Oxford

“ Oxford, indeed, is a paradise for the student of Art. Nowhere, except at Cambridge, can the series of architectural works be paralleled, and at both universities the charm of their ancient buildings is enhanced by their beautiful setting in college gardens.
It is not an accident that in the old universities more than anywhere else, so much of beauty has survived, nor is it to be put down as a happy piece of academic conservatism. It is rather the natural result of their constitution and endowment. What has been so fatal to the beauty of old England elsewhere has been material prosperity. ”

“ We shall have considered Oxford to very little purpose, if it is not plain that the University has been less a home of learning, on the whole, than a microcosm of English intellectual life. At Oxford the men have been thinking what England was to think a few months later, and they have been thinking with the passion and the energy of youth. The impulse to thought has not, perhaps, very often been given by any mind or minds within the college walls; it has come from without—from Italy, from France, from London, from a country vicarage, perhaps, from the voice of a wandering preacher. ”

“ It would be possible to continue for ever with such a subject as Oxford. Oxford, filled with the mystic echoes of the past, and the life and movement of the present, where a man passes four of the best years of his life, making livelong friendships, feeling things, doing things, and seeing things which remain indelibly engraved in his mind. Memories of Oxford have moved singers and poets to ecstasies of emotional utterance, inspired great writers with beautiful thoughts, and have been the one ray of comforting light in dark and miserable lives. ”

“ Indeed, the beauty and antiquity of Oxford, the libraries and cloisters and old places he haunted, now seemed to have grown into an almost necessary part of the American's environment, the needful background of his life. As if, like old Anthony à Wood, one could not imagine him living anywhere except in Oxford, walking through its almost doorless streets, or on the lawns of its College gardens, and ordering his studies and ways by the sound of its bells. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Most Americans have been to Oxford and will remember what a dream of the Middle Ages it is, with its crooked lanes, its gray and stately piles of ancient architecture and its meditation-breeding air of repose and dignity and unkinship with the noise and fret and hurry and bustle of these modern days. As a dream of the Middle Ages Oxford was not perfect until Pageant day arrived and furnished certain details which had been for generations lacking. ”

“ The ordinary English man or woman, unconnected with Oxford, has never heard of them. The undergraduate and the ordinary don has seen some part just now and then, when some enthusiastic guests have had to be taken round the sights.
And yet a book of many volumes might be written to tell of the things both rare and exquisite that Oxford hugs most close to her breast. He who cares to look may find them everywhere. There is not a college in all the University that does not possess something precious, either for its intrinsic beauty or for its historical interest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To Oxford belongs the honour of having been the first to present on the stage this noble play, and the production which I saw last week was in every way worthy of that lovely town, that mother of sweetness and of light. For, in spite of the roaring of the young lions at the Union, and the screaming of the rabbits in the home of the vivisector, in spite of Keble College, and the tramways, and the sporting prints, Oxford still remains the most beautiful thing in England, and nowhere else are life and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one. ”

“ The inevitable mention of the College has taken up space, which might well have been bestowed upon the many lovely bits of ancient stonework that feast the eye in quiet corners and retired quadrangles, each going to form that inner beauty which Oxford wears within her robe of natural adornment.
But there are more secret treasures still. It is wonderful as one contemplates the walls, the towers, the domes, the battlements, the spires, that mark the position of this or that famous portion of the University city, to try to realize the wealth of treasure that is hidden there. ”

“ We have glanced at the history of Oxford to little purpose if we have not learned that it is an eminently discontented place. There is room in colleges and common rooms for both sorts of discontent—the ignoble, which is the child of vanity and weakness; and the noble, which is the unassuaged thirst for perfection. The present result of the last forty years in Oxford is a discontent which is constantly trying to improve the working, and to widen the intellectual influence, of the University. ”

“ Year follows year, and century, century, and the stream of men flows unceasingly in and out of the city’s gates. Does Oxford change, however? Another wrinkle on her face may betray the lapse of many decades, but her beauty remains. ”

“ And to the darkest days of the eighteenth century belongs the most famous picture of the ideal Oxford life: "I spent many years, in that illustrious society, in a well-regulated course of useful discipline and studies, and in the agreeable and improving commerce of gentlemen and of scholars; in a society where emulation without envy, ambition without jealousy, contention without animosity, incited industry and awakened genius; where a liberal pursuit of knowledge and a genuine freedom of thought was raised, encouraged, and pushed forward by example, by commendation, and by authority." ”

