The double tripos.
The condition which characterised Cambridge studies before 1850 was that the mathematical tripos was obligatory on all candidates for honours. Between 1823 therefore and 1850 every classic was obliged to pass in one of the three classes of the mathematical tripos—he had, that is, to satisfy the examiners in two triposes. The results were often curious. Men like Macaulay, who became fellows of their college, were “ploughed” in the tripos, and professors of classics wroteM.A.after their names in virtue of a “poll” degree. The native repugnance to mathematical method in some men’s minds was constantly shown and at all stages of the university curriculum; Stratford Canning was “sorely puzzled” and indeed “in an agony of despair” over the study for which he was a “volunteer” at King’s, and Gray refused to graduate rather than pursue it. On the other hand the Cambridge “double first” meant a degree unrivalled in any part of the world.[301]
OLD HOUSES NEAR ST. EDWARD’S CHURCH AND ST. EDWARD’S PASSAGE This Passage leads from the Market into King’s Parade. Part of the South side of St. Edward’s Church is seen on the right. The Reformers Bilney, Barnes, and Latimer preached here. The three Tuns Inn, praised by Pepys for its good liquor, formerly stood in this passage.OLD HOUSES NEAR ST. EDWARD’S CHURCH AND ST. EDWARD’S PASSAGEThis Passage leads from the Market into King’s Parade. Part of the South side of St. Edward’s Church is seen on the right. The Reformers Bilney, Barnes, and Latimer preached here. The three Tuns Inn, praised by Pepys for its good liquor, formerly stood in this passage.
The present conditions for obtaining theB.A.degree are (a) residence for nine terms within the precincts of the university[302](b) satisfying the examiners in one of the examinations, or groups of examinations to which a degree is attached. One may satisfy them in one of four ways: (1) by reading for and obtaining ‘honours’[303](2) by taking the Previous, General, and Special examinations of the ordinary degree[304](3) bybeing ‘allowed the ordinary degree,’ which may happen when a man fails to be placed in any class of a tripos, but when his work is allowed to count as tantamount tothe examinations of the ordinary degree. (4) by being “excused the General,” which happens when a man has failed in the tripos examination, but his work iscounted as putting him half way towards the ordinary degree. Theaegrotatis a fifth way. If a man who has read for honours or for the ordinary degree falls sick, he is allowed to answer one or two of the examination papers only, and if he shows adequate knowledgeof these is granted a degree, but is not placed in any class.[305]
There have been frequent changes and regroupings in all the examinations described, and other reforms are in contemplation. In 1850 the Universities Commission led to radical changes at both universities. It is now proposed to simplify greatly Part I. of the mathematical tripos, placing the candidates in divisions in alphabetical order, and thus abolishing the senior wrangler.[306]This classification is the rule in the second parts of all the large triposes, all of which have been divided since their formation. The abolition of compulsory Greek in the Previous Examination is bruited and re-bruited, but for the moment the question has been set at rest (May 1906) by a decided negative vote of the senate.
The lecture and class.
The method of tuition at Cambridge consists of the lecture, the class, the weekly paper, and the examinations. “Reading” has, naturally, taken the place of oral teaching to a large extent, but the lecture still holds its place in the university. In the view of many of the seniors that place is still toolarge a one: the lecture at which copious (often verbatim) notes are taken is, no doubt, in many instances thrown away, especially in those subjects in which the lecturer simply goes over ground covered by the existing text-books. The class permits of lecturer and student discussing difficulties, and here the college tutor’s rôle is also of first importance;[307]the weekly paper (usually a “time paper,” to be answered in three hours) tests progress in the subject, and teaches a man how to “write down what he knows,” and to do so in a certain given time.
Professorships.
