Edward Oxford

“ 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. ”

“ A don will not hesitate to make the worst joke in a strong and cheerful voice in the bookseller’s shop, when it is full of clever freshmen.
Yonder they go, the worldly and the unworldly, the rich and poor, high and low, proving that Oxford is one of the most democratic places in Europe. The lax discipline that broadens the horizon of the inexpert stranger is probably neither unwise nor unpremeditated. It is certainly not inconsistent with the genius of a city whose very stones may be supposed to have acquired an educative faculty, and a sweet presence that is not to be put by. ”

“ College servants are the corbels and gargoyles that complete the picturesqueness and usefulness of Oxford. The oldest are not so much serviceable as quaint, often grotesque, reminders of an age that has gone; their faces are apt to express grim judgments upon the changes which they have helplessly watched; and they are among the stoutest retainers of the past. The younger are either very much like any other good men-servants, silent, receptive, curious but uninquiring, expensive, and better able to instruct than to learn; or they are average men, with Oxford variations. ”

“ The brow of Jupiter—of Plato—of Augustus—was a hill of majesty equal with Olympus. The history of old sculpture is an Ave! to the brow. Now the soul has descended to the eyes. In politics, war, literature, above all in finance, victory is with the eyes. The old man had the godlike span of curving bone; but his eyes slept. It was his good fortune and Oxford’s honour that he ruled an Oxford college. ”

“ In Oxford nothing is the creation of one man or of one year. Every college and church and garden is the work of centuries of men and time. Many a stone reveals an octave of colour that is the composition of a long age. The founder of a college laid his plans; in part, perhaps he fixed them in stone. His successors continued the work, and without haste, without contempt of the future or ignorance of the past, helped the building to ascend unto complete beauty by means of its old and imperfect selves. ”

“ For Oxford, the fifteenth century was an age of libraries and books. Looking back upon it, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester seems its patron saint,—donor of books to the Benedictines who lived on the site of Worcester College, and to the University,—harbinger of the Bodleian. We can still catch the savour of the old libraries at Merton where the light coloured by painted glass used to inlay the gloom under the wooden roof, or behind the quiet latticed windows above the cloisters at Christ Church. ”

“ At sunset or at dawn the city’s place in the world, as a beautiful thing, is clearest. Few cities look other than sad at those hours; many, unless hid in their own smoke, look cheap. Oxford becomes part of the magic of sunset and dawn,—is, as it were, gathered into the bosom of the power that is abroad. Yet, if it is one with the hills and the clouds and the silence, the human dignity of the place is also significant. The work of the ancient architect conspires with that of the sunset and of long, pregnant tracts of time ”

“ He believes Oxford to be as a fine sculptor, and wishes to put himself in its hands in such a way as to be best shapen by the experience, in a “wise passiveness.” He wants to be a scholar, and fears to be a pedant. He wants to learn a wise and graceful habit with his fellow-men, and fears to be what he hears called a gentleman. He wants to test his enthusiasm and prejudices, and fears to be a Philistine. He wants to taste pleasure delicately, and fears to be a viveur or an æsthete. ”

“ There a man might read, and comfort himself according to his means, and finally at night stamp up and down a passage, to warm his feet, before going to sleep in a crowded bed-chamber. On any day there was a chance that some splendid man, coming a little in the rear of his fame, would arrive in Oxford, and lecture or read a book. Should kings, or priests, or rude citizens interfere, the scholar could rusticate voluntarily—as he sometimes did—at Stamford, or Reading, or Maidstone, or Cambridge, and there, as best he might, by study and self-denial, as by a sacrament, recreate the University. ”

“ The Oxford graduate of the past is far too pale a ghost in literature. He lies in old books, like a broken sculpture waiting to be reconstructed, and survives but in an anecdote and from his importance after leaving Oxford for a bishopric or a civil place. For one memory of a Don there are a hundred of soldiers, statesmen, priests, in the quadrangles and streets. He is in danger of being treated as merely the writer of a quaint page among the records of the college muniment-room. ”

“ He is the corrector of all new abuses and the defender of old, and through his father, a college butler and long since dead, he has the times of Trafalgar fresh in his mind, with imposing third-hand memories of the days when Oxford was Jacobite. The subtle distinguishing marks of all the colleges, as far as concerns fashions of morals and manners, scholarship and sport, he knows by heart, and professes such an experienced acquaintance with like matters that in the High or by the Long Bridges he knows at sight a “Greats” man or a “Stinks” man or a mathematician ”

“ He finds himself marvelling that one who was merely a gentleman in London can be interesting in Long Wall Street or on the Cherwell. The superb, expensive young man who thinks that there is “practically nobody in Oxford”—the poor, soiled scholar—the exuberant, crimson-lipped athlete, whose stride is a challenge, his voice a trumpet call—the lean and larded æsthete, busily engaged upon the quaint designs of oriental life,—all discover some point in common when they are seen together in the Schools, or on the riverside. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He is to be found at the starting-point in February, in his college Torpid, and proves a stately nonentity or passenger; discovers that rowing abrades more than his skin, and gives it up just before he is asked to. For the future he sculls alone, once a week, when it is mild, and oftener when his friends are visiting him—which he does not encourage. At such times he learns that it is quite true that Oxford possesses some fine drawings, marbles, stained glass, and a library of little use to a determined “Greats” man. These he exhibits to the visitors impatiently and with pride. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is a gentle and puissant harmonising influence in Oxford which nothing can escape. I am no lover of Georgian architecture and am often blind to the power of Wren; but in Oxford I have no such incapacities; and I believe that here architecture should be judged, not as Norman or classical, as the work of Wolsey or Aldrich, but as Oxford architecture. ”

