our common race, and I do not believe that if I had met a like number of
Harvard men, going and coming in the mortar-boards and cropped gowns, in
those quadrangles or gardens, I should have known them from the Oxford
men I actually saw. They might have looked sharper, tenser, less fresh
and less fair, not so often blue of eye and blond of hair, more mixed
and differenced; but they would have had the same effect of being chosen
for their golden opportunity by fortune, and the same gay ignorance of
being favored above other youth. If one came to closer quarters and had
to ask some chance question, the slovenlier speech of the Harvard men
would have betrayed them in their answer, for even our oldest university
has not yet taken thought of how her children shall distinguish
themselves from our snuffling mass by the beauty of utterance which
above any other beauty discriminates between us and the English. It is
said that the youth of the parent stock are younger than our youth; but
I know nothing as to this; and I could not say that their manners were
better, except as the manners of the English are in being simpler. They
are not better in being suppler: I should say that as life passed with
him the American limbered and the Englishman stiffened, and that the
first gained and the last lost in the power to imagine another which
they both perhaps equally possessed in their shy nonage, and which
chiefly, if not solely, enables men to be comfortable to their fellows.
But here, as everywhere, I wish to be understood as making an inference
vastly disproportioned to the facts observed. The stranger in any
country must reflect that its people seem much less interested in
themselves and their belongings than he is, and from the far greater
abundance of their knowledge have far less to say of them. This may very
well happen to a traveller from an old land among us; his zest for our
novelty may fatigue us; just as possibly our zest for his antiquity may
put us at odds with him. The spirit seeks in either case a common ground
of actuality, achronic, ubiquitous, where it may play with its fellow
soul among the human interests which are eternally and everywhere the
same.
What these are I should be far from trying to say, but I think I may
venture to recur to my memories of the mute music of Harvard for the
dominant of the unheard melodies at Oxford. The genius of the older
university seemed much the same as that of the younger under the stress
of ceremonial, and to have the quality of that stern acquiescence in the
inevitable on the occasions of Commemoration Day that I remembered from
Commencement Days in the past. The submission did not break into the
furtively imparted jest which relieves the American temperament under
fire, but the feeling of obedience to usage, the law-abiding instinct of
the race, was the same in both. From both a gala pride was equally
remote; the confident expectation of living through it, and not even a
martyr exultance in the ordeal, was doubtless what sustained the
participants. We have simplified form, but the English have simplified
the mood of observing form, and in the end it comes to the same thing in
them and in us. But there the parallel ceases. There is a riches of
incident in the observance of Commemoration Day at Oxford, for which the
sum of all like events in our academic world is but an accumulated
poverty. We could not if we would emulate the continuous splendors of
the time, for we lack not only the tradition but the environment in
which to honor the tradition. If it were possible so to abolish space
that Harvard and Yale and Princeton, say, and Columbia could locally
unite, and be severally the colleges of one university, and assemble
their best in architecture for its embodiment, something might be
imaginable of their collectivity like what involuntarily, inevitably
happens at Oxford on Commemoration Day. Then the dinners in hall on the
eve and in the evening, the lunches in the college gardens immediately
following the academical events of the Sheldonian Theatre, the
architectural beauty and grandeur forming the avenue for the progress of
the Chancellor and all his train of diverse doctors, actual and
potential, might be courageously emulated, but never could be equalled
or approached. Our emulation would want the color of the line which at
Oxford comes out of the past in the bravery of the scarlets and crimsons
and violets and purples which men used to wear, and before which the
iridescent fashions of the feminine spectators paled their ineffectual
hues. Again, the characteristic surrender of personality contributed to
the effect. In that procession whatever were the individual advantages
or disadvantages of looks or statures, all were clothed on with the
glory of the ancient university which honored them; it was the
university which passively or actively was embodied in them; and their
very distinction would in a little while be merged in her secular
splendor.
Of course we have only to live on a few centuries more and our
universities can eclipse this splendor, though we shall still have the
English start of a thousand years to overcome in this as in some other
things. We cannot doubt of the result, but in the mean time we must
recognize the actual fact, and I will own that I do not see how we could
ever offer a _coup d’œil_ which should surpass that of the supreme
moments in the Sheldonian Theatre when the Chancellor stood up in his
high place, in his deeply gold-embroidered gown of black, and accepted
each of the candidates for the university’s degrees, and then, after a
welcoming clasp of the hand, waved him to the benches which mystically
represented her hospitality. The circle of the interior lent itself with
unimagined effect to the spectacle, and swam with faces, with figures
innumerable, representing a world of birth, of wealth, of deed, populous
beyond reckoning from our simple republican experience. The thronged
interior stirred like some vast organism with the rustle of stuffs, the
agitation of fans, the invisible movement of feet; but the master-note
of it was the young life which is always the breath of the university.
