could have easily had in New York, or even in London, and he made haste
to withdraw us from it up into a higher place at the top of the
Radcliffe Library, where we could look down on all Oxford, with the
tumult subsiding into repose under the foliage and amid the flowers of
the college gardens. It is the well-known view which every one is
advised by the guide-books to seize the first thing, and he could not
have done better for us, even from his great love and lore of the place,
than to point severally out each renowned roof and spire and tower which
blent again for my rapture in a rich harmony with nothing jarring from
the whole into any separately accentuated fact. I pretended otherwise,
and I hope I satisfactorily seemed to know those tops and deeps one from
another, when I ignorantly exclaimed, “Oh, Magdalen, of course! Christ
Church! And is that Balliol? And Oriel, of course; and Merton, and
Jesus, and Wadham--really Wadham? And New College, of course! And is
_that_ Brasenose?”
I honestly affected to remember them from a first visit twenty years
before, when in a cold September rain I wandered about among them with a
soul dry-shod and warmed by an inner effulgence of joy in being there on
any sort of terms. But I remembered nothing except the glory which
nothing but the superior radiance of being there again in May could
eclipse. What I remember now of this second sight of them will not let
itself be put in words; it is the bird which sings in the bush, and
alertly refuses to double its value by coming into the hand. I could not
now take the most trusting reader up into that high place, and hope to
abuse his innocence by any feigned knowledge of those clustering
colleges. All is a blur of leafy luxuriance, probably the foliage of the
garden trees which embower the colleges, but not so absolutely such that
it does not seem the bourgeoning and branching edifices themselves, a
sumptuous Gothic suggestion, in stem and spray, of the stone-wrought
beauty of the halls and chapels where nature might well have studied her
effects of Perpendicular or Early English, or that spiritual Flamboyant
in which she excels art. There remains from it chiefly a sense of
flowery color which I suppose is from the nearer-to insistence of trees
everywhere in bloom.
It was as if Oxford were decorated for the Eights by these sympathetic
hawthorns and chestnuts and fond lilacs, and the whole variety of kind,
sweet shrubs which had hung out their blossoms to gladden the pretty
eyes and noses of the undergraduates’ visitors. We could not drive
anywhere without coming upon some proof of the floral ardor; but perhaps
I am embowering Oxford more than I ought with borrowed wreaths and
garlands from the drive to the Norman church of Iffley where our friend
took us, ostensibly because it could just be got in before lunch, but
really because we needed some relief from the facts of Oxford which,
stamped thickly, one upon another, made us inexhaustible palimpsests of
precious impressions. I am sure that if another could get at my memory,
and wash one record clear of another, there would reveal itself such a
perfect history of what I saw and did as would constitute every beholder
a partner of my experiences. But this I cannot manage for myself, and
must be as content as I can with revealing mere fragmentary glimpses of
the fact, broken lines, shattered images, blurred colors. For instance,
all I can get at, of that visit to the Norman church at Iffley, is the
May morning air, with its sun and sweet, from which we passed to the
gloom, richly chill, of the interior, and then from that again, into the
sun and sweet, to have a swift look at the façade, with the dog-toothing
of its arches, which I then for the first time received distinctly into
my consciousness. A part of the precious concept, forever inseparable,
is my recollection of the church warden’s printed prayer that I would
not lean against the chain-fencing before the façade, and of my grief
that I could not comply without failing of the view of it which I was
there for: without leaning against that chain one cannot look up at the
dog-toothing, and receive it into one’s consciousness.