There was no salaried professorship in the university until Lady Margaret founded her chair of divinity in 1502. Before this, tuition in each faculty had been assigned to its doctors, the tuition in arts was left in the hands of the masters of arts. The next three professorships to be founded were also in the 3 faculties: the Regius of Divinity by the king in 1540, the Regius of Civil Law in the same year, and the Regius of Physic.[308]Henry also founded Regius professorships of Hebrew and Greek. In 1632 Sir T. Adams founded the Arabic, and in 1663, Henry Lucas, M.P. for the university, the Lucasian of Mathematics; the Knightbridge of Moral Philosophy was founded by a fellow of Peterhouse in 1683. Between that date and 1899 (when the professorship of Agriculture was founded) 35 professorships havebeen endowed, 16 of which are in natural sciences and medicine, 5 for languages, 4 for history and archæology, 2 more for law, 1 for mental philosophy and logic, and 3 more for divinity, one of which, the Norrisian, is tenable, and is now held by a layman. Fisher and Erasmus were the first holders of the Lady Margaret professorship, and Selwyn, Lightfoot, and Hort held it between the years 1855 and 1892. Bentley and Westcott held the Regius professorship (1717, 1870). Sir T. Smith was the first to hold the Regius of Civil Law, which was also held by Walter Haddon, and by Sir Henry Maine when he was twenty-five years old, Glisson of Caius was one of the distinguished holders of the Regius of Physic (1636), Metcalfe of S. John’s and Cudworth both held the Hebrew professorship, Sir J. Cheke was the first to sit in the chair of Greek following on three such great predecessors and professors of Greek at Cambridge as Erasmus, Croke, and Sir Thomas Smith. Isaac Barrow (1660), Porson (1792) and Sir R. C. Jebb (1889-1906), all Trinity men, have also held it. The Lucasian of Mathematics was held by Barrow, then by Isaac Newton, then by his deputy Whiston of Clare, then by Sanderson of Christ’s, and the chair was filled in the xix century by Airy and Sir George Stokes. Roger Cotes was the first to hold the Plumian of Astronomy (1707) founded three years previously by the Archdeacon of Rochester, who endowed it with an estate at Balsham. Professor Adams, the discoverer of Neptune, held the Lowndean of Astronomy and Geometry (1858-1892).The Regius of Modern History (George I. 1724)[309]was held by the poet Gray, by Sir J. Stephen, Charles Kingsley, Sir J. Seeley, and Lord Acton: the Cavendish professorship of Experimental Physics (founded by Grace of the Senate 1871) was first filled by Clerk Maxwell and Lord Rayleigh; F. W. Maitland (ob. Dec. 1906) held the Downing of Law; and the new Quick professorship of biology has just been offered to an American graduate.[310]
Next in dignity to professors are the Readers in the different subjects, who act as a sort of suffragans and assistants to professors; and next to these come the lecturers in branches of knowledge which range from comparative philology to electrical engineering, from medical jurisprudence to ethnology.[311]
Lambeth degrees and degrees by royal mandate.
The Pope was the fountain of graduate honour in the middle ages and conferred degrees in all the faculties, and he does so still. Doctors and masters from Rome would receive
MARKET STREET AND HOLY TRINITY CHURCH In this picture Holy Trinity Church (of which Charles Simeon was incumbent) with its spire may be seen on the left. The cool grey building in the middle of the picture is the Henry Martyn Hall, a modern structure. In the distance is seen the Tower and North side of Great St. Mary’s.MARKET STREET AND HOLY TRINITY CHURCHIn this picture Holy Trinity Church (of which Charles Simeon was incumbent) with its spire may be seen on the left. The cool grey building in the middle of the picture is the Henry Martyn Hall, a modern structure. In the distance is seen the Tower and North side of Great St. Mary’s.
incorporation at Cambridge, and Englishmen without a degree would be given, on occasion, a degree by the Pope.[312]The general statute of Henry VIII. conveying
A.D.1534.
to the primate all licences and dispensations which had heretofore “been accustomed to be had and obtained from Rome,” transferred the faculty of conferring degrees in England from the Pope to the Archbishop of Canterbury. This faculty had, until the date of the statute, formed part and parcel of the legatine powers, and had been exercised as such by Wolsey. It was among the more important powers transferred under the statute, relating to licences of the taxable sum of £4 and over, and required confirmation by Letters Patent under the great seal, or enrolment in Chancery. The right was exercised by successive archbishops, and every faculty so granted rehearsed the authority of parliament by which authority the said power was now vested in the see of Canterbury. In the reign of George I. the power was for the first time disputed. The then Bishop of Chester refused to induct a LambethB.D.and a law suit followed, as a result of
A.D.1722.
which a prescriptive and statutable right was made out for the practice. The matter was then carried by appeal to the King’s Bench and decided in favour of the archbishop, three years later, in 1725.
