Part 16

It was as if Oxford were decorated for the Eights by these sympathetic hawthorns and chestnuts and fond lilacs, and the whole variety of kind, sweet shrubs which had hung out their blossoms to gladden the pretty eyes and noses of the undergraduates’ visitors. We could not drive anywhere without coming upon some proof of the floral ardor; but perhaps I am embowering Oxford more than I ought with borrowed wreaths and garlands from the drive to the Norman church of Iffley where our friend took us, ostensibly because it could just be got in before lunch, but really because we needed some relief from the facts of Oxford which, stamped thickly, one upon another, made us inexhaustible palimpsests of precious impressions. I am sure that if another could get at my memory, and wash one record clear of another, there would reveal itself such a perfect history of what I saw and did as would constitute every beholder a partner of my experiences. But this I cannot manage for myself, and must be as content as I can with revealing mere fragmentary glimpses of the fact, broken lines, shattered images, blurred colors. For instance, all I can get at, of that visit to the Norman church at Iffley, is the May morning air, with its sun and sweet, from which we passed to the gloom, richly chill, of the interior, and then from that again, into the sun and sweet, to have a swift look at the façade, with the dog-toothing of its arches, which I then for the first time received distinctly into my consciousness. A part of the precious concept, forever inseparable, is my recollection of the church warden’s printed prayer that I would not lean against the chain-fencing before the façade, and of my grief that I could not comply without failing of the view of it which I was there for: without leaning against that chain one cannot look up at the dog-toothing, and receive it into one’s consciousness.

As often I have thought of asking my reader to revisit Oxford with me, I have fancied vividly possessing them of this or that distinctive fact, without regard to the sequences, but I find myself, poor slave of all that I have seen and known! following myself, step by step through the uneventful events in the order of their occurrence; and if my reader will not keep me company, after luncheon, in my stroll across fields and through garden ways beyond my friend’s house to that affluent of the Isis whose real name is the Cherwell, and which calls itself the Char, I know not how he is to get to the point where the Isis becomes the Thames, and where we are to see the first of the Eights, and two of the Bumps together. For except by this stroll we cannot reach the pretty water, so full, so slow, so bright, so dark, where we are to take boat, and get down to the destined point on its smooth breast, with a thousand other boats of every device, but mainly, but overwhelmingly, punts. The craft were all pushed or pulled by their owners or their owners’ guests, who were as serenely and sweetly patient with the problem of getting to the Eights or the Bumps in time, as if the affair were subjective, and might be delayed by an effort of the will in the various cases.

As with other public things in England, this had such a quality of privacy that we seemed the only persons really concerned, and other people in other boats were as much figures painted in the landscape as the buttercups in the meadowy levels that stretched on either hand at our point of departure, and presently, changed into knots of boskage, overhanging the dreamy lymph. But I shall not get into my picture the sense of the lush grasses, with those little yellow lamps, or those Perpendicular boles, with their Early English arches, or their Flamboyant leafage, any more than I shall get in the sense of the shore gleamily wetting its root-wrought earthen brinks, or bringing the weedy herbage down to drink of the little river. River it was, though so little, and as much in scale with the little continent it helps to water, as any Ohio or Mississippi of ours is with our measureless peninsula. There is also something in that English air, which, in spite of the centuries of taming to man’s hand leaves Nature her moods, her whims, of showing divinely and inalienably primitive, so that I had bewildering moments, on that sung and storied water, of floating on some wildwood stream of my Western boyhood. It has, so it appeared, its moments of savage treachery, and one still eddy where it lay smoothly smiling was identified as the point where two undergraduates had not very long ago been drowned. Sometimes the early or the later rams swell it to a flood, and spread it over those low pastures, in an image of the vaster deluges which sweep our immense stretches of river valley.

