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 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--

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 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. Rakewell 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 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

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.

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. And---- goes there after a college meeting, and

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.

OLD OXFORD DAYS