Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  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 stun 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 cours
e 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.

  It is everywhere much alike, that spirit of studious youth, at least in our common race, and I do not believe that if I had met a like number of Harvard men, going and coming in the mortar-boards and cropped gowns, in those quadrangles or gardens, I should have known them from the Oxford men I actually saw. They might have looked sharper, tenser, less fresh and less fair, not so often blue of eye and blond of hair, more mixed and differenced; but they would have had the same effect of being chosen for their golden opportunity by fortune, and the same gay ignorance of being favored above other youth. If one came to closer quarters and had to ask some chance question, the slovenlier speech of the Harvard men would have betrayed them in their answer, for even our oldest university has not yet taken thought of how her children shall distinguish themselves from our snuffling mass by the beauty of utterance which above any other beauty discriminates between us and the English. It is said that the youth of the parent stock are younger than our youth; but I know nothing as to this; and I could not say that their manners were better, except as the manners of the English are in being simpler. They are not better in being suppler: I should say that as life passed with him the American limbered and the Englishman stiffened, and that the first gained and the last lost in the power to imagine another which they both perhaps equally possessed in their shy nonage, and which chiefly, if not solely, enables men to be comfortable to their fellows. But here, as everywhere, I wish to be understood as making an inference vastly disproportioned to the facts observed. The stranger in any country must reflect that its people seem much less interested in themselves and their belongings than he is, and from the far greater abundance of their knowledge have far less to say of them. This may very well happen to a traveller from an old land among us; his zest for our novelty may fatigue us; just as possibly our zest for his antiquity may put us at odds with him. The spirit seeks in either case a common ground of actuality, achronic, ubiquitious, where it may play with its fellow soul among the human interests which are eternally and everywhere the same.

  What these are I should be far from trying to say, but I think I may venture to recur to my memories of the mute music of Harvard for the dominant of the unheard melodies at Oxford. The genius of the older university seemed much the same as that of the younger under the stress of ceremonial, and to have the quality of that stern acquiescence in the inevitable on the occasions of Commemoration Day that I remembered from Commencement Days in the past. The submission did not break into the furtively imparted jest which relieves the American temperament under fire, but the feeling of obedience to usage, the law-abiding instinct of the race, was the same in both. From both a gala pride was equally remote; the confident expectation of living through it, and not even a martyr exultance in the ordeal, was doubtless what sustained the participants. We have simplified form, but the English have simplied the mood of observing form, and in the end it comes to the same thing in them and in us. But there the parallel ceases. There is a riches of incident in the observance of Commemoration Day at Oxford, for which the sum of all like events in our academic world is but an accumulated poverty. We could not if we would emulate the continuous splendors of the time, for we lack not only the tradition but the environment in which to honor the tradition. If it were possible so to abolish space that Harvard and Yale and Princeton, say, and Columbia could locally unite, and be severally the colleges of one university, and assemble their best in architecture for its embodiment, something might be imaginable of their collectivity like what involuntarily, inevitably happens at Oxford on Commemoration Day. Then the dinners in hall on the eve and in the evening, the lunches in the collège gardens immediately following the academical events of the Sheldonian Theatre, the architectural beauty and grandeur forming the avenue for the progress of the Chancellor and all his train of diverse doctors, actual and potential, might be courageously emulated, but never could be equalled or approached. Our emulation would want the color of the line which at Oxford comes out of the past in the bravery of the scarlets and crimsons and violets and purples which men used to wear, and before which the iridescent fashions of the feminine spectators paled their ineffectual hues. Again, the characteristic surrender of personality contributed to the effect. In that procession whatever were the individual advantages or disadvantages of looks or statures, all were clothed on with the glory of the ancient university which honored them; it was the university which passively or actively was embodied in them; and their very distinction would in a little while be merged in her secular splendor.