There was a kind of warm chill in the afternoon air, which bore all odors of wood and meadow, and transmitted the English voices with a tender distinctness. From point to point there were reaches of the water where we had quite a boat’s-length of it to ourselves, and again there were sharp turns where it narrowed to an impossible strait and the congested craft must have got by one another through the air. The people in the punts, and canoes, and boats, were proceeding at their leisure, or lying wilfully or forgetfully moored by the flat shores or under the mimic bluffs. They struck into one another where they found room enough to withdraw for the purpose, and they were constantly grinding gunwale against gunwale, with gentle murmurs of deprecation and soft-voiced forgivenesses which had almost the quality of thanks. Then, before we knew it we were gliding under Magdalen bridge past bolder shores, and so, into wider and opener waters where, with as little knowledge of ours the Char had become, or was by way of becoming the Thames which is the Isis. I believe it is still the Char where the bumps take place in the commodious expanses between the college barges tethered to the grassy shores. These barges were only a little more conspicuously aflame and aflutter with bright hats and parasols and volatile skirts than the shores; and they were all one fluent delight of color. On the shore opposite the barge where we were guests, there ran, soon after we had taken our first cups of tea, a cry of undergraduates, heralding the first of the two shells which came rowing past us. Then, almost ere I was aware of it the bow of a shell which was behind touched the stern of the shell which was before, and the first bump had been achieved. The thing had been so lightly and quickly done that the mere fact of the bump had not fully passed from the eye to the mind, when a glory wholly unexpected by me involved us: the shell which had made the bump belonged to our college, or at least the college to which our barge belonged. Shining in the reflected light, we rowed back up the Char to the point of our departure, and in the long, leisurely twilight found our first day in Oxford drawing on to night in the fragrant meadow.

Was it this night or the next that I dined in hall? There were several dinners in hall, and I may best be indefinite as to time as well as place. All civilized dinners are much alike everywhere, from soup to coffee, and it is only in certain academic formalities that a dinner in hall at Oxford differs from another banquet. One of these which one may mention as most captivating to the fancy fond of finding poetry in antique usage was the passing from meat in the large hall, portraited round the carven and panelled walls with the effigies of the college celebrities and dignities, into a smaller and cosier room, where the spirit of the gadding vine began its rambles up and down the glossy mahogany; and then into a third place where the fragrant cups and tubes fumed in the wedded odors of coffee and tobacco. If I remember, we went from the first to the last successively under the open heaven; but perhaps you do not always so, though you always make the transit, and could not imaginably smoke where you ate or drank.

Once, when the last convivial delight was exhausted, and there was a loath parting at the door in the grassy quadrangle under the mild heaven, where not even a star intruded, I had a realizing sense of what Oxford could mean to some youth who comes to it in eager

inexperience from such a strange, far land as ours, and first fully imagines it. Or perhaps it was rather in one of the lambent mornings when I strayed through the gardened closes too harshly called quadrangles that I had the company of this supposititious student, and wreaked myself in his sense of measureless opportunity. Not opportunity alone, but opportunity graced with all the charm of tradition, and weighted with rich scholarly convention, the outgrowth of the patient centuries blossoming at last in a flower from whose luminous chalice he should drink the hoarded wisdom of the past. I said to myself that if I were such a youth my heart would go near to break with the happiness of finding myself in that environment and privileged to all its possibilities, with nothing but myself to hinder me from their utmost effect. Perhaps I made my imaginary youth too imaginative, when I was dowering him with my senile regrets in the form of joyful expectations. It is said the form in which the spirit of the university dwells is so overmastering for some that they are fain to escape from it, to renounce their fellowships, and go out from those hallowed shades into the glare of the profane world gladly to battle “in the midst of men and day.”

Even of the American youth who resort to it, not all add shining names to the effulgent records of the place. They are indeed not needed, though they may be patriotically missed from the roll in which the native memories shine in every sort of splendor. It fatigues you at last to read the inscriptions which meet the eye wherever it turns. The thousand years of English glory stretch across the English sky from 900 to 1900 in a luminous tract where the stars are sown in multitudes outnumbering those of all the other heavens; and in Oxford above other places one needs a telescope to distinguish them. The logic of any commemoration of the mighty dead is that they will animate the living to noble endeavor for like remembrance. But where the mighty dead are in such multitude perhaps it is not so. Perhaps in the presence of their records the desire of distinction fails, and it is the will to do great things for the things’ sake rather than the doer’s which remains. The hypothesis might account for the prevailing impersonality of Oxford, the incandescent mass from which nevertheless from time to time a name detaches itself and flames a separate star in the zenith.

