LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
OXFORD : FIFTY YEARS SINCE.
[To rim Barron or THR " SpEcramos."] SIR, —Whatever else may be said of Mr. Arnold's letter in your last issue, no one can deny it the merit of plain speaking; and I cannot help hoping that it may at least dead to an answer to the charge, which I myself do not believe, that "religion has now fallen into contempt in %Oxford." Without, indeed, having the acquaintance with -Oxford which Mr. Arnold till recently possessed, I believe that he has not done justice to the far larger amount of literary activity which is now found among the Fellows of all Colleges than was found in my day ; but I certainly feel that there is one serious mistake in the article of an old friend both of his and my own—Mr. G-oldwin Smith—to which he -alludes, in the contemptuous tone in which he has spoken of the old teaching of the University in his and my days both religious and literary—and in the manner in which he sup- poses it to have been injured by the " Tractarian Move- anent." " The Professoriate," as he tells us, " was at -that time decayed and mute ; Colleges with princely re- venues were doing nothing, or almost nothing, for education." This is perfectly true; and was due mainly to the long neglect of the eighteenth century. But then he adds,—" Worst of
.all, the University was in exclusively clerical hands .and when the Tractarian controversy was raging nothing saved education from practical submersion but the class list, and the private tutors, or 'coaches,' who prepared for it." And this I believe to be as untrue as the other is true. The Tractarian Movement" was no cause of intellectual weakness, 'but of great mental activity in the University ; and though its direct effect was no doubt theological (an effect which stimulated the religious teaching of the best Colleges), it also increased the energy of their intellectual life ; while it produced some really great men whose teaching and example can never %lie forgotten in Oxford.
I have no wish to compare, even if I had the means to do • so, the lectares now given at Oxford, with those of the time
I am speaking of ; but I may safely say that the one ideal of the tutors of Balliol when I first knew it in 1835, was to give a thorough training, intellectual and moral, to their pupils, -and that they were not unsuccessful in the effort. Of course the system was entirely different from the present ; but, :given a very able teacher, a lecture to eighteen or twenty men es not without its advantages, compared with one given to a hundred ; and it is hard to conceive better lectures than those -of the late Archbishop of Canterbury on Aristotle and Divinity, -or more finished scholarship than that embodied in the lectures -of Dean Scott on the Greek and Latin Poets ; in fact, I agree with the diction of a distinguished old friend in saying, " They snay talk as they like of their new systems, but my idea of a .good education is what we used to get from old Tait, and Scott, and Ward." And even intellectually it was no slight Advantage that our tutors were then both resident and acces- sible, and that a feature in the Oxford of to-day, which seems to have startled Mr. Goldwin Smith,—the fact of a College with- -out a single tutor living within its walls,—was then an impassibility. With regard to another point mentioned by Mr. Smith, I am afraid we are more at issue. He regards the daily attendance at chapel on those days, at his own College, as
• " only fitted to make men Turks." I believe that at Balliol it was regarded by almost all thoughtful men as a great :advantage. Bat this was probably due to our Tractarianism.
I have already remarked that on many points, and in many 'Colleges, there was great need of reform, especially in the 'weakness of the professoriate ; and Mr. Smith will remember 'that we were both members of a very small party, who united in a asisate letter to Lord John Russell, then Prime Minister, which, in fact, led to the first Commission of 1850, of which he and Mr. Stanley were secretaries. An accurate account of this, and of the numerous commissions of which it was the parent, would be a great help to the history of Oxford for the last fifty years. I will only add that the recommendations of the first Commission gave rise to strong differences of opinion among those who had at first supported it ; and that what may be called "the Moderate Party," having then Mr. Gladstone as their sup- porter in the Ministry, succeeded in carrying a comparatively moderate reform, the main result of which was the revival of the professoriate. But this has been followed by far more sweeping measures, the results of which I have but slight means of estimating.
I have ventured to supplement Mr. Arnold's letter, chiefly from the wish to protest against an idea, now apparently not uncommon, that the best religious teaching of old Oxford and the "Tractarian Movement " were injurious to its intellectual life; and also from a belief that the best sons and inspirers of Oxford have been the men who might truly be called great. Such men are the real life of a University ; and I do not believe that anything in its day so quickened the pulse of Oxford, both intellectual and moral, as Newman's sermons, or that so powerful an instrument of good has been known since. No University could be asleep which was constantly kept alive by the manly sense and earnest convictions of men like Newman and Arnold ; and I am not aware that with all its improvements, Oxford has yet succeeded in finding any one who can be compared to either of them.—I am, Sir, &c., Kanescombe, Torquay, February 20th. W. C. LAKE.
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