologist. He had made his name with his research into the rocks of south-west England and his patron was no less than the Prince Regent himself, who created a special professorship for him in 1819. He was the first president of the newly formed British Association, which had been formed to publicise advances in science. This was William Buckland.

Buckland charged two guineas for attendance at his course of lectures and he drew rapt audiences. He lectured on mineralogy and palaeontology; but he was as competent to lecture on artesian wells and civil engineering. He did not despise applied science, and became chairman of the Oxford Gas and Coke Company. Buckland began lecturing in 1814, and between 1820 and 1835 his lectures were part of the Oxford scene – rather as the lectures by the controversial scholar, Edgar Wind, on the history of art became necessities for the general public in the second half of the twentieth century. But then – the common fate of many dons who are great lecturers – attendance began to drop. A rival in the shape of Newman preaching in the university church of Great St Mary’s took his undergraduate audience away and in 1845 he left Oxford to become Dean of Westminster.

Buckland became a legend not so much for his scientific studies as for his remorseless application of the scientific practice of experiment and observation in his private life. He used to say that he had eaten his way through the whole animal creation and that the worst thing was a mole – ‘perfectly horrible’ – though afterwards he told Lady Lyndhurst that there was one thing worse than a mole and that was a blue-bottle fly. Mice in batter and bison steaks were served at his table in London. A guest wrote in his diary: ‘Dined at the Deanery. Tripe for dinner last night, don’t like crocodile for breakfast.’ He had a Protestant’s scepticism of Catholic miracles. Pausing before a dark stain on the flagstones of an Italian cathedral where the martyr’s blood miraculously renewed itself, he dropped to his knees and licked it. ‘I can tell you what it is: it is bat’s urine.’

Like many scientists his mind subconsciously continued to work on the problems preoccupying him. ‘My dear,’ he said to his wife, starting up from sleep at two o’clock in the morning, ‘I believe that Cheirotherium’s footsteps are undoubtedly testudinal.’ They hurried downstairs and while he fetched the pet tortoise from the garden, his wife mixed paste on the kitchen table. To their delight they saw that the impression left by the tortoise’s feet in the paste were almost identical with those of the fossil.

Their apartments in the quad were at once a natural history museum and a menagerie. They and their children lived surrounded on all sides by specimens, dead and alive, that Buckland had collected. When you entered the hall you might as easily mount a stuffed hippopotamus as the children’s rocking horse. Monsters of different eras glared down on you from the walls. The sideboard in the dining room groaned under the weight of fossils and was protected from the children by a notice: PAWS OFF. The very candlesticks were carved out of the bones of Saurians. Toads were immured in pots to see how long they could survive without food. There were cages full of snakes, and a pony with three children up would career round the dining-room table and out into the quad. Guinea pigs, owls, jackdaws and smaller fry had the run of the house. The children imbibed science with their mother’s milk. One day a clergyman excitedly brought Buckland some fossils for identification. ‘What are these, Frankie?’ said the professor to his four-year-old son. ‘They are the vertebuae of an ichthyosauwus,’ lisped the child. The parson retired crestfallen to his parish.

Buckland helped to establish the climate of opinion that made Darwin’s theory of the origin of species within a few years irresistible. He also set a standard of integrity among British scientists. It is easy to forget today how much then the story of the earth’s antiquity, the theory of evolution and the development of homo sapiens were founded on hypothesis and conjecture. Certainly the early geologists such as Buckland and Lyell based their theories on the facts of rock formation; certainly Darwin prevailed because no alternative explanation from the evidence that he produced was convincing. But the mass of evidence confirming and modifying their hypotheses accumulated after they wrote. It is important to remember, too, how many of the early hypotheses and theories were wrong. Buck-land’s story is of a man who published a book which changed his countrymen’s notions of pre-history; who forced himself to acknowledge in public that the main conclusions in that book were wrong; and who failed despite his own personal success to get Oxford to introduce science into its curriculum.

The book that made Buckland’s reputation in 1824 was called Reliquiae Diluvianae (Relics of the Flood). In it he linked the evidence of deposits in other caves in England and abroad with his own findings in the Kirkdale Cave in Yorkshire. This was the first fossil cave to be excavated in England. Buckland claimed that it had once been inhabited by hyenas who, it could be shown, had dragged the bodies of other animals into it, since their bones were characteristically splintered and lacked the parts which hyenas are in the habit of swallowing. These bones and teeth now lay on the floor of the cave beneath a thick layer of mud and were found all at the same level. Buckland therefore deduced that the hyenas had abandoned the cave at the onset of a great flood; and that this flood had also swept away the animals which lived about the cave and on whose carcasses the hyenas fed. It was at this stage in the argument that Buckland produced a further hypothesis. All the evidence showed that Yorkshire was once a sub-tropical land where elephants, bears and rhinoceros had roamed. All the evidence pointed to a flood. This, then, must have been the Flood described in Genesis, but it had occurred tens of thousands of years ago and not, as the seventeenth-century genealogists of the Old Testament had calculated, after 4004 BC.

When Buckland announced that it would be prudent to regard the six days of the Creation as six ages, many pious readers were in no mood to feel that the confirmation of the seventh chapter of Genesis compensated for the loss of the first. Nevertheless, there was no such outburst as greeted Darwin’s great book. The evangelical movement in the churches was not so formidable then nor so well organised, and the leadership had not passed into the hands of unintelligent zealots. The Tractarians, who were to rouse Oxford and the country to new heights of religious intensity and intolerance, were still unknown young men: their campaign lay nearly ten years ahead in the future. Buckland’s speculations were regarded as dangerous and daring but they were not repulsive to the Oxford of Copleston, which gave shelter to liberal theology. It was indeed this book that won him his canonry at Christ Church and his European reputation. In 1830 he was asked by the trustees of the Earl of Bridgewater’s will to write under the terms of the will one of eight treatises to ‘justify the ways of God to man’. Buckland spent six years on the task of explaining what geology and palaeontology told us of the earth’s history and then of arguing that the Bible cannot be said to contradict these findings because it is not a scientific textbook. This elicited a flurry of pamphlets from the country parsons, one of whom spent pages deducing from the height of the Himalayas that the waters of the Flood must have risen at the rate of thirty feet per hour; and the Dean of York addressed several grave letters to Buck-land. But as the Archbishop of York was a personal friend of Buckland and the two great periodicals, the Quarterly and the Edinburgh, came out on his side, he had little to fear.

Success and social eminence can easily corrupt scholars – particularly English scholars. Victorian savants found themselves petted by the influential and the great; insensibly they slid into becoming the academic defenders of the safe and the cautious; and then they found themselves expected to condemn the heretical. When The Origin of Species was published the geologist Adam Sedgwick, a famous contemporary of Buckland at Cambridge, used the full force of his authority to discredit it; and when the most eminent of all the English classical geologists, Sir Charles Lyell, after first hesitating announced his support, Darwin showed his appreciation of the danger that Lyell had run when he wrote, ‘In view of his age and his position in society his conduct is heroic’. Buckland had in complete honesty put forward a hypothesis which enabled the story of Genesis in some sense to be reconciled with his geological discoveries. Suddenly he was challenged – and challenged by a young foreigner whom he had befriended. This young man was the Swiss naturalist Agassiz, who had corresponded with Buckland about his work and for whom Buckland had raised funds to enable him to continue his researches. Agassiz put forward the notion, commonplace nowadays, that the alluvial deposits in caves such as Buckland excavated were the relics not of the Flood but of an Ice Age. Buckland was not at first convinced. But he went to Switzerland to study glaciers with Agassiz; got him to England to go over the evidence in his caves; and then renounced his own theories, championed the hypothesis that the Swiss had put forward, and converted Lyell. The mud which had filled the hyenas’ cave in Yorkshire had been brought by the melting snows on the hills, which could not disperse because the Scandinavian ice sheet was jammed up against the east coast of Britain.

This was the action of a man of character and generosity. It is also the work of a man of integrity. This kind of integrity is so much taken for granted today among scientists that is it difficult to imagine a time when it cost an effort. Perhaps it still costs an effort to the eminent when their juniors upset their conclusions, but they know well enough that it is quite hopeless to bluster. In the first half of the nineteenth century this was not so evident. Men still thought of truth as a unity. It was not Buckland’s piety that made him leap to the conclusion that he had evidence of the Flood. He imagined himself simply drawing on another set of facts in the Bible which were well-attested and which fitted into the pattern of logical deductions that he had drawn from his findings in the Kirkdale Caves. It was all the more creditable then that, unlike other clergymen and members of the well-established academic circles to which he belonged, he did not fail to change his views even though they might have damaged his prospects.

In the 1830s his prospects at Oxford seemed to glow. Fluent, rapid, engaging, he would stalk up and down amid his audience brandishing a cave-bear jaw or a hyena thigh-bone. He held field days on which he demonstrated the different deposits in the countryside. His ebullience, his sharp voice, his hatred of the dishonest and the bogus, and his own learning established him as an authority. He was a popular diner-out; he would appear at a dinner party carrying his blue bag, from which he would draw fossils and bones and intrigue the company. Another don wrote him the following friendly letter:

On our return last night I found as I thought that a spider had crawled out of the inkstand over a piece of paper; but it turns out to be a hieroglyphic from you which I so far interpreted as to perceive it was an invitation to meet some professor whose name as you wrote it looked somewhat indecent. I shall be happy to wait on you and take the opportunity of learning the Egyptian mode of writing.

He had no rival in his field and might have been expected to have established a school of natural science at Oxford. Yet when he left Oxford in 1845 it was as if he had never existed.

One cause for Buckland’s failure to make any impression on the Oxford curriculum was the strength of the spirit which was embodied in the Dean of Christ Church himself. Dean Gaisford did not take kindly to the peregrinations through the college of the pets that lived in the Buckland household. He thanked God when the family departed for a holiday in Italy and prophesised, ‘We shall hear no more of this geology.’ Yet this was the same Gaisford who had compelled Christ Church undergraduates to study physics. He was a surly, grim, meticulous classical scholar born of an obscure family but who had married the daughter of the Bishop of Durham. Everyone quotes today a sentence which he dropped in one of his sermons to his undergraduates: ‘Nor can I do better,’ he concluded, ‘than impress upon you the study of Greek literature, which not only elevates above the vulgar herd, but leads not infrequently to positions of considerable emolument.’ He spoke from his own experience. When he was an undergraduate the then Dean of Christ Church detected his ability and told him: ‘You will never be a gentleman, but you may succeed with certainty as a scholar. Take some little known Greek author and throw your knowledge into editing it: that will found your reputation.’ Gaisford chose a work on Greek metres by the Alexandrian grammarian Hephaestion, and produced an edition of monumental erudition. That was the spirit which defeated Buckland.

In the 1830s Oxford and Cambridge were in much the same situation. Both had their naturalists and neither acknowledged the existence of science in their curricula. But whereas a century later Cambridge was famous in almost every field of science, and scientists governed its affairs as much as arts men, at Oxford science was fenced in by a shortage of college fellowships. Scientists – and especially technologists – were relegated to the backwaters of the university. However powerful the impression that Buckland made, he scarcely made a dent upon the serried ranks of classicists; and when in fact years later the curriculum broadened it was in the direction of language, law and history: few undergraduates took the science option. The studies at Oxford fit for a gentleman, fit for the ruling class, leading to ‘positions of considerable emolument’ were, if no longer confined to Greek literature, certainly not those that Buckland attempted to popularise. On his death his collection of rocks and fossils was swept away into an inadequate building.