  Of course we have only to live on a few centuries more and our universities can eclipse this splendor, though we shall still have the English start of a thousand years to overcome in this as in some other things. We cannot doubt of the result, but in the mean time we must recognize the actual fact, and I will own that I do not see how we could ever offer a d’œil which should surpass that of the supreme moments in the Sheldonian Theatre when the Chancellor stood up in his high place, in his deeply gold-embroidered gown of black, and accepted each of the candidates for the university’s degrees, and then, after a welcoming clasp of the hand, waved him to the benches which mystically represented her hospitality. The circle of the interior lent itself with unimagined effect to the spectacle, and swam with faces, with figures innumerable, representing a world of birth, of wealth, of deed, populous beyond reckoning from our simple republican experience. The thronged interior stirred like some vast organism with 29 — 443 the rustle of stuffs, the agitation of fans, the invisible movement of feet; but the master-note of it was the young life which is always the breath of the university. How much or little the undergraduates were there it would not do for a chance alien spectator to say. That they were there to do what they would with the occasion in the tradition of an irresponsible license might be affirmed, but it must be equally owned that they generously forebore to abuse their privilege. They cheered the Candidates, some more, some less, but there was, to my knowledge, none of the guying of which one hears much, beyond a lonely pun upon a name that offered itself with irresistible temptation. The pun itself burst like an involuntary sigh from the heart of youth, and the laugh that followed it was of like quality with it.

  Then, the degrees being conferred, each with distinctive praise and formal acceptance in a latinity untouched by modern conjecture of Roman speech, there ensued a Latin oration, and then English essays and speeches from the graduates — thriftily represented, that the time should not be wasted, by extracts — and then a prize poem which did not perhaps distinguish itself so much in generals as in particulars fr
om other prize poems of the past. If it had been as wholly as it was partially good — and there were passages that caught and kept the notice — it would have been a breach of custom out of tune and temper, as much as if the occasional latinity had been of the new Roman accent instead of that old English enunciation as it was of right, there where Latin had never quite ceased to be a spoken language. All was of usage: the actors and the spectators of the scene were bearing the parts which like actors and like spectators had ancestrally borne so often that they might have seemed to themselves the same from the first century, the first generation, without sense of actuality. This sense might imaginably have been left, in any sort of poignancy, to the accidental alien, who in proportion as he was penetrated with it would feel it a contravention of the spirit, the taste, of the event.

  I try for something that is not easily said, and being said at all, seems over-said; and I shrink from the weightest impression of Oxford which one could receive, and recall those light touches of her magic, which as I feel them again make me almost wish that there had been no Eights, no Commemoration Day in my experience. Of course I shall fail to make the reader sensible of the preciousness of a walk from the Char through a sort of market flower-garden, where when I asked my way to a friend’s house a kindly consensus of gardeners helped me miss the short cut; but I hope he will not be quite without the pleasure I knew in another row on that stream. Remembering my prime joys in its navigation, I gratefully accepted an invitation to a second voyage which was delayed till we could be sure it was not going to rain. Then we started for the boat where it lay not far off under a clump of trees, and where we were delayed in their seasonable shelter by a thunder-gust; but the clouds broke away and the sun shone, so that when our boat was bailed dry, we could embark in a light shower, and keep on our way unmolested by the fine drizzle that was really representing fine weather. If I had been native to the impulsive climate I should not have noticed these swift vicissitudes, and as it was I noticed them only to enjoy them on the still, bank-full water, where I floated with a delight not really qualified by the question whether the pond-lilies which padded it in places were of the fragrant family of our own pond-lilies. I was pursued by a kindred curiosity in regard to many other leaves and blossoms till one Sunday morning, when, as I found myself interrogating a shrub by the sunny walk of a college garden, it came to me that my curiosity was out of taste. The bush was not there specifically, but as an herbaceous expression of the University, and I had no more right to pass certain bounds with it in my curiosity than I would have had to push any scholar of the place to an assertion of personality where he would have preferred to remain collective.