How much or little the undergraduates were there it would not do for a
chance alien spectator to say. That they were there to do what they
would with the occasion in the tradition of an irresponsible license
might be affirmed, but it must be equally owned that they generously
forebore to abuse their privilege. They cheered the Candidates, some
more, some less, but there was, to my knowledge, none of the guying of
which one hears much, beyond a lonely pun upon a name that offered
itself with irresistible temptation. The pun itself burst like an
involuntary sigh from the heart of youth, and the laugh that followed it
was of like quality with it.
Then, the degrees being conferred, each with distinctive praise and
formal acceptance in a latinity untouched by modern conjecture of Roman
speech, there ensued a Latin oration, and then English essays and
speeches from the graduates--thriftily represented, that the time should
not be wasted, by extracts--and then a prize poem which did not perhaps
distinguish itself so much in generals as in particulars from other
prize poems of the past. If it had been as wholly as it was partially
good--and there were passages that caught and kept the notice--it would
have been a breach of custom out of tune and temper, as much as if the
occasional latinity had been of the new Roman accent instead of that old
English enunciation as it was of right, there where Latin had never
quite ceased to be a spoken language. All was of usage: the actors and
the spectators of the scene were bearing the parts which like actors and
like spectators had ancestrally borne so often that they might have
seemed to themselves the same from the first century, the first
generation, without sense of actuality. This sense might imaginably have
been left, in any sort of poignancy, to the accidental alien, who in
proportion as he was penetrated with it would feel it a contravention of
the spirit, the taste, of the event.
I try for something that is not easily said, and being said at all,
seems over-said; and I shrink from the weightiest impression of Oxford
which one could receive, and recall those light touches of her magic,
which as I feel them again make me almost wish that there had been no
Eights, no Commemoration Day in my experience. Of course I shall fail to
make the reader sensible of the preciousness of a walk from the Char
through a sort of market flower-garden, where when I asked my way to a
friend’s house a kindly consensus of gardeners helped me miss the short
cut; but I hope he will not be quite without the pleasure I knew in
another row on that stream. Remembering my prime joys in its navigation,
I gratefully accepted an invitation to a second voyage which was delayed
till we could be sure it was not going to rain. Then we started for the
boat where it lay not far off under a clump of trees, and where we were
delayed in their seasonable shelter by a thunder-gust; but the clouds
broke away and the sun shone, so that when our boat was bailed dry, we
could embark in a light shower, and keep on our way unmolested by the
fine drizzle that was really representing fine weather. If I had been
native to the impulsive climate I should not have noticed these swift
vicissitudes, and as it was I noticed them only to enjoy them on the
still, bank-full water, where I floated with a delight not really
qualified by the question whether the pond-lilies which padded it in
places were of the fragrant family of our own pond-lilies. I was pursued
by a kindred curiosity in regard to many other leaves and blossoms till
one Sunday morning, when, as I found myself interrogating a shrub by the
sunny walk of a college garden, it came to me that my curiosity was out
of taste. The bush was not there specifically, but as an herbaceous
expression of the University, and I had no more right to pass certain
bounds with it in my curiosity than I would have had to push any scholar
of the place to an assertion of personality where he would have
preferred to remain collective.
What riches of personality lay behind the collectivity I ought not, if I
knew, to say. Again I take refuge, from the reader’s quest, which I
cannot help feeling in the indefinite attempt to suggest it, by saying
that the collective tone is that of Old Cambridge, or more strictly, of
Harvard. I remember that once a friend, coming in high June straight to
Old Cambridge after a brief ocean interval from Oxford, noted the
resemblance. As we walked under a Gothic archway of our elms, past the
door-yards full of syringas and azaleas, with
“Old Harvard’s scholar-factories red,”
showing on the other hand in the college enclosures, he said it was all
very like Oxford. He must have felt the moral likeness, the spiritual
likeness, as I did in Oxford, for physical or meteorological likeness
there is none absolutely. It is something in the ambient ether, in the
temperament, in the unity of high interests, in the mystical effluence
from minds moving with a certain dirigibility in the upper regions, but
controlled by invisible ties, in each case, to a common centre. It is
the prevalence of scholarship, which characterizes the respective
municipalities and which holds the civic bodies in a not ungraceful, not
ungrateful subordination.