What strikes one with the sharpest surprise is not the memories of distant times, however mighty, but those of yesterday, of this forenoon, in which the tradition of their glory is continued. The aged statesman whose funeral eulogy has hardly ceased to echo in the newspapers, the young hero who fell in the battle of the latest conquest, died equally for the honor of England, and both are mourned in bronze which has not yet lost its golden lustre beside the inscriptions forgetting themselves in the time-worn lettering of the tablets on the walls, or the brasses in the floors. Thick as the leaves in Vallombrosa, they strew the solemn place, but in the religious calm of those chapels and halls there is no rude blast to scatter them, or to disturb the quiet in which for a few hundred or a few thousand years they may keep themselves from the universal oblivion.

When one strays through those aisles and under those arches, one fancies them almost as conscious of their sacred eld as one is one’s self. Then suddenly one comes out into the vivid green light of a grassy quadrangle, or the flowery effulgence of a garden, where the banks of blossomed bushes are pushed back of the beds of glowing annuals by the velvety sward unrolled over spaces no more denied to your foot than the trim walks that wander beyond their barrier, under the ivied walls, and to and from the foot-worn thresholds. To the eye it is all very soft and warm, and the breadths of enclosing masonry, the arched or pillared gables, the towers starting on their skyward climb, seem to bathe themselves in sun or cool themselves in shade alike mellow and mild. There are other senses that more truly take account of the thermometer and report it in very glowing moments as not registering much above the middle fifties. But you answer in excuse of it that it is so sincere, just as you ascribe to its scrupulous truthfulness the failure of the English temperament ever to register anything like summer heat. We boil in the torridity of an adoptive climate, but our ancestral suns were no hotter than those of the English are now; and where we have kept their effect in some such cold storage as that, say, of Boston, we probably impart no greater heat to the stranger. The spiritual temperature of Oxford, indeed, is much that of Old Cambridge, that Old Cambridge, Massachusetts, when it was far older, forty years ago, than it is now. Very likely, the atmospheres of all capitals of learning are of the same degree of warmth; and of a responsive salubrity, in the absence of malarial microbes. At any rate I was at once naturalized to Oxford through my former citizenship in Old Cambridge, and in a pleasing confusion found myself in both places at once with an interval of forty years foreshortened in a joint past and present.

The note of impersonality is struck in both places, but not so prevalently in Old Cambridge as in Oxford, where the genius of the place at some moment of divine inspiration,

“Smote the chord of self, that trembling, passed in music out of sight.”

As in the political frame of things the powerful English individualities pronounce themselves strongliest by their abnegation to a patriotic ideal, so in this finer and higher England, this England of the mind, what chiefly impresses the stranger is that mighty accord, that impersonal potency, which is the sum of the powerful wills, intellects, spirits severally lost in its collectivity. The master of this college, the president of that, the dean of the other, they all unite in effacing themselves, and letting the university, which is their composite personality, stand for them. As far as possible they refuse to stand for it, and the humor of the pose is carried to the very whim in the custom which bars the Chancellor of the University from ever returning to Oxford after that first visit which he makes upon his appointment. My imagination does not rise to a height like his, but of all accessible dignities there seems to me none so amiable as the headship of one of those famous colleges. I will not, since I need not, choose among them, and very likely if one had one’s choice, one might find a crumpled rose-leaf in the cushioned seat. Yet one could well bear the pain for the sake of the pleasure and the pride of feeling one’s self an agency of that ancient and venerable impersonality and of denying one’s self the active appearance. Scholarship, when it does not degenerate into authorship is the most negative of human things. It silently feeds itself full of learning, which is as free again to the famine of future scholarship; and in a world where pretty nearly all the soft warm things of privilege are so cruelly wrong, I can think of none so nearly innocent as those which lap the love of learning round in such an immortal home of study as Oxford. It is there so fitly housed, so properly served, so respectfully fed, so decorously clad, so beautifully environed, that it might almost dream itself a type of what should always and everywhere be an emanation of the literature to which it shall return after its earthly avatar, and rest, a blessed ghost, between the leaves of some fortunate book on an unvisited shelf of a vast silentious and oblivious library.

