The Past
I have no doubt that the past had many such to show, and that the present, when it has graduated into a past, will not be found wanting; but the ways of the college servants of old are buried deep in oblivion. They were less numerous then, when a senior and a junior student slept in the same room, and the latter made the beds, etc. Upon scholars, Bible-clerks, and the like, fell a great many of the duties which are now the scout’s—as waiting at the fellows’ table in hall, and the pleasanter although more thankless task of calling up the fellows and more luxurious commoners in the morning. Not only was the scholar or “servitor” a practical servant for part of his time, but the regular servants could be students also, and we may guess from the Corpus statutes that they must sometimes have attended lectures and have taken degrees. A story runs that a vain scholar had sent some Latin verses to his tutor by the hand of a servant, who quickly read and corrected them, to the humiliation of the scholar, when he received them back, with the comment, that his work seemed to have been revised by one who was acquainted with the Latin tongue. No doubt a man of this stamp often rose, or if he stayed in college made his attainments profitable. A man who was once manciple at Wadham became a noted maker of mathematical instruments. The manciple bought and distributed provisions in the college: the cook or[Pg 344][Pg 343]
THE ENTRANCE TO QUEEN’S COLLEGE FROM LOGIC LANE
The cupola and entrance gate beneath, appearing across the road at the end of Logic Lane, form one of the most attractive objects in the High Street.
Behind the cupola shows part of the campanile and pediment of the buildings of the College on the north side of the Great Quadrangle. The statue is that of Queen Caroline, consort of George II. The buildings on the left of the picture belong to University College.
cooks and butlers were sometimes called upon to furnish a banquet of “nine hundred messes of meat, with twelve hundred hogsheads of beer and four hundred and sixteen of wine,” as at Balliol, when a Chancellor of twenty-two years of age was installed: the porter was prominent, but as yet much subordinated to the head of the college, to whom he delivered the keys at an early hour: the barber, who was sometimes also the porter, was the welcome dispenser of true and false news, and at Wadham survived until the sixties of last century, when he insisted that the amateur actors should have their wigs dressed by him, under pain of being betrayed to the Warden. Of the old servants—heu prisca fides—we can only guess at the devotion, from the story of old Thomas Allen’s servitor, who was overawed by his master’s mathematical instruments and his reputation of astrologer, and would “impose on freshmen or simple people” by telling them that spirits were often to be met coming up Allen’s staircase “like bees.” John Earle has preserved the ways of an old college butler, from his experience as a fellow of Merton.
“An old College Butler is none of the worst students in the house, for he keeps the set hours at his book more duly than any. His authority is great over men’s good names, which he charges many times with shrewd aspersions, which they can hardly wipe off without payment. His Box and Counters prove him to be a man of reckoning; yet he is stricter in his accounts than a usurer, and delivers not a farthing[Pg 348] without writing. He doubles the pain of Gallobelgicus, for his books go out once a quarter, and they are much in the same nature, brief notes and sums of affairs, and are out of request as soon. His comings in are like a Tailor’s from the shreds of bread, the chippings, and remnants of the broken crust: excepting his vails from the barrel, which poor folks buy for their hogs, but drink themselves. He divides a halfpenny loaf with more subtility than Kekerman, and subdivides the a primo ortum so nicely, that a stomach of great capacity can hardly apprehend it. He is a very sober man, considering his manifold temptations of drink and strangers, and if he be overseen, ’tis within his own liberties, and no man ought to take exceptions. He is never so well pleas’d with his place, as when a Gentleman is beholding to him for showing him the Buttery, whom he greets with a cup of single beer and sliced manchet, and tells him ’tis the fashion of the College. He domineers over Freshmen when they first come to the Hatch, and puzzles them with strange language of Cues and Cees, and some broken Latin which he has learnt at his Bin. His faculty extraordinary is the warming of a pair of Cards, and telling out a dozen of Counters for Post and Pair, and no man is more methodical in these businesses. Thus he spends his age, till the tap of it is run out, and then a fresh one is set abroach.[Pg 349]”
THE OXFORD DAY
CHAPTER VI
THE OXFORD DAY
With cares that move, not agitate the heart.
In other cities the past is a tradition, and is at most regretted. In Oxford it is an entailed inheritance. Nevertheless, by way of a gaudy foil to this hale immortality, fashions flourish there more luridly, and fade more suddenly, than elsewhere. Afraid, therefore, that I might stumble upon anachronisms unaided, I addressed myself as a seeker after truth to several freshmen who might have been expected to know practically everything. One wished to be excused because he was standing for the secretaryship of the Union, and was “somewhat out of touch with ordinary life.” He had been busily opening debates in half the colleges of Oxford, in order to prove his sound principles and high capabilities, and enclosed this table of labours:—
11th inst., at ——: “That in the opinion of this house His Majesty’s government has done its best.”
12th, at ——: “That the struggles of the poor towards a larger and freer life are not to be discouraged.”
13th, at——: “That vegetarianism is opposed alike to our traditions and our present needs.” Also later (to oppose): “That a wave of imperialism causes a reformation in the standards of literature.”
(14th, twenty-first birthday.)
18th, at ——: “That poets are the interpreters of their age.”
19th, at ——: “That in encouraging sports this University approaches more nearly to the Greek ideal than at any other period of its existence has been the case.”
20th, at ——: “A paper on ‘Mentality in Life and Art.’”
21st, at ——: “That Oxford has not sufficiently realised and reformed its national position since imperialism became an acknowledged fact.”
Another gentleman of more tender years and less exuberance forwarded the menu of his college junior gaudy, in itself a pleasant reminder of the more solid occupations of undergraduates. He had made a table of a day’s life, alongside the dishes, like this:—
| Soup | ||
| Macedoine. | The Senior Proctor. | |
| Fish | ||
| Turbot and Lobster Sauce. | My tailor: and to buy a meerschaum. | |
| Entrées | ||
| Tomates Farcées. | My Coach. | |
| Joint | ||
| Saddle of Mutton. | If possible, my philosophy tutor. | |
| Game | ||
| Pheasants. | Aristotle. | |
| Sweets | ||
| Pudding à la Belleline. | Eights. | |
| Glace | ||
| Neapolitain. | The Master. | |
| Savoury | ||
| Oysters à la Bonne Bouche. | Jones’s hair. |
He had “no time for more.”
Of the third answer I can just see this fragment, in a fine confident penmanship, among the flames: “Oxford life falls under three heads, which I shall discuss separately. They are Religion, Education, and Social Life. And first of Education. My tutor breakfasts at eight. He has forty-eight pupils, and four ladies from Somerville College. He has one lecture and to-morrow’s to prepare. In the afternoon he will be fresh and cheerful at the college barge, watching the races. He is writing two books, and is on the Board of Guardians. In spite of this the great thing about Oxford education is the way it stamps a man—‘the cast of Vere de Vere,’ as the poet says; no matter in what position in life his lot is thrown, a certain easy grace——”
I find a more rational description of an Oxford day as it was in 1867, and as it was up to the publication of Mr. Rhodes’s will, in the Oxford Spectator, one of the most enduring of undergraduate periodicals.
“The whole History of Philosophy,” says the writer, E. N[olan], “is simply the story of an ordinary Oxford day.... In the morning, when I awake, the eastern dawn, as it shines into my room, gives my philosophy[Pg 354] an Oriental tinge. I turn Buddhist, and lie thinking of nothing. Then I rise, and at once my tenets are those of the Ionics. I think, with Thales, that Water is the great first principle. Under this impression I take my bath. Then, yielding to Animaxander, I begin to believe in the unlimited, and straightway, in a rude toilette, consume an infinite amount of breakfast. This leads to the throwing open of my window, at which I sit, an unconscious disciple of Anaximenes, and a believer in the universal agency of Air. I lock my door and sit down to read mathematics, seeming a very Pythagorean in my loneliness and reverence for numbers. I am disturbed by a knock. I open the door and admit my parlour-maid, who wishes to remove the breakfast things. She is evidently an Eleatic, for she makes an abstraction of everything material, and reduces my table to a state of pure being. Again I am alone, and as I complete my toilet before my mirror, I hold, as Heraclitus did, the principle of the becoming, and think that it, and it only, should be the rule of existence. I saunter to the window, and ponder upon the advantages or otherwise of taking a walk. I am kept at home by some theory of the Elements, such as possessed Empedocles. Now I bethink me of my lunch, and I become an Atomist in my hunger, as I compare the two states of Fulness and Void. At last Atomistic Necessity prevails, and I ring my bell. Lunch over, I walk out, and am much amused, as usual, with the men I meet. I notice that those who have intellect superior to their fellows neglect their personal appearance.[Pg 355] These, I think, are followers of Anaxagoras: they believe in νοῦς, and they deny the Becoming. Others I noticed to be bent upon some violent exercise. I feel myself small and weak beside them, wondering much whether I, who to them am but half a man, am man enough to be considered, sophistically, the measure of all things. I console myself with remarking to myself that I surely know my work for the Schools better than they. Behold! I am Socratic. Virtue, I say, consists in knowing. So I chatter away to myself, feeling quite Platonic in my dialogue, until I meet a luckless friend who is to be examined next day in Moderations. I walk out with him far into the country, talking to him about his work, and struggling against my deeply-rooted antipathy to exertion of any kind. Surely Aristotle could not have been more peripatetic, or Chrysippus more Stoical. The dinner-hour makes me Epicurean, and I pass unconsciously over many stages of philosophy. I spend an hour in the rooms of a friend who is reading hard for honours. I come away but little impressed with the philosophy of the Schoolmen. The evening passes like a dream. I have vague thoughts of recurring to my former good habits of home correspondence; but this revival of letters passes by, leaving me asleep in my chair. Here, again, as at dinner, I doubtless pass through many unconscious stages. At length I begin to muse upon bed. It is a habit of mine to yield to the vulgar fascinations of strong liquors before retiring for the night. Philosophy, I learn, works in a circle, ever[Pg 356] returning unto itself. It is for this reason, perhaps, that my last waking act is inspired both by Hegel and Thales. Hegel prompts me to crave for Spirit: Thales influences me to temper it with Water.”
Yet, if the Oxford day, as is fitting, can always be expressed in terms of philosophy, it is sometimes more complex, often more simple than that; and it is longer. It begins and ends at 7 A.M. At that hour, the student and the fanatical novel-reader, forgetful of time, the passive Bacchanalian, and the man who prefers the divine, long-seated Oxford chair to bed, are usually persuaded to retire; for unacademic voices of servant and starling begin to be heard in the quadrangle. The blackbird is awake in the shrubbery. Very soon the scout will appear, and will not know whether to say “Good-night” or “Good-morning,” and with the vacant face of one who has slept through all the blessed hours of night, will drive men to bed. There is a dreamy laying aside of books—volumes of Daudet and Dickens, Fielding and Abbé Prévost, Morley, Roberts and Poe,—old plays and romances,—Stubbs, and the Chronicles, Stuart pamphlets,—Thucydides, Aristotle, and later Latin than Quintilian. If there is to be a Divinity examination later in the morning, there are Bibles scattered up and down, epitomes, and a sound of men’s voices asking the difference between one and another version of a parable, and “Who was Gallio?” and preparing all the playful acrobatics that will pass for knowledge in the Schools. While these are trying to sleep, with the gold sunlight winning through their[Pg 358][Pg 357]
EXETER COLLEGE CHAPEL, FROM SHIP STREET
The Chapel of the College, rebuilt by Sir George Gilbert Scott in 1857, rises in the centre of the picture, and with its spire forms a conspicuous feature in Ship Street.
Below is that part of the College fronting “The Turl.”
On the right are some of the buildings of Jesus College.
The sun of a late summer afternoon strikes the western gable of the Chapel.
eyelids, one or two picked men are rising of their own free will, and some because they have to run in the Parks before a training breakfast; others are arguing with themselves or with their scouts that it cannot possibly be nearly half-past seven; or later on, that a passing bell or a bell-wether has been mistaken for the college chapel bell; others expelling the awakening scout with more frankness: some doze and doze, with alternate pricks of conscience and necessity, and desperately deciding to rise, have to saunter about, too late for chapel, too early for breakfast; the majority murmuring that all is well, and enjoying the pleasantest of thefts from daylight; for, to the man who need not, or will not, rise, the chapel bell is a blithe and kindly spirit, that sets a crown upon the bliss of oncoming sleep and gives a keener edge to his complacency, as he thinks of the cold, sleepy virtue that walks in the world below. The chaplain, a man of habit, is also getting up. No one has ever seen a fellow late for chapel.
When the service is over, those who have attended are either awake or asleep again. The service itself is of an awakening kind, and has a vigour that is unknown outside Oxford.
Oh, dear and saintly chaplain,
Time toils after you in vain!
When you stroked the Eight to glory,
Did you prove this quite so plain,
As at morning chapel daily
And at evensong again?
[Pg 362]
So run the verses which express the kind of vigour in vogue.