In the short run, however, Gaisford was to be discomfited. For though Buckland left Oxford in due course his eldest son, Frank, came up to Christ Church as an undergraduate and for three years plagued the Dean. The principles of scientific experiment were embodied even more deeply in the son, and his father had trained him to be a keen observer. When he was eight years old a turtle had been sent to the college for the banquet which was to follow the Duke of Wellington’s installation as Chancellor. His father gave it a swim in the fountain in Tom Quad, with Frank riding on its back; and the boy then watched it being decapitated in the college kitchen and noticed how the severed head bit the kitchen boy’s finger. Frank was sent to school at Winchester, and there he followed his father’s principles. He collected the heads of cats and rats as other boys collected birds’ eggs. He taught himself to eat hedgehogs, fry mice in batter, dissect the eye of the Warden’s mastiff and snare and skin the headmaster’s exquisite cat. He dissected the cat’s body night after night until the stench became overpowering … for the other boys. Dissection was his principal pastime and he was heard to remark meditatively, ‘What wouldn’t I give for that fellow’s skull,’ when a particularly dolichocephalic youth happened to saunter by.

At Oxford Frank Buckland was at last able fully to develop his hobbies. He was a large, genial, bohemian figure, often dressed in a German student’s cap and a blue pea-jacket, and would make the quad resound to the notes of a gigantic Swiss wooden horn. True to family custom he lived surrounded by livestock. There were marmots, guinea pigs, snakes and a chameleon which perched on a wine glass, swallowing flies, until, to the delight of the spectators, it tumbled headlong into the preserved ginger. There was an eagle which walked into cathedral during the eight o’clock service: Dean Gaisford ‘looked unspeakable things’. There was a jackal whose yells curdled the blood of nervous freshmen. Most notable of all was his young bear, named after a ferocious Old Testament king Tiglath-Pileser. Tig went to wine parties in cap and gown, watched the boats and lived a full social existence. At one party he met Monckton Milnes. Milnes was at that time known as a fashionable young versifier and man-about-town and happened to have been learning the elements of mesmerism from the well-known bluestocking Harriet Martineau. He decided to mesmerise Tig, who growled ferociously but fell in a stupor to the ground. Dean Gaisford, however, had the last word. He had already rusticated the eagle for its sacrilegious behaviour, and the jackal had also been sent down. ‘Mr Buckland,’ he said, ‘I hear you keep a bear in college; well, either you or the bear must go.’

‘My object in life, to be a high priest of nature, and a great benefactor of mankind,’ Frank wrote in his diary at the age of twenty. He therefore became a doctor. But instead of turning to research after becoming qualified, as his contemporary, Darwin’s great supporter T. H. Huxley did, he accepted a commission in the Life Guards as an assistant surgeon so as to be able to pursue his collection of freaks and animals. He was popular in the mess; though on one occasion he upset the solemnity of church parade when first the men and then the officers were overcome by gales of laughter on seeing Buckland, who was off-duty, stroll by on the far side of the parade ground deep in conversation with a dwarf and a seven-foot-five French giant whom he had been entertaining to breakfast. He later married and set up house near Regent’s Park. Nothing could have been more cordial than the welcome the Bucklands gave to their guests, but they had to be people of strong nerves. Only one room in the house was in theory reserved for homo sapiens, and even this would be turned into a sanatorium for sick animals. ‘Sing up, old boy,’ your host would say to a piebald rat as one entered the room and, sure enough, ‘melodious notes could be heard issuing from its diaphragm’. Pickled snakes would be produced for you from a tank, live ones from Frank’s coat. At tea the hairy arm of the monkey would seize your muffin, while the guinea pigs nibbled your toes under the table. That incomparable memorialist, the High Church radical parson, William Tuckwell, said that ‘You felt as if another Flood were toward and the animals parading for admission to the Ark.’ The fellow-guests were equally unpredictable. Chinese, Zulus and Eskimos were all to be found at dinner. Delicate problems of etiquette presented themselves: should the bearded lady go down to dinner on the arm of Mr or Mrs Buckland? And which arm should you take of the four presented by the Siamese twins? After dinner you could be certain that Frank Buckland would keep the party going. He used to try the effect of chloroform on his animals and once Hag, his favourite monkey, discovered her ancient enemy the eagle almost senseless with anaesthetic: chattering with glee she proceeded to take her revenge, plucking its wings and clouting it over the head again and again. When the time came to take your leave there was no difficulty in obtaining a cab as the parrot was on duty at the front door to call a hansom. But if it was your fate to stay the night, the terrors of the small hours were scarcely endurable. A cold nose and prickles might invade your bed: it was only the hedgehog, which was let loose at night to keep down the black beetles but preferred to drink the soup in the tureen. Or you might wake in the morning to find that the jaguar had eaten your boots. Whether the servants came or left in droves is not recorded, but one supposes that only cooks of an iron constitution could remain at their post. Buckland’s brother-in-law tells us that the windows slammed fast in the street and hearts sank at the house whenever a van arrived at the front door and the servants staggered up the steps bearing a cask containing a grinning gorilla or an imperfectly preserved hippopotamus, ‘its lips curled in a ghastly smile’.

Needless to say Frank continued his father’s gastronomic tradition. Kangaroo ham, rhinoceros pie, panther chops, horse’s tongue and elephant’s trunk were carved for his guests, who discovered that the best technique was to bolt a mouthful of meat and chase it with a beaker of champagne. Not all his dishes were a success. Chinese sea slugs were said to taste like calf’s head and glue. But through the Acclimatisation Society and other clubs the craze spread. After the siege of Paris, when it was known how near starvation the defenders had been, rat dinners were given in London and Cambridge. At one time donkey featured on menus: one of Buckland’s successors said that it was ‘delicious … like Tyrolese venison’. But that formidable Victorian society hostess Lady Dorothy Nevill, who had a penchant for baked guinea pig, declared, ‘I tried eating donkey too but I had to stop that for it made me stink.’

And yet there is something instructive and sad in this merry search for freaks and curios. Frank Buckland’s career reminds one that the offspring of academic families are not by any means destined to follow their father’s footsteps. The Annexe about the intellectual aristocracy (see page 304) records those who lived up to their parents’ expectations, but it does not record the many who did not inherit their academic genes – or their firmness of character. Everything comes too easily to them. Frank never had to work at science, he absorbed it in childhood, he never had to work his way in the world. Winchester and Christ Church and his own good nature opened all doors; while his father kept hyenas as part of a scientific experiment, Frank assembled his menagerie for fun. He had become a typical example of the son who follows his father’s calling but without the talent and inner compulsion to carve out a name for himself.

Then suddenly his life changed. For nine years he had been contributing numerous articles to the well-known periodical the Field, articles which formed the bulk of his book Curiosities of Natural History. The editors got bored and told him they had had enough. A few years previously he had failed to get the vacancy of full surgeon to the Life Guards: owing to a change in regulations, it went to the most senior man in the brigade. These two reverses made him take stock. He may also have appreciated how his father, after becoming Dean of Westminster and reaching the age when even the best scientists cease to produce their most original work, turned his mind to practical matters: the application of science to agriculture, sewage and water supply problems in London and Oxford – and the reforming of the antediluvian Westminster School. Frank Buckland got himself appointed an Inspector of Fisheries and at last began to play his role as a ‘benefactor of mankind’. In the 1860s he was primarily concerned with hatching freshwater fish; in the seventies he was using all his charm and energy on a crusade up and down the country to stop river pollution, and by studying the habits of fish to learn how to make them multiply and to stop over-fishing. He was the first to predict for practical purposes the seasonal position of the shoals of fish in the North Sea. He began to study the balance of life within the sea and the effect of ocean temperature on migration. He saw to it that the inspectorate interested itself in the mesh of fishermen’s nets so that fry fell back into the sea. He understood, as his predecessors had to, that to understand the life of sea fishes you must study their food and what affects its abundance. He therefore got the fishermen themselves to make observations and by a modest outlay in prizes filled log-books with their reports of fish culture in the North Sea. He fought the maltreatment of animals that often sprang from ignorance, once saving a swarm of elvers in Gloucestershire from massacre; on another occasion at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals ‘made a speech about cruelty to seals. Much applauded. Deo gracias.’

In 1848 William Buckland and his wife had been injured when their coach overturned in France: Buckland was thrown out on his head and shortly afterwards he fell into a torpor for eight years, never reading a book but The Leisure Hour or the Bible. He directed that his body should be buried in limestone deposits and at his head should stand a slab of Aberdeen granite, one of the oldest of British rocks. The earth which had rendered so many of its secrets to him seemed reluctant to receive him in the biting frost and his grave had to be blasted by dynamite out of the ground. But his head is missing. His son had insisted on a post-mortem: the base of the brain lay in a pool of pus. Twenty-five years later, when the tubercular bacillus was discovered, the cause of death was attributed to tuberculous disease of the cervical vertebrae. Very properly in the interest of scientific medicine his skull was bequeathed to the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons.

CHAPTER THREE The Charismatic Don – John Henry Newman

In the first decades of the nineteenth century there were among the Oxford colleges two centres of learning in particular: Christ Church and Oriel. Christ Church was wealthy, large and in Dean Cyril Jackson’s time selected as many of its undergraduates as possible by merit. Oriel was far smaller, but Provost Eveleigh broke ranks by selecting its fellows not solely by patronage or performance in examination. He asked: did this man show intellectual sparkle? His successor, Copleston, carried on this tradition, and Oriel became known as a society of liberal intellectuals – Noetics, as they were called – who enjoyed dialectical dispute so much so that fellows of other colleges complained that the Oriel common room stank of logic. Thomas Arnold was one of this band until he left, later to become headmaster of Rugby. John Keble, the saintly churchman, whose hymns became part of Anglican worship, was another. The undergraduates, too, benefited from the good teaching of their tutors. When Copleston was Provost Oriel won twenty-seven first-class honours in examinations, though the far larger Christ Church won eighty-two.

Many college tutors taught the Latin and Greek texts in a perfunctory way, sometimes as baffled by their intricacies as their pupils. Some years later Leslie Stephen* at Cambridge gave a satirical account of a tutor, more renowned as the coach of his college boat than as a scholar, construing a Latin text with his class: ‘Easy all. Hard word here. What does it mean? Don’t know? No more don’t I. Paddle on all.’ But the Oriel tutors were different. Among them was a rough-tongued, ill-dressed, unconventional logician, Richard Whately, who took his pupils for early morning walks and regarded them as an anvil on which to hammer out his ideas. When a shy young man from Trinity was elected a fellow of Oriel, so tongue-tied that he could not bring himself to speak to his hero Keble and the others, Copleston told Whately to take him under his wing and draw him out. He did so to such effect that four years later, in 1826, John Henry Newman was appointed a tutor at Oriel and considered to be a fine addition to the college’s liberal tradition. But he was not. He spent his days discussing theology, patristics and doctrine with a group of newly elected fellows: Edward Pusey, Robert Wilberforce and above all with Hurrell Froude, a militant High Churchman. It was Froude who sowed in Newman’s mind the seeds of a hatred of Protestantism. The Oxford Movement was forming and it was to change the face of Oxford.

The first sign of this moral intensity soon appeared. In the Oriel tradition a tutor should help his men to construe Greek and Latin texts: it was up to them to make something of what they read, not for him to tell them what they should believe. But this was what Newman thought it was his duty to do. More than that, he held himself responsible for his students’ conduct. He was unique in treating them as friends, and those who responded hung on his every word. On the other hand the well-born fellow commoners who took the sacrament at Holy Communion and chased it with a champagne breakfast were anathema to Newman. He and his fellow tutors reduced the numbers of these aristocratic sprigs by half, and turned away stupid candidates. They next proposed that undergraduates should be divided into the clever and diligent and the thick and idle. Each group would follow a course of lectures appropriate to their talents. At this point the new Provost, Edward Hawkins, took fright. Were all men of good family to be turned away? Was it not the duty of tutors to give as much attention to less able students as to the high-fliers? Hawkins was disturbed to hear that Newman proselytised his pupils, and Copleston supported Hawkins. Oriel had always set its face against cramming for exams. The dispute rumbled on until Hawkins refused to allot any pupils to Newman or to Froude and Wilberforce. They resigned. Hawkins appointed safe men in their place – and the decline of Oriel as an intellectual power house began. Little did Hawkins realise that his own election as Provost had given Newman a position far more influential than a tutorship. For on his election he resigned as vicar of St Mary’s in the High Street, where the university sermon was preached each Sunday – a living in the gift of Oriel – and Newman was appointed in his place.