A.D.1660-1700.
From the accession of Charles II. till the end of thecentury the usual recipients were members of one or other of the universities, and when this was not the case incorporation in Cambridge university was granted with the proviso that no precedent was thereby created. Between 1539, when Cranmer created aD.D., and the accession of Charles II., only seven instances of archi-episcopal degrees are recorded.[313]Over 450 were conferred between 1660 and 1848, and some 334 have been conferred since.[314]A Cantabrigian primate confers the Cambridge hood, an Oxonian the Oxford. There have been many instances of the incorporation of men who were recipients of the ‘Lambeth degree’ in one or other of the colleges. The LambethM.A.does not include membership of the Senate or of Convocation.[315]
During Stuart times there were several examples of the conferring of degrees by royal mandate; a custom commuted to the now traditional compliment, when a sovereign or prince receives a degree, of conferring degrees on any persons he may wish associated with him in the honour. Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, whosestudies at Cambridge were interrupted by diplomatic missions, was createdM.A.by royal mandate.
Ad eundem.
Ad eundemdegrees, admitting a graduate to the same degree which he already enjoys elsewhere, are granted by all universities; but such degrees are no longer granted at Cambridge as a simple right.[316]
Honorary degrees, and the idea of a university.
The university confers other “complete” or “titular” degrees on certain persons who have not qualified for them by residence and examination at Cambridge. A list of those on whom this honour has been bestowed since 1859 is printed in the Cambridge Calendar. The complete degrees are conferrable upon members of the royal family, privy councillors, bishops and bishops designate, peers,[317]the judges of the High Court, the deans of Westminster, of the chapel royal Windsor, and of Cathedral churches; and also upon heads of colleges in the university, and other distinguished persons who already have a Cambridge degree and are either conspicuous for merit or holders of university office. Titular degrees may be conferred on Englishmen or foreigners of conspicuous merit.
A propos of a recent list of ‘birthday honours’ a weekly literary newspaper reminded us “that commerce, politics, and retired generals are not the only vitalizing forces in this country”; it blamed a public which it described as “increasingly illiterate and sheepish,” and adjured the universities to make no “concessionsto popular prejudice” but “to confine the honours they are able to give to those who deserve them.” It is in fact ludicrous and absurd that the universities should be expected to come in with their blessing in cases of non-academic success, and that degrees should be mere acclamations of popular verdicts. The public should have every reason to regard these as the blue riband of academic attainment in contrast with the attainments of successful ignorance or successful vulgarity, or indeed with all those kinds of success which are sufficiently rewarded by thevox populi, and in other ways. It is expected that a university should set a limit to the assumption that every good and perfect thing is at the beck and call of the mere plutocrat, and should confer its honours and seat in its rectorial chairs only those persons who present academic qualifications. When one sees with what punctilious assiduity every mark and brand of tradesman and tradesmen’s interests receives recognition nowadays, one turns with anxiety to the Cambridge list of honorary degree men. The university’s awards have not yet however been assigned to people who have grown rich on “Trusts,” business ‘slimness,’ or industries like the canned meat industry; whose title to recognition is that they have been successful speculators. How very nice it would be if instead of installing gasometers in the leper colonies or sending the latest pattern of trichord overstrung grand piano to the deaf and dumb schools of Europe and America, some rich man, with a less pretty taste for publicity, should endow the university with a million pounds
GREAT ST. MARY’S, FROM TRINITY STREET Here we only get a glimpse of the Tower of the Church with King’s Parade in the distance. In the foreground on the right is Caius College.GREAT ST. MARY’S, FROM TRINITY STREETHere we only get a glimpse of the Tower of the Church with King’s Parade in the distance. In the foreground on the right is Caius College.
sterling! Should he be the recipient of an honorary degree? Would it not be churlish to refuse it? If anything could increase one’s respect for the benefactor it would behisrefusal of this kind of recognition of his services. However there is no harm in very occasional exceptions, because these shout the exceptional circumstances and confuse no one. It is different altogether when to create an honorary degree list Mr. Anybody and Mr. Nobody are called upon to step up. It seems a simple programme that periods marked by dearth in merit should also be marked by dearth of awards, but when did a simple programme ever prove attractive from the days of Naaman downwards?