Now the perfervid reading man, and the man whose genealogical tree is conspicuous for a constant succession of maiden aunts, go to their cocoa and eggs: and, within three hours afterwards, the average man, to porridge, fish, eggs and bacon, coffee and oranges; the decadent, to cigars, liqueurs and wafers; the æsthete, to his seven wonders and a daffodil; and some, of all classes, to the consolations of philosophy and soda-water. Only the last-named habitually break their fast in solitude. For it is in Oxford the most social meal of the day. It may begin at any time from eight until half-past eleven—anything later being “brunch”—and last until half-past one. Some even believe that an invitation to breakfast embraces the afternoon. Lectures seldom interfere with the meal, since the man who leaves for their sake is not usually missed. A very early breakfast is pregnant with yawns, and may also be forgotten; a very late one is unhappily curtailed. Ten o’clock is an ideal to be striven after. The host has to be studious not to invite two men who are “blues,” or who are entered for the same examinations, or who are freshmen from the same school, which would be apt to produce treatises instead of conversation. It is dangerous also to have two epigrammatists. For that leads to a game of shuttlecock and battledore between the two, and of patience among the rest.... He knows that four men incapable of these things are coming, and as he peeps from his bedroom to see that all is ready,[Pg 363] he hears their steps and laughter echoing up the stairs. He is rapidly surveying them all in his mind, wondering how such excellent ingredients will mix, when they enter, having picked one another up by good fortune on the way, and already got rid of a possible tendency to talk about politics, weather, or dreams. They discuss everything. One who is bound to be a fellow starts on “the æsthetic value of dons.” One who has never left England offers a suggestive remark on Swiss scenery or the effect of palms against a sunrise in the Pacific. The transitions are indescribably rapid; yet the link of merely an epigram or a laugh, or possibly the very sense of contrast and incongruity, makes the whole run on as some fine hedge of maple, hawthorn, holly, elm, beech, and wild cherry runs on, and is fine and nothing else, except to a botanist. The talk is a play in five acts: each man is in turn a chorus. But whether the subject be freshmen, or Disraeli, or Sancho Panza, or the English aristocracy, it is treated as it never was before. Perhaps that is the result of the detached attitude of a number of very young men. Perhaps it is because each in turn, of the five average men, is touched with genius temporarily by accretion from the other four. One says a dull thing, another a silly thing, a third a rash thing, a fourth a vague thing, and straightway the fifth catches fire and blazes with something of the true light from heaven, and he not less than the rest is astonished. The spirit of the conversation is as different from the prandial spirit as shortbread from wedding cake. It has neither the richness of that nor the frivolity of tea.[Pg 364] The breakfast talker seems to depend very little on memory. He remembers fewer stories, less of the book he read on the night before, than at a later meal. He is thrown more entirely upon the resources of his own fantasy. The experience of sleep still lies like a great water between him and yesterday. In the cold, young, golden light, among the grey stones of the quadrangle, the brain, too, rejoices in its own life, and forgets to look before and after. Habit is weaker. He catches another glimpse of the “clouds of glory,” if only in a mirage. He is renovated by the new day; and although by dinner-time he will have advanced to warmer sympathies and a more tranquil satisfaction, there will then be something more cynical in his indolent optimism than in the sharp but easily warded points of morning wit.... Of course, a breakfast party of men in training for the Torpids is another thing. That is a question of arithmetic. So, too, with a breakfast given formally to freshmen, which is mainly a question of time and stories about dons. Breakfasts with fellows are either of the best kind, or they are ceremonies. There are some colleges, where the fellows not only feel that there is no need of condescension, but they do not condescend: the elder is not expected to be preternaturally simple, nor the younger to be abstruse. In other colleges, such breakfasts of the great and small are sometimes farces and sometimes ceremonies. The don knows that the other’s knowledge of the Republic is small; the undergraduate is equally aware of the fact: the one assumes that he has an index to the othe[Pg 365]r’s mind; the other that one so scathing in his opinion of essays will be the same in his treatment of little quips about the Colonial Secretary or accounts of pheasant-shooting in the Christmas vacation: one is determined to pounce; the other not to be pounced upon. The scout who changes the dishes indicates whether it is a ceremony or a farce. If he smiles, it is the one; if he does not, it is the other. Not everybody, indeed, in these colleges has the same misfortune, though any one may, as the young man who carefully prepared a paraphrase of one of the obscurest articles in the Encyclopædia Britannica and two brand new epigrams artfully inwoven, and served them up as he sat down at the breakfast table of the bursar, who smiled and commented moodily: “What a boon the Encyclopædia is to the tired man!” But breakfast with even the best of dons has this disadvantage, that he can bring it to an end with a word; so that his guest may afterwards be seen disconsolately reading a newspaper, and feeling that to have eaten food is hardly more to have breakfasted than to have dined.
Between nine and one o’clock the different species of Oxford kind are either within doors—sleeping, talking, or working—or to be seen in various conditions of unrest; observers and observed in the High, in pairs or singly; and, if freshmen, either stately in scholars’ gowns or apparently anxious to convince others that they have just picked up their commoners’ gowns; sauntering to the book-shops, or to look at a cricket pitch or a dog; or hurrying to lectures with an earnest[Pg 366]ness that strangely disappears when they are seated and the lecture is begun.
In the stream of men there is one thin black line that is unwavering—the line of men, with white fillets of sacrifice under their chins, going to the examination Schools. This is the only place in the world where the plough is still wrought into a weapon of offence. They are under the care of a suitable, ferocious, wild man, who is one of the Old Guard of the opposition to women at Oxford; and in his bleak invitation to ladies, to proceed to their appointed rooms, lays terrible stress upon the word “women,” as if it were a term of abuse in his strange tongue. He is partly responsible for the reply of an undergraduate to an American who asked, what might be the name of the buildings which he so admired and which made him feel at home?
“That,” said the undergraduate, “is the Martyrs’ Memorial.”
“And who are those going in?”
“They are the Martyrs.”
“But I thought they were burned three hundred years ago?”
“Sir,” said the undergraduate impressively, “they are martyred twice daily.”
“Well, I guess Oxford is very Middle Age and all that, but I didn’t know it went so far as that”: and the humane visitor went away, talking of agitation in the New York Herald.
Of all Oxford pastimes, that of going to the book[Pg 367]sho[Pg 368]p
ENTRANCE TO THE DIVINITY SCHOOL
The doorway through which a servant with a silver “poker” is preceding the Vice-Chancellor leads to the old Divinity School.
The window at the end of the lobby—usually called the “Pig Market”—looks into Exeter College garden.
after breakfast is one of the most wise. There the undergraduate meets the don whose lecture he has slighted; in fact, he meets every one there, or escapes them, if he thinks fit, behind one of the tall piles. Some prefer leap-frog and hopping contests in the quadrangle. In some colleges they are said to read Plato under the trees in the morning: in others, it is to be presumed, in spite of the negligent capers of the wearers, that the hours are spent in choosing the necktie or waistcoat best suited to “flame in the forehead of the morning sky.” Another amusement is to go to the Divinity School and see the Vice-Chancellor, seated between the two neat and restless proctors, conferring degrees. Near, and on either side of the daïs, the ladies are enjoying the scene, with no traces of any selfish “I would an’ if I could.” Below them sit dons who are to present members of their colleges,—a pale, superb, militant priest conspicuous among the rows of English gentlemen. Farther removed from authority is the Opposition, half a hundred undergraduates, who merrily applaud the perambulations of the mace-bearer or the deportment of their friends. Pale blue, and scarlet, and peach-coloured hoods make a brave contrast with the dead grey light and colourless stone of traceried ceiling and pillared walls, and the dim foliage of trees and ivy outside.
Lectures are a less stately pleasure. Some lecturers walk up and down the room as in a cage, and pause only for a more genial remark than usual, with uplifted gown and back to the blazing fire. Others laugh at their[Pg 372] own jokes, or even at jokes which they leave unexpressed. Some are stern and impassioned: some appear to be proposing a health; others, again, a vote of condolence. One came in clothed for travel, twenty minutes late, and after a few remarks, said that brevity was the most pardonable of the virtues, and that he had to catch a train; and left. In the old days, Merton was famous for Schoolmen, Christ Church for poets, All Souls’ for orators, Brasenose for disputants, and so on, says Fuller. That is not quite so now. Yet, as then, “all are eminent in some one kind or other,” although the undergraduate does not always perceive it. Some are noted for research, some for views, some for condensation. An impartial observer once remarked that, “even when he is abridging an abridgment, an Oxford lecturer always had views.” A scratching, coughing, whispering silence is respectfully observed. Once upon a time, a lady (not English) entered a famous hall, guide-book in hand, spectacles on nose; went from place to place, contemplated all, and incurred only the amazement of the lecturer and the admiration of the audience. It is to be noticed that the audience of what M. Bardoux good-naturedly calls Monks, is in most cases far more interested in note-books than in the lecturer. Some will spend three consecutive hours in lecture rooms, and therein compile very curious anthologies. Even that does not conduce to enthusiasm; and nobody in recent years has been electrified in an Oxford lecture room. “I have discovered,” writes an outsider, “with much difficulty that there are two[Pg 373] classes in Oxford, the learned and the unlearned: my difficulty arose from the fact that the latter were without coarseness and the former without enthusiasm.” And certainly in a city that loves to light bonfires, and is never more herself than when she is welcoming a guest, enthusiasm is astonishingly well concealed. It may be detected occasionally among gentlemen who are conducting East-Enders from quadrangle to quadrangle, or among those who like the ground-ivy beer at Lincoln College on Ascension Day, or among those who salute financiers and others in the act of becoming Doctors of Civil Law at the Encænia. It was said that some one unsuccessfully spread his gown as a carpet for the late Mr. Rhodes’s feet: it is certain that some played upon him with little jets of truth very heartily, and asked Socratic questions, on that august occasion.
At luncheon there is, however, some enthusiasm; not for the meal, which is commonly a stupid one, but for the long afternoon, to be spent in the parks, or on the river, or in the country, east to Wheatley, west to Fyfield. These matters, or the prospect of a long bookish afternoon indoors or (in the summer) under a willow on the Cherwell or Evenlode, encroach too absolutely upon luncheon to allow it to be anything more than an affair of knives and forks. As for the country, a man used frequently to walk so as to know all the fields for twenty miles on every side. But the walker is vanishing. Games take away their thousands; bicycles their hundreds; the motor car destroys twos and threes. On Sundays walking is almost fashionable;[Pg 374] on week-days it is in danger of becoming notorious as the hall-mark of a “reading man.” An uninteresting youth was once asked, as a freshman, what exercise he favoured, and replied, “I belong to the reading set and go walks.” The remark was generally considered to lower him to the rank of the Intellectuels, or as the “Guide Conversationelle” translates the word, the Prigs. That guide, which appeared in the J.C.R. in June 1899, is so characteristic in its humour that I cannot apologise for quoting from it:—
Guide Conversationelle de l’Étranger à Oxford
| L’Américain. | The Anglo-Saxon. |
| L’Espion. | The proctor. |
| Le Chauvinisme. | Imperialism. |
| Le Morgue. | Self-respect. |
| Le Noble. | The good fellow. |
| Le Bourgeois pauvre. | The tosher [an unattached student]. |
| Le Mauvais Repas. | Hall [dinner]. |
| Le Repas. | The Grid [iron; an Oxford social club]. |
| Le Culte. | The Salvation Army. |
| Le Fou. | The earnest man. |
| Le Lion. | The don. |
| L’Intellectuel. | The Prig. |
| Merci. | —— |
| Vous me devez cinq francs. | Oh! it doesn’t matter. |
| Je suis Athée. | I am broad. |
| Il est dans le mouvement. | He is a gentleman. |
| Il a manqué son coup. | I hate that man. |
| Suivre les cours. | Reading for a second. |
| Républicain de Vieille Roche. | Little Englander. |
| Opportuniste. | Conservative (or) Liberal. |
| Socialiste. | Radical. |
| Collectiviste. | Socialist. |
| Le vertu. | Our English way. |
| Etre vicieux.[Pg 375] | To be out of it. |
| Il arrivera. | His father got that place. |
| J’ai peur. | Where’s the good of ragging? |
| C’est faux. | In some respects you are right. |
| Tu en as menti. | Surely you must be mistaken. |
| Abruti. | My dear Sir! |
The river (or l’après midi) is the new college of the nineteenth century. As an educational institution it is unquestioned. The college barges represent perhaps the most successful Oxford architecture of the age. Certainly it was a thought of no mean order which set that tapering line of gaudy galleys to heave and shimmer along the river-side, against a background of trees and grass, and themselves a background for the white figures of the oarsmen. It is a fine lesson in eloquence to listen to the coaches shouting reprimand and advice, in sentences one or two words long, to a panting crew. One can see the secret of English success in the meek reception which a number of hard-working, conscientious, abraded men give to the abuse of an idler on the bank. On the afternoon of the races all is changed. The man who yesterday shouted “Potato sacks!” or “Pleasure boat!” now screams “Well rowed all!” Before and behind him flows all of the University that can run a mile. The faces of all are expressive in every inch; all restraint of habit or decorum is gone for the time being. The racing boats make hardly a sound; and for the most part the rowers hear not a sound from the bank, but only the click of their own rowlocks. Here and there a rattle is twirled; a bell rings; a pistol is fired; and a pair or several pairs of boats creep into the side, winners and losers, and languidly[Pg 376] watch the still competing boats as they pass. The noise of rattles, bells, pistols, whistles, bagpipes, frying-pans, and shouts can be heard in all the colleges and in the fields at Marston and Hinksey, where it has a kind of melody. Close at hand, it has a charm for the experienced tympanum: for in the cries of the victorious colleges the joy of victory is too great to allow of any discordant crow of mere triumph; the cries of those about to be beaten are too determined to have in them anything of hate. Such is the devout enthusiasm of the runners on the bank that if their own college boat is bumped they will sometimes run on to cheer the next boat that passes. The mysteries of harmony are never so wonderful as when, opposite the barge of a college that has made its bump, the sound of a hundred voices and a hundred instruments goes up, from dons, clergymen, old members of the college, future bishops, governors, brewers, schoolmasters, literary men, all looking very much the same, and in their pride of college forgetting all other pride. “If the next great prophet comes in knickerbockers, with good legs and a megaphone, he will be received in Oxford,” says one as he leaves the river. “Was a prophet possible? Would he be a warrior, or an orator, or a quiet actor and persuader? Out of the wilderness, or out of the slum?” Such were the questions asked. “In any case he would not be listened to in Oxford,” thought one. “Why not? provided his accent was good,” thought another. “Comfort yourself,” said a third; “some one would ask at hall table what school he came[Pg 378][Pg 377]
THE RIVER ISIS
On the right is the gold-and-white barge of Magdalen College undergoing repair. The masts and barges of other Colleges line the side of the river, and Folly Bridge closes the prospect.
from; the question would go round; and the prophet would retreat from the refrigerator.” “But suppose him a sort of Kipling, twenty or thirty feet broader every way——”
“Send up some buttered crumpets and slow poison” was the epitaph of the conversation, which was, after all, between children of a cynical age and in the hour of tea. But there is many a true thing said at tea in Oxford. The hours from four to seven are nothing if not critical. It is an irresponsible, frivolous time, and an interregnum between the tyranny of exercise and the tyranny of food. Nothing is now commended; yet nothing is envied. I suspect that some of the causes of the University love of parody might be found by an investigator in the Oxford tea. Over his crumpet or “slow poison” the undergraduate who is no wiser than he should be legislates for the world, settles even higher matters, and smilingly accepts a viceroyalty from Providence. With some it is a festival of Slang—venerable goddess! I have heard a philologist trace a little Oxford phrase to the thieves of Manchester a century ago or more. Now he plans profound or witty speeches for the Union, devises “rags” and rebellions, and writes for the undergraduate magazines, and has his revenge in a few well-chosen words upon coaches, dons, captains of football, and all forms of Pomposity, Dulness, and Good Sense. “Common-sense,” says one, “is nonsense à la mode.” He luxuriates in the criticism of life, and blossoms with epigrams. He says in his heart, “In much wisdom is much grief: and he that[Pg 382] increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,” and sets himself to make sayings which, if not truer than proverbs, are funnier. Others prowl: i.e. they go through that promiscuous calling upon acquaintances which is the bane of half its beneficiaries. Some of these prowlers seem to live by this kind of canvassing—thieves of others’ time and generous givers of their own. They will boast of having taken twenty teas in one afternoon. But on Sunday comes their judgment. They wear a soberer aspect on their way to the drawing-rooms of Oxford hostesses. In the comfortable chairs sit the incurable habitués—cold, saturnine spectators, or impudent, stiff-hearted epigrammatists, handing round at regular intervals neat slices from the massy joints of their erudition or their wit. They smile sadly and yet complacently over their tea-cups as the prowler enters. They wait until the victim is in right position, viz. with a perfectly true remark about the weather, or Sunday, or sport, or dentists; and then suddenly “slit the thin-spun life” with an unseasonable query or corroboration. The hostess smiles imperceptibly. In a few moments the prowler is gone. “Mr. ——,” says the hostess, “you pronounce the sweetest obituaries I ever meet, but I have never known you to pronounce them over the deceased.”