No don has ever captivated Oxford as John Henry Newman did. For ten years or more every pronouncement he made, every direction towards which he seemed to be veering was scrutinised, interpreted and criticised and those luminous eyes scanned to see if they expressed praise or censure. What was it on this day to make him petulant and on that honey-tongued and caressing?

Who could resist the charm [asked Matthew Arnold] of that spiritual apparition gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St Mary’s, rising into the pulpit, and then in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts – subtle, sweet, mournful? I seem to hear him still saying: ‘After the fever of life, after wearinesses and sicknesses, fightings and despondings, languor and fretfulness, struggling and succeeding; after all the changes and chances of this troubled, unhealthy state – at length comes death, at length the white throne of God, at length the beatific vision.’

There were other famous preachers in his time. At Cambridge Charles Simeon in Holy Trinity commanded a congregation as large as that of Newman and for longer. But Simeon was a moderate Evangelical and not in any sense an intellectual. Newman appealed to intellectuals and scholars as well as to devout religious enthusiasts. They were never sure what new interpretation would be put on the Scriptures, what doctrine would be reinterpreted to bring it into line with whatever position Newman in his spiritual pilgrimage had reached. When his readings of the Fathers revealed schisms and heresies in the early Church, Newman asked himself whether these depravities were not being repeated today in the Church of England. He spoke seemingly to every individual in his congregation because he reminded him he was a sinner. At the heart of his sermons, as much when he went over to Rome as before, was the overpowering sense of sin – and of its consequences. For Newman hell was a reality. The fear of the Lord, said the Psalmist, is the beginning of wisdom, and he strove to inculcate holy dread among his listeners. His voice was quiet and musical, with a ‘silver intonation’, as one contemporary put it. The pauses, the charm, the change of tone, all the arts of rhetoric were at his command. Long though it is, the passage below, imagining the horror of a soul that finds itself condemned to eternal punishment – taken from a sermon he preached when a Roman Catholic – illustrates his power.

‘Impossible,’ he cries, ‘I a lost soul. I separated from hope and from peace for ever. It is not I of whom the Judge so spake! There is a mistake somewhere; Christ, Saviour, hold thy hand – one minute to explain it. My name is Demos: I am but Demos, not Judas, or Nicolas, or Alexander, or Philetus, or Diotrephes. What? hopeless pain! for me! Impossible, it shall not be.’ And the poor soul struggles and wrestles in the grasp of the mighty demon which has hold of it, and whose very touch is torment. ‘Oh, atrocious,’ it shrieks in agony, and in anger, too, as if the very keenness of the affliction were a proof of its injustice. ‘A second! and a third! I can bear no more! stop, horrible fiend, give over; I am a man and not such as thou! I am not food for thee, or sport for thee! I never was in hell as thou, I have not on me the smell or taint of the charnel-house. I know what human feelings are; I have been taught religion; I have had a conscience; I have a cultivated mind; I am well versed in science and art; I have been refined by literature; I have had an eye for the beauties of nature; I am a philosopher or a poet, or a shrewd observer of men, or a hero, or a statesman or an orator, or a man of wit and humour. Nay – I am a Catholic; I am not an unregenerate Protestant; I have received the grace of the Redeemer; I have attended the Sacraments for years; I have been a Catholic from a child; I am a son of the Martyrs; I died in communion with the Church; nothing, nothing which I have ever seen, bears any resemblance to thee, and to the fame and stench which exhale from thee; so I defy thee and abjure thee, O enemy of man!’

Alas! poor soul, and whilst it there fights with that destiny which it has brought upon itself, and with those companions whom it has chosen, the man’s name, perhaps, is solemnly chanted forth, and his memory decently cherished among his friends on earth. His readiness in speech, his fertility in thought, his sagacity, or his wisdom are not forgotten. Men talk of him from time to time, they appeal to his authority; they quote his words; perhaps they even raise a monument to his name, or write his history. ‘So comprehensive a mind! Such a power of throwing light on a perplexed subject, and bringing conflicting ideas or facts into harmony!’ ‘Such a speech it was he made on such and such an occasion; I happened to be present, and never shall forget it,’ or ‘It was the saying of a very sensible man’ or ‘A great personage, whom some of us knew’ or ‘It was a rule of mine, now no more’ or ‘Never was his equal in society, so just in his remarks, so versatile, so unobtrusive’, or ‘I was fortunate to see him once when I was a boy’ or ‘So great a benefactor to his country and his kind!’ ‘His discoveries so great’ or, ‘His philosophy so profound’. O vanity! vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What profiteth it? His soul is in hell … Vanity of vanities, misery of miseries! They will not attend to us, they will not believe us. We are but few in number and they are many, and the many will not give credit to the few … Thousands are dying daily; they are waking up into God’s everlasting wrath.

That passage, so profuse in examples, so exquisite in variations of pace, so dramatic in the change of tone from the condemned’s protestations to the pitying dispassionate observer who retails how worldly judgements of a man’s worth are trivial and absurd when set against eternal judgement, plays upon the mind. And then comes the end, so bitter and characteristic of Newman’s self-pity and anger that he and his minority of believers are scorned by the great and the good and by the multitude who, regardless of his warning, are, perhaps, destined themselves to eternal torment.

Newman came by his sense of sin honestly. He was brought up an Evangelical, and the Evangelical party in the Church more than any other explained how that terrible sense of sin can be assuaged and the sinner find comfort provided that he throws himself on Christ’s mercy, repents and finds grace in his new-found faith. The drama of Newman’s spiritual pilgrimage from Evangelicalism to the Church of Rome is all the more ironic since his first break with the culture of the Oriel Noetics came over the issue of Catholic Emancipation. He opposed it.

For centuries Roman Catholics had been subject to disabilities. They were not permitted, for instance, to sit in Parliament. In the seventeenth century they were regarded as a fifth column in the service of England’s enemies, Spain and France. James II, a Catholic king, had been deposed. Nor had opinion changed after the Napoleonic Wars. England remained solidly Protestant. But Ireland was another matter. For years Roman Catholic Ireland had been regarded as England’s Achilles’ heel – a country in which the French might consider they could successfully land and strangle British trade. Yet here was a country whose population was largely Roman Catholic, who were compelled to finance the established Protestant Church of Ireland and whose political leaders were debarred from sitting in Parliament. Agitation to repeal the anti-Catholic laws met obdurate resistance, not least from the King. What changed the minds of the Tory ministers was the state of public opinion in Ireland, which by 1829 seemed likely to burst into open rebellion. The Duke of Wellington and Robert Peel, who had both opposed Catholic Emancipation, now caved in; and they forced George IV, slobbering in tears, to give his assent.

Peel was the member of Parliament for Oxford University and, in view of his U-turn, scrupulously resigned his seat and stood for re-election. He was defeated, had to find another constituency, was denounced as a traitor and apostate. His defeat as the university’s burgess was brought about by a coalition of outraged Evangelicals and the old High and Dry party of the Established Church, composed of heads of houses and clergy united by the slogan of ‘No Popery’. Prominent in this coalition was Newman. He even carried the majority of the younger fellows of Oriel with him, leaving the Provost, Hawkins, isolated and his old mentor Whately fuming. Whately realised that Newman had broken with the liberal party for ever and with delicate malice saw to it that at a dinner he was placed between the most obtuse, port-swilling High Churchman and the most violent Evangelical: he asked him how he liked his new allies.

Meanwhile the government had been trying to lighten the burden of Church rates and taxes upon the Irish peasantry. How could this, in part, be financed? The Established Church of Ireland was sustained by four archbishops and eighteen bishops, somewhat excessive for the number of Irish Protestants. Why not therefore suppress ten bishoprics? It was Whately who had taught Newman to deplore Erastianism – the acceptance that the Church was a dependency of the State, a ministry of morals, whose bishops were appointed under Crown patronage by the Prime Minister. Even more questionable was the Prime Minister’s practice of choosing clergymen who would vote for his party in the House of Lords. By singular irony Whately had become Archbishop of Dublin and the opportunity was too good to miss. Newman wrote a devastating snub to his old teacher.

At this time Newman’s stock was high among the Oxford dons. Like the vast majority of the bishops he opposed the introduction of the Reform Bill, which was finally passed in 1832. The Whig reforms generated a new wave of opposition. The reforms in Ireland beggared the Protestant parish clergymen, and did not do all that much for the Roman Catholic peasantry. Nor, in the opinion of Oxford, were the reforms to lighten the burden of Church rates and other disabilities on the Dissenters any better. Yet it was at this moment that another attempt was made to enable Dissenters – Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers and the like – to enter Oxford and Cambridge. If Roman Catholics and Dissenters could now sit in Parliament, why should they not be permitted to become students at Oxford and Cambridge? This was the view which Provost Hawkins and other fellows of Oriel held. Among them was Renn Dickson Hampden. He had been appointed professor of moral philosophy when Newman himself had hopes of being elected, and had written a pamphlet supporting the proposal to relax the rule requiring undergraduates to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles. Pamphlets flew about. Once again Newman triumphed when the proposal was voted down.

Worse was to follow. In 1836 the Regius professor of divinity died and the Whigs were still in power in London. Melbourne naturally consulted the Archbishop of Canterbury but he sent the Archbishop’s list of eight names to Whately and Copleston for comment. They advised him to reject all eight names and appoint the new professor of moral philosophy, Hampden. Newman and the young professor of Hebrew, Edward Pusey, petitioned the Hebdomadal Council (composed of the heads of the colleges) to appoint a committee to examine Hampden’s writings – in particular the Bampton Lectures he had delivered a few years previously. Were they or were they not heretical? The committee found Hampden guilty of rationalism. Amid growing excitement, with one set of proctors vetoing a vote, and their successors permitting it, various indignities and prohibitions were heaped on Hampden. The virulence of the language used infected the undergraduates, who at one point stormed the Sheldonian Theatre denouncing Hampden.

Newman had now become a different kind of don. He had become a university politician. But he remained a puzzle, because he was not playing politics along the recognised party lines. Not for him the reform of the curriculum or the structure of university committees. His concern was the orientation of the Church of England; and since nearly all dons were clergymen in holy orders, what he said concerned them. By now he had turned against science and political economy as subjects fit for Oxford. He deplored the decision to hold the British Association meeting in the university. The aim of Oxford should be to guide and purify the Church. Using all his gifts of charisma and rhetoric Newman provoked an era of controversy, bitterness and intolerance which hung like a cloud over Oxford for the next thirty years. Religion – doctrine, theology, the interpretation of the Bible, the liturgy, fasting, celibacy, the sacraments – became topics of unbridled dispute. Newman had come to regard Evangelicalism as a faith that fostered spiritual pride, a faith that was vulgar and hostile to the intellect, too liable to foster sects that broke away from the Anglican Church, too sympathetic towards those enemies of the Church, the Dissenters, and above all too self-confident that all that a soul needed to be saved was to experience conversion. Evangelicals regarded the Church of England as less important than the Invisible Church to which the elect of all sects belonged. But Newman argued that a good Christian should not consider that one single experience – his conversion – absolved him. Newman preached holiness, not conversion. Holiness was a state of mind in which day by day you sought to live a better life, a more disciplined life, under the Church’s guidance. Evangelicals were content to convert individuals but Newman wanted to convert the nation.