When we say that neither the elementary nor the advanced studies of a university exist simply with a view to providing the members of the community with a profession or the means of making their living, we say what is a little less obvious, and trench on ground which is hotly debated. Thousands upon thousands, it may be urged, have always gone to a university to learn a profession, and thousands who have not had this end in view have yet gone up there with no intention of acquiring learning. The university has always prepared for the professions, why not for the industries; why should it not comprise technical colleges? Hitherto, however, the universities have prepared men for the learned professions, and there is a difference between learning philosophy, theology, biblical exegesis, jurisprudence and political philosophy, or physiology and comparative anatomy for the purposesof a life profession, and learning agriculture, forestry, military tactics, or mining engineering. The growth of great branches of industry has however been as great as the growth of knowledge and the sciences; the conditions of modern life are entirely and altogether changed, competition extends far beyond the industrial world, to the universities themselves, and to the struggle for existence of knowledge for its own sake. Without supposing that this last condition will be permanent, one may still think that the universities could not refuse to teach what are called “the modern subjects,” which means industries like scientific agriculture or electrical engineering that have more money in them than the professions. In a way, too, it is only a turning of the tables; when the learned professions were studied it was because they promised the profitable careers.
It need not by any means be competition which urges the university to undertake the ‘modern subjects’; it may be, and it is, the persuasion that its rôle does not end with creating a career, that a university possesses advantages extrinsic to the degree taken, or even the work done at it. The truth perhaps is that the present conditions of life afford an object to universities as far-reaching as has ever been allotted to them since their foundation. In these days of haste, and unchewed cuds of learning, they can suggest the value of leisure—and when a man is now sent to Cambridge or Oxford this fact alone is some security that he and his are content not to put haste and quickresults above and before everything else. The lazy man we have always with us, the man in a hurry is a modern product, and suffers from a modern disease with which a university is better able, by latent influence and tradition, to deal than any other institution. And when it has taught the value of intellectual digestion, the number of those things which can only be well learnt by being gradually learnt, and in due season, has the university nothing more to teach? Our modern malady of haste, of quick methods, and quick results has a commercial basis, a certain standard of values and returns which is best so described. The academic spirit is the antagonist of this spirit, of the love of publicity, the self-advertisement, the liking for cheap and unearned rewards. Even as a business maxim it is being preached again that work done for its own sake is the only lasting work. The university may be a bulwark against false values in life, against the restlessness which is confounded with action, the constant change which is not the same thing as adaptation, against the prejudice that certain good things are not always and everywhere ends in themselves. And there is another conspicuous service which a university can perform. The commercial standard is the root of our social vulgarity, and the academic life has been in all ages that ‘simple life’ of which we hear so much. It is not necessary for generations of Englishmen to grow up to regard ‘poverty as a crime,’ or to subscribe to the worship of mere prosperity and success. A university may always be a protestagainst these and other mental vulgarities, against even that debasing of the good coin of the King’s English in which Milton saw the incipient undoing of a nation. What better place for combating the last ridiculous refuge of Englishmauvaise honte—the shamefacedness which prefers to speak one’s own language incorrectly? Something every man at least who reads for a tripos must learn about the uses of work, about its respect, something about breadth of view and accuracy of detail—and also about the legitimate support which such work is in life. It will be said that a man’s personal character and his home life inculcate all these things and give him the means to meet the shafts of outrageous fortune. But what the university can give him which his own personal character and probably his home surroundings cannot, is the way to set about making of learning a possession for ever. Some nice person said “mathematics is such a consolation in affliction,” and there is much to be said for the point of view.