As often I have thought of asking my reader to revisit Oxford with me, I
have fancied vividly possessing them of this or that distinctive fact,
without regard to the sequences, but I find myself, poor slave of all
that I have seen and known! following myself, step by step through the
uneventful events in the order of their occurrence; and if my reader
will not keep me company, after luncheon, in my stroll across fields and
through garden ways beyond my friend’s house to that affluent of the
Isis whose real name is the Cherwell, and which calls itself the Char, I
know not how he is to get to the point where the Isis becomes the
Thames, and where we are to see the first of the Eights, and two of the
Bumps together. For except by this stroll we cannot reach the pretty
water, so full, so slow, so bright, so dark, where we are to take boat,
and get down to the destined point on its smooth breast, with a thousand
other boats of every device, but mainly, but overwhelmingly, punts. The
craft were all pushed or pulled by their owners or their owners’ guests,
who were as serenely and sweetly patient with the problem of getting to
the Eights or the Bumps in time, as if the affair were subjective, and
might be delayed by an effort of the will in the various cases.
As with other public things in England, this had such a quality of
privacy that we seemed the only persons really concerned, and other
people in other boats were as much figures painted in the landscape as
the buttercups in the meadowy levels that stretched on either hand at
our point of departure, and presently, changed into knots of boskage,
overhanging the dreamy lymph. But I shall not get into my picture the
sense of the lush grasses, with those little yellow lamps, or those
Perpendicular boles, with their Early English arches, or their
Flamboyant leafage, any more than I shall get in the sense of the shore
gleamily wetting its root-wrought earthen brinks, or bringing the weedy
herbage down to drink of the little river. River it was, though so
little, and as much in scale with the little continent it helps to
water, as any Ohio or Mississippi of ours is with our measureless
peninsula. There is also something in that English air, which, in spite
of the centuries of taming to man’s hand leaves Nature her moods, her
whims, of showing divinely and inalienably primitive, so that I had
bewildering moments, on that sung and storied water, of floating on some
wildwood stream of my Western boyhood. It has, so it appeared, its
moments of savage treachery, and one still eddy where it lay smoothly
smiling was identified as the point where two undergraduates had not
very long ago been drowned. Sometimes the early or the later rams swell
it to a flood, and spread it over those low pastures, in an image of
the vaster deluges which sweep our immense stretches of river valley.
There was a kind of warm chill in the afternoon air, which bore all
odors of wood and meadow, and transmitted the English voices with a
tender distinctness. From point to point there were reaches of the water
where we had quite a boat’s-length of it to ourselves, and again there
were sharp turns where it narrowed to an impossible strait and the
congested craft must have got by one another through the air. The people
in the punts, and canoes, and boats, were proceeding at their leisure,
or lying wilfully or forgetfully moored by the flat shores or under the
mimic bluffs. They struck into one another where they found room enough
to withdraw for the purpose, and they were constantly grinding gunwale
against gunwale, with gentle murmurs of deprecation and soft-voiced
forgivenesses which had almost the quality of thanks. Then, before we
knew it we were gliding under Magdalen bridge past bolder shores, and
so, into wider and opener waters where, with as little knowledge of ours
the Char had become, or was by way of becoming the Thames which is the
Isis. I believe it is still the Char where the bumps take place in the
commodious expanses between the college barges tethered to the grassy
shores. These barges were only a little more conspicuously aflame and
aflutter with bright hats and parasols and volatile skirts than the
shores; and they were all one fluent delight of color. On the shore
opposite the barge where we were guests, there ran, soon after we had
taken our first cups of tea, a cry of undergraduates, heralding the
first of the two shells which came rowing past us. Then, almost ere I
was aware of it the bow of a shell which was behind touched the stern of
the shell which was before, and the first bump had been achieved. The
thing had been so lightly and quickly done that the mere fact of the
bump had not fully passed from the eye to the mind, when a glory wholly
unexpected by me involved us: the shell which had made the bump belonged
to our college, or at least the college to which our barge belonged.
Shining in the reflected light, we rowed back up the Char to the point
of our departure, and in the long, leisurely twilight found our first
day in Oxford drawing on to night in the fragrant meadow.