To Newman the independence of the Church was more important than anything else in the world. The Church – did not the Apostles’ Creed say so? – was a Catholic church, a reformed, not a Protestant church: Roman abuses had been reformed, but not the Church itself. No government, no sovereign, no Parliament, could reform God’s Church, and Erastianism – the Prime Minister exercising ecclesiastical patronage – was as evil as Protestantism. To disestablish bishoprics in Ireland was sacrilege: whether the Irish were or were not Anglicans was irrelevant. The word of God required authoritative interpretation and priests alone could interpret it because they were directly descended from the Apostles by the laying-on of hands at ordination. The Church interprets the Bible and the rubrics of the Prayer Book and looks to the Early Fathers for guidance. The old High and Dry party, centred on Christ Church, supported the Established Church. But for Newman the Church was not established by the State. It was sanctified because the Church was a holy body descended from the twelve Apostles.

These were the tenets of the Oxford Movement and Newman was its leader. Among his allies was his senior, John Keble, who preached a sermon on National Apostasy denouncing the proposal to suppress the Irish bishoprics. More influential was the young Edward Bouverie Pusey, appointed in his twenties to the Regius professorship of Hebrew by Wellington on the advice of the Dean of Christ Church. (The Duke’s supporters were mightily offended: the Bouverie family had made bitter speeches against the government; but the Duke replied against the grain of the times: ‘How could I help it when they told me he was the best man?’) Pusey’s prestige as a scholar, an Eton and Christ Church man, his aristocratic connections, gave weight to the cause. Young disciples, such as Robert Wilberforce (son of the great Evangelical opponent of the slave trade), Frederick Faber, Henry Manning, joined Newman; but one man in particular captivated Newman. That was Hurrell Froude.

Froude was a handsome, dashing young man of a well-born Devon family and Newman fell in love with him. There are always some dons who like to shock and Froude was one of them. He was a fanatic. Coming from a High Church family, he hated Protestantism, detested the Reformation and ridiculed the Thirty-Nine Articles. So did Newman’s brother-in-law Tom Mozley, who declared that the Catechism was like a millstone round the neck of the Church. The Puseyites, as they began to be called, spread their teaching through pamphlets they called ‘Tracts for the Times’ – tracts which later became learned treatises. Many of the tracts were designed to show how many medieval practices, long since abandoned, should be revived. The first tract Pusey wrote was on the spiritual benefits of fasting.

In 1836 Froude died of tuberculosis and Newman wrote a preface to his Remains, in great part a transcription of his diaries. No young man who is earnest and has a mission in life should allow his diaries to be published. Froude’s descriptions of his ascetic practices, and his self-examination of his deeds, his thoughts, his motives, revealed him to be a prig; but far more damaging were his praise of clerical celibacy, his devotion to the Virgin Mary, his contempt for the heroes of the English Reformation – Froude once said that the best thing about Cranmer was that he burned well. Before the year (1838) was out, the irrepressible champion of Protestantism, Charles ‘Golly’ Golightly, got up a subscription to raise a memorial in Oxford to the Protestant Martyrs, and impaled Newman and Pusey upon a dilemma: to contribute or not to contribute? They havered; and then withdrew. From then on they were suspect.

Dons are apt to give way to a temptation that afflicts many of us. They cannot resist ridiculing their opponents. Newman pulverised his. When a professor preached against Froude, and went on to doubt whether Newman and Keble were sound men, Newman sat up all night fashioning a reply that twitted the professor from pillar to post. He was to do the same years later when, in the first chapter of his Apologia, he turned Charles Kingsley into a figure of fun. But dons who possess the gift of writing devastating reviews of other scholars are often sullen and prickly when they themselves are attacked. Newman wrote indignant letters to his adversaries and to old friends.

The habit of rebuking those whom he considered were betraying the Church grew on him. What others called intolerance he called adherence to principles. He was jeered when he refused to conduct the marriage of a parishioner called Jubber because she was the daughter of a Baptist pastry-cook and had not been baptised according to the rites of the Church of England. Arnold, by now headmaster of Rugby, was a special target for his jokes – Arnold had once published an ill-judged book on reform of the Church so that Dissenters (but not Quakers, Unitarians or Roman Catholics) might be deemed to be in communion with Anglicans. Newman was reported as saying – his throwaway lines were quoted everywhere – ‘But is Arnold a Christian?’ He had not in fact quite said that. Someone had said of a German theologian who the Tractarians suspected was unorthodox, ‘Arnold said he was a Christian’: to which Newman replied with a laugh, ‘Arnold must first show that he is a Christian himself.’ After Newman’s campaign against Hampden an article came from the School house at Rugby. It was titled ‘The Oxford Malignants’, and it stigmatised Newman and his followers as persecutors.

By 1839 Newman had lost the support of the old High and Dry party. In 1841 he scandalised Oxford beyond hope of redemption. That was the year when he published Tract 90, just before his fortieth birthday. In it he declared that the Thirty-Nine Articles in the Prayer Book, though they were conceived in an uncatholic age, could be ‘subscribed by those who aim at being Catholic in heart and doctrine’. Newman still believed that the Church of Rome was wrong in practice. But in dogma? Even though some of the articles expressly condemned Roman beliefs, Newman argued that a way could be found to reconcile the two churches. Indeed the articles required re-casting. ‘Let the church sit still,’ he wrote, ‘let her be content to be in bondage … let her go on teaching with the stammering lips of ambiguous formularies.’ The time would come, so Newman’s reader inferred, when the Church would be reunited with Rome.

Tract 90 confirmed what High Churchmen as well as Evangelicals had feared. It convinced them that Newman was a popish agent infiltrating the Church of England to bring it over to Rome. All but two of the heads of houses condemned it, bishop after bishop penned charges denouncing it. The row was not a theological dispute alone. It penetrated to the heart of academic life. The Provost of Oriel refused to write testimonials for those candidates for ordination known to admire Newman and Pusey. The new brand of High Churchmen had little hope of being elected to fellowships. Colleges changed the hour of hall dinner on Sunday to prevent their undergraduates from attending St Mary’s, where Newman preached. Tittle-tattle about the latest Tractarian perversions replaced urbane conversation. A lady in an omnibus turned to the clergyman next to her and asked him whether he realised that each Friday Dr Pusey sacrificed a lamb. ‘My dear Madam, I am Dr Pusey, and I assure you I do not know how to kill a lamb.’ Tell-tale informers flitted about the streets insinuating, intriguing and whispering that so and so was unsound, another a known Romaniser, a third had been seen going to Littlemore, where Newman was conducting a retreat in which each day was governed by monastic discipline from Matins and Laud to Vespers and Compline. Newman had become the most notorious don in Oxford.

In 1842, the year after Tract 90 was published, Newman in effect retired as a don. He moved to Littlemore, a village outside Oxford, to lead a life governed by monastic rules and even penances such as hair-shirts and whips. The country, as well as Oxford, waited for him to convert to Rome. They waited for three years. Then at last he took the fatal step.

When Newman went over to Rome, the effect was cataclysmic. Dozens followed him – to the grief and fury of their families. He left behind him far more who felt betrayed. They believed he had found in Anglicanism the via media between vulgar Protestantism and Roman idolatry. For him, too, it was tragic: Keble and old Dr Routh, the President of Magdalen, did not shun him, but many of his closest friends broke with him for ever. Of his own family all were estranged except for one sister.

Yet Newman had one further contribution to make as a don. Some years later as a Roman Catholic priest he was appointed President of the new Catholic university in Dublin. Was that university to be a denominational university for Roman Catholics as one bishop wanted? Or was it to be, as another wanted, solely for Irishmen and a spearhead against the English ascendancy? Newman wanted neither. He soon resigned but the experience inspired him to write his academic utopia, The Idea of a University.

‘For all the complicating effect of its religious setting,’ wrote Anthony Quinton,* ‘there is still no more eloquent and finely judged defence of intellectual culture than Newman’s.’ Pater thought it perfection in its own sphere, just as Lycidas was the perfect poem. G. M. Young considered that all other books on education could be pulped so long as we were left with Aristotle’s Ethics and Newman’s Idea.†

The university, Newman argued, was a temple for teaching universal knowledge. Students should study the sciences that advance knowledge and the arts and professions relevant to everyday life. But not vocational subjects; nor subjects that lack general ideas – antiquarianism is not history. The university did not exist to create knowledge. Its purpose was to disseminate ‘the best that is known and thought in the world’, to use his admirer Matthew Arnold’s words. Of course, the teachers should ‘study’, but the notion of systematic research did not swim into Newman’s ken. Originality, discovery, students dedicated to a single branch of learning, were contrary to his idea of a university. He accepted that some scholars want to devote themselves exclusively to study: let them do so – but in an institute. Nor did he sanction students studying whatever took their fancy – what the Germans called Lernfreiheit.

Students will graduate cack-handed unless they are taught how to relate their own specialism to every other and what the meaning is of the totality. That is why everyone must study philosophy. Philosophy will teach them the difference between scholarship and ‘viewiness’, i.e. journalism or the kind of education – so Newman and most Oxford dons considered – the University of London offered.

Learning is not the sole function of a university. It is also a milieu, a place where a spell is cast over the student that binds him to it for the rest of his life. The college inside the university was the sorcerer that cast the spell. Without the spirit of a college, run by tutors who regarded their office as a calling and not another step in the journey to rich livings or benefices in the Church, a university becomes a mere examining machine. A university is nothing unless it is a place where a student lives, eats and converses with other students, learns to socialise, to understand human beings other than himself. If you specialise and grind away at a subject you may become egotistical, self-centred, uncivilised. The true university taught a man to be a gentleman, one ‘who never inflicts pain … avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast … guards against unseasonable allusions or topics which may irritate. If he be an unbeliever, he will be too profound and large-minded to ridicule religion …’ A university is an assemblage of learned men [who] ‘adjust together the claims and relations of their respective subjects of investigation. They learn to respect, to consult and to aid each other.’

The satirical will observe that this was hardly a description of the role Newman had played in Oxford; what is more Newman did not hesitate to call the habit of mind that he was advocating ‘liberal’ (a word which in his Oxford days was synonymous with sin). It was a habit that inculcates ‘freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation and wisdom’. It will not be acquired unless the student first learns the idea of rule and exception, and the scientific method of assessing evidence. Nor will he acquire it merely by reading books. The cultivation of the intellect is a goal in itself. Newman had no fear in accepting science as a fit study, whereas Michael Oakeshott’s utopia of a university (published in 1949) dismissed science as a subject that had scarcely been able to detach itself from vocational training. But then came the all-important qualification. Knowledge has to be guided and purified by religion.

The American scholar Sheldon Rothblatt* unravelled the subtlety of the qualification. The scholar or scientist, wrote Newman, should be ‘free, independent, unshackled in his movements’, untroubled by any threat that he was going too far or causing a scandal. But then no one surely could argue that a scientist would be shackled if he accepted that he would not use his science to contradict the dogmas of faith. Nor would such a scientist be unaware that among his students were those with immature minds; and he would naturally avoid scandal at all costs. The cultivation of the intellect is not enough. Without religion it is but a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. The filthiest Catholic beggar woman, if she be chaste and receives the sacraments, has a better chance of reaching heaven than the most upright gentleman if all he has to exhibit at St Peter’s gate are his virtues. Knowledge has to be guided by religion, Did not this qualification torpedo the lovely vessel he had built?