A university can teach these things because, unlike technical colleges or seminaries for the professions, it exists first and foremost for the advancement of learning. Traditionally inseparable from this is its other object—education; and together they provide the tests it applies to all such questions as ‘how far it shall adapt itself to a commercial standard.’ For a university is not only a place of higher studies, it is the nursery of study; and to instil the love of learning for its own sake will always be required of it. In thewords of Elizabeth of Clare: “When skill in learning has been found, it sends out disciples who have tasted its sweetness.” In the last resort universities must stand for these things; the day when they cease to do so the idea of a university will have oozed out of them. Like all good things the university will bring forth from its treasure things new and old. We shall not look for degrees in cricket, but there may be degrees in agriculture, degrees in engineering, degrees in forestry. Why not, if a degree signifies a diploma of competence? But there should be degrees and degrees. There should be licentiates in the technical arts by the side of bachelors and masters in the liberal arts: the university must claim to mete with its own measure, and to teach its own lesson to all sorts of men.Hinc lucem et pocula sacra——
University and college officers:—chancellor and vice-chancellor—the senate—graces—proctors—bedells—the master of a college—the vice-master or president—the fellows—unmarried and married fellows—the combination room—dons’ clubs—‘Hobson’s choice’—the dons of last century—classes of students:—scholar—pensioner—fellow-commoner—sizar—age of scholars—privileges of peers—position of the sizar—college quarters and expenses—‘non-colls’—early discipline—jurisdiction of the university in the town—present discipline:—the proctors—fines—‘halls’—‘chapels’—town lodgings—expulsion—rustication—‘gates’—the tutor—academical dress—cap and gown—the undergraduates’ day—the gyp—the college kitchen—‘hall’—‘wines’—teas—the May term—idleness—rioting—modern studies and tripos entries—athletics—the Union Society—Sunday at Cambridge—scarlet days—academic terms and the long vacation—multiplication of scholarships—class from which the academic population has been drawn and careers of university men:—the Church—the rise of an opulent middle class—the aristocratic era—English conception of the benefits of a university—examples of the classes from which the men have come—recruiting grounds of the university—popularity of colleges—numbers in the colleges—religion at Cambridge—Cambridge politics—university settlement at Camberwell—married dons and future changes.
University and college officers:—chancellor and vice-chancellor—the senate—graces—proctors—bedells—the master of a college—the vice-master or president—the fellows—unmarried and married fellows—the combination room—dons’ clubs—‘Hobson’s choice’—the dons of last century—classes of students:—scholar—pensioner—fellow-commoner—sizar—age of scholars—privileges of peers—position of the sizar—college quarters and expenses—‘non-colls’—early discipline—jurisdiction of the university in the town—present discipline:—the proctors—fines—‘halls’—‘chapels’—town lodgings—expulsion—rustication—‘gates’—the tutor—academical dress—cap and gown—the undergraduates’ day—the gyp—the college kitchen—‘hall’—‘wines’—teas—the May term—idleness—rioting—modern studies and tripos entries—athletics—the Union Society—Sunday at Cambridge—scarlet days—academic terms and the long vacation—multiplication of scholarships—class from which the academic population has been drawn and careers of university men:—the Church—the rise of an opulent middle class—the aristocratic era—English conception of the benefits of a university—examples of the classes from which the men have come—recruiting grounds of the university—popularity of colleges—numbers in the colleges—religion at Cambridge—Cambridge politics—university settlement at Camberwell—married dons and future changes.
WEhave seen that it is of the essence of a universitythat it should be both a learned and a learning body, and that from the first the academic group consisted of “masters” or licensed teachers, and of scholars maintained on the college foundations. Contemporaneously with the growth of the college we find at the head of the university a chancellor, and at the head of the college its principal or “Master.”[318]
The chancellor.
A chancellor was originally a cathedral officer whose business it was to grant licences to teach.[319]His connexion with schools of learning seems to be due entirely to the authority which diocesans exercised in the granting of these licences, especially in the faculties of theology and canon law. It is then as a bishop’s officer that he makes his appearance at our universities; at Cambridge as the local officer of the Bishop of Ely, at Oxford as the local officer of the Bishop of Lincoln. “The chancellor and masters” of the university of Cambridge are first heard of together in Balsham’s rescript, in the year 1276;[320]but Henry III.’sA.D.1275-6.A.D.1270.letter to the university written six years earlier is addressed to “the masters and scholars of Cambridgeuniversity.” It may then be assumed that before this date the chancellor was still an episcopal emissary rather than an academic chief, but that from about this time he began to be chosen by themselves from among the regent-masters of the university, although with the approval of the Bishop of Ely. This approval was not dispensed with until in 1396 a member of the noble family of Zouche became chancellor; and the chancellor’s independence of the Bishop of Ely for confirmation of his title was made absolute byA.D.1402.Boniface IX. six years later.
Vice-chancellor.