Here glow the lamps,
And teaspoons clatter to the cosy hum
Of scientific circles. Here resounds
The football field with its discordant train,
The crowd that cheers but not discriminates....
There are also teas with the young, the beautiful,[Pg 383] and the virtuous in the plain and exclusive northernmost haunts of learning in Oxford. The University could not well do without their sweet influences. Yet if men, in their company, are often better than themselves, as is only right, they are perhaps less than themselves. Also, in wit carnivals, it is permitted to women to use all kinds of weapons, from a sigh to a tea-urn; to men they are not permitted, although they have nothing sharper or more rankling in their armoury. Hence, on the part of generous women, a sort of pity, and on the part of men some timidity and (short of rudeness) tergiversation. And I am not privileged to give an account of a real Somerville tea.
But it is a thing impossible to praise in rhyme or prose the pleasures of tea at Oxford—perhaps especially in autumn, as the sun is setting after rain—when a man knows not whether it is pleasanter to be rained upon at Cumnor, or to be dried again by his fire—and the bells are ringing.
Not that Nepenthes which the wife of Thone
In Egypt gave to Jove-born Helena,
Is of such power to stir up joy as this,
To life so friendly.
Perhaps, as you light candles, and ask, “What is warmth without light?” your companion replies, “A minor poet”; and when you ask again in irritation, “What is light without warmth?” he is ready with, “An edition of Tennyson with notes.” And not even the recollection of such things and worse can spoil the charm of Oxford tea. Then it is that the homeliness of Oxford[Pg 384] is dearest. And what a carnival of contrasts in men and manners can be seen in a little room. “Oxford,” writes the Oxford Spectator,—
Oxford is a stage,
And all the men in residence are players:
They have their exeats and examinations;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the Freshman,
Stumbling and stuttering in his tutor’s rooms.
And then the aspiring Classman, with white tie
And shy, desponding face, creeping along
Unwilling to the Schools. Then, at the Union,
Spouting like Fury, with some woeful twaddle
Upon the “Crisis.” Then a Billiard-player,
Full of strange oaths, a keen and cunning card,
Clever in cannons, sudden and quick at hazards,
Seeking a billiard reputation
Even in the pocket’s mouth. And then the Fellow,
His fair, round forehead with hard furrows lined,
With weakened eyes and beard of doubtful growth,
Crammed with old lore of useless application,
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and study-worn Professor,
With spectacles on nose and class at side;
His youthful nose has grown a world too large
For his shrunk face; and his big, manly voice,
Turning again towards childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange, eventful history
In utter donnishness and mere nonentity,
Without respect, or tact, or taste, or anything.
I said that undergraduate magazine humour was a tea-table flower. I should have said that it flowers at tea and is harvested after dinner. The penning of it is a nocturnal occupation, and the best wit is sometimes the result of that pregnant nervousness which comes from competing with time. It was until very lately[Pg 386][Pg 385]
THE SHELDONIAN THEATRE AND OLD CLARENDON BUILDINGS
The steps from Cat Street lead to the enclosure of the Theatre, the east entrance of which is seen. Above the entrance, and crowning the roof of the Theatre, rises Sir Christopher Wren’s cupola, from the windows of which a panorama appears of unsurpassed beauty and interest.
On the right of the picture is the south front of the Clarendon Building.
a tradition that undergraduate journalism should be anonymous. Of many good and feeble things the authorship will now probably never be known. “Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew?” And it is an odd thing that so few reputations have been promised or made therein. Probably the writers of the Cambridge Light Green and the “Lambkin Papers” in the J.C.R. of Oxford have alone not only shown but fulfilled their promise in contributions to an undergraduate periodical. The explanation is that the cleverest men are content to produce either parody or what is narrowly topical, and both of these are usually born in their graves. “Parody,” said a don, “is always with us, and nearly always against us.” Parody and its companions are, in fact, a sort of unofficial bull-dogs, that persecute all forms of bad, and even good, behaviour which do not come within the proctor’s jurisdiction. The proctor is a favourite victim. “O vestment of velvet and virtue,” runs an obvious parody in the Shotover Papers of 1874, by “Gamble Gold,”—
O vestment of velvet and virtue,
O venemous victors of vice,
Who hurt men who never have hurt you,
Oh, calm, cruel, colder than ice.
Why wilfully wage ye this war? is
Pure pity purged out of your breast?
O purse-prigging Procuratores,
O pitiless pest!
The wise fool, the foolish wise man, the impostor, and the ungainly fanatic, are all game to the undergraduate[Pg 390] satirist. “We draw our bow at a venture,” he writes; “so look to it, don and undergraduate, boating men and reading men; look to it, O Union orators, statesmen of the future; look to it, ye patrons of St. Philip’s and St. Aldate’s; look to it, ye loungers in the Parks; look to it, ye Proctors, and thou, O Vice-Chancellor, see that your harness be well fitted, that between its joints no arrow shall pierce. Our aim is careless, but perhaps it may strike deep; if we cannot smite a king we shall contentedly wing a freshman.” Not seldom this note of Titanic defiance is struck by the freshman himself. If he cannot be an example of what is most subtle in literature or most brilliant in life, he will peacefully consent to be in his own person a warning against the commonplace. He is, indeed, very often among the parodists, although as a rule he does not get beyond imitation. Perhaps the large percentage of parodists will account for that timidity of poets which has left Cambridge almost without a tribute from its countless band. The gay, sarcastic man who dines next to you, or is a fellow-officer at the Union, is bound to hear of your serious follies in print, and will as infallibly make that an excuse for rushing into print himself. I have even heard it seriously urged that the number of critics in Oxford accounts for the silence of nearly every one else, and that not the irresponsible undergraduate alone blasts the blossoms of wisdom while he takes the sting out of foolishness. A cautious use of high teas might be recommended as a step towards seriousness.[Pg 391]
Some, even to-day, fly speedily from tea to work. Upon others, and in some degree upon these, dinner lays a cheerful hand in anticipation. The optimist becomes “happier and wiser both.” The very pessimist rises at least to a cynic. Under the head of dinner I include, first and least, the discussion of the cook’s poetry and prose, if one may be permitted to make the distinction, since his joints have been called “poems in prose”; second, the feast of reason, etc.; third, those acts of pleasure or duty which came naturally to the wise diner. The first two are hardly distinct acts. “We devour” says Leigh Hunt, “wit and argument, and discuss a turkey and chine.” The word “dinner” was once derived from the Greek word for terrible, and was held to imply not so much its terrors for the after-dinner speaker, as for the man who came simply to eat. Most Oxford colleges have accordingly an elaborate and forcible set of rules for humiliating the sordid man. In old days he apparently quoted from the Bible, which every one knew, just as every one knows the Times to-day; and consequently a quotation from the Bible was punished along with puns, quotations from Latin and Greek, and oaths. As unbecoming to a feast of reason, flannels and other clothes belonging to the barbaric hours of life are forbidden. The unpunctuality of such as obviously come only to devour is treated in the same way. Gross inadvertence or apparent physical incapacity to do anything but eat have also been punished in gentlemen both punctual and suitably clothed; but these and other excesses of[Pg 392] virtuous intention are not always sanctioned by the High Table. The punishment usually takes the form of a fine to the extent of two quarts of beer, which the sufferer has to put in circulation among his judges. Punning, too, is attacked. It was time that the pun should go. It was becoming too perfect, and a monopoly of the mathematical mind. Two hundred years ago men laughed at this:—“A chaplain in the University of Oxford, having one leg bigger than the other, was told that his legs might be chaplains too, for they were never like to be fellows.” To-day, it is doubtful whether it would be honoured by the fine or “sconce.” Yet the pun has in a sense been supplanted not very worthily by the “spoonerism.” That, too, has become a very solemn affair. It is in the hands of calculating prodigies, and men are expected to laugh at “pictures defeated” instead of “features depicted” and the like. It smacks of the logic required for a pass degree, while the old puns sentent plus le vin que l’huile. Yet the spoonerism is venerable in years; and Anthony Wood records among his pieces of humour the saying of Dr. Ratcliff of Brasenose, that “a proud man will buy a dagger or die a beggar.” Nor is the anecdote extinct, as one may learn from the laughter at any High Table, where it is known that men do not discuss ontology. Oxford humour, at and after dinner, may be divided under these heads:—
(1) The Rag.
(2) The Epigram.
(3) Humour.
The first, saving when it amounts to house-breaking or assault, or should endanger the perpetrator under the last Licensing Act, consists in the thoughtful preparation and execution of something unexpected for the benefit of an offending person, or in the elaboration of something visibly and audibly funny for fun’s sake at the expense of the artists alone. It was “a rag,” for example, two hundred and fifty years ago, as also more recently, to make a various and crowded ceremony of the enforced exit of a popular undergraduate. The hero may be mounted on a hearse or a steam-roller, and proceed with stately accompaniment. Or he may go in pink with a pack of bull-dogs, and whips dressed as proctors, to the tune of “ The Conquering Hero.” Some prefer twenty-four barrel-organs, if obtainable. But the “rag” is a branch of decorative art that deserves a volume with illustrations. No one who has not studied it can guess at the beautiful work which is devoted to the conversion of a gentleman’s bedroom into a sitting-room. Any one who would teach us how divine a thing the rag can be made, would be heartily thanked. I may remark, in passing, that it gives full play to the intellect,—is, in fact, a counterpart to the occupations of the schoolmen, and is neither less practical nor less ingenious, and reaches its highest perfection in the hands of scholars who can do nothing without remembering Plato, and say nothing without remembering Aristophanes. Lest I should be suspected of not being on the side of the angels in recent controversy, I will give no examples, save a trifling one[Pg 394] which has just been recalled for me by a volume of Hazlitt. We made a supper party of six with Corydon, our host at —— in Oxford. His gestures (particularly a gracious way of bowing his head as he smiled) had a magic that quickly made our number seem inevitable and right. Very soon all were talking eagerly in harmonious alternation. A choicely laden board of cold viands, which none seemed to have noticed, stood unvisited, and was finally cleared. Corydon was speaking (of nothing in the least important) when the servant carried in a strange but dainty course of little, fine old books that sent the conversation happily into every nook that rivers from Helicon visit. Again and again came in dishes of the same character, for which Corydon’s purse and library had been ransacked. The wealth of how many provinces—to use an honoured phrase—had gone to the preparation of that meal! “And by the way, I have some cold fowls and wine and fruit ready,” the host said suddenly.... One found that Shelley and champagne were good bosom friends; another that a compôte of port, Montaigne, and pomegranate was incomparable.... This Hazlitt also was at that excellent supper and “rag.” Nor can I omit a mention of the strong sculptor who strove all night in the midst of a wintry quadrangle, in order to astonish the college with a snow statue of the most jovial fellow of the society, with a cigar between his teeth and a bottle in each hand. Mr. Godley has sung of a more boisterous rag, “the raid the Saxon made on the Cymru men,” which was in this way:[Pg 395]—
Mist upon the marches lay, dark the night and late,
Came the bands of Saxondom, knocking at a gate,—
Mr. Jones the person was whom they came to see—
He, they said, had courteously asked them in to tea.
Did they, when that college gate open wide was thrown,
Go and see the gentleman, as they should have done?
No: in Impropriety’s indecorous tones
(Quite unmeet for tea-parties) loud they shouted “Jones!”
Straightway did a multitude answer to their call—
Un, dau, tri, pedwar, pump, chwech—Mr. Joneses all—
Loud as Lliwedd’s echoes ring all asserted, “We
Never asked these roistering Saesnegs in to tea!”
Like the waves of Anglesey, crashing on the coast,
Came the Cymru cohorts then: countless was their host:
Retribution stern and swift evermore assails
Him who dares to trifle with gallant little Wales....
One who might be supposed to know said in 1899 that where a Cambridge man would know an article from the Encyclopædia Britannica by heart, an Oxford man would abridge it in an epigram; and there, he contended, was a difference and a distinction. But the epigram is said to be dying. It were greatly to be regretted, if that were true, since the epigram was the handsomest medium ever chosen by inexperience for its own expression. As poetry is a criticism of life by livers, so the epigram is a criticism of life by those who have not lived. It used to be the toga of the infant prodigy at Oxford. “If only life were a dream, and I could afford hansoms!” or “A little Jowett is a dangerous thing!” used to pass muster in a crowd of epigrams. But I seemed to see the skirt of[Pg 396] the departing epigram this year, when a young man exclaimed that he had discovered that, “After all, life is the thing,” in a discussion concerning conduct and literature: and the shock was hardly lessened by the critical repartee that the remark was “not only true but inadequate.” A few years ago smaller notions than that were not allowed to go into the world without their fashionable suit. That was the epigram. It was a verbal parallel to legerdemain. The quickness of the fancy deceived the brain: or rather the brain made it a point of courtesy to be deceived. For there was a kindly conspiracy between the speaker and the hearer in the matter of epigrams. A certain degree of skill was expected of the latter, who knew almost infallibly whether a saying was an epigram, just as he would have known a hearse or a skiff. It was the jingling bell which every one but the exceptionally clever wore in his cap, to prove that he aspired to talk. All were epigrammatists, and regarded as alien nothing epigrammatical. When “Lady Windermere’s Fan” was played at Oxford, even those who had not heard them before laughed at the epigrams in the Club scene. One such remarked to a persevering imitator of Wilde: “The epigrams in ‘Lady Windermere’ were a faint echo of yourself.” But these are other times, and when the same youth, bald and still young, very recently ventured to clothe a little truism archaically, the curate next to him touched a note of horror mingled with contempt as he said, “That sounded like an epigram.” In one respect an Oxford dinner is the better for the absence[Pg 397] of epigram. The machine-made article is impossible. It used to be as ineffectual as the prayers of Thibet. A man might be seen, forgetful of the world, nursing his faculties from soup to ice, in the gestation of an epigram. Thus it tended to cast a shadow over conversation, and to replace the genial, slow, and whist-like alternations of good talk with the sudden follies of snap or the violences of bridge. Breakfast itself was sometimes made the occasion of duels, with a thrust and parry not oftener than twice in a course. A man would come melancholy to luncheon because he had not hit upon a good thing in the lecture which preceded it. Nevertheless, there was something to be said for the manufacture, if not for the manufacturer. His epigrams could be repeated spontaneously by another. Thus an elderly morose undergraduate, unable to knot a bow, would one day ejaculate at the wrong moment: “A woman is never too stupid to be loved, nor too clever to love.” The next evening a simple and dashing boy would make a hit with it, by nice judgment of time and place. Much applause was sometimes accorded to the wit of laborious, obscure young men who were content to father their offspring upon the illustrious. Thus, one undergraduate was once found slaving at an original work, entitled “Addenda to the Posthumous Humour of the late Master of Balliol.”
