It seemed to me such a piece of good fortune to have been asked down
to Oxford at Commemoration by a gentleman implicated in the remarkable
ceremony which goes on under that name, who kindly offered me the
hospitality of his college, that I scarcely stayed even to thank
him—I simply went and awaited him. I had had a glimpse of Oxford in
former years, but I had never slept in a low-browed room looking out
on a grassy quadrangle and opposite a mediæval clock-tower. This
satisfaction was vouchsafed me on the night of my arrival; I was
made free of the rooms of an absent undergraduate. I sat in his deep
armchairs; I burned his candles and read his books, and I hereby
thank him as effusively as possible. Before going to bed I took a turn
through the streets and renewed in the silent darkness that impression
of the charm imparted to them by the quiet college-fronts which I had
gathered in former years. The college-fronts were now quieter than
ever, the streets were empty, and the old scholastic city was sleeping
in the warm starlight. The undergraduates had retired in large numbers,
encouraged in this impulse by the collegiate authorities, who deprecate
their presence at Commemoration. However many young gownsmen may be
sent away, there yet always remain a collection sufficient to represent
the sound of many voices. There can be no better indication of the
resources of Oxford in a spectacular way than this fact that the first
step toward preparing an impressive ceremony is to get rid of as many
as possible of the actors.
In the morning I breakfasted with a young American who, in common with
a number of his countrymen, had come hither to seek stimulus for a
finer strain of study. I know not whether he would have reckoned as
such stimulus the conversation of a couple of those ingenuous youths,
sons of the soil, whose society I always find charming; but it added,
from my own point of view, in respect to the place, to the element of
intensity of character. After the entertainment was over, I repaired,
in company with a crowd of ladies and elderly people, interspersed
with gownsmen, to the hoary rotunda of the Sheldonian theatre, which
every visitor to Oxford will remember from its curious cincture of
clumsily carven heads of warriors and sages perched upon stone posts.
The interior of this edifice is the scene of the classic hooting,
stamping, and cat-calling by which the undergraduates confer the last
consecration upon the distinguished gentlemen who come up for the
honorary degree of D.C.L. It is with the design of attenuating as
much as possible this volume of sound that the heads of colleges, on
the close of the term, a few days before Commemoration, speed their
too demonstrative disciples upon the homeward way. As I have already
hinted, however, the contingent of irreverence was on this occasion
quite large enough to preserve the type of the racket. This made the
scene a very singular one. An American of course, with his fondness for
antiquity, his relish for picturesqueness, his “emotional” attitude at
historic shrines, takes Oxford much more seriously than its sometimes
unwilling familiars can be expected to do. These people are not always
upon the high horse; they are not always in a state of fine vibration.
Nevertheless there is a certain maximum of disaccord with their
beautiful circumstances which the ecstatic outsider vaguely expects
them not to transcend. No effort of the intellect beforehand would
enable him to imagine one of those silver-grey temples of learning
converted into a semblance of the Bowery Theatre when the Bowery
Theatre is being trifled with.
The Sheldonian edifice, like everything at Oxford, is more or less
monumental. There is a double tier of galleries, with sculptured
pulpits protruding from them; there are full-length portraits of kings
and worthies; there is a general air of antiquity and dignity, which,
on the occasion of which I speak, was enhanced by the presence of
certain ancient scholars seated in crimson robes in high-backed chairs.
Formerly, I believe, the undergraduates were placed apart—packed
together in a corner of one of the galleries. But now they are
scattered among the general spectators, a large number of whom are
ladies. They muster in especial force, however, on the floor of the
theatre, which has been cleared of its benches. Here the dense mass is
at last severed in twain by the entrance of the prospective D.C.L.’s
walking in single file, clad in crimson gowns, preceded by mace-bearers
and accompanied by the Regius professor of Civil Law, who presents
them individually to the Vice-Chancellor of the University, in a Latin
speech which is of course a glowing eulogy. The five gentlemen to whom
this distinction had been offered in 1877 were not among those whom
fame has trumpeted most loudly; but there was something “as pretty
as a picture” in their standing in their honourable robes, with heads
modestly bent, while the orator, as effectively draped, recited their
titles sonorously to the venerable dignitary in the high-backed chair.