The office was annual. The same man, however, was often appointed again and again, and Guy de Zouche himself had been chancellor in 1379 and again in 1382. Bishop Fisher who retained the chancellorship until his death in 1534 was the first chancellor appointed for life.[321]As soon as it became customary to elect as chancellor of the university some personage who would be able to represent its interests in the world outside, a vice-chancellor performed all those functions which before fell to the chancellor, and the position and functions of the present vice-chancellor are exactly equal to those of the old academic chancellor.[322]The first political chancellor succeeded the greatest of what, for distinction, I have called theacademic chancellors of the university. Thomas Cromwell took the post left vacant by Fisher’s martyrdom and held it till his own downfall in 1540. The chancellorship is now held by the owner of a traditional Cambridge name, Spencer Cavendish 8th duke of Devonshire.
The chancellor is appointed “for two years” or such further time “as the tacit consent of the university permits.” Under this proviso the appointment is practically for life. The vice-chancellor is appointed from among the heads of houses, and the office is annual. In each case the appointment is in the hands of the senate, or legislative body of the university which consists of all resident masters of arts and of those non-residentM.A.’swho have kept their names upon the university register.
Senate and graces.
The meetings of the senate take place in the Senate House and are called congregations. In these, degrees are conferred and “graces” are considered; a “grace” being the name for all acts of the senate, or motions proposed for its acceptance.
Resident members of the senate form the “electoral roll,” and elect the council.[323]Lastly the executive bodyconsists of the chancellor, the high steward,[324]the vice-chancellor, a commissary appointed by the chancellor, and thesex viriwho adjudicate on all matters affecting the senior members of the university, are elected “by grace of the senate,” and hold their office for two years.
A.D.1603.
The university has sent two members to parliament since the first year of James I. The exercise of the parliamentary suffrage belongs to the whole senate and is the one exception to the rule which obliges every member to record his vote personally in the Senate House.[325]The total number of members of the senate is 7192; the total number of members of the university is 13,819, this latter including all bachelors of arts and undergraduates in residence, and allB.A.’swhose names are on the books pending their proceeding to the degree ofM.A.
Proctors.
After the vice-chancellor no officers are so much in evidence as the proctors. Their duties are twofold: they conduct the congregations of the senate, and they maintain discipline among the undergraduates. There are 2 proctors elected annually, to whom are joined 2 pro-proctors, and 2 additional pro-proctors. The pro-proctors have not the standing of the proctors as university officials, but they exercise the sameauthority over the men.[326]Other executive officers are the public orator, who is “the voice of the senate”[327]; the university librarian, the registrary, the university marshal (appointed by the vice-chancellor) and the bedells.
Bedell.
If the proctor is the procurator of the academic society, the bedell is the executor of its mandates. The bedells attend the (chancellor or) vice-chancellor on all public occasions, bearing silver maces, and, like the beadles of all guilds and corporations, they summon members of the senate to the chancellor’s court.[328]For bedel or bedell is an obsolete form of beadle retained in the ancient corporations of Oxford and Cambridge. As a town or parish officer the beadle brought messages and executed the mandates of the town or parish authority. The apparitor of a trades guild was alsocalled a “bedel,” and it is, no doubt, as a guild officer that he appears in our universities and has taken so firm a footing there.
The bedell was the servant of a faculty, and also of a “nation” in the continental universities: hence at Cambridge one was the bedell of theology and canon law, the other of arts. They arranged and announced the day and hour of lectures. For many centuries Cambridge had an esquire and a yeoman bedell; but the latter was abolished in 1858. Apparently the yeoman bedell was not a member of the university, and he may have been a townsman.[329]The two esquire bedells of the present day are nominated by the council of the senate, and elected by the latter body.[330]
The Master.