Something of the hereditary grudge between town and gown descended to
Harvard from the English centres of learning; but the prompt assertion
of town government as the sole police force forbade with us the question
of jurisdictions which it is said still confuses the parties with a
feeling of enmity at Oxford. The war of fists following the war of
swords and daggers, which in the earliest times left the dead of both
sides in the streets after some mortal clash, and kept each college a
stronghold, even after that war had no longer a stated or formal
expression, is forever past, but still the town and the gown in their
mutual dependence hold themselves aloof in mutual antipathy. So I was
told, but probably on both sides the heritage of dislike resides only in
the youthfuler breasts, and is of the quality of those ideals which
perpetuate hazing in our colleges, or which among boys pass forms of
mischief and phases of superstition along on a certain level of age. All
customs and usages are presently uninteresting, as one observes them
from the outside, and can be precious on the inside only as they are
endeared by association. What is truly charming is some expression of
the characteristic spirit such as in Oxford forbids one of the colleges
to part in fee with a piece of ground on which a certain coveted tree
stands, but which allows it to lease that beautiful feature of the
landscape to a neighboring college. A thing like that is really
charming, and has forever the freshness of a whimsical impulse, where
whimsical impulses of many sorts must have abounded without making any
such memorable sign.
In the reticence of the place all sorts of silent character will have
been accumulating through the centuries until now the sum of it must be
prodigious. But that is a kind of thing which if one has any direct
knowledge of it one feels to be a kind of confidence, and which one lets
one’s conjecture play about, in the absence of knowledge, very
guardedly. For my part I prefer to leave quite to the reader’s
imagination the charming traits of the acquaintance I would fain have
made my friends. Sometimes they were of difficult conversation, but not
more so than certain Old Cambridge men, whom I remembered from my youth;
the studious life is nowhere favorable to the cultivation of the smaller
talk; but now that so many of the Fellows are married the silence is
less unbroken, and the teas, if not the dinners, recur in a music which
is not the less agreeable for the prevalence of the soprano or the
contralto note. It seemed to me that there were a good many teas,
out-doors when it shone and in-doors when it rained, but there were
never enough, and now I feel there were all too few. They had the
_entourage_ which the like social dramas cannot have for yet some
centuries in our centres of learning; between the tinkle of the silver
and the light clash of the china one caught the muted voices of the past
speaking from the storied architecture, or the immemorial trees, or even
the secular sward underfoot. But one must not suppose that the lawns
which are velvet to one’s tread are quite voluntarily velvet. I was once
sighing enviously to a momentary host and saying of his turf that
nothing but the incessant play of the garden-hose could keep the grass
in such vernal green with us, when he promptly answered that the
garden-hose had also its useful part in the miracle of his own lawn. I
dared not ask if the lawnmower likewise lent its magic; that would have
been
[Illustration: OXFORD--LOOKING UP THE ISIS
H. W. Taunt & Co.]
going too far. Or at least I thought so; and in the midst of the
surrounding reticences I always felt it was better not to push the
bounds of knowledge.
There is so much passive erudition, hived from the flowers of a thousand
summers in such a place of learning, that I felt the chances were that
if the stranger came there conscious of some of his own little treasure
of honey, he would find it a few thin drops beside the rich stores of
any first apiarist to whom he opened it. In that long, long quiet, that
illimitable opportunity, that generously defended leisure, the
scholarship is not only deep, but it is so wide that it may well include
the special learning of the comer, and he may hear that this or that
different don who is known for a master in a certain kind has made it
his recreation to surpass in provinces where the comer’s field shrinks
to parochial measure. How many things they keep to themselves at Oxford,
it must remain part of one’s general ignorance not to know, and it is
more comfortable not to inquire. But out of the sense of their guarded,
their hidden, lore may spring the habit of referring everything to the
university, which represents them as far as they can manage not to
represent it. They may have imaginably outlived our raw passion of
doing, and have become serenely content with being. This is a way of
saying an illanguagible thing, and, of course, oversaying it.