Each of them, when the little speech is ended, ascends the steps
leading to the chair; the Vice-Chancellor bends forward and shakes
his hand, and the new D.C.L. goes and sits in the blushing row of his
fellow doctors. The impressiveness of all this is much diminished
by the boisterous conduct of the “students,” who super-abound in
extravagant applause, in impertinent interrogation, and in lively
disparagement of the orator’s Latinity. Of the scene that precedes the
episode I have just described I have given no account; vivid portrayal
of it is not easy. Like the return from the Derby it is a carnival of
“chaff;” and it is a singular fact that the scholastic festival should
have forcibly reminded me of the great popular “lark.” In each case
it is the same race enjoying a certain definitely chartered license;
in the young votaries of a liberal education and the London rabble on
the Epsom road it is the same perfect good humour, the same muscular
jocosity.
After the presentation of the doctors came a series of those collegiate
exercises which have a generic resemblance all the world over: a
reading of Latin verses and English essays, a spouting of prize poems
and Greek paraphrases. The prize poem alone was somewhat attentively
listened to; the other things were received with an infinite variety
of critical ejaculation. But after all, I reflected, as the ceremony
drew to a close, the romping element is more characteristic than it
seems; it is at bottom only another expression of the venerable and
historic side of Oxford. It is tolerated because it is traditional;
it is possible because it is classical. Looked at in this light it
became romantically continuous with the human past that everything else
referred to.
I was not obliged to find ingenious pretexts for thinking well of
another ceremony of which I was witness after we adjourned from the
Sheldonian theatre. This was a lunch-party at the particular college
in which I should find it the highest privilege to reside and which
I may not further specify. Perhaps indeed I may go so far as to say
that the reason for my dreaming of this privilege is that it is deemed
by persons of a reforming turn the best-appointed abuse in a nest of
abuses. A commission for the expurgation of the universities has lately
been appointed by Parliament to look into it—a commission armed with
a gigantic broom, which is to sweep away all the fine old ivied and
cobwebbed improprieties. Pending these righteous changes, one would
like while one is about it—about, that is, this business of admiring
Oxford—to attach one’s self to the abuse, to bury one’s nostrils in
the rose before it is plucked. At the college in question there are no
undergraduates. I found it agreeable to reflect that those grey-green
cloisters had sent no delegates to the slangy congregation I had just
quitted. This delightful spot exists for the satisfaction of a small
society of Fellows who, having no dreary instruction to administer,
no noisy hobbledehoys to govern, no obligations but toward their own
culture, no care save for learning as learning and truth as truth,
are presumably the happiest and most charming people in the world. The
party invited to lunch assembled first in the library of the college, a
cool, grey hall, of very great length and height, with vast wall-spaces
of rich-looking book-titles and statues of noble scholars set in the
midst. Had the charming Fellows ever anything more disagreeable to
do than to finger these precious volumes and then to stroll about
together in the grassy courts, in learned comradeship, discussing
their precious contents? Nothing, apparently, unless it were to give a
lunch at Commemoration in the dining-hall of the college. When lunch
was ready there was a very pretty procession to go to it. Learned
gentlemen in crimson gowns, ladies in bright finery, paired slowly
off and marched in a stately diagonal across the fine, smooth lawn of
the quadrangle, in a corner of which they passed through a hospitable
door. But here we cross the threshold of privacy; I remained on the
further side of it during the rest of the day. But I brought back with
me certain memories, of which, if I were not at the end of my space, I
should attempt a discreet adumbration: memories of a fête champêtre in
the beautiful gardens of one of the other colleges—charming lawns and
spreading trees, music of Grenadier Guards, ices in striped marquees,
mild flirtation of youthful gownsmen and bemuslined maidens; memories,
too, of quiet dinner in common-room, a decorous, excellent repast; old
portraits on the walls and great windows open upon the ancient court,
where the afternoon light was fading in the stillness; superior talk
upon current topics, and over all the peculiar air of Oxford—the air
of liberty to care for the things of the mind assured and secured by
machinery which is in itself a satisfaction to sense.
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