Newman loved to needle. ‘It would be a gain,’ he once said, ‘to the country were it vastly more superstitious.’ G. M. Young noted that Newman’s mind was forged and tempered in the schools of Oxford where Aristotle’s logic was practised: a mind ‘always skimming along the verge of a logical catastrophe and always relying on his dialectical agility to save himself from falling: always exposing what seems to be an unguarded spot, and always revealing a new line of defence when the unwary assailant has reached it’. Kingsley was the unwary assailant and his denunciation of Newman provoked Newman’s Apologia, a masterpiece of spiritual autobiography. Yet, Young adds,

If the public, or the modern reader, said ‘Never mind all that: what we want to know is, when Dr Newman or one of his pupils tells us a thing, can we believe it as we should believe it if the old-fashioned parson said it?’ I am afraid that the upshot of the Apologia and its appendices is No. What is one to make of a man, especially of a preacher, whose every sentence must be put under a logical microscope if its full sense is to be revealed?

Today it is no longer possible to define a university in terms of a single idea. British universities differ vastly. Some still pursue original enquiry and, unlike Newman’s utopia, engage in fundamental research. Others contain departments for specialist learning and act as a service centre for vocational, professional and technological demands made on them by government. Whether it was wise to call them all universities is another matter. Nevertheless Newman’s ideal was not all that far from the distinguished liberal arts colleges in America, and some new universities in Britain tried to set up separate colleges within the campus. For many years Newman’s Idea was cited as the justification of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges and of the special status of Oxbridge as distinct from other universities. To this day Oxford and Cambridge colleges scarcely doubt that, from whatever class their students come, they exist to educate Newman’s elite.

‘Credo in Newmanum’ was not an idle joke. His magnetism lasted long after he disappeared from Oxford. He haunted those who knew him in their dreams. His disciple W. G. Ward, who in turn had to resign from his lectureships at Balliol and then was degraded to the status of undergraduate for publishing The Ideal of a Christian Church, dreamt that he was talking to a veiled lady and telling her that her voice fascinated him as Newman’s once had done. ‘I am John Henry Newman,’ she said, throwing back her veil. Another dreamt he was travelling in a first-class carriage and talking to an elderly clergyman whom he suddenly recognised as Newman and who said to him in a tone of surpassing sweetness, ‘Will you not come and join me in my third-class carriage?’

Newman’s charisma was unmatched. As knowledge became more specialised and Oxford and Cambridge grew larger, no don could hope to appeal to the whole university as Newman was able to do. Some thought Ruskin might do so; and T. H. Green, who appeared as Mr Gray in Mrs Humphry Ward’s novel Robert Elsmere, intrigued so many students that Jowett feared he was indoctrinating them. But neither of them rivalled Newman. Although brilliant lecturers over the years bewitched their audience few could expect many students from faculties other than their own to attend. Scientists often regarded the head of the lab, ‘the prof’, with awe and affection; but no mass audience of undergraduates hung on the utterances of Rutherford or Florey. To see charisma at work in the twentieth century you had to go to a smaller institution such as the London School of Economics. There Laski* exerted a pervasive influence among generations of students, particularly those from India; though perhaps the truer charismatic figure was R. H. Tawney, the famous socialist historian, recognised by colleagues and students alike as something of a saint. Tawney held out hopes of a better world to come, and he possessed a quality that impressed all who met him: purity of heart. The Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore possessed this quality and so, in a fierce, uncompromising way, did Wittgenstein. But though everyone knows of Moore’s influence on Bloomsbury, the numbers these Cambridge philosophers spoke to, immured as they were in a tiny faculty that spoke to none other, were sparse. At Oxford it was different. Philosophy was integral to Greats (the second part of the degree in classics) and in Modern Greats (the degree in philosophy, politics and economics). In the midcentury Ryle, Ayer and Austin, the Robespierre of linguistic philosophy, held audiences agog. But no one thought of comparing any of them to Newman.

Perhaps the don in recent years who reminds one of Newman was F. R. Leavis in Cambridge. Leavis used some of Newman’s tactics to create a following. Like Newman he was proud to be both persecutor and persecuted. He accused his colleagues in the faculty of English of betraying the true principles of literary criticism, insinuated they were dullards or featherweights, and was aggrieved when those who were in fact excellent critics, but were not crusaders, were promoted and he was not. He was more successful than Newman in persuading a wider public that he had been ill-treated and embodied the true ethos of Cambridge. Each number of Scrutiny which he edited was a ‘Tract for the Times’. That he was an outstanding literary critic was beyond question. What is more he declared that criticism, not philosophy (let alone theology), was to be queen of the sciences. Leavis claimed to reveal not just the meaning of literature but the meaning of life. He told the young which values to praise and which to denounce and who, present as well as past, was to be despised.

That was why his disciples were as ardent as Newman’s. They admired his austerity and his unremitting seriousness. They were fortified when he toppled poets and novelists of long-established reputations – why waste time on them, he declared, when those whose vision of life was supremely important beckoned? Writing about Newman, Owen Chadwick* judged that the Oxford students flocked to hear him because he was a revolutionary. They admired him precisely because he enraged the heads of houses, the proctors, the tutors and other symbols of authority in the university. Leavis, too, made himself an outcast, embattled, friendly and helpful to those who accepted him and sat at his feet and correspondingly hostile to those who did not accept that there is in the end only one way to live and only a handful of great poets and novelists who teach one how to do so.

To regard Newman solely as a don would do him monstrous injustice. Newman changed the face of the Church of England. The Oxford Movement brought back the mystery of the sacraments, and the beauty of worship. He understood the romance of Oxford, the dignity of its buildings, its gardens and the flowers in them, whose genius loci cast a spell of lasting loyalty over its alumni. The university ceased to be merely a corporate body with endowments and privileges. It became, as Sheldon Rothblatt puts it, ‘a thrilling emotion-laden higher order conception of higher education’, and the colleges centres of aristocratic culture linked to certain schools, grammar as well as public schools, which fed them with pupils. Newman did not go quite as far as Pusey, who asserted that it was no part of a university to advance science, or make discoveries ‘or produce works in Medicine, Jurisprudence or even Theology’: though he agreed with Pusey that a university existed to ‘form minds religiously, morally, intellectually, which shall discharge aright whatever duties God, in his Providence, shall appoint to them’. Newman considered the university’s role was to teach universal knowledge. Let the scientists and their laboratories go elsewhere. That is why, Rothblatt noted, Victorian researchers were more famed for the learned societies, the botanical gardens, the museums, libraries and other specialised institutions they created, than for the publications by which their German confrères made their reputation.

Newman breathed a new spirit into a university that had become complacent and becalmed. But ‘the voice that breathed o’er Eden’ was not the gentle Keble’s voice. It was the voice of a doctrinaire – indubitable, incontestable; and the reverberations were disagreeable. Accusations of heterodoxy flew about and the atmosphere of the university became sour and embittered. The tempest-tossed seas that charismatic dons leave behind them take some time to subside, and Newman’s career was to trouble the man who, more than any other, gave meaning to the word don: Benjamin Jowett, tutor and Master of Balliol College.

* Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), fellow of Trinity Hall (1854–64), mountaineer, rowing coach, literary critic and first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography.

* Anthony, Lord Quinton, life peer 1982, fellow of All Souls (1949–55), New College (1955–78), President of Trinity College, Oxford (1978–87); philosopher.

† G. M. Young (1882–1959) fellow of All Souls, civil servant in the Board of Education, scholar of the Victorian era and author of Portrait of an Age (1936).

* Sheldon Rothblatt, professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley since 1963 and some time Director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education.

* Harold Laski (1893–1950), professor and teacher on politics at LSE for thirty years; prominent Fabian Society member and publicist for socialism.

* Owen Chadwick, OM, Regius professor of modern history (1968–83), Master of Selwyn College (1956–83).

CHAPTER FOUR Benjamin Jowett and the Balliol Tradition

For a century and a half Balliol has been one of the most splendid colleges at Oxford or Cambridge. It sent a host of distinguished graduates into all walks of life; its successes in the schools were proverbial; its junior common room provided a scene of animated intellectual life which few other undergraduate societies could rival. It was a society with a history of academic distinction and the nursery of statesmen, pro-consuls, scholars, lawyers and men of letters. When Harrovians sang, ‘the Balliol comes to us now and then’, they acknowledged that a Balliol scholarship was prized higher by headmasters than that of any other college – because the winner would have had to have faced the stiffest competition. How did this come about? The answer is that it was the work of Benjamin Jowett.

No famous institution owes its quality merely to one man. The foundations of Balliol’s success were laid by two former masters, Parsons and Jenkyns. Their reforms made possible the election of fellows on their merits: Jowett was elected while he was still an undergraduate. When Hawkins got rid of Newman, Froude and Robert Wilberforce as tutors, Balliol supplanted Oriel. But whereas Oriel had offered fellowships to men from other colleges, and by this means overcame the insularity of the past, Balliol found a less spectacular method of finding scholarly candidates for fellowships. Less spectacular but simple – the method was to teach the undergraduates well and train them in the traditions of the college. This was Jowett’s doing. No doubt he was helped by historical accidents – by his senior, Tait, a Balliol tutor, going to Rugby as headmaster in succession to Arnold, and sending the new breed of high-minded public schoolboy to his own college. No doubt he was helped by Balliol’s Scottish connections, so that hard-working, hard-headed Scots came there to irritate the gentlemanly idlers. But it was Jowett who directed the energies of both breeds – and those of the idlers. His own parents had been spendthrift failures; his family, once rich, had fallen on evil days. As a result he was haunted by the spectre of wasted lives and determined that his pupils should not waste theirs. ‘Usefulness in life’ was his yardstick, and he observed how often men of great ability failed because they were shy, awkward or ill mannered. His enemies declared that his only criterion was worldly success – that he felt that a pupil who had failed in life had somehow personally insulted him – that Balliol had been let down. The Warden of Merton put it differently: ‘He never affected or specifically admired an “unworldly” character … he was always disposed to regard worldly success as a test of merit … he hoped that his pupils would not like those of another great teacher “make a mess of life”.’ (The other ‘great teacher’ was, of course, Newman; and Jowett considered that those who went over with him to Rome or were bewildered and deserted, as Arthur Hugh Clough found himself, had ‘made a mess of life’.)

Jowett taught his men the secret and the delight of hard work. ‘The object of reading for the Schools,’ he said, ‘is not primarily to obtain a first class, but to elevate and strengthen the character for life.’ ‘You are a fool,’ he said to one. ‘You must be sick of idling. It is too late for you to do much. But the class [in examination] matters nothing. What does matter is the sense of power which comes from steady working.’ By power, Jowett meant the power over oneself, the ‘power in a man to control and direct his own life instead of drifting on the currents of fortune and self-indulgence’.

He used this power over himself. He was small, shy, and in his youth looked like a cherub; but he turned his shyness into an educative weapon by maintaining devastating silences followed by still more devastating remarks. After walking for three hours in silence his undergraduate companion, as they passed by a bridge, ventured to say, ‘That is a fine view.’ The silence continued until Jowett said, ‘That was a very foolish remark you made an hour ago.’ When a man showed up with an indifferent copy of Greek iambics, Jowett asked him, ‘Have you any taste for mathematics?’ He would dictate a passage from English literature and expect, poker in hand in front of his fire, his pupils to extemporise viva voce into Latin or Greek. To be able to do so ‘gave more promise than knowing the whole of Tennyson and Wordsworth’. At all times of day and night his door was open – but for study, not talk. He was not popular as a tutor. He once rebuked a fellow for being too familiar with the undergraduates. He hated slang and insisted on giving a little girl a shilling every time she said ‘awfully’ until she was ashamed. Newman had been the first to regard his duties as a tutor to be pastoral. But, as his one-time disciple and later Rector of Lincoln Mark Pattison said, Newman would have turned Oriel into a priestly seminary whereas Jowett never imposed his own beliefs on anyone.