“ Oxford stood by itself in its meadows by the rivers, having its relations with all England, but, like its sister at Cambridge, living a life of its own, unlike that of any other spot in England, with its privileged powers, and exemptions from the general law, with its special mode of government and police, its usages and tastes and traditions, and even costume, which the rest of England looked at from the outside, much interested but much puzzled, or knew only by transient visits. ”

“ To the barbaric mind, ambitious of culture, Oxford is the usual image of the happy reconciliation between research and acceptance. It typifies to an American the union of science and sense—of aspiration and ease. A German university gives a greater impression of science and an English country-house or an Italian villa a greater impression of idle enjoyment; but in these cases, on one side, knowledge is too rugged, and on the other satisfaction is too trivial. Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure. ”

“ It is impossible to tell some one else just what Oxford is—but Oxford as it may be is a question with which every Oxford man has to deal for himself. Oxford is a home of ‘influences’; it is all too frequently referred to as the ‘home of lost causes’; what it becomes for each man who trusts himself or is entrusted to its ‘influence’, depends largely upon himself. The University offers each man wide fields for the investment of his time and talent—it offers much for one to learn—but it does not do much choosing for one, nor does it set itself as a task-master. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Oxford's young enthusiasm is pictured in the pupils, its quiet temper in the tutor, its dress, its ways of talk, the beginning of its æstheticism, its hereditary self-satisfaction, its variety of youthful intellect, its high sense of honour and morality, its manliness, its noisy athleticism, its sense that Oxford is, on the whole, though a doubt may now and then intrude, the mother, and the father, too, of the intellectual universe ”

“ The meadows and the rivers bring to mind the trees. What and where would be the loveliness of Oxford without her trees? Some have already been mentioned—the stately elms of the Broad Walk, and the old gnarled willows along the Cherwell's banks. But there are others, needing perhaps a little looking for, but none the less an integral part of Oxford's beauty when once found. ”

“ Oxford, that once seemed a pleasant porch and entrance into life, may become a dingy ante-room, where we kick our heels with other weary, waiting people. At last, if men linger there too late, Oxford grows a prison, and it is the final condition of the loiterer to take ‘this for a hermitage.’ It is well to leave the enchantress betimes, and to carry away few but kind recollections. ”

“ Oxford, that lotus-land, saps the will-power, the power of action. But, in doing so, it clarifies the mind, makes larger the vision, gives, above all, that playful and caressing suavity of manner which comes of a conviction that nothing matters, except ideas, and that not even ideas are worth dying for, inasmuch as the ghosts of them slain seem worthy of yet more piously elaborate homage than can be given to them in their heyday. If the Colleges could be transferred to the dry and bracing top of some hill, doubtless they would be more evidently useful to the nation. ”

“ But there are so many people, to whom the human interest in the fairest city counts for more than all the rest, that it is time to wander among the quadrangles, the halls, the chapels, and the other ancient fabrics that speak of the university life of Oxford. As we pass in through many a massive gateway, tread many a stone-paved path, climb many an old oak stair worn by the feet of many generations, it is strange if no strand of sentiment puts us in touch with some of those who have passed that way before. ”

“ The charms of Oxford for the historical student and for the lover of Art have been spoken of. But a large part of the world comes under neither head; to it the charm of Oxford consists in the young lives that are continually passing through it. ”

“ It was certainly a fine dream to bring together at Oxford young men from the colonies, from the United States and from Germany, selected for intellect and character, learning to esteem each other, carrying to all parts of the world common interests and a common culture. It would be intolerable if all our universities were Oxfords, but there is room in the world for one place that shall fully represent the traditional culture of the past, and Oxford possesses a unique fascination that seems to adapt it to the purpose planned. ”

“ And yet steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection,—to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?—nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tübingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! ”

“ But in all the sweetest sounds that have till now gone up from earth to heaven Oxford has had its part. Not only have birds and meadows, trees and rippling streams made constant music to the God who made them, but the heart and voice of man have not unworthily joined in. What of Keble and Clough from Oriel, singing indeed a different strain, but singing for all that? What of Bishops Heber and Ken, from All Souls and from New? Of Robert Browning of Balliol, and Landor Trinity's chief poet? ”

“ It was an honest attempt to raise Oxford life, which by all evidence needed raising, to something more laborious and something more religious, to something more worthy of the great Christian foundations of Oxford than the rivalry of colleges and of the schools, the mere literary atmosphere of the tutor's lecture-room, and the easy and gentlemanly and somewhat idle fellowship of the common-rooms. It was the effort of men who had all the love of scholarship, and the feeling for it of the Oxford of their day, to add to this the habits of Christian students and the pursuit of Christian learning. ”