Of humour, the third division, there is nothing to be said. It has been met with at the Union, in spite of the notice:[Pg 398]—
Lost!
A sense of humour
by the following gentlemen——
They will take in exchange early numbers
of Sword and Trowel or a selection
of hatbands.
For the most part, the heavier vices and lighter virtues of speech are said to flourish there. “It is a pity,” said a critic of the Union, “that so many ingenious youths should disarm themselves by pretending to be in the House of Commons, which they rival as a club.” A Frenchman has said that its histrionic wealth at one time equalled the house of Molière. Indeed, as a home of comedy it is the most amusing and accomplished in Oxford; and on that account, probably, the public theatre seldom provides anything but opera and farce. A bland, clever youth, stooping like a candle in hot July—his body and a scroll of foolscap quivering with emotion, as he suggests to a smiling house that the Conservative party should bury its differences under the sole management of Mr. Redmond: a stiff, small, heroic figure—with a mouth that might sway armies, a voice as sweet as Helicon, as irresistible and continuous as Niagara—pouring forth praise of the English aristocracy and the Independent Labour Party, to a house that believes or disbelieves, and applauds: a minute, tormented skeleton, acrobatic and ungainly, so eloquent on the futility of Parliament, that he might govern the Empire, if he could govern himself: one who is not really comfortable without a cigarette, yet awes the house by his superb complacency, as he utters now and[Pg 399] then a languid epigram about the Irish peasantry or indigo, in the brief intervals of an apparent colloquy with himself:—these and a multitude of the fervid, the weighty, the listless, the perky, and the dull, are among the Union orators of yesterday. “I went to the Union to be amused,” says one. “They were debating a question of literature. A brilliant man opened; a learned opposed. Others followed—some for, some against, the motion; others again made observations. I was not disappointed. I was edified. There was no research. There was little originality. But there was a dazzling simplicity and lucidity, and an extraordinary power of treating controversially the profoundest matters as if they were common knowledge; above all, the reserved gestures, the self-control, were dignified, and made me believe that I was listening to the opinions of an assembly of middle-aged men of the world, and not a handful of students not yet past their majority.” But the glories of Union oratory are weekly: the theatre is consequently a favourite evening lounge; some even prefer it on Thursdays. It is noticeable that the house is more familiar than elsewhere in its praise or disapproval of the players. Half a dozen in the dress circle will hold a (rather one-sided) conversation with the stage for half an evening. It is also customary, and especially on Saturdays, for the audience to sing the choruses of songs to their taste many times over, and then to revive them in the quiet streets. Banquets, and the reception given to the speeches of actors and managers, and the nature of those speeches[Pg 400] as well, prove the hearty fellowship between University and stage. It has long been so. “At a stage play in Oxford,” says one old author, “(at the King’s Arms in Holywell) a Cornishman was brought in to wrestle with three Welshmen, one after another, and when he had worsted them all, he called out, as his part was, Have you any more Welshmen? Which words one of Jesus College took in such indignation that he leaped upon the stage and threw the player in earnest.” It must be admitted, however, that such familiarities on the stage itself are now unknown.
To a stranger walking from the Union or the theatre, after Tom has sounded the ideal hour of studious retirement, Oxford might well appear to be a nest of singing birds. The windows of brilliantly lighted rooms, with curtains frequently undrawn, in dwelling-house or college, reveal rows of backs and rows of faces, with here one at a piano and there one standing beside, singing lustily, while the rest try with more or less success to concentrate their talents upon the chorus: probably they are singing something from Gaudeamus, Scarlet and Blue, or other song-books for students, soldiers, and sailors; or, it may be, a folk song that has never come into print. Sometimes, in the later evening, the singing is not so beautiful. For here those sing who never sang before, and those who used to sing now sing the more. Perhaps only the broadest-minded lover of grotesque contrasts will care for the ballads flung to the brightening moon among the battlements and towers. But the others should not[Pg 402][Pg 401]
JESUS COLLEGE
The romantic tower and lowering gateway of the College are almost in the centre of the picture—a bit of Exeter College appearing above the buildings to the left.
Two masters are engaged in vigorous argument in front of the Principal’s door, over which is a “hood” of the Georgian period, in quaint contrast with the surrounding style of architecture.
judge harshly or with haste. These are but part of the motley in which learning clothes itself. Much sound and fury is here no proof of deep-seated folly; nor quietness, of study; nor are a man’s age, dignity, and accomplishments in mathematical proportion to the demureness of his deportment. I notice on one little tankard these philosophies in brief, scrawled with a broken pen:—
Ah! who would lose thee,
When we no more can use or even abuse thee?
ΠΑΝΤΑ ΡΕΙ
Qui vit sans folie n’est pas si sage qu’il croit.
The old is better.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use.
ΜΙΣΕΩ ΜΝΑΜΟΝΑ ΣΥΜΠΟΤΑΝ
Assiduitate non desidia.
Too much study is sloth.
Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando.
Quittez le long espoir et les vastes pensées.
And though some are evidently framed with an eye confined to the tankard, how applicable all are to the shining pewter and life itself!
You shall be in one small sitting-room, on an evening, while in one corner a ditty from the Studentenlieder is hummed; in another, Hagen’s Carmina Medii Ævi or W. B. Yeats or Marlowe is declaimed; in another,[Pg 406] you shall hear ghosts or sports discussed; in a fourth, the orthodoxy of the Inferno: yet the whole company shall be one in spirit. And the same in another such room—where a dozen men are divided into groups around three of the number who are reading, for discussion, the rules of the Salvation Army, the Anthologia Planudea, and a Blue Book.
At the top of an adjacent staircase there is a lonely gentleman eating strawberries and cream, and thinking about wall-paper; or one like a gnome, amidst innumerable books,—his floor strewn with notes, phrases, queries,—writing a prize essay; or one reading law, with his newly-presented football cap on his head; one reading Kipling and training a meerschaum; one alternately reading the Organon of Aristotle and quoting verbatim from Edgar Allen Poe to admiring workers at the same text; or one digesting opium, and now and then looking for five minutes at one or other of a huge pile of books at his side—Paul Verlaine, Marlowe, Jeremy Taylor, the Odyssey, Ariosto, and Pater. The staircases creak or clatter with the footsteps of men going up and down, to and from these rooms. Outside one or two sets of rooms the great outer door—the “oak”—is fastened, a signal that the owner wishes to be undisturbed, and practically an invitation to trials of strength with heel and shoulder from the passer-by. In the faintly lighted quadrangles, men are hurrying, or sauntering, or resting on the grass among the trees. Perhaps there is a light in the college hall. The sound of a castanet dance played by a band—or a song—comes through the window. The music[Pg 407] grows wilder. The chorus swallows up the song. There are half a dozen conductors beating time, among the crowded benches of the audience. The small lights are but stains upon the air, which is composed of cigar and cigarette smoke. Mirth is eloquently expressed in every way, from laughter to a snore. The candles begin to fall from the brackets; the seats are carried out; and, to a still wilder tune, two hundred men join hands and dance. The band is given no rest: in fact, they are unable to rest, and the same glow sits in their cheeks. But in the darkness they slip away. For all the candles are out, and there is a bonfire making red weals upon the grey walls; then another dance; and a hundred times, “Auld lang syne,” until the college is quiet, and but rarely a light is seen through curtains and over battlements: and the long Oxford night begins. Large reponens, we build up the fire. If it be autumn, we will hardly permit it ever to go out, thus consoling ourselves for the transitory glow of the sun, and fantastically handing on the sunsets of many summers and the dawns of many springs, in that constant flame. Sitting before it, we seem to evolve a fiery myth, and think that Apollo and Arthur and other “solar” heroes more probably leapt radiant from just such a fire before the eyes of more puissant dreamers in the old time. The light creeps along the wall, fingering title after title of our books. They are silently preluding to a second spring, when poets shall sing instead of birds, and we shall gather old fragrant flowers, not from groves, but from books. We see coming a long, new summer, a bookish summer,[Pg 408] when we shall rest by olive and holm oak and palm and cypress, and not leave our chairs—a summer of evenings, with tropic warmth, no cloud overhead, and skies of what hue we please.
There many Minstrales maken melody,
To drive away the dull Melancholy,
And many Bardes, that to the trembling chord
Can tune their timely voices cunningly:
And many Chroniclers, that can record
Old loves and warres for Ladies doen by many a Lord.
A certain Italian poet used “to retire to bed for the winter.” He had some wisdom, and we will follow him in spirit; but, having Oxford rooms and Oxford armchairs, that were not dreamed of in his philosophy, we need not stay abed. Few of the costless luxuries are dearer than the hour’s sleep amidst the last chapter of the night, while the fire is crumbling, grey, and murmurous, as if it talked in its sleep. The tenderest of Oxford poets knew these nights:—
About the august and ancient Square
Cries the wild wind; and through the air,
The blue night air, blows keen and chill;
Else, all the night sleeps, all is still.
Now the lone Square is blind with gloom,
A cloudy moonlight plays, and falls
In glory upon Bodley’s walls:
Now, wildlier yet, while moonlight pales,
Storm the tumultuary gales.
O rare divinity of Night!
Season of undisturbed delight:
Glad interspace of day and day!
Without, an world of winds at play:
Within, I hear what dead friends say.[Pg 409]
Blow, winds! and round that perfect Dome
Wail as you will, and sweep, and roam:
Above Saint Mary’s carven home,
Struggle and smite to your desire
The sainted watchers on her spire:
Or in the distance vex your power
Upon mine own New College tower:
You hurt not these! On me and mine
Clear candlelights in quiet shine:
My fire lives yet! nor have I done
With Smollett, nor with Richardson:
With, gentlest of the martyrs! Lamb,
Whose lover I, long lover, am:
With Gray, where gracious spirit knew
The sorrows of arts lonely few....
And it is day once more; and beauty, the one thing in Oxford that grows not old, seems a new-born, joyous thing, to a late watcher who looks out and sees the light first falling on dewy spires.[Pg 411][Pg 410]
IN A COLLEGE GARDEN
CHAPTER VII
IN A COLLEGE GARDEN
In spring, when it rained, says Aubrey, Lord Bacon used to go into the fields in an open coach, “to receive the benefit of irrigation, which he was wont to say was very wholesome because of the nitre in the aire, and the universal spirit of the world.” Nor is it difficult in a college garden to associate the diverse ceremonial of Nature with the moods and great days of men. What, for example, can lay such fostering hands upon the spirit that has grown callous in the undecipherable sound of cities, as the grey February clouds that emerge from the sky hardly more than the lines in mother-of-pearl or the grain of a chestnut? I have thought,—in that garden,—that we are neglectful of the powers of herb and flower to educate the soul, and that the magical herbalists were nobly guessing at difficult truths when they strove to find a “virtue” in every product of lawn and sedge. There is a polarity between the genius of certain places and certain temperaments; our “genial air” or natal atmosphere is, we may think, enriched by the soul of innumerable plants, beyond the[Pg 414] neighbourhood of which some people are never quite themselves. And this college garden of smooth, shining lawn, and trees that seem more than trees in their close old friendship with grey masonry, has a singular aptness to—I had almost said a singular knowledge of—those who have first been aware of beauty in its shade. “If there be aught in heredity, I must perforce love gardens; and until the topographer of Eden shall arise, I have set my heart on this.” So says a theologian, one of its adornments in academic black and white.
Old and storied as it is, the garden has a whole volume of subtleties by which it avails itself of the tricks of the elements. Nothing could be more romantic than its grouping and contrasted lights when a great, tawny September moon leans—as if pensively at watch—upon the garden wall. No garden is so fortunate in retaining its splendour when summer brusquely departs, or so rich in the idiom of green leaves when the dewy charities of the south wind are at last accepted. None so happily assists the music and laughter and lamps of some festivity. And when in February the heavy rain bubbles at the foot of the trees, and spins a shifting veil about their height and over the grass, it seems to reveal more than it conceals. The loneliness of the place becomes intense, as if one were hidden far back in time, and one’s self an anachronism. It is a return to Nature. The whole becomes primeval; and it is hard to throw off the illusion of being deep in woods and in some potent presence[Pg 416][Pg 415]—
THE FELLOWS’ GARDEN, MERTON COLLEGE
The portion of this garden shown is bounded by the south-east portion of the old City Wall, with one or two bastions still remaining, and the terrace walk formed on a mound level with the top of the steps, shown in the picture, commands a fine view of Christ Church Meadows and the Broad Walk. A grand avenue of lime trees is on the left, where at a lower level is placed an armillary sphere.
The time is near sunset.
Hoc nemus ...
Quis deus incertum est, habitat deus.
At such times the folded gloom gives up the tale of the past most willingly.
The casual stranger sees little in the garden but neatness and repose. He may notice how luckily the few trees occur, and what warmth the shrubbery bestows, when they are black with rain and the crocus petals are spilt in silence. In a little while he may be privileged to learn what a great space for the eye, and especially for the imagination, the unknown gardener has contrived out of a few roods of high-walled grass. He will perhaps end by remarking that an acre is more than so many square yards, and by supposing that it is unique because it is academic.
But it is no merely academic charm that keeps him there, whether the sun in October is so bright on the frosty grass that the dead leaves disappear when they fall,—or on a spring evening the great chestnut expands; its beauty and magnitude are as things newly and triumphantly acquired; and it fills the whole space of sky, and in a few minutes the constellations hang in its branches.
