A “BUMP” AT THE BARGES.
But there is an architect who has taken up the tale where Thomas Holt dropped it, and who has carried it farther, with results almost as important for the appearance of Oxford. A like moment in the history of the place seemed to have come round again. The new ways of the University needed new schools—for examination this time instead of disputation—and a great extension of college building coincided. Never, perhaps, since Wren had the churches of London to rebuild has one architect had such a fling in so important a place as Mr. T. G. Jackson in the Oxford of our time. And there can be no question that, whatever the faults of restlessness and overcrowding that sometimes mar his designs, Mr. Jackson has been worthy of his opportunity.
IFFLEY MILL.
The last great addition to Oxford is its undergraduates. It is not very long since the colleges, in respect of undergraduates, were normally as All Souls’ is now, with its four Bible Clerks; but they were not as All Souls’ is in respect of its Fellows. The long deserts of theological and political war had left them for the most part mere club-houses, whose members existed to drink port together of an evening, and abuse one another in little pamphlets during the day. The Common Room was the great invention of the late seventeenth century, and the eighteenth was spent in bringing it to perfection. Then came the Fellows of Oriel, the Examination Statutes, the genius of the Masters of Balliol, the Commission, the new Statutes, the Unattached. It is an exciting show for the visitor, this incongruous surface of new and old, this great bustle and pulse of the machine among the frail and crumbling walls. Each morning dilatory tides of men in cap and gown set about the streets under the jangling bells; each afternoon, in punctual haste, a steady stream of the same men, in flannel, makes for the river, and flows back for the monastic evensong and refectory dinner. There was a time when the dinner-hour was ten o’clock in the morning, and it was thought that so late an hour was a sign of the decay of learning.
Meanwhile the streets grow emptier, and the visitor, in the abstraction of the growing darkness, will gather hints of the antiquity about him. He will see the society grimace of the buildings relax. Their features will relapse into startling meanings, and the presence of other centuries will strike in upon his senses. If he is an American, like Mr. James’s Passionate Pilgrim, he will feel about it all the pang of a forfeited possession. It is part of himself that was lost and is found, a history forgotten long before he was born. Now he remembers it.
Nowhere is midnight so late as in Oxford. It is announced from so many towers at so many moments by bells of the most various tone and cadence; but by all, even to the most maundering and belated, with the same precise conviction, as if one could hear all the lecturers saying the same thing in their own words—It is midnight here, now. And faint and loud another and another awakes and insists, It is midnight here, now. Through the middle clamour the chime of St. Mary’s drops down three pathetic steps and climbs up through the same intervals. The University is older by another hour.
The great deed of the new undergraduates was the discovery of the river. In the early years of the century it was still only a place for fishing in; occasionally a heavy tub was rowed down to Nuneham. Bell-ringing had gone out as an exercise; cricket was the game of one exclusive club; the nearest approach to a healthy rivalry between the colleges was a competition between New College and All Souls’ in making negus. New College won by putting in no water. It was not till 1837 that the old boats had their sides cut down. About ten years later outriggers came in, and after another ten, keelless boats. Another ten brought sliding seats from America, and so the skiff and the four and the eight reached their perfect economy of construction, and the quality of beauty they share with their counterpart, the bicycle, on land. Both bicycle and skiff are extensions of the human machine within such limits that they remain as it were mere developed limbs working at every moment as parts of one balancing frame, projections of the person.