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.