It is rather perfect than academic; a garden of which the most would say that, after their own, it is the best. Its shape and size are accidents, for it embraces the sites of an old hall, a graveyard, and an orchard of Elizabeth’s time; and the expert mole might here and there discover traces of a dozen successive fashions since it was clipped and carved by a dialist and[Pg 420] peppered with tulips. But a thoughtful conservatism and a partnership between many generations have given it an indubitable style. The place has, as it were, a nationality, and the inevitable boundaries are apparently the finishing-strokes of the picture and not its aboriginal frame. Yet it is no natural garden into which any one may stroll and scatter the ends of cigarettes. A strong customary law is expressed by the very aspect of the place. Hence, part of it is still sacred to the statelier leisure of the dons. Hence, where any one can go, whether by right, or from a lack of beadles, it is the good fortune of every one to find himself alone when he reaches the spot. Even so, the trees have never quite their just tribute of dignity and ceremonial. They would be pleased to welcome back the days when Shenstone could only visit Jago secretly, because he wore a servitor’s gown; when even Gibbon remembered with satisfaction “the velvet cap and silk gown which distinguish a gentleman commoner from a plebeian student”; and when, within living memory, the “correct thing for the quiet, gentlemanly undergraduate was a black frock-coat and tall hat, with the neatest of gloves and boots,” on his country walk. The garden, when its borders were in scrolls, knots, and volutes, was certainly not among
The less ambitious Pleasures found
Beneath the Liceat of an humble Bob,
but was chiefly honoured by those who had graduated into a grizzled wig “with feathery pride,”—Mr. Rake[Pg 421]well of Queen’s or Beau Trifle of Christ Church, or the ornate gentleman who are depicted in Ackerman,—and by dons who had never lost their self-respect by the scandal of keeping the company of undergraduates. When Latin was the language of conversation at dinner and supper, the trees looked their best. The change came, perhaps, in the days of the President who went about the world muttering Mors omnibus communis, or when our grandfathers made the gravel shriek with their armchair races across the quadrangles; for in those days, according to an authority on roses, undergraduates either read, or hunted, or drove, or rowed, or walked (i.e. up and down the High). The pile of the lawn continued to deepen, and the trees to write new legends upon the sky.
The limes are in number equal to the fellows of the college, and, with the great warden horse-chestnut and the lesser trees, make up a solemn and wise society. They waste no time. Now and then they talk a little, and when one talks, the others follow; but as a rule the wryneck or the jackdaw talks instead; and with them it seems to be near the end of the day, nothing remaining save benedictus benedicat. In the angriest gale and in the scarcely grass-moving air of twilight the cypresses nod almost without sound. They are sentinels, unarmed, powerful in their unknown watchword, solemn and important as negroes born in the days of Haroun Alraschid. They say the last word on calm. And so old—— goes there often, to remember the great days of the college fifty years ago, and, looking[Pg 422] priest-like with his natural tonsure and black long gown, seems to worship some unpermitted graven image among the shadows. When he is in the garden, the intruder may see a complete piece of mediæval Oxford; for the louvre, and the line of roofs, and the mullioned windows are, from that point of view, as they were in the founder’s time.
At the feet of the trees are the flowers of the seasons in their order. Here and there the precious dark earth is visible, adding a charm to the pale green stems and leaves and the splendid or thoughtful hues of blossom. The flower borders and plots carve the turf into such a shape that it seems a great quiet monster at rest. One step ahead the grass is undivided, enamelled turf: underfoot, the innumerable blades have each a colour, a movement, a fragrance of their own,—as when one enters a crowd, that had seemed merely a crowd, and finds in it no two alike.
On one side is the shrubbery, of all the hues of the kingdom of green. Underneath the shrubs the gloom is a presence. The interlacing branches are as the bars of its cage. You watch and watch—like children who have found the lion’s cage, but the lion invisible—until gradually, pleased and still awed, you see that the caged thing is—nothingness, in all its shadowy pomp and immeasurable power. Seated there, you could swear that the darkness was moving about, treading the boundaries. When I first saw it, it was a thing as new and strange as if I had seen the world before the sun, and withdrawing my eyes and looking at the fresh limes[Pg 424][Pg 423]
IN TRINITY COLLEGE GARDENS
The wrought-iron gates, supported by noble piers, to the left of the picture, open immediately opposite Wadham College. The road between the College and the gates leads to the New Museum, the Parks, and Keble College. There is no entrance for the public through these gates.
Some of the fine trees which adorn this eastern part of the gardens are shown.
was like beholding the light of the first dawn arriving at Eden. And in the evening that accumulated gloom raised the whole question between silence and speech, and did not answer it. The song of the blackbird is heard, cushioned among the sleepy cooings of doves. And when they cease, how fine is the silence! When they revive, how fine is the song! For the silence seems to appropriate and not to destroy the song. The blackbird, too, seems to appropriate and make much of the silence when he sings. The long meditations of the gowned and ungowned therein are not of less account because the only tangible result is the perfect beheading of dandelions as they walk to and fro.
How shall I name you, immortal, mild, proud shadows?
I only know that all we know comes from you,
And that you come from Eden on flying feet.
Is Eden far away, or do you hide
From human thought, as hares and mice and coneys
That run before the reaping-hook and lie
In the last ridge of the barley? Do our woods
And winds and ponds cover more quiet woods,
More shining winds, more star-glimmering ponds?
Is Eden out of time and out of space?
And do you gather about us when pale light
Shining on water and fallen among leaves,
And winds blowing from flowers, and whirr of feathers,
And the green quiet, have uplifted the heart?
Not often can the most academic dreamer see Faunus among those trees or Daphne in the laurel again.
On the grass the shadows of the roof, and later, of a tree, make time an alluring toy. The shadow is cut in finer and sharper angles than the roofs make, in the rich, hazy, Oxford light.[Pg 428]
To walk round about the garden twice could not occupy an hour of the most tranquil or gouty human life, even if you stayed to see the toadflaxes and ferns in the wall, to note the shape of the trees, and admire how the changing sun patronises space after space of the college buildings. Yet no maze or boundless moor could give a greater pleasure of seclusion and security. Not in vain has it served many academic generations as a sweet and melodious ante-chamber of the unseen. For, as an old book grows the richer to the wise reader, for the porings of its dead owners in past years, so these trees and this lawn have been enriched. Their roots are deep in more than earth. Their crests traffic with more than the doves and the blue air. There is surely no other garden so fit to accompany the reading of Comus or the Æneid. They become domesticated in the heart amidst these propitious shades. But not many bring books under the trees; nor are they unwise who are contented to translate what silence says. The many-coloured undergraduate lounges there with another of his kind, and may perhaps encounter the shade of some “buck” or “smart” of old, who will set a stamp of antiquity on his glories. Choleric old—— walks there sometimes; but either a caterpillar falls, or the leaves turn over and unburden themselves of their rain; and he comes back, loudly thinking that, if a covered cloister had been in the place of the trees, he would not have lost a very ingenious thread of reflection about the greatest good of the greatest number. [Pg 430][Pg 429]And—— goes there after a college meeting, and
FELLOWS’ GARDEN, EXETER COLLEGE
On the extreme left of the picture is part of the two-storeyed Library of the College, built in 1856. Farther on is the south end of the lobby to the Divinity School (“Pig Market,” see other picture), at the base of which are some steps, leading to an earthen embankment overlooking Radcliffe Square.
Bishop Heber’s tree is planted at the south-east corner of this embankment (see other picture), and shows between the aged acacia tree and the dome of the Radcliffe Library, which appears to the extreme right of the painting.
A group of Fellows are seated under the acacia, probably resting after playing bowls.
changes his mind. The merry breakfaster finds that a turn among the trees will add the button-hole to his complacency. The grave young scholar, with his gown almost to his heels, and the older one whose gown and cap resemble nothing that is worn by any save a tramp, meet there on summer evenings. The freshman gives the highest colour and purest atmosphere to his prophetic imaginings when he walks there first. One says that the garden is partly a confessor and partly an aunt. Above all, it is the resort of those who are about to leave Oxford for ever; and under its influence those who have forgotten all their ambitions, and those who are beginning to remember them, meet on some June or October afternoon, to decide that it has been worth while; and between the trees the college has a half-domestic, half-monastic air; all else is quite shut out, except where, like a curve of smoke, a dome rises, and the wraith of a spire among the clouds.[Pg 435][Pg 434]
OLD OXFORD DAYS
CHAPTER VIII
OLD OXFORD DAYS
The history of a college like New or Wadham is written clearly on its walls. It rose by one grand effort, from one grand conception, at the will of founder and architect. All its future uses were more or less plainly implied in the quadrangles, chapel, and hall, through which the opening procession marched with solemn music; they stood in need of little more than time and good fortune. Such a college was then in a sense mature, fully armed and equipped, before the founder’s decease.
But it was more characteristic of an Oxford college to be evolved irregularly, by strange and difficult ways, with much sudden expansion and decline, into its present state. Thus Lincoln and Oriel were, for a short time after their foundation, fallow, if not extinct. The latter, in spite of its renovation by a king, after whom it was at first inclined to be named, grew up around the humble, illustrious tenement of La Oriole, where its early scholars dwelt, and whence they gave their society its lasting name. That[Pg 438] cradling tenement has its parallel in many a college history.
In the thirteenth or fourteenth century some Oxford citizen would build a pair of cottages, where a carpenter and an innkeeper came to live. At the inrush of students to welcome a famous lecturer, the spare rooms of those cottages received their share. Some of the lodgers stayed on, liked the carpenter and his wife and family, with whom they lived on terms of social equality; and in a generation the tradition of entertaining scholars was established. A few years saw the formation of a colony of students from one countryside or great estate. As the custom was, they chose a superior from among their number. In those days, if an American had run upstairs to the head, he might have had a more satisfactory answer than he had yesterday to his command: “I’ve come to take rooms in your college!” for the hostel was, roughly speaking, an hotel. The members fought side by side in the battles of the nations (viz. Northerners, Southerners, etc.), and of town and gown. They bent over the same books. They sang the same songs. And together they came to love the place, the two cottages and those adjacent into which they had overflowed. Such a group fled from the ancient Brasenose Hall to Stamford, in one of the University migrations, in 1334; carried with them the knocker of their lodgings in the shape of a brazen nose, and fixed it to the door of their “Brasenose Hall in Stamford.” If they forgot to take it back on their return, it nevertheless “got perched upon the top of the pineal gland” of[Pg 439] the college brain; and with characteristic spirited piety the descendants of the old hall-men found it out in 1890, and hung it in a place of honour and safety.
In later life one of the carpenter’s tenants became a bishop, or a royal almoner. Either at the height of his fame and wealth, or on his deathbed, he would remember his old retreat, and its associations with law and Aristotle and
Breed and chese and good ale in a jubbe.
There his old friends or their successors still dwelt, and learned and taught and fought. So he gave money for the purchase of the cottages; a neighbouring garden plot, perhaps a strip of woodland outside the walls, and the rents of some home farms for the revenue; together with the advowson of a church—if possible the one which he remembered best in Oxford, or if not, then one within his diocese or influence. He sketched the statutes, which fixed the number of the scholars and the rules for electing new ones and a head. He himself chose the first head. The scholars were to remain unmarried and in residence; to study the Arts, or Theology, or Canon and Civil Law; and to pray for his soul.
The carpenter’s and innkeeper’s tenants found themselves suddenly powerful and rich. They had their own seal, and a new and more settled enthusiasm, and a diapason of duties and ceremonies, added to their life. They had their aisle in the church whose shadow reached them on summer evenings. If their estates were[Pg 440] large and well managed,—if the country was prosperous, and the head obeyed the statutes and the fellows the head,—their progress was swift. Perhaps a legal difficulty interposed delay, or their rents disappeared. Perhaps the fellows quarrelled with the head, or the discipline was such that the fellows climbed into college at late unstatutable hours and became a scandal in the University. But a descendant or neighbour of the founder, or a parishioner of the college living, came to their help. One gave a present, in order that he might be remembered in the college prayers: another sent books: a former fellow who was grateful or pitiful made a rich benefaction when he went to court. Already the little original tenements were tottering or too small. They must build and rebuild. Then a “second founder” adopted as his children that and all succeeding generations of scholars, who should praise him for a benefaction larger than the first.
They pull down the old buildings, all save a flanking wall with a gateway to their taste, and begin to build. The benefactor sends teams of oxen to carry wood and stone. They are quarrying at Eynsham and Headington, and in the benefactor’s own distant county. They are felling oaks at Cumnor or Nuneham, actually before the bronzed foliage has crisped to brown. All day the oxen come and go: on the river, the boats are carrying stone, slates, and wood, unless the frost binds the barges among the reeds and the foundation soil breaks the spade. The master mason has already roughly hewn a statue of the patron saint or the founder, or his[Pg 442][Pg 441]
THE LIBRARY, ORIEL COLLEGE
Across the picture, opposite the spectator, appears the Library, a dignified building of the Ionic order of architecture, designed by James Wyatt about 1788. It occupies the northern side of the inner quadrangle.
On the ground floor, in the rusticated “basement” upon which the Library stands, are the Common Rooms of the College.
The time is late afternoon in summer.
rebus and coat of arms. He has decided that the old doorway shall be the entrance to the college kitchen, lying far back in the main quadrangle, which will not only take in the site of the demolished buildings, but the neighbouring garden and a lane that could be spared. If he is unfortunate, he may have to stop when he has completed only the entrance, with the head’s lodgings vigilant above it, and a few sets of rooms adjacent on either side, already occupied. If all is well, in a few years, or perhaps at the end of the mason’s life, the shining whole is the admiration of Oxford. The bishop who is to consecrate the chapel comes informally to see it a few days beforehand, and is therefore able to restrain his wonder when he comes pompously with the chancellor and all the great names of the University. The chapel and hall face the entrance. All round are the dwelling rooms, on two storeys, if we count the long-untenanted attics. On one side alone there is twice the space of the old cottages; but the arrangement is the same—the rooms branching on the left and right from a staircase that rises from ground to attic. The library is on a first floor: on one side of it, the windows invite the earliest light,
Whan that the belle of laudes gan to rynge
And freres in the chauncel gonne synge;
on the other, they enable the late student, who cannot buy light, to read until the martins cast no shadow as they pass in June: and there they put the gorgeous Latin poets and missals, embroidered with colours like[Pg 446] the bank of a brook, and along with them the dull works of a benefactor, in that very corner where the spider loves them to-day. The fellow who loves sleep will not choose the eastward-facing, library side of the quad. But they have made it almost impossible for him to oversleep himself. For in a humbler truckle-bed a younger scholar sleeps near him. Some rooms contain three beds side by side. Leading out of this dormitory are little cupboards or studies, sometimes under lock and key, for solitary work. Most of the walls are ungarnished; a few are hung with coloured cloth or even frescoed. The furniture is simple and scanty. The hall itself has but a “green hanging of say,” a high table for the seniors, and two pairs of forms and tables on trestles for the juniors. The kitchen is more opulent, with its tall andirons, chopping-board, trivet, gridiron, spit, and great pot and chafer of brass, its pans, dishes, and platters; while in the buttery there are four barrels abroach. Now and then an old member or admirer of the society sends a group of silver vessels: the most honoured becomes the loving cup that circulates on gaudy days; and with it goes some significant toast, as the jus suum cuique at Magdalen accompanies the “Restoration cup,” on which the names of James II.’s ejected fellows are engraved. For while the college grows, and sends its just proportion of astute or learned men into the world, it flowers with customs and traditions—prayers in the chapel, festivals in the hall,—the Christmas boar’s head decorated with banners at Queen’s,—the ancestral vine at Lincoln. At dinner[Pg 448][Pg 447]
MAGDALEN COLLEGE TOWER FROM THE MEADOWS
To the left of the picture appear those noble black poplars of which Oxford is justly proud. The College tower is seen between them and another group of trees, Magdalen Bridge and the elms in the “Grove” finishing to the extreme right.