“ Nor is it only the men like Lord Salisbury, Lord Rosebery and Mr Gladstone, who guide the country at home, or like Lord Milner and Lord Curzon, who give their best work to Greater Britain, that are the true sons of the University; it is the plain, hard-working clergymen and civilians, also, who, by their lives of honest and unselfish toil, hand on the torch of good conduct and high ideals which has been entrusted to them.
Oxford had some share in the events which led to the deposition of Edward II. The King wrote to the Chancellor, masters and scholars calling upon them to resist his enemies. ”

“ The belief that English kings feared to enter the city is curious, for Oxford was a favourite place for holding meetings of the witan in the eleventh century, and King Harold died there in 1040. It lingered late, for it is noted that Henry III ‘defied the old superstition which was commonly repeated’ by worshipping at the saint's shrine in 1264 (Wykes, iv. 143) , and it was said that Edward I refrained from entering Oxford in 1275 from fear of the legend (ib. p. 264) . ”

“ 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. ”

“ He establishes a despotism for the good of the college. He is willing to take the fellows into partnership, makes advances, and, when coyly repulsed, has his sense of importance increased by the knowledge that an opposition exists. His splendour is marred only by the stranger, who mistakes his brass-buttoned blazer for a livery, and finds his pomposity well worthy of such fine old quadrangles,—and requests him with a smile and half a sovereign to exhibit the chapel and the hall, and “tell me who are the swells”!
He walks about Oxford with a beautiful satisfaction. ”

“ Cheerfulness broke in pretty often in Oxford. And that was a time when there was more love of Oxford than ever before. Even the wealthy Fellows of All Souls’ (“that Eden to the fruitful mind,” as Lady Winchilsea called it at that time) never bought their college; and when one of them was taunted with the quip that Oxford was less learned than Bath, he was able to reply that it was also more fashionable. I find, too, in its love of the past, as [Pg 176] in its love of nature, something heartier, though I daresay less mystical, than our own. Johnson’s love of Pembroke is an example. ”

“ He knows the female cousins of all the undergraduates of his college, and many of them have been mildly in love with him in a punt. He is often in London, where he is very academic, and would wish to appear merely well-informed. When he meets London friends in Oxford, he is anxious to prove that he at least is not a mere Don; yet his friends can only wonder that there is now no such thing as an Oxford point of view, but only an [Pg 205] Oxford drawl. His sitting-room is magnificent, and like style, conceals the man. It is no wonder that a man with such arm-chairs should be well satisfied. ”

“ When he left Oxford Oscar Wilde was already a well-known figure: his sayings were passed from mouth to mouth, and he was a favorite subject for caricature in the pages of “Punch.” Finally, he became known to all the world as Bunthorne in Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera, “Patience.” From being the most talked-of man in Oxford, he became the most talked-of man in London—a very different thing: many a reputation has been lost on the road between Oxford and London. His reputation, stimulated by long hair and velveteen knee-breeches, gave Whistler a chance to say, “Our Oscar is knee plush ultra.” ”

“ His later struggles must be considered in the light of the political history of the concluding episodes of Edward's reign. In a few years we shall find the Oxford champion abandoning the Latin language of universal culture, and appealing to the people in homely English. With Wycliffe's entry upon his wider career, it is hardly too much to say that Oxford ceased to be merely a part of the cosmopolitan training ground of the schoolmen, and became in some fashion a national institution. ”

“ It had at length become possible again for [Pg 182] a man to keep his terms and take his degree without continual residence within college walls. The numbers of the University grew rapidly, and at a time when more efficient tutors and discipline made Oxford attractive to many who were neither frivolous nor rich. Oxford became, in fact, a place of education. The previous century had been conspicuous for great names and lack of system; what was achieved was due to individual endowment and energy; and the able men stood somewhat apart from their contemporaries. ”

“ But he has a strong belief that any kind of distinction is dangerous at Oxford, and among the least of its possibilities. He respects the scholar and the Blue, and sees that they might equally well be made in another city or on another stream. Bent upon a life among men, he sees that a university is a place where many are men, but where many of the suspicious and calculating passions of a bigger world are in abeyance ”

“ Bradwardine, though a scholar of universal reputation, won his fame at Oxford without the supplementary course at Paris, and lived all his career in his native land. As an English university career became more self-sufficient, Oxford became the school of the politician and the man of affairs as much as of the pure student. The new tendency is illustrated by the careers of the brothers Stratford, both Oxford scholars, yet famous not for their writings but for lives devoted to the service of the State, though rewarded by the highest offices of the Church. ”