New College, Oxford

“ It was resigned voluntarily by New College in 1834; but the distinction is still observed (or should be) that a Fellow of the College needs no grace for his degree, or if one is asked, 'demands' it as a right (postulat is used instead of the usual supplicat) . I have adopted Dr. Rashdall's explanation of the origin of this strange privilege. It is curious to add that King's College, Cambridge, copied it, along with other and better features, from its great predecessor and model, New College. ”

“ The broad-minded founder accepted this view. He drew up statutes, by means of which he hoped to train men who should help the Church to recognise, to lead and to control the New Movement. The verdict of his contemporaries with regard to his work and intentions is expressed by Erasmus, who wrote that “Just as Rhodes was once famous for the Colossus, and Caria for the tomb of Mausolus, so the new College at Oxford dedicated to the most profitable literature would be recognised throughout the civilised world as one of the chief ornaments of Britain.” ”

“ In this great foundation then the three characteristic features of a college are found—a common life, powers of self-government, with the right of choosing future members, and endowments that enable religion and learning to flourish, free from more pressing cares. It is these features which distinguish the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, and which have determined their history. ”

“ If Oxford thus, to some extent, moulded to her pattern men who, welcome as they were, were only accidental, surely the college spirit may be trusted to assimilate whatever material the changed conditions of social or of political life furnish to it. The hope of many at Oxford is that there will be a great development and a great change. On one side it will be good if Oxford becomes to a much greater extent not only an all-British, but also a world university; on another side it is to be hoped that far more than ever before men of all classes in England will come to Oxford. ”

“ The ordinary English man or woman, unconnected with Oxford, has never heard of them. The undergraduate and the ordinary don has seen some part just now and then, when some enthusiastic guests have had to be taken round the sights.
And yet a book of many volumes might be written to tell of the things both rare and exquisite that Oxford hugs most close to her breast. He who cares to look may find them everywhere. There is not a college in all the University that does not possess something precious, either for its intrinsic beauty or for its historical interest. ”

“ Oxford, indeed, is a paradise for the student of Art. Nowhere, except at Cambridge, can the series of architectural works be paralleled, and at both universities the charm of their ancient buildings is enhanced by their beautiful setting in college gardens.
It is not an accident that in the old universities more than anywhere else, so much of beauty has survived, nor is it to be put down as a happy piece of academic conservatism. It is rather the natural result of their constitution and endowment. What has been so fatal to the beauty of old England elsewhere has been material prosperity. ”

“ In Oxford nothing is the creation of one man or of one year. Every college and church and garden is the work of centuries of men and time. Many a stone reveals an octave of colour that is the composition of a long age. The founder of a college laid his plans; in part, perhaps he fixed them in stone. His successors continued the work, and without haste, without contempt of the future or ignorance of the past, helped the building to ascend unto complete beauty by means of its old and imperfect selves. ”

“ In theory, "hall" and "college" have much in common; one Cambridge college indeed has retained the name of "hall," and two of the women's colleges in Oxford have preferred to keep the old style. In practice, their difference lies in the two facts that colleges are wealthier, with more endowments, and that they are self-governing, with Fellows who co-opt to vacancies in their own body and elect their head. St. Edmund Hall has its head appointed by the fellows of Queen's, with which institution it has long been connected. ”

“ Many of the middle-aged disciples of the Church of Common-sense are still in our midst. They say the old sayings, they intone the old responses, but somehow it seems that scepticism is abroad; it seems that the world is wider than their system. Not even open examinations for fellowships and scholarships, not half a dozen new schools, and science, and the Museum, and the Slade Professorship of Art, have made Oxford that ideal University which was expected to come down from Heaven like the New Jerusalem. ”

“ And as though to emphasize beyond dispute the Collegiate nature of these Societies, we find that each one of them made haste to provide itself with buildings and surroundings, which still present to us, in the midst of the dirt and turmoil of busy London, something of the charm and seclusion and self-sufficiency of an Oxford College, with its Hall and Chapel, its residential buildings, its Library, and grassy quadrangles, and its Gateway to insure its privacy. ”

“ We see in Oxford the shadow of the Middle Ages projected far into the region of modern life. A College is a strange compound, half club, half convent, and its daily usages are curiously intermingled with the past. For two centuries after the Reformation, Protestant founders cast their institutions in the mould of Wykeham and Waynflete: the scholastic system appears to have been a living thing at the beginning of the last century, and its ghost still haunts the academic shades. These facts have their parallel in the architecture of Oxford. ”

“ It has been a feature of the history of Oxford that every college has, from time to time, come to the front as the special home and source of some movement. There has never been the overshadowing concentration of men and of wealth, which has given a more one-sided direction to the history of Cambridge. Hence the strength of the college system; every college has its traditions to live up to, its great names to cherish, and Wadham is, certainly, by no means last or least in these respects. ”

“ Until the nineteenth century, there really was no university at Oxford, at least in modern times. The colleges were quite independent of one another socially and in athletics, and each of them provided all the necessary instruction for its members. The social clubs which now admit members from the university at large began life as wine clubs of separate colleges, and even to-day the influence of the parent college is apt to predominate. ”