Distinct from the university authorities are the college authorities. The foremost of these is the Master of each college. This officer used to beprimus inter pares, the senior among the fellows or teachingbody of his house. The change to the later “splendid isolation” of the “Head” is expressed architecturally in the relative positions of the Master’s lodging, as we can see it to-day in the old court of Corpus—the simple room leading to the dining hall and the college garden with a garret bedroom above it—and the palatial dwellings which in one or two of the colleges no longer form part of the main buildings. It is one which has a curious chronological parallel with the change that took place in the relative positions of a cathedral dean and chapter after the Reformation. The old college Master, like the old university chancellor, and the cathedral dean, was, officially and residentially, part and parcel of the body he represented. After the Reformation all these positions were shifted. The college Master became in appearance, what the cathedral dean had become in fact, “a corporation sole,” while the university chancellor was translated to supra-academic spheres, and no longer resided even in the university city. “Sixty years since,” writes a present member of the university, “society at Cambridge was divided broadly into two classes—those who were Heads and those who were not.” Ludicrous stories are told of the pride which inflated “the Heads,” who at times resented being accosted not only by the inferior undergraduate but by the fellows of their own college. The provost of King’s of just a hundred years ago was referred to familiarly by his irreverent juniors as ‘Tetoighty.’[331]
Heads of colleges have not only the statutory powers conferred on them by their college, but as assessors to the vice-chancellor they join with him in the government of the university. Their powers were largely increased by the statutes of 1570 which Whitgift procured from Elizabeth; and in 1586-7 it was decided that the vice-chancellor should always be chosen from their number.[332]The modern “Head” emulates the old academic Master, isprimus inter paresamongst his fellow collegians, and is no longer dreadful to his juniors.
There are only two exceptions to the title of Master held by all heads of colleges. The head of King’s College, like the head of Eton, is styled Provost, and the head of Queens’ College is styled President.[333]
The vice-master is called the president. His position is like that of a prior under an abbot, or a subprior in a priory: the one representing the college outside and ruling over the community, the other ruling in the house and having the authority in all which concerns its management.
With the Master and vice-Master are associated the fellows, the dean, the tutors, lecturers, chaplains, and the bursar.[334]
THE LAKE IN BOTANIC GARDENS Many different kinds of trees surround this winding water, the banks of which are lined with a variety of rushes and reeds, and are inhabited by many sorts of water-fowl.THE LAKE IN BOTANIC GARDENSMany different kinds of trees surround this winding water, the banks of which are lined with a variety of rushes and reeds, and are inhabited by many sorts of water-fowl.
Fellows.
“I can never remember the time when it was not diligently impressed upon me that, if I minded my syntax, I might eventually hope to reach a position which would give me three hundred pounds a year, a stable for my horse, six dozen of audit ale every Christmas, a loaf and two pats of butter every morning, and a good dinner for nothing, with as many almonds and raisins as I could eat at dessert,” writes Trevelyan in his “Life and Letters” of Macaulay whose appreciation of a Cambridge fellowship fell nothing short of reverence.
The fellows are the foundation graduates, as the scholars are the foundation undergraduates of a college. They are more; they are, corporately, its masters and owners. Financially, a fellowship is represented by the dividend on the surplus revenue of a college.[335]As this surplus revenue varies while the fellows are a fixed number, the value of fellowships varies, but may not now exceed £250 a year. A fellow enjoys as a rule other emoluments, as tutor, lecturer, librarian, bursar, of his college, so that his pecuniary position is by no means represented by the value of the simple fellowship. All fellowships are now bestowed for a term of years; life fellowships being held by those only who are on the staff of their college, who have served it, that is, in a tutorial or other official capacity.
Married and unmarried fellows.
Until the last quarter of the xix century fellows had to be bachelors. The ruleagainst married officials was first relaxed, after the Reformation, in favour of heads of houses; Dr. Heynes, President of Queens’ in 1529, having been the first married Master.[336]Fifty years later the fellows of King’s complained that the wife of their provost had been seen taking the air on the sacred grass of the college court, where, nevertheless, her husband declared she could not have set her foot twice in her life. Early in George III.’s reign a movement was afoot among the fellows of a different character: in 1766 Betham of King’s writes to Cole that the university had been in a most violent flame: “young and old have formed a resolution of marrying”; “the scheme is—a wife and a fellowship with her.” In the “sixties” certain colleges began to admit married fellows, while in others a fellow might marry if he held university office, as professor or librarian. No fellowship nowadays is confined to unmarried men.