The time is late afternoon.
the tables shine with flagons and tankards, and great “sprig salts” of silver plate, which were the main college investment, the pledges of affection, or, as at Wadham, the customary gift of those who were admitted to the dignity of the high table. The shining of most was put out for ever in Charles I.’s melting-pot at New Inn Hall; and only the lists survive, each tankard and ewer and candlestick described by its donor’s name.
Thus, by the fact of their coming from neighbour villages and towns, perhaps also from one school, to a home on which they depended for their learning and the necessities of life, the fellows and scholars became knit together, with noticeable characteristics and peculiarities—almost a family resemblance; and in religious or political difficulties they made a solid strength of opinion and influence. A little heresy might break out under Henry the Eighth or Mary. A great benefaction might encourage the building of another quadrangle or a new library, and the institution of more fellowships and scholarships. They contributed a handsome quantity of plate to the king, and an officer to his army; or, to a man, resisted the Puritan intrusion after his death. Such were the more conspicuous events of centuries. The conflicts in the University, according to some proverbial Latin verses, were in early times at least as important as the boat race to-day. They were a subtle measure of the state of parties and movements; and in these the college played its part. And when the days of fighting were over, there was the University lampoon: “These[Pg 452] paltry scholars,” says an old ballad, supposed to be addressed by an Oxford alderman to the Duke of Monmouth,—
These paltry scholars, blast them with one breath,
Or they’ll rhime your Grace and us to death.
The college was busy in sending out into the world of Church and State its more vigorous members—those who excelled in the age when examinations were disputations that sometimes became almost a form of athletic sport; and in keeping within its walls the quieter spirits, who were willing to spend a life among manuscripts, in perfecting the management of the college estates, or in the education and discipline of others. From a scholarship to a fellowship, and from a fellowship to a college living, were frequently made the very calmest windings to a happy decent age, though no doubt the last stage sometimes led to such a regret as this:—
Why did I sell my College Life
(He cries) for Benefice and Wife?
Return, ye Days! when endless Pleasure
I found in Reading or in Leisure!
When calm around the Common Room
I puff’d my daily Pipe’s Perfume!
Rode for a stomach, and inspected,
At Annual Bottlings, corks selected:
And din’d untax’d, untroubled, under
The Portrait of our pious Founder!
It was a fine thing to sit day after day, in rooms sweetened, as in Burton’s day, with juniper, or in the college library, which was as a bay or river mouth leading into the very land of silence—to sit and write, or not write, as you pleased; and, in the days when[Pg 453] books were no longer shelved with their faces to the wall, look up at
Bullarium
Cherubini
printed in gold upon the glowing calf, and making mystical combinations as night came on. There, and in hall, chapel, study, and garden, men doomed to very diverse fates and stations went and still go, and found it possible to live a more enchanted life than anywhere else.
The refractory Headington stone crumbled, and while the classical buildings became yearly less handsome than when the masons left them, the Gothic gained by the rich inlay and delicate waste of weather and time. As if time and weather wrote the chronicles of the society, the walls came to have a singular influence upon each generation, and gave them, as it were, a common ancestry and blood—noble blood, for all. Even when they departed they had the irrefragable right of exiles to look back and salute.
And yet how different the life within those walls which some now living can remember! Sixty years ago, they lament, “no man was ever seen in the streets of Oxford after lunch without being dressed as he would have been in Pall Mall.” Charles Reade at Magdalen “created a panic even among the junior members” by wearing a green coat and brass buttons, as Dean of Arts. Sixty years before that, George Colman had matriculated in a grass-green coat, “with the furiously bepowdered pate of an ultra coxcomb.” And now, says the first-quoted authority, “shooting-[Pg 454]jackets of all patterns, in which it is not given to every man to look like a gentleman,” have taken the place of frock-coat, tall hat, and gloves, “in which every one looked well.” The change from knee-breeches to trousers early last century was made possible by the gross lenience of a proctor.
Without college or university games, the old Oxford day was very much unlike our own. Bonfires of celebration, almost alone among modern amusements, are of great antiquity, in street and quad. A hundred years ago the man who would now row or play cricket for his college, was hunting, or pole-jumping across the fields; or, if he was original, he took the long walks which were popular a few generations ago, but are now so exceptional that I know nobody who ever saw, and recognised, Matthew Arnold’s tree, though some are lazily inclined to believe that it is the one elm that dwells with the seven firs on Cumnor Hurst.
One of the few college games was confined to the fives courts, which lay within the walls and have long disappeared, and are inconceivable to-day, when competition and spectators on ground remote from the colleges are characteristic of Oxford sport. Earlier still, a form of college game was the “vile and horrid sport” of forcibly shaving those who were about to become Masters of Arts, and the “tucking” (i.e. scratching on the chin with the thumb nail) of freshmen, which the first Earl of Shaftesbury put down at Exeter. These customs cast but a feeble shadow to-day in the occasional solemnity of trimming a contemporar[Pg 455]y’s exuberant or ill-kept hair. A more appropriate form of celebrating the taking of degrees was an elaborate supper, which is now less often possible, when a man frequently takes his degree in solitude and leaves Oxford immediately. William Paston, in the fifteenth century, writes, that he was made bachelor on a Friday and had his feast on the Monday following. He was promised a gift of venison, and though disappointed, his guests “were pleased with such meat as they had.” Even William of Wykeham, who forbade every possible game to his scholars at New, and would not allow the post-prandial leisure to be spent on ordinary days around the fire in the middle of his great hall, provided that, after supper, “on festivals and other winter nights, on which, in honour of God, his Mother, or some other saint,” there is a fire in the hall, the fellows might indulge in singing or reading “poems, chronicles of the realm, and the wonders of the world.” Some of the college halls preserved their old central fireplaces, under a louvre, until early in the last century. While the fellows dined, a servitor stood there, and read aloud from the Bible, in the first days of the college; or, as at Trinity in 1792, recited a passage from Homer or Virgil or Milton. Southey records it as a rule, that every member of the University could go by right once a year to Balliol hall, and “be treated with bread and cheese and beer, and all on condition that, when called upon, he should either sing a song or tell a story.” Those who were unqualified doubtless stayed away. Yet there is little sign that the[Pg 456] temperate or secluded undergraduate suffered for his gifts. Whitefield himself, who cost his relatives £24 for his first three years, and wore “woollen gloves, a patched gown, and dirty shoes,” says that the other men left him alone when “he became better than other people,” as a “singular odd fellow,” at Pembroke. There was, however, one custom which must have left such men with a sore memory. For the “fresh night” was long the common doom of men soon after entering the University. There were fires of charcoal in the hall on All Saints’ eve, All Saints’ day and night, and onwards to Christmas day and Candlemas day; and the freshmen were brought in before an assembly of their seniors among the undergraduates. Anthony à Wood describes the ordeal thus:—
“On Candlemas day, or before, every freshman had warning given him to provide his speech, to be spoken in the public hall before the undergraduates and servants on Shrove Tuesday night that followed, being always the time for the observation of that ceremony.
“Feb. 15, 164⅞, Shrove Tuesday, the fire being made in the common hall before five of the clock at night, the fellows would go to supper before six, and making an end sooner than at other times, they left the hall to the liberty of the undergraduates, but with an admonition from one of the fellows (who was then principal of the undergraduates and postmasters [at Merton]) that all things should be carried in good order. While they were at supper in the hall, the cook (Will Noble) was making the lesser of the brass pots full of cawdel at the[Pg 458][Pg 457]
THE CLOISTERS, NEW COLLEGE
The great west window of the College Chapel shows above the Cloisters to the east. The window was painted from designs made by Sir Joshua Reynolds.
To the right of the drawing is the picturesque group of the Warden’s Lodgings.
The area of the Cloisters was consecrated as a private burial-place for the College, 19th October 1400.
freshmen’s charge; which, after the hall was free from the fellows, was brought up and set before the fire in the said hall. Afterwards every freshman, according to seniority, was to pluck off his gown and band, and if possible make himself look like a scoundrel. This done, they were conducted each after the other to the high table, and there made to stand on a form placed thereon: from whence they were to speak their speech with an audible voice to the company; which if well done, the person that spoke it was to have a cup of caudle and no salted drink; if indifferently, some caudle and some salted drink; but if dull, nothing was given to him but salted drink, or salt put in college beer, with tucks to boot. Afterwards when they were to be admitted into the fraternity, the senior cook was to administer to them an oath over an old shoe. After which, spoken with gravity, the freshman kissed the shoe, put on his gown and band, and took his place among the seniors.”
Wood himself not only earned pure caudle, but sack as well, with an oration in this vein:—
“Most reverend Seniors,—May it please your Gravities to admit into your presence a kitten of the Muses, and a meer frog of Helicon to croak the cataracts of his plumbeous cerebrosity before your sagacious ingenuities. I am none of the University blood-hounds that seek for preferment, and whose noses are as acute as their ears, that lie perdue for places, and who, good saints! do groan till the Visitation comes. These are they that esteem a tavern as[Pg 462] bad as purgatory, and wine more superstitious than holy water; and therefore I hope this honourable convocation will not suffer one of that tribe to taste of the sack, lest they should be troubled with a vertigo and their heads turn round.”
Except at such a special season as that, the old Oxford day bore more resemblance than our own to the life elsewhere. The fashions in cards and dress were the same as in London; the outdoor amusements were those of other town or country gentlemen. There was horse-racing at Spurton Hill and Brackley, cock-fighting at Holywell. Edgeworth’s contemporaries attended the assizes, and interfered on behalf of justice, in spite of sheriff and judge. Anthony à Wood went to fish at Wheatley Bridge, and “nutted at Shotover by the way.” And early rising was a tradition in every college until last century. The undergraduate, who to-day lives on historical principles, is often later than his sixteenth-century original was to dine, when he sits at his breakfast of steak and XX in a fine old room. Chapel at six o’clock and a lecture at seven was a common doom. Shelley and Hogg, after their days spent in shooting at a mark, and making ducks and drakes and paper boats at a Shotover pond, sat up, indeed, until two, over their conversations on literature and chemistry, but rose at seven, because it was customary. While dinner was at ten or eleven, breakfast was an informal meal. Some attempted to do without it: hence a morning preacher swooned on the altar steps. Wood speaks of the juniors “at breakfast in hall” in[Pg 463] 1661. The majority took beer and bread from the buttery, and probably taking it in one another’s rooms, started the genial custom of breakfast parties, which was perfected early in the nineteenth century. “Let the tender swain,” says the well-spiced Oxford Sausage, a mid-eighteenth-century product of Oxford (and Cambridge) wits,—
Let the tender Swain
Each Morn regale on nerve-relaxing Tea,
Companion meet of languor-loving Nymph:
Be mine each Morn with eager appetite
And Hunger undissembled, to repair
To friendly Buttery; there on smoaking Crust
And foaming Ale to banquet unrestrained,
Material Breakfast! Thus in ancient Days
Our ancestors robust with liberal cups
Usher’d the Morn, unlike the squeamish Sons
Of modern Times: Nor ever had the Might
Of Britons brave decay’d, had thus they fed,
With British Ale improving British worth.
The institution of breakfast, whatever happened to British worth, was certainly helped forward by the tea, rolls, and toast which slowly ousted ale. Lectures and disputations in private or in the Schools followed breakfast. The latter possibly encouraged inter-collegiate sports, since Exeter and Christ Church on one occasion resolved their disputation into a fight which attracted Masters of Arts. And well it might; for otherwise they were in danger of dining like fighting cocks and amusing themselves like doves: the sixteenth-century fellows of Corpus, for example, were permitted no games but ball in the college garden. Examinations are still a select and expensive form of amusement.[Pg 464] The stories told of celebrated men and their viva voce conflicts with examiners, and the like, have inspired more than one to go into the Schools in a mood of smiling irreverence. The fame resulting, it is true, has to be propagated by much anecdote from the lips of the hero himself. In the Middle Ages the humour was of a lustier kind. The parsley crown went, or should have gone, to the most brazen giver and taker of learned wit. In Anthony à Wood’s day, one William George, “cynical and hirsute in his behaviour,” was a noted sophister and disputant, and improved his purse by preparing the exercises of the dull or lazy for public recitation. The nature of these examinations, in their dull old age, has been recorded by one who took part:—
“Two boys, or men, as they call themselves, agree to do generals together. The first stage in this mighty work is to produce arguments. These are always handed down from generation to generation, on long slips of paper, and consist of foolish syllogisms on foolish subjects. The next step is to go for a liceat to one of the petty officers, called the Regent Master of the Schools, who subscribes his name to the questions, and receives sixpence as his fee. When the important day arrives, the two doubty disputants go into a large dusty room, full of dirt and cobwebs, with walls and wainscot decorated with the names of former disputants, who, to divert the tedious hours, cut out their names with their penknives or wrote verses with a pencil. Here they sit in mean desks, opposite to each other, from one till three. Not once in a hundred times does[Pg 465] any officer enter; and if he does, he hears one syllogism or two, and then makes a bow, and departs, as he came and remained, in solemn silence. The disputants then return to the amusement of cutting the desks, carving their names, or reading Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, or some other edifying novel.”
Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century, “great progress is made towards the wished-for honour of a bachelor’s degree”; the goal might be reached, if the undergraduate knew a few “jolly young Masters of Arts,” by answering questions concerning the pedigree of a race-horse. Such was the lack of interest in the disputations that they were called “wall” lectures, after the name of their principal auditor.
A little poaching gave a very attractive substitute for cross-country running. But increasing college discipline and the heightening average of wealth and birth among students cut off the more violent sports of the Middle Ages. The unattached, poor Welsh and Irish students, who kept up the University name for rough and adventurous relaxations, disappeared before the Reformation; and after the Poor Law Act of 1531 had condemned begging scholars, who were not authorised under the seal of a university, to be treated as able-bodied beggars, there can have been few to poach at Shotover and Abingdon. The masked Mohock revels and Jacobite struttings of the Augustan age were a poor alternative. The blithe and fearless spirit of trespassing, so common among undergraduates, is the sole survival to-day, if we exclude the pious uprooting[Pg 466] of stakes and fences on fields supposed (by reference to Doomsday Book) to be common land. Before and after the Puritans, who preferred music in their rooms, there was free access to the acting of dramas in Latin and English, and earlier still, to the miracle plays of Herod and Noah and the like. Even during the Commonwealth private theatricals were popular; and Wood speaks of one John Glendall, a fellow of Brasenose, who was the witty terræ filius in 1658, when the Acts were kept in St. Mary’s Church, as “a great mimick, and acted well in several plays which the scholars acted by stealth in Kettle Hall, the refectory at Gloster Hall,” etc.