There are few occasions more likely to produce bad blood in a college than the death or retirement of the head and the election of a successor. At Lincoln Mark Pattison had been an outstanding tutor; but outstanding tutors all too often fail to be elected head of the college – they have offended too many colleagues. Pattison was harsh, severe and sardonic; always willing to wound and never afraid to strike. Yet it looked as if he would be Rector until, by a discreditable intrigue, a non-resident fellow was brought in to vote and Pattison was outvoted. To his fury he had to connive in the election of a boorish nonentity. He threw up his tutorship and left for Germany.

At Balliol in 1854 it was different. The younger fellows voted for Jowett, the elderly for the future Archbishop Temple. The votes were equal. Then Temple’s supporters suborned two of Jowett’s party; would not Robert Scott make a suitable Master? He was part author of the standard Greek lexicon ‘Liddell and Scott’. After all, he was known to be on friendly terms with Jowett. So the deal was struck. Jowett was mortified. He did not leave for Germany, nor did he resign his tutorship. But he sulked. He no longer appeared in common room and when a dinner was given to celebrate the consecration of the new chapel, Jowett sat with the undergraduates. Some consider he was rejected on grounds of unorthodoxy. More likely he was thought to be inflexible. He bided his time and after eleven years elections to the fellowship gave him a majority and Scott was reduced to a cipher.

Jowett lived at a cataclysmic time in the history of the Church of England. The intense inter-party disputes between Tractarians, Evangelicals and the old High and Dry and Low and Slow parties in the Church were as nothing to the more menacing developments in Germany. Scholars there began to apply to the Bible methods of criticising sources that were used in historical research. Clever dons were not perturbed that William Buckland and the geologists had disproved the literal truth of Genesis; but what of the thousands who went to church each Sunday and believed every tale in the Bible to be true? Clever dons, however, were appalled when they appreciated what the ‘higher criticism’, as it was called, was doing in Germany, where professors in the classroom mocked the miraculous doings in the Old Testament; and thus anyone suspected of being influenced by German scholarship was assumed to be unorthodox. The years of Jowett’s maturity were years marked by a series of rows, disputes, accusations of treachery and reproaches for bigotry. It was the age of the row over The Origin of Species and of the colonial bishop, John Colenso, who admitted that the questions of the simple natives to whom he ministered had shown him that the literal truth of the Bible was unsustainable. They were years when those who, however tentatively, tried to reinterpret Scripture were bound to be attacked by, for example, Henry Liddon, who became the leader of the Tractarian party. Liddon declared that if Jesus believed Moses to be the author of the first five books of the Bible, anyone who doubted this – or that Jonah lived in the belly of the whale – called Christ a liar and could not be a Christian.

Before he failed to be elected Master of Balliol Jowett had been among those reinterpreting Scripture. He and his friend Arthur Stanley published commentaries on several of St Paul’s Epistles. The leading biblical scholar of the day, Lightfoot, at Cambridge, dismissed Stanley’s work as readable, inaccurate and superficial. He thought better of Jowett. Jowett was more skilful, said Lightfoot, at destroying accepted interpretations than at forming a new one, but he praised Jowett for challenging received opinions. Jowett had set himself to reinterpret the doctrine of the Atonement. Sunday after Sunday in Evangelical and Low Church pulpits the congregation was told why Christ died for all mankind on the Cross. He died to atone for their sins. But there was a proviso. He made this bargain with God the Father provided that the sinner ‘closed with the offer’ – who must proclaim his faith that he was saved. Jowett found this offensive. Was the redemption of mankind to be compared to a huge commercial transaction? Jowett determined to sanitise this version of the central Christian dogma. He had visited Germany and consulted the renowned biblical critic Lachmann. That was enough for the traditionalists. Having humiliated Newman over the Martyrs Memorial, ‘Golly’ Go lightly now determined to humiliate Jowett.

The year after Jowett’s defeat for the mastership Dean Gaisford died and Palmerston appointed Jowett to the Regius professorship of Greek. Golightly dug up an old statute and forced Jowett to sign the Thirty-Nine Articles in front of the Vice-Chancellor. Jowett did so with contempt. He interrupted the Vice-Chancellor, who began a sententious speech to remind him what an awesome occasion this was, and stalked from the room. He met with further injustice, this time at the hands of the Tractarians. The Regius chair was worth only £40 a year and Jowett lost money by accepting it. The stipend was paid by Christ Church. Why should Christ Church, asked Pusey as a canon of Christ Church, finance a university professorship held by a man whose orthodoxy was suspect? Such was the legacy of Tractarian zeal.

To do Pusey justice he tried various devices to increase Jowett’s salary but every attempt was foiled by Jowett’s foes – and sometimes by his friends. It became more difficult when in 1860 Essays and Reviews was published. This was a book of contributions by churchmen, some of whom were trying to come to grips with the critical analysis of the Bible by German theologians. They were a distinguished lot: Temple and Pattison among them, but also four, including Jowett, who had become notorious for their unorthodox views. The book created yet another scandal. Two of the contributors were prosecuted and found guilty in the ecclesiastical courts. One of them was condemned for doubting whether the wicked would suffer Eternal Punishment in hell. In the end the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council acquitted. But the judgement had a more serious consequence. It meant that the State, not the Church, would decide whether individual clergymen were unorthodox. The rows continued to the end of the century. Good, earnest dons brought up to see themselves as defenders of the faith believed that it was their duty to protest at deviations from what had until yesterday been regarded as true; and equally good but enquiring dons believed it was their duty to show how it was possible to reconcile Christian belief with the most recent discoveries of scientists and of historical and textual research. The Privy Council’s judgement stopped dozens of priests from being ejected from their livings and the Church from being torn apart by faction.

Jowett did not escape censure. Pusey launched proceedings in the Vice-Chancellor’s court to convict Jowett of having published doctrines contrary to those of the Church. The prosecution failed but never again was Jowett to express his theological opinions in public. What exactly did he believe? Pusey was not the only one to ask that question. As the years passed the rationalists looked at him with suspicion. Frederic Harrison, the Positivist follower of Auguste Comte, and Leslie Stephen the agnostic, both considered that the only course open to Jowett was to become a layman. Certainly there are passages in the official biography of Jowett which suggest that he believed neither in a personal God nor in a corporeal resurrection. The best that can be said for him, Stephen suggested, was that Jowett was only following Mill’s advice to liberal clergymen, which was to stay in the Church and throw their weight in favour of tolerance in order to prevent the Church falling into the hands of fanatics. Shortly after Essays and Reviews appeared Stephen gave up his fellowship at Cambridge because he could no longer believe in the truth of Christianity; and so, a few years later, did Henry Sidgwick, whose reputation as a scholar was far higher than that of Jowett. Stephen thought Jowett should have followed his example. Should he have done so?

A don ought to revere the intellect and believe in the power of reason. Jowett didn’t. His perplexity about Christian dogma seems to have affected his attitude to the whole of knowledge. He was interested in Hegel – indeed was among the first in England ever to study him. That was as far as it went. ‘Logic,’ he used to say, ‘is neither a science nor an art but a dodge.’ Maybe: but the aphorism showed that he did not think anyone could write anything valuable. ‘How I hate learning!’ he once exclaimed. He disliked ‘useless learning’, yes – but this grew into contempt for research. To say as Jowett did, ‘One man is as good as another until he has written a book,’ was a typical piece of dreary donnish irony. Leslie Stephen’s most biting sentence on Jowett runs: ‘“He stood,” said one of his pupils, “at the parting of the ways,” and he wrote, one must add, “No thoroughfare” upon them all.’

Yet no one who reads his letters or his works can doubt that he believed himself to be a Christian, and many sincere Anglicans believed far less than he did. He was less concerned with the truth or the all-importance of Christianity than with the inadequacy of the forms and the words in which to express it. It is not fair to brand him with moral cowardice and infer that he would not stand up for what he believed to be true. In his wisdom Jowett realised that he himself had not the genius to redefine Christian doctrine; and this being so it would be better to remain silent rather than add to the din raised by Tractarians. He thought little of the best liberal theologian, F. D. Maurice: what had he done but substitute one form of mysticism for another? But the Church owed more to Maurice than to Jowett’s attempts to strip Christianity of its eschatology, its mysteries, its paradoxes and perplexities. He knew that his reputation did not rest on his published work: ‘What I do is by sparks and flashes and not by steady thought.’ His lectures were called ‘Glimpses of the Obvious’. He left his pupil T. H. Green to pursue Hegel and become the most influential philosopher in Oxford in the seventies (Jowett admired and deplored Green and was buried next to him). Augustine Birrell* put forward a worldly apologia: ‘Why should men sell out of a still-going and dividend-paying concern when they have not the faintest idea where to look for another investment for their money? Where was Jowett to go if he gave up Balliol? … So he stayed where he was and Balliol … turned out a number of excellent young fellows warranted to come and go anywhere except to the gallows and the stake.’ It was not an explanation that would have satisfied Leslie Stephen. But it satisfied George Eliot and Tennyson.

The tide had at last turned for him when in 1870 he met Gladstone and they had a long talk about Ireland. Jowett disagreed with the line Gladstone took, but Gladstone was impressed. Could he do something for Jowett? he asked one of his cabinet colleagues. He did the one thing that Jowett wanted – he got Scott out of the Master’s Lodgings by offering him the lucrative deanery of Rochester. Jowett was at last Master of Balliol, and rumours mounted about impending reforms. The ceremony of grace at hall dinner was modified and a new head chef was appointed. That was all.

Jowett was no reformer. In the early fifties he had been one of the few to applaud Gladstone for supporting university reform, though sad that Gladstone (wisely) appointed commissioners to see that the colleges gave effect to the reforms proposed by the Royal Commission instead of trusting the dons to reform themselves. At one time he advocated creating more professorships, but when Mark Pattison put forward a scheme for endowing research, Jowett opposed it. His remark that study for its own sake was a waste of time drew from Pattison the comment that Oxford resembled a lively municipal borough.

Pattison was a singularly unattractive figure. When he became a theist he spurned his sisters, who adored him, and married his wife not for love but to look after him. She was twenty-seven years his junior. Her selfishness took the form of self-righteousness; his, self-pity. Both were hypochondriacs – as John Sparrow noted – she the more resourceful and experienced of the two. Pattison blamed her frigidity for the estrangement, but when she later married Charles Dilke* (at a time when the scandal that was to drive him from public life was beginning) Dilke never complained that she was sexually inadequate. Pattison had learnt in exile to admire German universities and their outstanding contributions to learning. Having been a champion of the tutorial system and an opponent in the fifties of increasing the professoriate, he now wanted, when at last he became Rector of Lincoln, to abolish colleges, religious tests and pass degrees. He hated the new Oxford of prizes and firsts in the schools. He was the ally of the medieval historian Freeman, who as a guest at a tutors’ dinner exclaimed, ‘I have come to see the crammers cram.’ He considered a don should devote himself to learning. Oxford should become a centre for advanced studies and colleges should become specialised departments as in civic universities.

Jowett stood for the college and the tutorial system. He made enemies. No one of his character could fail to do so. The conservatives among the dons were as jealous of his success as the liberals indignant at his hostility to research. The historian and fellow of All Souls Charles Oman called him ‘a noted and much detested figure’ representing ‘modernism, advertisement and an autocratic pose, a tendency to push the importance of the college beyond the limits of its undoubted merit’. Trollope characterised him as Mr Jobbles in The Three Clerks, and W. H. Mallock mocked him as Dr Jenkinson in The New Republic. Oman, Freeman and Pattison considered a don’s first duty was to research. On the other hand, the then Dean of Christ Church, while accepting that tutors as well as professors should write books, considered the tutor’s first duty was ‘to look after his men’. The result too often was that tutors didn’t write books.