Was it this night or the next that I dined in hall? There were several
dinners in hall, and I may best be indefinite as to time as well as
place. All civilized dinners are much alike everywhere, from soup to
coffee, and it is only in certain academic formalities that a dinner in
hall at Oxford differs from another banquet. One of these which one may
mention as most captivating to the fancy fond of finding poetry in
antique usage was the passing from meat in the large hall, portraited
round the carven and panelled walls with the effigies of the college
celebrities and dignities, into a smaller and cosier room, where the
spirit of the gadding vine began its rambles up and down the glossy
mahogany; and then into a third place where the fragrant cups and tubes
fumed in the wedded odors of coffee and tobacco. If I remember, we went
from the first to the last successively under the open heaven; but
perhaps you do not always so, though you always make the transit, and
could not imaginably smoke where you ate or drank.
Once, when the last convivial delight was exhausted, and there was a
loath parting at the door in the grassy quadrangle under the mild
heaven, where not even a star intruded, I had a realizing sense of what
Oxford could mean to some youth who comes to it in eager
[Illustration: “A BUMP”
H. W. Taunt & Co.]
inexperience from such a strange, far land as ours, and first fully
imagines it. Or perhaps it was rather in one of the lambent mornings
when I strayed through the gardened closes too harshly called
quadrangles that I had the company of this supposititious student, and
wreaked myself in his sense of measureless opportunity. Not opportunity
alone, but opportunity graced with all the charm of tradition, and
weighted with rich scholarly convention, the outgrowth of the patient
centuries blossoming at last in a flower from whose luminous chalice he
should drink the hoarded wisdom of the past. I said to myself that if I
were such a youth my heart would go near to break with the happiness of
finding myself in that environment and privileged to all its
possibilities, with nothing but myself to hinder me from their utmost
effect. Perhaps I made my imaginary youth too imaginative, when I was
dowering him with my senile regrets in the form of joyful expectations.
It is said the form in which the spirit of the university dwells is so
overmastering for some that they are fain to escape from it, to renounce
their fellowships, and go out from those hallowed shades into the glare
of the profane world gladly to battle “in the midst of men and day.”
Even of the American youth who resort to it, not all add shining names
to the effulgent records of the place. They are indeed not needed,
though they may be patriotically missed from the roll in which the
native memories shine in every sort of splendor. It fatigues you at last
to read the inscriptions which meet the eye wherever it turns. The
thousand years of English glory stretch across the English sky from 900
to 1900 in a luminous tract where the stars are sown in multitudes
outnumbering those of all the other heavens; and in Oxford above other
places one needs a telescope to distinguish them. The logic of any
commemoration of the mighty dead is that they will animate the living to
noble endeavor for like remembrance. But where the mighty dead are in
such multitude perhaps it is not so. Perhaps in the presence of their
records the desire of distinction fails, and it is the will to do great
things for the things’ sake rather than the doer’s which remains. The
hypothesis might account for the prevailing impersonality of Oxford, the
incandescent mass from which nevertheless from time to time a name
detaches itself and flames a separate star in the zenith.
What strikes one with the sharpest surprise is not the memories of
distant times, however mighty, but those of yesterday, of this forenoon,
in which the tradition of their glory is continued. The aged statesman
whose funeral eulogy has hardly ceased to echo in the newspapers, the
young hero who fell in the battle of the latest conquest, died equally
for the honor of England, and both are mourned in bronze which has not
yet lost its golden lustre beside the inscriptions forgetting themselves
in the time-worn lettering of the tablets on the walls, or the brasses
in the floors. Thick as the leaves in Vallombrosa, they strew the solemn
place, but in the religious calm of those chapels and halls there is no
rude blast to scatter them, or to disturb the quiet in which for a few
hundred or a few thousand years they may keep themselves from the
universal oblivion.
When one strays through those aisles and under those arches, one fancies
them almost as conscious of their sacred eld as one is one’s self. Then
suddenly one comes out into the vivid green light of a grassy
quadrangle, or the flowery effulgence of a garden, where the banks of
blossomed bushes are pushed back of the beds of glowing annuals by the
velvety sward unrolled over spaces no more denied to your foot than the
trim walks that wander beyond their barrier, under the ivied walls, and
to and from the foot-worn thresholds. To the eye it is all very soft and
warm, and the breadths of enclosing masonry, the arched or pillared
gables, the towers starting on their skyward climb, seem to bathe
themselves in sun or cool themselves in shade alike mellow and mild.