This is one of three radical changes which the university has undergone in the last thirty years. The abolition of the Religious Test Act which severed the strict connexion of our universities with the Church of England, the marriage of fellows, and the appointment of men not in clerical orders to fill the chief university and college offices, have gradually changed the face of university life, secularising it and socialising it, bestowing on it, definitely, a lay and undenominational character which is perhaps not so far from itsprimitive ideal as sticklers for the connexion of the universities with the Church would have us believe. It is no longer an advantage to be in orders at Cambridge: they do not help you to a fellowship for this is given to the best man in open competition; even heads of colleges need no longer be clergymen, and only one collegiate office, that of the dean, is still preferably bestowed on a parson. The results are curious. Clerical fellows are popular, but theology is a neglected subject in the big colleges and the theological chairs are not centres of influence. At the same time every college enjoys clerical patronage, which can be exercised in favour of its deserving sons; and every college, besides its dean, appoints chaplains for the maintenance of the chapel services.[337]Clerical fellows, it is true, are now in a minority, but there seems to be no reason why the clerical don should cease to abound, as he has always abounded, in our university cities. A university education has become more not less valuable for a clergyman now that it enables him to meet men whose beliefs differ widely from his own; now that the right to display an academic hood in church is no longer prized as its chief advantage.[338]
The combination room.
Among the ‘dons’ the centre of social life has always been the combination room. It represents that pledge of civilisation the with-drawing-room, the room contiguous to the banqueting-hall, where the pleasures of the spirit steal an advantage over the pleasures of the table. The rudeness which marked the period of the early renascence, from court to convent, in England, clung also to our academic life, and it is not till the last quarter of the xvi century that we find the fellows first provided with table napkins, and learn that the enterprising college which made the innovation exacted a fine of a penny from those who continued to wipe their fingers on the tablecloth. The temptation to this latter practice must indeed have been great; for the fork which made its appearance at the dawn of the renascence in France was unknown in England two hundred years later. It is only in the course of the next, the xviith, century that the combination room emerges as a more or less luxurious apartment; the subsequent addition of newspapers, magazines, and easy chairs marking in turn the rise of journalism and the higher standard of comfort. The dons of Charles II.’s time who had to be content with the “London Gazette” supplemented the lack of news by social clubs. “The Ugly Faces” club dined periodically in what was then the ugliest of college halls—Clare. “TheOld Maids’ Club” flourished in the early xix century, with Baker the antiquary, Tonstall, and Conyers Middleton as members. The first “news letter” was however laid on the table of Kirk’s coffee-house in Charles’s reign. The first flying-coach, following the example of Oxford which had run a coach to London in one day, sped to the Capital in 1671.[339]
When the xix century opened there was no general society in Cambridge. It was more out of the way of polite England than Oxford, and many dons whose homes were at a distance spent the whole year in their colleges, emphasising the faults and therefore detracting from the virtues of small learned societies. The dons in the xvi century, say at S. John’s College, had been a brilliant company who bestowed as much on the Elizabethan age as they took from it: but the xviii century closed upon a period of dulness and reaction, in which the rudeness of material civilisation met a social uncouthness little calculated to recall the university of Spenser, of Burleigh, of Bacon. The intimacy between the fellows and their head was a thing of the past; the familiarity between scholar and don had been replaced by “donnishness”which kept the undergraduate at arm’s length; the blight of the artificial and stilted, the sterile and pompous aristocratism of just a century ago had settled down upon the university. Isolated in this eastern corner of England, just before the enormous impulse to travelling brought by railways, just after the cosmopolitan spirit which took even the Englishman abroad—the sense of a debt to Italy, of a continental comradeship—had finally ceased to exist, Cambridge dons at the dawn of the xix century had perhaps fathomed the lowest social depths. But before this century passed a social change more wonderful than the material changes around them metamorphosed university society. The unmannerly don married; and the sex which makes society, the sex which suffers no social deterioration when left to its own devices—the aristocratic sex—was introduced as the don’s helpmeet. More still—worse still—she was introduced in the same quarter of a century as what the weak-kneed among us cry out upon—his rival. It is the same donnish bachelor, separated by a gulph from the social amenities, wedded to ingrained habits and some eradicable prejudices, who suffered women to come to Cambridge and take what they could of the intellectual advantages he himself enjoyed. The historian of the great movements of the age we live in will record with interest this proof of the traditional open-mindedness which has never deserted the Cantabrigian, which has never failed to respond to the sacred dual claims of the age and the intellect.