The finer impressions of such a place--there is no other such in the
world unless it is Cambridge, England, or Old Cambridge,
Massachusetts,--escape the will to impart them. The coarser ones are
what I have been giving the reader, and trying to pass off upon him in
their fragility for something subtile. If one could have stayed the
witchery of an instant of twilight in a college quadrangle, or of
morning sunshine in a college garden, or of a glimpse of the High Street
with the academic walls and towers and spires richly foreshortened in
its perspective, or of the beauty of some meadow widening to the level
Isis, or the tender solemnity of a long-drawn aisle of trees leading to
the stream under the pale English noon, and could now transfer the spell
to another, something worth while might be done. But short of this
endeavor is vain. There was a walk, which I should like to distinguish
from others, all delightful, where we passed in a grassy field over an
old battle-ground of the Parliamentarians and the Royalists, and saw
traces of the old lager-beads, the earthworks in which the hostile camps
pushed closer and closer to each other, and left the word “loggerheads”
to their language. But I do not now find this very typical, and I am
rather glad that the details of my sojourn are so inextricably
interwoven that I need not try to unravel the threads which glow so rich
a pattern in my memory.
X
THE CHARM OF CHESTER
Because Chester is the handiest piece of English antiquity for new
Americans to try their infant teeth on, I had fancied myself avoiding it
as unworthy my greater maturity. I had not now landed in Liverpool, and
as often as I had hitherto landed there before, I had proudly disobeyed
the charge of more imperfectly travelled friends to be sure and break
the run to London at Chester, for there was nothing like it in all
England. Having indulged my haughty spirit for nearly half a century,
one of the sudden caprices which undermine the firmest resolutions
determined me to pass at Chester the day which must intervene before the
steamer I was going to meet at Liverpool was due. Naturally I did
everything I could to difference myself from the swarm of my crude
countrymen whom I found there, and I was rewarded at the delightful
restaurant in the Rows, where I asked for tea in my most carefully
guarded chest-notes, with a pot of the odious oolong which observation
has taught the English is most acceptable to the palate of our average
compatriots, when they cannot get green tea or Japan tea. Perhaps it was
my mortifying failure in this matter which fixed me in my wish never to
be taken for an Englishman, except by other Americans whom it was easy
to deceive.
The Americans abounded in Chester, not only on the present occasion but
in my three successive chance visits to the place; and if they were by
an immense majority nearly all of the same sex, they were none the worse
for that. By pretty twos, by pretty threes, by yet larger lovely groups,
and, in serious, middle-aged instances, singly, they wandered in and out
of the plain old cathedral; they strayed through the Rows or arcades by
which Chester distinguishes herself from other cities in having
two-storied sidewalks; they clustered in the shops where the prices were
adjusted to their ignorance of English values and they could pay as much
for a pair of gloves as in New York or Chicago; they crowded the narrow
promenade which tops the city wall; they haunted the historic houses,
where they strayed whispering about with their Baedekers shut on their
thumbs, attentive to the instruction of the custodians; they rode on the
tops of the municipal tram-cars with apparently no apprehension from
their violation of the sacred American principle of corporational
enterprise in transportation; they followed on foot the wanderings of
the desultory streets; at the corners and before the quainter façades
the sun caught the slant of their lifted eye-glasses and flashed them
into an involuntary conspicuity. In all his round I doubt if his ray
could have visited countenances of a more diffused intelligence,
expressive of a more generous and truly poetic interest in those new
things of the old English world on which they were now feeding full the
longing, and realizing rapturously the dreaming, of the years and years
of vague hopes. I could read from my own past the pathos of some lives,
restricted and remote, to which the present opportunity was like a glad
delirium, a glory of unimagined chance, in which they trod the stones of
Old Chester as if they were the golden streets of the New Jerusalem.
These
[Illustration: WATER-TOWER AND ROMAN REMAINS]
and such as these have forever the better of those born to the manner;
as for those assuming to be naturalized to the manner, they are not
worthy to be confounded with such envoys from the present to the past.
It is only the newest Americans who ever really see England, and they
are apt to see it in the measure of that simplicity for which sincerity
is by no means a satisfactory substitute.
It could well be in a passion of humility that a sophisticated traveller
might wish to hide himself from them in the depths of that Roman bath
which apparently so few visitors to Chester see. We found it with some
difficulty, by the direction of a kindly shop-woman who, though she had
lived all her life opposite, could only go so far as to say she believed
it was under a certain small newspaper and periodical store across the
way. Asking the young man we found there, he owned the fact, and leaving
a yet younger man in charge, he lighted a stump of candle, and led to a
sort of cavern back of his shop, where the classic relic, rude but
unmistakable, was. Rough, low pillars supported the roof and the modern
buildings overhead, and the bath, clumsily shaped of stone, attested the
civilization once dominant in Chester. Our guide had his fact or his
fable concerning the spring which supplied the bath; but whether it is
in summer or in winter that this spring almost wholly disappears, I am
ashamed not to remember.