There is memory enough of lunches and dinners and teas, in halls and on lawns and in gardens, but as the reader was not asked, so cannot he in self-respect and propriety go. But there was one of the out-door affairs of which I may give him at least a picture-postal-card glimpse. No one’s abnegated personality will be infringed, not even the university need shrink from the intrusion if the garden of no college is named. The reader is to stand well out of the way at a Gothic window looking on the green where the guests come and go under an afternoon heaven which constantly threatens to shower, and never showers; where the sun indeed appears just often enough to agree with the garden trees that it will add indescribably to the effect if their lengthening shadows can be cast over the sward with those of the Gothic tops around. A little breeze crisps the air, and the birds sing among the gossiping leaves of the hawthorns and of the laburnums. One great chestnut stands elect, apart, dense with spiky blossoms from the level of its lowest spreading boughs to the topmost peak of its massive cone. Everywhere is the gracious architecture in which the mouldering Oxford stone, whether it is old or new, puts on the common antiquity.

I will not say that all the colleges seem crumbling to ruin, but the scaly and scabrous complexion of the surfaces is the impression remaining from the totality. The decay into which the stone almost instantly falls is sometimes rather dreadful to the casual glance in the plinths of those philosophers and sages about the Sheldonian Theatre, where the heads seem to be dropping away in a mortal decay. I believe they are renewed from time to time when they become too dreadful, but always in the same stone; and I do not know that I would have it otherwise in the statues or structures of Oxford. Where newness in any part would seem upstart and vulgar, every part looks old, whether it is of the last year or the first year. The smoke has blackened it, the damp has painted it a dim green; the latent disintegration of the stone has made its way to the surface, which hangs in warped scales or drops in finer particles. One would not have a different material used for building; brick or marble would affront the sensibilities, and deny the wisdom of that whole English system, in which reform finds itself authorized in usage, and innovation hesitates till it can put on the likeness of precedent.

It is interesting in Oxford to see how the town and the university grow in and out of each other. Like other towns of the Anglo-Saxon civilization it is occasional, accidental, anarchical, the crass effect of small personal ambitions and requisitions. In the course of so many centuries its commonness could not always fail of a picturesque quaintness, and perhaps it only seems without beauty or dignity because the generous collective spirit working itself out in the visible body of the university has created more of both than any other group of edifices in the world embodies. Those shapeless, shambling, casual streets, with their scattered dwellings and their clustering shops, find by necessity a common centre, without impressiveness or distinction. But in their progress or arrival, weakly widening here, or helplessly narrowing there, they often pass under the very walls of the venerable and beautiful edifices which constitute at once the real Oxford and the ideal Oxford, alike removed from the material Oxford of the town. Sometimes it is a wall that flanks a stretch of the commonplace thoroughfares; sometimes a gate or a portal under a tower giving into the college quadrangle from which you pass by inner ways beneath inner walls to an inmost garden, where the creepers cling to the windows and the porches, or a space of ivied masonry suns itself above the odorous bushes and the daisied sward. It would be hard to choose among these homes of ancient lore; but happily one is not obliged to choose. They are all there for the looking, and one owns them, an inalienable possession for life. One would not will them away, if one could; they must remain forever to enrich the pious beholder with the vision which no words can impart.

The heart of the pilgrim softens in the retrospect even towards that municipal Oxford which forms the setting of their beauty, as a mass of common rock may shapelessly enclose a cluster of precious stones, crystals which something next to conscious life has deposited through the course of the slow ages in the rude matrix. He relents in remembering pleasant suburbs, through which the unhurried trams will bear him past tasteful houses, set in embowered spaces of greensward, and on past pretty parks into the level country where there are villas among grounds that will presently broaden into the acreage of ancestral-seats, halls, manors, and, for all I know, castles. Even the immediate town has moods of lurking in lanes apart from the busier streets, and offering the consolation of low, stone dwellings faced by college walls, and dedicated to the uses of furnished lodgings. If it should be your fortune to find your sojourn in one of these, you may look down from your front window perhaps into the groves that shade Addison’s Walk; or you may step from your back door into a grassy nook where a tower or bastion of the old city wall will be hiding itself in a mesh of ivy. The lane before may be dusty with traffic and the garden behind may be damp with the rains that have never had intervals long enough to dry out of it; but the rooms with their rocking floors will be neatly kept, and if they happen to be the rooms of a reading or sporting undergraduate, sublet in some academic interval, you will find the tokens of his tastes and passions crowding the mantels and the walls. He has confided them with the careless faith of youth, to your chance reverence; he has not even withheld the photographs which attest his preference in actresses, or express a finer fealty in the faces self-evidently of mother or sister or even cousin, or some one farther and nearer yet.