There are other senses that more truly take account of the thermometer
and report it in very glowing moments as not registering much above the
middle fifties. But you answer in excuse of it that it is so sincere,
just as you ascribe to its scrupulous truthfulness the failure of the
English temperament ever to register anything like summer heat. We boil
in the torridity of an adoptive climate, but our ancestral suns were no
hotter than those of the English are now; and where we have kept their
effect in some such cold storage as that, say, of Boston, we probably
impart no greater heat to the stranger. The spiritual temperature of
Oxford, indeed, is much that of Old Cambridge, that Old Cambridge,
Massachusetts, when it was far older, forty years ago, than it is now.
Very likely, the atmospheres of all capitals of learning are of the same
degree of warmth; and of a responsive salubrity, in the absence of
malarial microbes. At any rate I was at once naturalized to Oxford
through my former citizenship in Old Cambridge, and in a pleasing
confusion found myself in both places at once with an interval of forty
years foreshortened in a joint past and present.
The note of impersonality is struck in both places, but not so
prevalently in Old Cambridge as in Oxford, where the genius of the place
at some moment of divine inspiration,
“Smote the chord of self, that trembling, passed in music out of sight.”
As in the political frame of things the powerful English individualities
pronounce themselves strongliest by their abnegation to a patriotic
ideal, so in this finer and higher England, this England of the mind,
what chiefly impresses the stranger is that mighty accord, that
impersonal potency, which is the sum of the powerful wills, intellects,
spirits severally lost in its collectivity. The master of this college,
the president of that, the dean of the other, they all unite in effacing
themselves, and letting the university, which is their composite
personality, stand for them. As far as possible they refuse to stand for
it, and the humor of the pose is carried to the very whim in the custom
which bars the Chancellor of the University from ever returning to
Oxford after that first visit which he makes upon his appointment. My
imagination does not rise to a height like his, but of all accessible
dignities there seems to me none so amiable as the headship of one of
those famous colleges. I will not, since I need not, choose among them,
and very likely if one had one’s choice, one might find a crumpled
rose-leaf in the cushioned seat. Yet one could well bear the pain for
the sake of the pleasure and the pride of feeling one’s self an agency
of that ancient and venerable impersonality and of denying one’s self
the active appearance. Scholarship, when it does not degenerate into
authorship is the most negative of human things. It silently feeds
itself full of learning, which is as free again to the famine of future
scholarship; and in a world where pretty nearly all the soft warm things
of privilege are so cruelly wrong, I can think of none so nearly
innocent as those which lap the love of learning round in such an
immortal home of study as Oxford. It is there so fitly housed, so
properly served, so respectfully fed, so decorously clad, so beautifully
environed, that it might almost dream itself a type of what should
always and everywhere be an emanation of the literature to which it
shall return after its earthly avatar, and rest, a blessed ghost,
between the leaves of some fortunate book on an unvisited shelf of a
vast silentious and oblivious library.
There is memory enough of lunches and dinners and teas, in halls and on
lawns and in gardens, but as the reader was not asked, so cannot he in
self-respect and propriety go. But there was one of the out-door affairs
of which I may give him at least a picture-postal-card glimpse. No one’s
abnegated personality will be infringed, not even the university need
shrink from the intrusion if the garden of no college is named. The
reader is to stand well out of the way at a Gothic window looking on the
green where the guests come and go under an afternoon heaven which
constantly threatens to shower, and never showers; where the sun indeed
appears just often enough to agree with the garden trees that it will
add indescribably to the effect if their lengthening shadows can be cast
over the sward with those of the Gothic tops around. A little breeze
crisps the air, and the birds sing among the gossiping leaves of the
hawthorns and of the laburnums. One great chestnut stands elect, apart,
dense with spiky blossoms from the level of its lowest spreading boughs
to the topmost peak of its massive cone. Everywhere is the gracious
architecture in which the mouldering Oxford stone, whether it is old or
new, puts on the common antiquity.