Jowett was to be remembered for ever as a character. Undergraduates appeared before him – he saw two or three every day – and the idle were slain by his sarcasm. By now he had learnt to sympathise with their pleasures. As early as 1879 Balliol held a ball and as Vice-Chancellor he defended the Oxford University Dramatic Society against the sourpuss dons like Freeman who spoke of the ‘portentous rage for play acting’. At the end of his life Jowett said, ‘At one time I was against the boat, and cared little for its success, but now I think very differently.’ He became known as ‘The Jowler’. The terrible silences disappeared so that even Pattison could say, ‘There’s affability for you.’ He was now positively genial towards the young. One of them said he tried never to quarrel: if a man insulted him he asked him to dinner. ‘You’ll do, dear boy,’ laughed Jowett. ‘You’ll do.’ It was said that if you were a peer, a profligate or a pauper, the Master would be sure to take you up. Jowett was not the first don to institute reading parties in the vacation, but he was the first head of house to know something about all his men, and a great deal about some of them. The list of Balliol graduates in 1873–8 included Asquith, Curzon, Gell, Milner, Baden-Powell, Leveson-Gower and W. P. Ker. As undergraduates they would have been invited to meet the Master’s guests – among them Turgenev, George Eliot and G. H. Lewes, Bishop Colenso, Archbishop Tait, Lord Sherbrooke and Tyndall. He made a point of mixing the different types of undergraduates at his parties – ‘Jowett’s Jumbles’, they were called – yet Balliol was judged to be the most cliquey of all colleges.

Swinburne as well as George Eliot stayed in the Lodgings. Jowett asked Swinburne to look at his translation of Plato’s Symposium and when the poet suggested a sentence could be construed differently Jowett’s eyes widened: ‘Of course that is the meaning. You would be a good scholar if you were to study.’ Swinburne was set down in an adjoining room to continue the good work, and a friend talking to Jowett was interrupted by a cackle from next door. ‘Another howler, Master.’ ‘Thank you, dear Algernon,’ said Jowett as he shut the door. Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Republic was his most lasting contribution to learning. For years it was the most popular translation, much read in schools.

He liked the well-born and the famous. When the Crown-Princess of Prussia (‘little Vicky’) called on him to talk philosophy he thought her ‘quite a genius’ – and certainly she would have made a better showing than most of her women contemporaries, other than George Eliot. But he also encouraged poor men to come to Balliol and did nothing to impede the concern with working-class education and poverty that T. H. Green and Arnold Toynbee initiated and for which Balliol became so well known under the mastership of A. L. Smith and Alexander (‘Sandy’) Lindsay.

He continued to hold sharp opinions. ‘No writer,’ he said of Carlyle, ‘had done or was doing so much harm to young men as the preacher of tyranny or apologist of cruelty.’ ‘Comtism destroys the minds of men, Carlyle their morals.’ He was outraged that Governor Eyre’s* expenses should have been paid by the State. ‘A generation ago we should have hanged him.’ He hated Euripides: ‘he is immoral when he is irreligious and when he is religious, he is more immoral still.’ Staying in Scotland to deliver two lectures on Socrates he was accosted after dinner by Professor Blackie of Glasgow University, who said, ‘I hope you in Oxford don’t think we hate you.’ ‘We don’t think of you at all,’ was the reply. The snub was deserved; the professor had sung a song, unasked, called ‘The Burning of the Heretic’, which Jowett may have considered was a dig at him.

In 1882 Jowett became Vice-Chancellor for four years. Charles Fortnum again offered his collection of antique and Renaissance works of art to the Ashmolean Museum, and Arthur Evans, the prime excavator of Minoan civilisation in Crete, maintained that Jowett did his best to refuse the gift by masterly inactivity and much dissembling. In his biography Geoffrey Faber defended Jowett against this charge and pointed out that no Vice-Chancellor can accept a gift without considering what it will cost the university to accept it. Evans was young and high-handed: Fortnum, like other benefactors, hinted that his bequest could go elsewhere unless Oxford fell in with his wishes. Furthermore Jowett had always recognised that something had to be done for archaeology and for the old Ashmolean collections. Nevertheless, he acquired a reputation as one who was determined to have his way. It was said of him, ‘Parnell is not in it with him for obstruction.’ When supporters of a scheme he opposed got it put first on the agenda at the last meeting of Council, Jowett declared that no one could discuss so important a matter so late in the term and left the chair. His mode of governance lived on. Years later Lindsay, when Master of Balliol, found himself in a minority of one at a college meeting and remarked, ‘I see, we are deadlocked.’

And love? He was devoted to a giant Scotsman, Robert Morier, one of his earliest pupils who later became ambassador in St Petersburg. In the sixties he was tempted to marry the daughter of the Dean of Bristol; but when another fellow was appointed to the only fellowship in the college open to a married man, Jowett’s interest flagged. No wonder: he had fallen for Florence Nightingale. The friendship grew: he annotated three vast volumes she had written entitled Suggestions for Thought. He was impressed by her vitality, originality and by her caustic comments on the religious and social life of the day. She corresponded with him and he wrote interminable replies. Then some instinct told him that if he continued to answer her requests and some of her commands, he would wear himself out – as indeed Clough and Sidney Herbert had done. Years later the irrepressible Margot Tennant asked him outright whether he had ever been in love; and when he said he had once been very much in love she persisted and asked what she was like. ‘Very violent, my dear, very violent.’

There was another kind of love that was to confront Jowett. Disillusioned in his attempts to sustain Christianity by liberal theology, Jowett turned to Plato. Gladstone had spoken of the ‘shameless lusts which formed the incredible and indelible disgrace of Greece’, and Ruskin wondered at the ‘singular states of inferior passion which arrested the ethical as well as the formative progress of the Greek mind’. But the Aesthetic Movement began to get under way in the seventies and soon Pater’s mellifluous sentences began to be quoted and John Addington Symonds extolled the phallic ecstasy in Aristophanes. Indeed there was a falling-off of candidates for Greats and a shift towards law and the modern history school, where William Stubbs lectured (usually to classes of four or five undergraduates) on the safe subject of Parliament in the Middle Ages and never ventured later than the Thirty Years War. Greats was to recover in the eighties, when it scored twice as many firsts as history. Swinburne left no one in doubt where Jowett stood. He declared that it was impossible to confuse Jowett

with such morally and spiritually typical and unmistakable apes of the Dead Sea as Mark Pattison, or with such renascent blossoms of the Italian Renaissance as the Platonic amorist of blue-breeched gondoliers who is now in Aretino’s bosom. The cult of the calamus, as expounded by Mr Addington Symonds to his fellow calamites, would have found no acceptance or tolerance with the translator of Plato.

The translator of Plato did indeed on one occasion take action. A Balliol undergraduate, William Hardinge, sent Pater sonnets praising homosexual love. Pater responded by signing himself ‘Yours lovingly’. Jowett was told: confronted both, expelled Hardinge from Balliol and never spoke to Pater again.

Jowett left two legacies. The first he could not have foreseen, a legacy that influenced higher education throughout the twentieth century. Those who have read the most famous of all public school novels, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, will remember that at supper after the football match in which School house has defeated the School, young Tom hears the captain, ‘old Brooke’, say in his speech, ‘I know I’d sooner win two schoolhouse matches running than get the Balliol Scholarship any day.’ Of course other colleges offered scholarships but by ancient statute they might be confined to those who could claim descent from the founder of the college: ‘Founder’s Kin’. Or they were reserved for those from a particular school – at New College for Wykehamists or at King’s for Etonians. Or at Trinity and all other colleges at Cambridge they were awarded after an undergraduate had been in residence for a year or more. But by the end of the century the colleges, in response to the commissioners’ criticism that poor men of talent could not afford to enter the ancient universities, offered scholarships for the less well-to-do. The requirements for entry to the university remained as unexacting as possible: few wanted to frighten away the sons of the well-to-do, whose fees kept the colleges afloat.

The scholarship exam in each college did more than provide a bursary for poor undergraduates. It became the blue riband for the public schools and the grammar schools. Schools prided themselves on winning one or more each year. Later Oxford and Cambridge established examining boards that granted exemption from the modest university entrance exam. You were exempt if you obtained five credits in the School Certificate – a test that an intelligent fifteen-year-old or a clever fourteen-year-old could pass. What were schoolboys and – girls to do for the last three to four years at their school? The answer was to work for the scholarship exam in classics, or maths, or science, or history, or modern languages. When the Oxbridge examining boards set up a new sixth-form exam, the Higher Certificate or Advanced Level (A Level, as it was later called), it followed the pattern of the scholarship exam. Of course the colleges insisted that ancillary subjects must be taken as well as papers in the specialism that the candidate had chosen. A history specialist had to be tested in Latin and French and one other foreign language; a scientist in maths; but everyone knew that those who shone in their specialism were those who won the prize.

And so the notorious English specialism in secondary schools took root. Boys and girls chose which way they would jump as early as fourteen; and at fifteen opted either for maths and science or for the humanities. If for the latter, they never opened a maths textbook again. The system suited the dons: boys and girls arrived at the university knowing something about the scholarly debates in their specialism. It suited the professions: after leaving school a doctor could qualify in seven years, a lawyer in six. It suited the Treasury because the first degree took only three years. Boys and girls were content: no longer would those with a mathematical block have to try to master the calculus.

But did it suit the nation? During the twentieth century the complaints grew. Industry complained that graduates in science and engineering had such narrow minds, and commerce that arts graduates were innumerate. Even the Civil Service at last rebelled. They rebelled because critics argued that the skills which a civil servant needed at the end of the twentieth century were not tested by the kind of examination so dear to the hearts of the dons. In the nineteenth century the dons had got government to agree that entry to the public service should be met by a competitive examination on the same lines as the final examination in the universities. At one time all you had to do was to reproduce in the Civil Service or Foreign Service exam those qualities that had won you high honours in the university; though it must be said, you had to pass an interview. From time to time variations were introduced; and your examiners, who were dons themselves, might not sympathise with the spin that you put on your answers to questions. (When Keynes sat for the Civil Service exam he got his lowest mark for economics and as a result entered the India Office and not the Treasury.) No one dissented from the principle. It seemed self-evident-to Macaulay, to Charles Trevelyan, to Jowett and the younger dons. So indeed it seemed until the very end of the twentieth century.

The second legacy was the primacy of the tutors. Jowett’s reign saw the end of the old catechetical college lecture (in reality a class construing a text) and the rise of the tutorial. In 1869 the History Tutors Association formed: they arranged the lectures, supplied the examiners and determined what was to be taught. The professoriate was outflanked. Clerical fellowships declined: colleges did not want fellows who had an eye on the next benefice on offer.

There grew up in Oxford and Cambridge a posse of dons, often young bachelors, who like Jowett knew something of all of their men and a lot about some of them. At Balliol, it was noted, it was ‘possible for a tutor without taking Orders to be virtually a minister of religion’. An observer writing in the Church Quarterly Review thanked God for the work of John Conroy, a science tutor at Balliol, and for H. O. Wakeman, tutor at Keble; and at Balliol T. H. Green and Nettleship were renowned moralists.

Not everyone saw college tutors as deutero-clergymen. ‘They sit in their comfortable rooms and do nothing except cram in Latin and Greek for examinations,’ wrote one critic in the Nineteenth Century, and another in the same year, 1895, depicted the modern don as ‘an open derider of religion’. All was not well with Oxford, and the university had its critics in London. In 1866 Jowett was lamenting that not a twentieth part of the ability of the country came to the university, and Pattison two years later echoed him. An odious comparison was made between Oxford and the Grandes Écoles, in which Oxford was compared to ‘a great steam-hammer for cracking walnuts’. But then, as the Saturday Review observed, what was one to say when the Provost of Oriel said that Oxford existed to provide curates, not solicitors or surgeons? With the collapse of college incomes in the eighties fellowships became less attractive. Those formerly devoted to research were diminished or abolished. This in turn led to dissatisfaction among the college tutors, who now saw themselves as less well-paid than public schoolmasters with little leisure to pursue learning, compelled every year to begin teaching the same subjects to a new set of students. When in the past young dons taught for a spell and then left to fill college livings, they did not grow stale; but after twenty years the college tutor became dull and dispirited.

