The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses - Noel Annan

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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.

       CHAPTER TWO The Genesis of the Modern Don – William Buckland

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

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

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

      Buckland charged two guineas for attendance at his course of

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