For centuries the ale-houses were full of university life. At one time there were three hundred in Oxford. They had excellent uses before a common room perfected the homeliness of the college; and even afterwards, in the eighteenth century, a poetical club met at “The Tuns” to display their wit. There the undergraduates freshened and shared their wit, before each had an ample sitting-room, and before the junior common room,—where now the newspaper rustles, and the debate roars or chirps, and the senior scholar, on rare occasions, speaks to a not wholly reverent college meeting from the time-honoured elevation of the mantelpiece. The men of Balliol continued the old-fashioned devotion to the “Split Crow” in Broad Street long after the coffee-house had become fashionable. The vice-chancellor, being president of the rival and neighbouring society of Trinity, scoffed at the Maste[Pg 468][Pg 467]r’s
BROAD STREET, LOOKING WEST
On the left of the picture is the enclosing wall of the Sheldonian Theatre, with its startlingly picturesque thermes. A flight of semicircular steps leads to an entrance between two of them.
In the first bay of the wall, seen through the palisade fence, is the old Ashmolean Museum, and farther on is a glimpse of Exeter College. The spire is that of the College Chapel.
By the large tree standing near the Church of St. Mary Magdalen are the buildings of Balliol College, and nearer to the spectator is the entrance to Trinity College and Kettle Hall.
Some of the houses to the right of the picture are fair specimens of eighteenth-century domestic architecture.
Two or three bicycles are shown, and the time is early noon.
attempt to discourage them; “so now they may be sots by authority.” The disorder was winked at because it increased the “natural stupidity” of the Balliol men of the day. But the attitude of the University towards humour two centuries ago was a wily mixture of patronage and ferocity. The terræ filius was only not official in his reckless bombardment of order and authority at the annual University Act. It was as though a jackdaw should be invited to church. He and his companion (for they hunted in couples) were chosen, as regularly as proctors, by election; and to become terræ filius must have been the blue riband of the wilder sort of University wits. Year after year pairs of terræ filii fired their random shots at great and small, always with audacity, sometimes with the utmost scurrility; and year after year one or both of the pair suffered expulsion, or, like Addison’s father, public humiliation, for their scandalous and opprobrious words, which no doubt earned the gratitude of irresponsible juniors.
It was long a common recreation, a recreation only, to go on the river in a boat, and to row or be rowed to some place of meditation or festivity, or to go with music and wine upon the Isis to Godstow Bridge or Sandford—
And there
Beckley provides accustom’d fare
Of eels, and perch, and brown beefsteak.
And the mention of Sandford carries with it many memories for modern Oxford men, even if perch is[Pg 472] not always to be had—of winter afternoons when the mulled port was as sweet as a carnation, and a voice from a slowly-gliding barge was the sole sound in all the land. One joyous company long ago went, “like country fiddlers,” to Farringdon fair, with cithern, bass viol, and violin. The city itself offered other amusements than the theatre, music hall, billiard tables, and picture shows of to-day. Freaks, monstrosities, mountebanks, jugglers, were welcome not only to undergraduates of fifteen or sixteen. There was “a brazen head that could speak and answer” at the Fleur de Lace on one day; on another, strange beasts. On May-day a maypole stood near St. Peter’s-in-the-East and opposite the “Mitre.” A bear-baiting was always a possibility. There was a fencing school at hand. One who cared for none of these has left this account of his Oxford day in the seventeenth century:—
Morn, mend hose, stu. Greek, breakfast, Austen, quoque dinner;
Afternoon, wa. me., cra. nu., take a cup, quoque supper—
i.e., interprets Wood, in the morning he mended his stockings, studied Greek, took breakfast, studied St. Augustine, and dined; and in the afternoon, walked in Christ Church meadows, cracked nuts, took a drink, and had supper.
Above all, in and after the time of Cromwell the city provided coffee-houses,—the real, steaming, smoking, witty thing. The hospitality and spirit of careless intercourse between college and college which they fostered belong to the present day. They were first opened, too, at a time when much of mediæval life was[Pg 474][Pg 473]
THE HIGH STREET LOOKING EAST
The Mitre Inn is on the left of the picture, and above the white building rises the tower and lantern of All Saints’ Church. A part of these buildings has been removed for the extension of Brasenose College. Farther on, the spire of the University Church appears above the porch of All Saints’, and a portion of the battlements of All Souls’ College closes the perspective.
departing, when Christmas sports were dying, and Latin conversation at dinner and supper was going out of use; and Anthony à Wood laments that scholar-like conversation (“viz. by quoting the fathers, producing an antient verse from the poets suitable to his discourse”) was accounted pedantic, and “nothing but news and the affairs of Christendom,” he says scornfully, “is discoursed of, and that generally at coffee-houses.” At some, perhaps at all of them, there was a light library, which apparently resembled the library of a modern college barge. A copy of Rabelais, with poems and plays, all chained in the old manner, embellished Short’s coffee-house. Later came the Tatlers and Spectators and Connoisseurs, for “such as have neglected or lost their Latin or Greek,” as Tom Warton said:—
“As there are here books suited to every Taste, so there are liquors adapted to every species of reading. Amorous tales may be perused over Arrack punch and jellies; insipid odes over orgeat or capilaire; politics over coffee; divinity over port; and defences of bad generals and bad ministers over whipt syllabubs. In a word, in these libraries instruction and pleasure go hand in hand; and we may pronounce, in a literal sense, that learning remains no longer a dry pursuit.” And in Gibbon’s day the dons changed their seats from chapel to hall, and from common room to coffee-house, in an indolent circle; and not only dons, but the infinite variety of University types in the distinguishing raiment of that day[Pg 478]—
Such nice distinction one perceives
In cut of gown, and hoods and sleeves,
Marking degrees, or style, or station,
Of Members free, or on foundation,
That were old Cato here narrator
He must perforce have nomenclator.
There, or at an ale-house, which appears to have been less exposed to a proctorial raid, the sociable spent the Oxford evening, which grew longer as the nineteenth century approached. Sunday evenings were frequently devoted to the fair sex in Merton walks, which were always gay.
My hair in wires exact and nice,
I’ll trim my cap to smallest size,
That Polly sure may see me,
exclaims an eighteenth-century spark, with a hint that the kindly relations between town and gown sometimes reached the married state. Yet another writer with an eye for the amusing side of Oxford life drew the following picture, which a diligent seeker might, with difficulty, parallel to-day. Gainlove and Ape-all, two Oxford undergraduates, are talking:—
“Gainlove. What, bound for the Port of Wedlock, Sir?
“Ape-all. No, no, no, no, Sir; I only use her as a Pleasure boat to dabble about the stream with, purely for a Passo Tempo, or so. O Lord, Sir, I have been at London, and know more of the world than to make love to a woman I intend to marry—only it diverts the spleen to talk to a girl sometimes, you know—and ’tis such a comedy, when one gallants them to college, to[Pg 480][Pg 479]
THE BOTANIC GARDEN
The Garden is surrounded by a wall, commenced in 1632, pierced by several noble gateways one of which shows to the left of the picture.
The entrance gateway fronting the High Street was designed by Inigo Jones.
The Garden is a favourite promenade and spot for rest; Magdalen Tower is seen to great advantage through its grand trees.
see all the young Fellows froze with envy, stand centinel in their niches, like the figures of the Kings round the Royal Exchange. And the old Dons who would take no more notice of one at another time than a bishop of a country curate, will come cringing, cap in hand, to offer to show the ladies the curiosities of the College—when the duce knows they only want to be nibbling.”
Those who liked not these things had at least as good an opportunity of quiet work as to-day. A separate set of rooms for each member of a college had gradually become almost universal in the eighteenth century; and the great outer door or “oak” shut off those who wished from the rest of the world. Shelley was so pleased with that impervious door that he exclaimed: the oak “is surely the tree of knowledge!” The simplicity of the quarters within, before much of undergraduate social life was passed in their rooms, would astonish modern eyes, if we may judge from contemporary cuts, that show a few chairs, a small table with central leg, a cap and gown on the wall, an inkhorn hanging by the window, a pair of bellows and tongs by the fire, and over the mantel-piece a picture or mirror. But there the undergraduate was safe from duns “with vocal heel thrice thundering at the gate,” and, let us hope, from dons, in colleges where they came round at nine in the evening, to see that he kept good hours. Dibdin tells us that, as he closed the Curiosities of Literature, he saw the Gothic battlements outside his window “streaked with the dapple light of morning.” Ten years later, in the first year[Pg 484] of the nineteenth century, Reginald Heber, then at Brasenose, looked out from his window and saw the fellows of All Souls’ thundering the “All Souls’ Mallard” song—
Griffin, Turkey, Bustard, Capon
Let other hungry mortalls gape on,
And on their bones with stomachs fall hard.
But let All Souls men have the Mallard.
Hough the blood of King Edward, by ye blood of King Edward,
It was a swapping, swapping mallard—
carrying torches and inspired with canary as they sang. No one appears to have heard the song again. And with that sound old Oxford life died away.[Pg 485]
THE OXFORD COUNTRY
CHAPTER IX
THE OXFORD COUNTRY
Lætissimus umbra.
And the eye travels down to Oxford’s towers.
The walls of Oxford are tufted with ivy-leaved toadflax, wallflower, and the sunny plant which botanists call “inelegant ragwort.” They form a trail from the villages, upon wall after wall, into Ship Street and Queen’s Lane, by which the country may be traced. In the same way, the city may be said to steal out into the fields. Not only do we read the epitaph of a forgotten fellow in a quiet church, and mark a resemblance to Merton or Lincoln in the windows of an old house in North Hinksey Street, but the beauty of the windy Shotover plateau, with its slopes of hyacinth and furze, and the elmy hills of Cumnor and Radbrook, are haunted and peopled by visions of the distant spires. They give that mild, well-sculptured country a soul. Even when the city is out of sight, its neighbourhood is not to be put by. Everywhere it is a suspected presence, a hidden melodist. Whether in memory or anticipation, it is, on all our walks, “like some grave thought threading a mighty dream.[Pg 488]”
I could wish that an inexorable Five Mile Act had kept it clear of red brick. Newman and Ruskin hinted at the same. I know not how to describe the spirit which turns a few miles of peaceful southern country into something so unique. But if I mention a wood or a stream, let the reader paint in, as it were, something sweet and shadowy in the distance, with his imagination or recollection; let it be as some subtle perfume in a pot pourri which makes it different from all others.
There is a beautiful, sloping acre, not far from Oxford, which a number of great elms divide into aisles and nave, while at one end a curving hawthorn and maple hedge completes them with an apse. Towards Oxford, the space is almost shut in by remote elms. On one side I hear the soft and sibilant fall of soaking grass before the scythe. The rain and sun alternating are like two lovers in dialogue; the rain smiles from the hills when the sun shines, and the sun also while the rain is falling. When the rain is not over and the sun has interrupted, the nightingale sings, where the stitchwort is starry amidst long grass that bathes the sweeping branches of thorn and brier; and I am now stabbed, and now caressed, by its changing song. Through the elms on either side, hot, rank grasses rise, crowned with a vapour of parsley flowers. A white steam from the soil faintly mists the grass at intervals. The grass and elms seem to be suffering in the rain, suffering for their quietness and solitude, to be longing for something, as perhaps Eden also dropped “some natural tears” when left a void. A potent, warm, and not quite soothing[Pg 490][Pg 489]
OXFORD, FROM SOUTH HINKSEY
Elms and willow trees fringe the slope of the hills leading to the valley, in which the city shows sparkling in the morning sunlight.
Commencing from the west or left side of the picture, we see the tower and lantern of All Saints’, with the dome of the Radcliffe Library telling dark against the sky; then come the University Church of St. Mary, Tom Tower, and the stretch of buildings of Christ Church, with the Great Hall of the College, the Cathedral spire finishing the group.
Merton Tower stands detached to the east.
The almost level line of the horizon, with the trees bordering the river to Iffley, frame as beautiful a group of buildings as any to be seen in England.
Farm sheds show under the willow trees to the left.
The time is the early morning of a summer day.
perfume creeps over the grass, and makes the May blossom something elvish. I turn and look east. Almost at once, all these things are happily composed into one pleasant sense, and are but a frame to a tower and three spires of Oxford, like clouds—but the sky is suddenly cloudless.
I suppose that ivy has the same graceful ways on all old masonry, yet I have caught myself remembering, as if it were unique, that perfect ancient ivy that makes an arcade of green along the wall of Godstow nunnery. And in the same way, above all others I remember the pollard willows that lean this way and that along the Oxford streams—like prehistoric sculpture in winter, but in summer a green wave and full of voices. Never have I seen sunsets like those which make Wytham Wood and Marley Wood great purple clouds, and the clouds overhead more solid than they. How pleasant are Cherwell and Evenlode, and those angry little waters at Ferry Hinksey! When I see the rain a white cloud and Shotover Hill a grey cloud, I seem never before to have seen the sweetness of rain. October is nowhere so much itself as among the Hinksey elms, when the fallen leaves smell of tea (and who that loves tea and autumn will cast a stone?). The trees, whether they stand alone or in societies, are most perfect in autumn. Something in the soil or climate preserves their farewell hues as in a protracted sunset. Looking at them at nightfall, it is hard to believe that they have been amidst ten thousand sunsets and remained the same; for they ponder great matters, and not only in[Pg 494] the autumn, but in May, when the silence is startled by the gurgling laughter of the hen cuckoo. When spring comes into the land, I remember a mulberry that suspended its white blossom, among black boughs, over a shining lawn at the edge of the city; and the bells that in March or April seemed to be in league with spring, as we heard them from the fields. And how well a conversation would grow and blossom between Headington and Wheatley or Osney and Eaton! Some that loved not the country would flourish strangely in wisdom or folly as the roads rose or fell, or as the grey oak stems of Bagley Wood began to make a mist around us. The only incidents, in twenty miles, were the occasional sprints of one who was devoted to a liver, or the cometary passing of one on a bicycle that sang Le Roi d’Ivetot as if it were a psalm containing the whole duty of man. And how a book—even a “schools” book—taken on the river or the hills, would yield a great sweetness to alternate handlings and laughter of several companions; or, if it were a dull book, might be made to yield more than its author ever meant. I have ever thought that the churchyard with a broken cross at Hinksey, and the willows below and the elms above, if one takes George Herbert there, is a better argument for the Church than Jewel and Chilling worth, if the old yew had not seemed the priest of some old superstition still powerful.
No one can walk much in the Oxford country without becoming a Pantheist. The influence of the city, the memories, the books he is fresh from, help the indolent[Pg 496][Pg 495]
OXFORD FROM HEADINGTON HILL
The elm trees of the “Grove” of Magdalen College show to the extreme left of the picture. The buildings of the College do not appear.