“ In the sixteenth century, Oxford plays no great part in the actual revolution in the English Church; yet it will be a place attractive to many who cherish the memory of the "Oxford Reformers," the members of Erasmus' circle—John Colet, Thomas More, William Grocyn, and other scholars—who hoped by sound learning to amend the Church without violent change. Some, on the other hand, will see in the sixteenth-century Oxford, the school which trained men for the Counter-Reformation, such as the heroic Jesuit, Campion, or Cardinal Alien, the founder of the English College at Douai. ”

“ We shall have considered Oxford to very little purpose, if it is not plain that the University has been less a home of learning, on the whole, than a microcosm of English intellectual life. At Oxford the men have been thinking what England was to think a few months later, and they have been thinking with the passion and the energy of youth. The impulse to thought has not, perhaps, very often been given by any mind or minds within the college walls; it has come from without—from Italy, from France, from London, from a country vicarage, perhaps, from the voice of a wandering preacher. ”

“ The report, with a view to bringing working people under the influence of Oxford itself, further recommends that colleges be asked to set aside a number of scholarships or exhibitions, to enable selected students from the tutorial classes to reside in Oxford, either in Colleges, in University Halls, as non-collegiate students, or at Ruskin Hall. ”

“ It had at length become possible again for [Pg 182] a man to keep his terms and take his degree without continual residence within college walls. The numbers of the University grew rapidly, and at a time when more efficient tutors and discipline made Oxford attractive to many who were neither frivolous nor rich. Oxford became, in fact, a place of education. The previous century had been conspicuous for great names and lack of system; what was achieved was due to individual endowment and energy; and the able men stood somewhat apart from their contemporaries. ”

“ Oxford has now 21 colleges, among which are Balliol, Christ Church, Magdalen, Oriel, Trinity, and University College; 64 professors and teachers, and 3000 students. It is rich in museums and libraries; the Bodleian Library is of great value, the Taylor Library is devoted to modern literature. The Oxford or Tractarian Movement, one of the most remarkable religious impulses of modern times, had its centre in the University between 1834 and 1845. Among distinguished Oxford alumni were Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, Wesley, Newman; Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith; Johnson, Gibbon, Freeman, Green ”

“ To a man who is taking his M.A. degree, Oxford, as it was when he was a freshman, seems quite a thing of the past. By the public at large no place is supposed to be so conservative, so unchanging, nay, so stubborn in resisting new ideas, as Oxford; and yet people who knew it forty or fifty years ago, like myself, find it now so changed that, when they look back they can hardly believe it is the same place. Even architecturally the streets of the University have changed, and here not always for the better. ”

“ But Christ Church is not the only unique college in Oxford. As there is no other to be found in any university so curiously combined with the cathedral and ecclesiastical dignitaries of a see, so is there no other, in this country at all events, that has preserved its original intention, as a college for Fellows only, as has All Souls. Here no noisy undergraduate is allowed to disturb the calm. ”

“ The number of students and of residents, the dignity of the authorities, the value of the foundations, the history and the architecture, the known sympathy of entire Britain in what is done there, justify a dedication to study in the undergraduate, such as cannot easily be in America, where his college is half suspected by the Freshman to be insignificant in the scale beside trade and politics. Oxford is a little aristocracy in itself, numerous and dignified enough to rank with other estates in the realm ”

“ It is like a great family mansion, which owner after owner has enlarged or improved to meet his own needs or tastes, and which, thus chronicling successive phases of social and domestic life, is wanting in uniformity but not in living interest or beauty.
Oxford is a federation of Colleges. It had been strictly so for two centuries, and every student had been required to be a member of a college when, in 1856, non-collegiate students, of whom there are now a good many, were admitted. The University is the federal government. ”

“ Oxford at this time presented a spectacle which seems to have struck the imagination of all her foreign visitors. Three hundred halls and grammar-schools, besides her noble colleges and religious houses, furnished means of education to a far larger number of students than resort thither at the present time. The English universities, though admitting the new learning, still adhered to the scholastic philosophy—a fact which formed the groundwork of those charges brought against them by some of their contemporaries, and re-echoed by Wood, of being behind their time. ”

“ Doubtless, therefore, the visitors found Oxford a pleasant place, and cruelly they marred the enjoyments of it. Like a sudden storm of rain, they dropt down into its quiet precincts. Heedless of rights of fellows and founders' bequests, of sleepy dignities and established indolences, they re-established long-dormant leisures in the colleges. In a few little days (for so long only they remained) they poured new life into education. They founded fresh professorships—professorships of Polite Latin, Professorships of Philosophy, Divinity, Canon Law, Natural Sciences—above all of the dreaded Greek ”

“ As a teaching institution Oxford is expensive, but (on the whole) efficient. It is expensive because it sacrifices the teacher to the taught, and leads the former to bestow upon the latter a great deal of individual attention, more, possibly, than is good for him, more, certainly, than is necessary or than he gets elsewhere. It is efficient because the college spirit is strong, and the competition between the colleges is keen. ”

“ Hence, while great nobles and great merchants sold their splendid houses and grounds, and grew rich on the unearned increment, and while non-residential universities moved bodily from their old positions to new and more fashionable quarters, Oxford and Cambridge colleges went on working and living in the same places. ”

“ There is a great difference between a university and a college. A university is great enough to shelter many colleges, and its chancellor is ruler over all. When we reflect that Christ Church College, alone, included as many important buildings as are to be found in some of our modern American universities, we may have some idea of the extent of Oxford University, within whose boundaries twenty such colleges could be counted. ”