I will not say that all the colleges seem crumbling to ruin, but the
scaly and scabrous complexion of the surfaces is the impression
remaining from the totality. The decay into which the stone almost
instantly falls is sometimes rather dreadful to the casual glance in the
plinths of those philosophers and sages about the Sheldonian Theatre,
where the heads seem to be dropping away in a mortal decay. I believe
they are renewed from time to time when they become too dreadful, but
always in the same stone; and I do not know that I would have it
otherwise in the statues or structures of Oxford. Where newness in any
part would seem upstart and vulgar, every part looks old, whether it is
of the last year or the first year. The smoke has blackened it, the damp
has painted it a dim green; the latent disintegration of the stone has
made its way to the surface, which hangs in warped scales or drops in
finer particles. One would not have a different material used for
building; brick or marble would affront the sensibilities, and deny the
wisdom of that whole English system, in which reform finds itself
authorized in usage, and innovation hesitates till it can put on the
likeness of precedent.
It is interesting in Oxford to see how the town and the university grow
in and out of each other. Like other towns of the Anglo-Saxon
civilization it is occasional, accidental, anarchical, the crass effect
of small personal ambitions and requisitions. In the course of so many
centuries its commonness could not always fail of a picturesque
quaintness, and perhaps it only seems without beauty or dignity because
the generous collective spirit working itself out in the visible body of
the university has created more of both than any other group of edifices
in the world embodies. Those shapeless, shambling, casual streets, with
their scattered dwellings and their clustering shops, find by necessity
a common centre, without impressiveness or distinction. But in their
progress or arrival, weakly widening here, or helplessly narrowing
there, they often pass under the very walls of the venerable and
beautiful edifices which constitute at once the real Oxford and the
ideal Oxford, alike removed from the material Oxford of the town.
Sometimes it is a wall that flanks a stretch of the commonplace
thoroughfares; sometimes a gate or a portal under a tower giving into
the college quadrangle from which you pass by inner ways beneath inner
walls to an inmost garden, where the creepers cling to the windows and
the porches, or a space of ivied masonry suns itself above the odorous
bushes and the daisied sward. It would be hard to choose among these
homes of ancient lore; but happily one is not obliged to choose. They
are all there for the looking, and one owns them, an inalienable
possession for life. One would not will them away, if one could; they
must remain forever to enrich the pious beholder with the vision which
no words can impart.
The heart of the pilgrim softens in the retrospect even towards that
municipal Oxford which forms the setting of their beauty, as a mass of
common rock may shapelessly enclose a cluster of precious stones,
crystals which something next to conscious life has deposited through
the course of the slow ages in the rude matrix. He relents in
remembering pleasant suburbs, through which the unhurried trams will
bear him past tasteful houses, set in embowered spaces of greensward,
and on past pretty parks into the level country where there are villas
among grounds that will presently broaden into the acreage of
ancestral-seats, halls, manors, and, for all I know, castles. Even the
immediate town has moods of lurking in lanes apart from the busier
streets, and offering the consolation of low, stone dwellings faced by
college walls, and dedicated to the uses of furnished lodgings. If it
should be your fortune to find your sojourn in one of these, you may
look down from your front window perhaps into the groves that shade
Addison’s Walk; or you may step from your back door into a grassy nook
where a tower or bastion of the old city wall will be hiding itself in a
mesh of ivy. The lane before may be dusty with traffic and the garden
behind may be damp with the rains that have never had intervals long
enough to dry out of it; but the rooms with their rocking floors will be
neatly kept, and if they happen to be the rooms of a reading or sporting
undergraduate, sublet in some academic interval, you will find the
tokens of his tastes and passions crowding the mantels and the walls. He
has confided them with the careless faith of youth, to your chance
reverence; he has not even withheld the photographs which attest his
preference in actresses, or express a finer fealty in the faces
self-evidently of mother or sister or even cousin, or some one farther
and nearer yet.