To the right of the “Grove” are the two spires of the Cathedral and the University Church of St. Mary, with the Radcliffe dome and the “Schools” tower farther on.
The view is looking west, at sunset in corn harvest.
walker, who is content to sit under a hedge and wait for the best things, to make his gods. The lanes are peopled with no fairies such as in Wales and Ireland nimbly feed the fantasy, which here, in consequence, is apt to take flight in wonderful ways. I remember one (and Ovid was not at all in his mind) who was all but confident that he saw Persephone on flat pastures and red ploughlands, gleaming between green trees, when the hawthorn was not yet over and the roses had begun, and the sapphire dragon-fly was afloat, on the Cherwell, as the boat made a cool sound among the river’s hair, betwixt Water Eaton and Islip. On the quiet, misty, autumn mornings, the hum of threshing machines was solemn; and there at least it was a true harmony of autumn, and the man casting sheaves from the rick was exalted—
Neque ilium
Flava Ceres alto nequiquam spectat Olympo.
Everywhere the fancy, unaided by earlier fancies, sets to work very busily in these fields. I have on several afternoons gone some way towards the beginning of a new mythology, which might in a thousand years puzzle the Germans. The shadowy, half-apprehended faces of new deities float before my eyes, and I have wondered whether Apollo and Diana are not immortal presences wheresoever there are awful trees and alternating spaces of cool or sunlit lawn.... In the lanes there seems to be another religion for the night. There is a fitful wind, and so slow that as we walk we[Pg 500] can follow its path while it shakes the heavy leaves and dewy grass; and we feel as if we were trespassing on holy ground; the land seems to have changed masters, or rather to have One. Often I saw a clean-limbed beech, pale and slender, yet firm in its loftiness, that shook delicately arched branches at the top, and below held out an arm on which a form of schoolboys might have sat,—rising out of fine grass and printing its perfect outlines on the sky,—and I could fancy it enjoyed a life of pleasure that was health, beauty that was strength, thought that was repose.
The Oxford country is rich in footpaths, as any one will know that goes the round from Folly Bridge, through South Hinksey, to the “Fox” at Boar’s Hill (where the scent of wallflower and hawthorn comes in through the window with the sound of the rain and the nightingale); and then away, skirting Wootton and Cumnor, past the “Bear” (with its cool flagged room looking on a field of gold, and Cumnor Church tower among elms); and back over the Hurst, where he turns, under the seven firs and solitary elm, to ponder the long, alluring view towards Stanton Harcourt and Bablock Hythe. He may take that walk many times, or wish to take it, and yet never touch the same footpaths; and never be sure of the waste patch of bluebell and furze, haunted by linnet and whinchat; the newly harrowed field, where the stones shine like ivory after rain; the green lane, where the beech leaves lie in February, and rise out of the snow, untouched by it, in polished amber; the orchard, where the grass is[Pg 501] gloomy in April with the shadow of bright cherry flowers.
One such footpath I remember, that could be seen falling among woods and rising over hills, faint and winding, and disappearing at last,—like a vision of the perfect quiet life. We started once along it, over one of the many fair little Oxford bridges, one that cleared the stream in three graceful leaps of arching stone. The hills were cloudy with woods in the heat. On either hand, at long distances apart, lay little grey houses under scalloped capes of thatch, and here and there white houses, like children of that sweet land—albi circum ubera nati. For the most part we saw only the great hawthorn hedge, which gave us the sense of a companion always abreast of us, yet always cool and fresh as if just setting out. It was cooler when a red-hot bicyclist passed by. A sombre river, noiselessly sauntering seaward, far away dropped with a murmur, among leaves, into a pool. That sound alone made tremble the glassy dome of silence that extended miles on miles. All things were lightly powdered with gold, by a lustre that seemed to have been sifted through gauze. The hazy sky, striving to be blue, was reflected as purple in the waters. There, too, sunken and motionless, lay amber willow leaves; some floated down. Between the sailing leaves, against the false sky, hung the willow shadows,—shadows of willows overhead, with waving foliage, like the train of a bird of paradise. Everywhere the languid perfumes of corruption. Brown leaves laid their fingers on the[Pg 502] cheek as they fell; and here and there the hoary reverse of a willow leaf gleamed in the crannied bases of the trees. A plough, planted in mid-field, was curved like the wings of a bird alighting.
We could not walk as slowly as the river flowed; yet that seemed the true pace to move in life, and so reach the great grey sea. Hand in hand with the river wound the path, until twilight began to drive her dusky flocks across the west, and a light wind knitted the aspen branches against a silver sky with a crescent moon, as, troubled tenderly by autumnal maladies of soul, we came to our place of rest,—a grey, immemorial house with innumerable windows.[Pg 503]
IN PRAISE OF OXFORD
CHAPTER X
IN PRAISE OF OXFORD
Many have written in praise of Oxford, and so finely that I have made this selection with difficulty. I have excluded the work of living men, because I am not familiar with it. Among that which is included will be found passages from the writings of one who was at both Universities, John Lyly; of two who were at Cambridge only, Dryden and Wordsworth; of two who were at neither, Hazlitt and Hawthorne; and of several brilliant lovers of Oxford whose faith was filial and undivided. Almost all the quotations have wit or beauty enough to defend them, even had they been less apposite: their charm is redoubled in this place, since they are in Oxford’s praise. They are worthy of a city which a learned German compares with the creations of Poussin and Claude. But they are in no need of compliment. I could only wish that I had put down nothing unworthy of their blessing. I have; and so they stand in place of epilogue, where they perform the not unprecedented duty of apology.[Pg 506]
“There are also in this Islande two famous Universities, the one Oxford, the other Cambridge, both for the profession of all sciences, for Divinitie, phisicke, Lawe, and for all kinde of learning, excelling all the Universities of Christendome.
“I was myself in either of them, and like them both so well, that I meane not in the way of controversie to preferre any for the better in Englande, but both for the best in the world, saving this, that Colledges in Oxenford are much stately for the building, and Cambridge much more sumptuous for the houses in the towne, but the learning neither lyeth in the free stones of the one, nor the fine streates of the other, for out of them both do dayly proceede men of great wisdome, to rule in the common welth, of learning to instruct the Common people, of all singuler kinde of professions to do good to all. And let this suffice, not to enquire which of them is the superior, but that neither of them have their equall, neither to ask which of them is the most auncient, but whether any other bee so famous.”
John Lyly.
“Where the Cherwell flows along with the Isis, and their divided streams make several little sweet and pleasant islands, is seated on a rising vale the most famous University of Oxford, in Saxon Oxenford, our most noble Athens, the seat of the English Muses, the prop and pillar, nay the sun, the eye, the very soul of the nation: the most celebrated fountain of wisdom and learning, from whence Religion, Letters and Good[Pg 507] Manners, are happily diffused thro’ the whole Kingdom. A delicate and most beautiful city, whether we respect the neatness of private buildings, or the stateliness of public structures, or the healthy and pleasant situation. For the plain on which it stands is walled in, as it were, with hills of wood, which keeping out on one side the pestilential south wind, on the other, the tempestuous west, admit only the purifying east, and the north that disperses all unwholesome vapours. From which delightful situation, Authors tell us it was heretofore call’d Bellositum”—Camden.
Ye sacred Nurseries of blooming Youth!
In whose collegiate shelter England’s Flowers
Expand, enjoying through their vernal hours
The air of liberty, the light of truth;
Much have ye suffered from Time’s gnawing tooth:
Yet, O ye spires of Oxford! domes and towers!
Gardens and groves! your presence overpowers
The soberness of reason; till, in sooth,
Transformed, and rushing on a bold exchange
I slight my own beloved Cam, to range
Where silver Isis leads my stripling feet;
Pace the long avenue, or glide adown
The stream-like windings of that glorious street—
An eager Novice robed in fluttering gown!
Wordsworth.
“King James, 1605, when he came to our University of Oxford, and, amongst other edifices, now went to view that famous Library, renewed by Sir Thomas Bodley, in imitation of Alexander, at his departure brake out into that noble speech, If I were not a King, I would be an University man; and if it were[Pg 508] so that I must be a prisoner, if I might have my wish, I would desire to have no other prison than that Library, and to be chained together with so many good Authors et mortuis magistris. So sweet is the delight of study, the more learning they have (as he that hath a Dropsy, the more he drinks the thirstier he is), the more they covet to learn, and the last day is prioris discipulus; harsh at first learning is, radices amaræ, but fructus dulces, according to that of Isocrates, pleasant at last; the longer they live, the more they are enamoured of the Muses. Heinsius, the keeper of the Library at Leyden in Holland, was mewed up in it all the year long; and that which to my thinking should have bred a loathing caused in him a greater liking. I no sooner (saith he) come into the Library, but I bolt the door to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such vices, whose nurse is idleness, the mother of ignorance, and Melancholy herself; in the very lap of eternity, amongst so many divine souls, I take my seat, with so lofty a spirit and sweet content, that I pity all our great ones, and rich men that know not this happiness.”
The Anatomy of Melancholy.
But by the sacred genius of this place,
By every Muse, by each domestic grace,
Be kind to wit, which but endeavours well,
And, where you judge, presumes not to excel.
Our poets hither for adoption come,
As nations sued to be made free of Rome:
Not in the suffragating tribes to stand,
But in your utmost, last, provincial band.
If his ambition may those hopes pursue,
Who with religion loves your arts and you,
[Pg 510][Pg 509]
THE OLD ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM AND SHELDONIAN THEATRE
The Old Ashmolean Museum, with its noble entrance, stands to the left of the picture; on the right side is part of the south front of the Sheldonian Theatre.
An entrance to the enclosure from Broad Street is seen between the thermes and a part of the north side of the street.
The collection of the Old Ashmolean Museum is removed to the Taylor Institution.
Oxford to him a dearer name shall be,
Than his own mother university.
Thebes did his green unknowing youth engage,
He chooses Athens in his riper age.
Dryden.
“Rome has been called the ‘Sacred City’—might not our Oxford be called so too? There is an air about it, resonant of joy and hope: it speaks with a thousand tongues to the heart: it weaves its mighty shadow over the imagination: it stands in lowly sublimity, on the ‘hill of ages,’ and points with prophetic fingers to the sky: it greets the eager gaze from afar, ‘with glistening spires and pinnacles adorned,’ that shine with an eternal light as with the lustre of setting suns; and a dream and a glory hover round its head, as the spirits of former times, a throng of intellectual shapes, are seen retreating or advancing to the eye of memory: its streets are paved with the names of learning that can never wear out: its green quadrangles breathe the silence of thought, conscious of the weight of yearnings innumerable after the past, of loftiest aspirations for the future: Isis babbles of the Muse, its waters are from the springs of Helicon, its Christ Church meadows, classic, Elysian fields!—We could pass our lives in Oxford without having or wanting any other idea—that of the place is enough. We imbibe the air of thought; we stand in the presence of learning. We are admitted into the Temple of Fame, we feel that we are in the Sanctuary, on holy ground, and ‘hold high converse with the mighty dead.’ The enlightened and[Pg 514] the ignorant are on a level, if they have but faith in the tutelary genius of the place. We may be wise by proxy, and studious by prescription. Time has taken upon himself the labour of thinking; and accumulated libraries leave us leisure to be dull. There is no occasion to examine the buildings, the churches, the colleges, by the rules of architecture, to reckon up the streets to compare it with Cambridge (Cambridge lies out of the way, on one side of the world)—but woe to him who does not feel in passing through Oxford that he is in ‘no mean city,’ that he is surrounded with the monuments and lordly mansions of the mind of man, outvying in pomp and splendour the courts and palaces of princes, rising like an exhalation in the night of ignorance, and triumphing over barbaric foes, saying, ‘All eyes shall see me, and all knees shall bow to me!’—as the shrine where successive ages came to pay their pious vows, and slake the sacred thirst of knowledge, where youthful hopes (an endless flight) soared to truth and good, and where the retired and lonely student brooded over the historic, or over fancy’s page, imposing high tasks for himself, framing high destinies for the race of man—the lamp, the mine, the well-head whence the spark of learning was kindled, its stream flowed, its treasures were spread out through the remotest corners of the land and to distant nations. Let him who is fond of indulging a dream-like existence go to Oxford, and stay there; let him study this magnificent spectacle, the same under all aspects, with the mental twilight tempering the glare of noon, or[Pg 515] mellowing the silver moonlight; let him not catch the din of scholars or teachers, or dine or sup with them, or speak a word to any of its privileged inhabitants; for if he does, the spell will be broken, the poetry and the religion gone, and the palace of enchantment will melt from his embrace into thin air!”
Hazlitt.
“Oxford ... must remain its own sole expression; and those whose sad fortune it may be never to behold it have no better resource than to dream about grey, weather-stained, ivy-grown edifices, wrought with quaint Gothic ornament, and standing around grassy quadrangles, where cloistered walks have echoed to the quiet footsteps of twenty generations,—lawns and gardens of luxurious repose, shadowed with canopies of foliage, and lit up with sunny glimpses through archways of great boughs,—spires, towers, and turrets, each with its history and legend,—dimly magnificent chapels, with painted windows of rare beauty and brilliantly diversified hues, creating an atmosphere of richest gloom,—vast college halls, high-windowed, oaken-panelled, and hung around with portraits of the men in every age whom the University has nurtured to be illustrious,—long vistas of alcoved libraries, where the wisdom and learned folly of all time is shelved,—kitchens (we throw in this feature by way of ballast, and because it would not be English Oxford without its beef and beer) with huge fireplaces, capable of roasting a hundred joints at once,—and cavernous[Pg 516] cellars, where rows of piled-up hogsheads seethe and fume with that mighty malt-liquor which is the true milk of Alma Mater: make all these things vivid in your dream, and you will never know nor believe how inadequate is the result to represent even the merest outside of Oxford.”—Hawthorne.
“Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!
There are our young barbarians, all at play!
And yet steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection,—to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?—nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tübingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties! whose example could ever so inspire us to keep down the Philistine in ourselves, what teacher could ever so save us from that bondage to which we are all so prone, that bondage which Goethe, in his incomparable lines on the death of Schiller, makes it his friend’s highest praise (and nobly did Schiller deserve the praise) to have left miles out of[Pg 517] sight behind him—the bondage of Was uns alle bändigt, DAS GEMEINE! She will forgive me, even if I have unwittingly drawn upon her a shot or two aimed at her unworthy son; for she is generous, and the cause in which I fight is, after all, hers. Apparitions of a day, what is our puny warfare against the Philistines, compared with the warfare which this queen of romance has been waging against them for centuries, and will wage after we are gone?”
Matthew Arnold.
THE END
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