For a moment it looked as if the pendulum might swing back against the tutorial system. When Jowett died his natural successor in the college was not chosen. The Balliol dons imported a Scots philosopher, Edward Caird. But fourteen years later, when Caird resigned, the natural successor came in. He was, like Jowett, a bachelor. Strachan-Davidson had been senior Dean for thirty-two years and was the idol of the undergraduates, particularly of those whose frolics and way of life, so different from his own, he tolerated. Balliol was to become the home of many tutors famous in their day, such as Cyril Bailey, though perhaps the best known was Francis ‘Sligger’ Urquhart, at whose austere chalet in Switzerland reading parties met in vacation. Urquhart was not an intellectual. He emanated a stream of gentle sympathy that brought others out. At the end of Lindsay’s twenty-five-year mastership of Balliol Lindsay said, ‘The place exists and I hope always will exist, for the young men.’

* Augustine Birrell (1850–1933), man of letters and liberal minister for education and later Chief Secretary for Ireland (1907–16).

* Sir Charles Dilke (1843–1911), Liberal minister for local government (1882), withdrew from public life after Mrs Crawford (his sister-in-law) declared she had committed adultery with him – which he denied. Married Mark Pattison’s widow in 1885. Returned as an MP in 1892 until his death.

* Edward Eyre (1815–1901), Governor of Jamaica, put down riots by the black population in the island with great brutality: defended by Carlyle, prosecuted at the instigation of J. S. Mill, Huxley and Herbert Spencer.

CHAPTER FIVE The Don as Scholar – Frederic Maitland

Trinity is the greatest and grandest of all Cambridge colleges and in science the intellectual power-house of the university. It was the home of Newton and of those formidable classical scholars Bentley and Porson. But though Cambridge was spared the bitter divisions that split Oxford, it too became embroiled in similar political and religious controversy. By tradition Cambridge was a university of the Whigs, but in 1831, as the nation was rocked by the debates on the Reform Bill, the true sentiments of the dons became clear. The Whigs – a young Cavendish who had become second in the mathematical tripos, and young Palmerston – lost their seats in Parliament. The Master of Trinity, Christopher Wordsworth, deprived Connop Thirlwall, the outstanding young theologian of the day, of his assistant tutorship. Thirlwall had come out in favour of admitting Dissenters to Cambridge and had questioned the merit of compulsory attendance in chapel. Wordsworth did not stop there. He let it be known that, had he had the power to deprive Thirlwall of his fellowship, he would have done so. That was too much for the fellows of Trinity. They gave Wordsworth such a hard time that he found life in the Lodge as Master unendurable. But Wordsworth was not a man to give an inch to his enemies. He timed his resignation skilfully. The mastership of Trinity is a Crown appointment, and Wordsworth was determined that he should not be succeeded by the notable liberal and popular professor Adam Sedgwick. Watching the smoke signals from Westminster as keenly as any bushman, Wordsworth perceived that Melbourne’s administration was tottering and he waited until Peel formed a Tory government. Peel did not disappoint him. He nominated William Whewell as the next Master.

Whewell was a polymath. He introduced analysis into Cambridge mathematics after a visit to Germany, where he picked up crystallography and – after he had been appointed professor in the subject – mineralogy. A treatise on gothic architecture was tossed off, as was a work of considerable importance on the theory of tides and how they affected the British Isles. He was not an experimental scientist. He described science and became famous for a vast treatise on the history and philosophy of the inductive sciences. He had unbounded energy and boundless arrogance. Built like a prize-fighter, he was a bully. But he was not a die-hard and was generous on the rare occasions he suffered defeat. He bounced the university into accepting the Prince Consort as a candidate for the chancellorship, brought him home in a contested election and supported his plans for increasing the number of professorships. Whewell spoke in favour of establishing a natural and moral sciences tripos and put forward a not very practical plan for reforming the curriculum.

For intellectual distinction Trinity had a rival. Next door was St John’s, where Wordsworth found his sleep disturbed by Trinity’s loquacious clock and pealing organ where in the ante-chapel the statue stood

Of Newton with his prism and silent face

The marble index of a mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas thought, alone.

The Master of St John’s, William Bateson, was a more vigorous reformer than Whewell and considerably more genial. The Johnian mathematicians clocked up a record of successes in the tripos that surpassed even those of Trinity. The first chemistry laboratory in Cambridge was set up in St John’s under George Liveing; the moral science teachers included the economist Alfred Marshall; and skilled classicists from Shrewsbury School flocked there to be taught by a notable reformer, Heitland, and by T. E. Page, whose Latin texts for many years every schoolboy had to master. They were the successors of those whom William Wordsworth praised when he went there in 1787, ‘whose authority of Office serv’d, To set our minds on edge’. On the other hand the mathematicians at St John’s tended to be an unimaginative lot, the successors to Wordsworth’s

Men unscoured, grotesque

In character, tricked out like aged trees

Which, through the lapse of their infirmity

Give ready place to any random seed

That chuses to be rear’d upon their trunks.*

Undergraduates studied either for a pass degree or for honours, i.e. the tripos. In the first half of the nineteenth century the pass men regarded the tutors as mere schoolmasters. They were rowdy. The reforming headmasters of the public schools got their boys under control by delegating the problem of discipline to housemasters and prefects and by promoting games. The tutors had no such resources. Their pupils were irritated by the intolerable numbers of petty university and college rules which may have been appropriate three centuries earlier when undergraduates were fifteen years old. To carry an umbrella while wearing cap and gown was an offence. So were pigeon-shooting, attendance at prize-fights, dinners in pubs – even, in one case, sporting a moustache. The college tutors were there to din into their heads the rudiments required for a pass degree – if they were in residence. It was said that you knew it was term-time in Cambridge if you saw Whewell, when he was tutor at Trinity, at the Athenaeum. Whewell knew none of his undergraduates: he argued that if he knew them he could not be an impartial examiner. He once rebuked his gyp (college servant) for not telling him when one of his pupils died.

The men reading for honours were equally dismissive of their tutors. Few of the 350 fellows taught them. If you sat for the mathematical or classical tripos you hired a coach (who had taken high honours in his time). He would charge you £7 or, if you settled for being taught once a day, £14 a term. The tutor was your enemy, fining or gating you for breaking a college rule. The coach was your friend. You paid him and his job was to get you as high a place as possible in the tripos list; in both classics and mathematics marks were awarded for each question and an exact order of merit was published in the class list. The coach would be an expert crammer adept at forecasting what the examiners might ask that year. He might even be a professor. Henslow, the professor of botany at Cambridge, was so ill-paid that he had to cram students for five to six hours a day. Undergraduates made their name by being classed senior Classic, or among the top Wranglers (i.e. mathematicians).

One of the obstacles to change was the existence of small colleges. Who was to teach new subjects such as science or history when the few fellows were able only to teach mathematics or classics? When the future historian G. G. Coulton came up to St Catharine’s in 1877 the senior tutor was such an inadequate teacher that Coulton paid to be taught classics by the junior tutor. The Dean was omniscient – that is to say he knew, if challenged on the spur of the moment, the price of a wooden leg and the added cost if it was tipped with brass. Five other fellows completed the list, three of whom were non-resident; and in order to keep out any younger man the old guard elected yet another non-resident in 1880.

There were, of course, a number of dons who were determined to bring about change. The impetus came from Trinity and St John’s. The reforming dons disliked the coaches because so long as they reigned supreme it was difficult to reform the tripos and bring into the classical curriculum philosophy, history and philology, or establish science as a separate tripos. The reformers finally undermined the coaches – though it took years to do so – not only by extending the curriculum but by abolishing the tradition of ranking candidates in the tripos results. The narrowness of the curriculum and the premium it put on memory as distinct from critical intelligence had been criticised outside more than inside the university. The Prince Consort let it be known where his sympathies lay, though he was careful not to suggest that German universities were superior to Cambridge in scholarship. When John Seeley gave his inaugural lecture, succeeding Charles Kingsley as Regius professor of history, he used the opportunity to criticise the narrowness of the classical curriculum and the pedantry of the great coach Richard Shilleto. It was this that drew from Hepworth Thompson, who had succeeded Whewell as Master of Trinity, the remark, ‘I never could have supposed that we should so soon regret the departure of poor Kingsley.’

Yet Thompson was one of those who did his share in reform. The statutes of all colleges were archaic, and when Lord John Russell’s commissioners appeared and numbers of colleges at first refused to cooperate, Whewell – despite reservations – was helpful. Twenty years later the junior fellows of Trinity again determined to revise the statutes and found themselves supported by Hepworth Thompson. Thompson had to keep reminding the fellows that the question was not how the statutes were to be reformed but how they were to be altered, that is to say redrafted to give effect to the changes the reformers wanted. It was at one of these interminable meetings that Thompson made his immortal dictum: ‘We are none of us infallible, not even the youngest.’ The revised statutes were passed to the Privy Council – which under Gladstone’s influence rejected them. Gladstone had a more comprehensive plan. He wanted to set up another Commission on Oxford and Cambridge, and the commissioners incorporated Thompson’s work into their recommendations.

Thompson was helped by three fellows in particular – Henry Jackson, Coutts Trotter and Henry Sidgwick. Coutts Trotter got the college to accept that candidates for fellowships should submit a dissertation; and that the tripos should not be considered as the sole guide to their intellectual promise. Henry Jackson became renowned as a great teacher and threw open his classes on Plato to the whole university. He was behind the removal of religious tests, the abolition of Greek as a requirement to enter the university, and he and Sidgwick supported the foundation of colleges for women. The third, Henry Sidgwick, was the outstanding utilitarian philosopher in the tradition of Mill. It was he who invited Michael Foster to teach physiology and become the first professor in the subject; and it was he who taught Frederic Maitland, who won a first in philosophy.

Trinity was the nest of Cambridge’s philosophers: of the Idealist M’Taggart, then of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and later of Wittgenstein – and also of the notably less original C. D. Broad. In history both G. M. Trevelyan and Steven Runciman* were able as men with independent means to retire from Trinity when young to devote themselves to research and writing. But Trevelyan returned in 1926 as Regius professor of modern history and in 1940 accepted at Churchill’s insistence another Crown appointment, the mastership of Trinity.

The most famous scholar in classics was a Trinity don: Housman believed that the first duty of a classicist was to apply himself to textual criticism. He despised those who tried to explain why Greek and Latin poetry were so moving. Yet he was profoundly moved by poetry; and on one occasion he let the mask of rigid fidelity to textual criticism slip and at the end of a lecture on Horace he read his translation of what he considered the most poignant of all the odes, ‘Diffugere nives’. He refused to allow his name to go forward for a higher degree of Doctor of Letters on the grounds that he was not the equal in textual criticism of those Trinity scholars, Bentley and Porson. (As a result no other classical don dared put in for the degree.) His austerity, his determination to nil admirari became a tradition in Trinity. Andrew Gow, a classical scholar in the Housman tradition, was a friend to numbers of undergraduates, particularly if they were interested in painting. His colleague Gaillard Lapsley, the American-born medieval historian, asked Gow to look at a painting by Allan Ramsay he had bought and waited on tenterhooks for the connoisseur’s judgement. ‘Not a very good Allan Ramsay, is it?’ Pause. ‘But then Allan Ramsay wasn’t a very good painter, was he?’ When Housman deigned to review a fellow of Trinity’s history of Louis Napoleon and admitted that some of the epigrams hit the nail on the head, he could not resist adding, ‘the slang with which Mr Simpson now and then defiles his pen is probably slang he learnt in his cradle and believed in his innocence to be English: “a settlement of sorts for example …”’

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