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The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses
Noel Annan
A wonderfully engaging and entertaining history of the great dons of the last two hundred years, by one of our leading historians of ideas.Rich in anecdote, and displaying all the author’s customary mastery of his subject, The Dons is Noel Annan at his erudite, encyclopedic and entertaining best.The book is a kaleidoscope of wonderful vignettes illustrating the brilliance and eccentricities of some of the greatest figures of British university life. Here is Buckland dropping to his knees to lick the supposed patch of martyr’s blood in an Italian cathedral and remarking, ‘I can tell you what it is; it’s bat’s urine.’ Or the granitic Master of Balliol, A.D. Lindsay, whose riposte on finding himself in a minority of one at a College meeting was, ‘I see we are deadlocked’.But, entertaining as it is, The Dons also has a more serious purpose. No other book has ever explained so precisely – and so amusingly – why the dons matter, and the importance of the role they have played in the shaping of British higher education over the past two centuries.
The Dons
Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses
NOEL ANNAN
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_7418b08c-48b6-5c53-8693-56e089fff77e)
HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
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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
Ebook Edition © June 2016 ISBN: 9780007391066
Version 2016-08-24
DEDICATION (#ua17b9a10-38a2-51f6-ac86-23a50249780b)
To Francis Haskell
CONTENTS
Cover (#u5c9f22c1-9fda-5109-b6bc-b4030897e194)
Title Page (#ud2b6cfed-265f-5b62-b6d0-41880509bc1a)
Copyright (#u2761da18-6c51-5d08-8d7b-f17dec172e22)
Dedication (#ue3cc4930-8b85-5ee4-b69b-919408b54f24)
Introduction (#u5a844b01-289b-5765-bc14-a4925f57079d)
I: The Dons Create an Intellectual Aristocracy (#u4671b51d-59a3-537c-8528-a0c209068098)
II: The Genesis of the Modern Don – William Buckland (#u63200cca-c026-5b4f-8f40-a5c8cda98e4c)
III: The Charismatic Don – John Henry Newman (#u9c82e790-cce0-5734-a9c0-42e566dde191)
IV: Benjamin Jowett and the Balliol Tradition (#u816352ed-d0ba-5842-8eb5-de61102bb23d)
V: The Don as Scholar – Frederic Maitland (#u16a6ac2a-0e8d-526f-98a7-e30b9c560721)
VI: The Pastoral Don – The Ethos of King’s (#litres_trial_promo)
VII: The Trinity Scientists – J. J. and Rutherford (#litres_trial_promo)
VIII: The Don as Wit – Maurice Bowra (#litres_trial_promo)
IX: The Don as Performer – George Rylands (#litres_trial_promo)
X: The Don as Dilettante – John Sparrow (#litres_trial_promo)
XI: The Don as Magus – Isaiah Berlin (#litres_trial_promo)
XII: Women Dons in Cambridge (#litres_trial_promo)
XIII: The Don as Administrator (#litres_trial_promo)
XIV: ‘Down with Dons’ (#litres_trial_promo)
Annexe: The Intellectual Aristocracy (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_ba859fff-7aa4-5f1e-865e-4ceca3818139)
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 (#ulink_975578e3-2ac0-57b0-9ffe-c7c6bde388c6)
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.’* (#ulink_cd8dbbe2-7d64-5cfb-86f7-3205aabec1b7) 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.* (#ulink_08afe77a-f467-5e09-b398-79856de48ac6)
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.* (#ulink_cac4938d-eb1b-559f-b867-f30a07cc1aca)
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* (#ulink_86686c6f-e3ca-5329-8958-5cfa026f2886) 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.
* (#ulink_6abccc5f-7155-5ed9-b7bb-79c3a10ec2a8) Martin Joseph Routh (1755–1854), President of Magdalen College, Oxford (1791); remembered for his advice to a young scholar: ‘Always verify your references.’
* (#ulink_f0c0e9df-bdf6-551f-86f3-a4f499e1485f) 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.
* (#ulink_c0242d95-a695-5508-983f-fbd2ec38c211) If you want to follow the ramifications of the intermarriage of these families, please turn to the Annexe at the end of the book.
* (#ulink_a4ee1642-61db-5a80-a5e9-a03dcea4a96c) 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 (#ulink_f2758f26-c6a5-55e4-a5c6-ed19098b010a)
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.
