Chapter VIII: Part 8

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

H. W. Taunt & Co.]

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.

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, ubiquitous, 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 simplified 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 college 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 _coup 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 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 from 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 weightiest 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.

What riches of personality lay behind the collectivity I ought not, if I knew, to say. Again I take refuge, from the reader’s quest, which I cannot help feeling in the indefinite attempt to suggest it, by saying that the collective tone is that of Old Cambridge, or more strictly, of Harvard. I remember that once a friend, coming in high June straight to Old Cambridge after a brief ocean interval from Oxford, noted the resemblance. As we walked under a Gothic archway of our elms, past the door-yards full of syringas and azaleas, with

“Old Harvard’s scholar-factories red,”

showing on the other hand in the college enclosures, he said it was all very like Oxford. He must have felt the moral likeness, the spiritual likeness, as I did in Oxford, for physical or meteorological likeness there is none absolutely. It is something in the ambient ether, in the temperament, in the unity of high interests, in the mystical effluence from minds moving with a certain dirigibility in the upper regions, but controlled by invisible ties, in each case, to a common centre. It is the prevalence of scholarship, which characterizes the respective municipalities and which holds the civic bodies in a not ungraceful, not ungrateful subordination.

Something of the hereditary grudge between town and gown descended to Harvard from the English centres of learning; but the prompt assertion of town government as the sole police force forbade with us the question of jurisdictions which it is said still confuses the parties with a feeling of enmity at Oxford. The war of fists following the war of swords and daggers, which in the earliest times left the dead of both sides in the streets after some mortal clash, and kept each college a stronghold, even after that war had no longer a stated or formal expression, is forever past, but still the town and the gown in their mutual dependence hold themselves aloof in mutual antipathy. So I was told, but probably on both sides the heritage of dislike resides only in the youthfuler breasts, and is of the quality of those ideals which perpetuate hazing in our colleges, or which among boys pass forms of mischief and phases of superstition along on a certain level of age. All customs and usages are presently uninteresting, as one observes them from the outside, and can be precious on the inside only as they are endeared by association. What is truly charming is some expression of the characteristic spirit such as in Oxford forbids one of the colleges to part in fee with a piece of ground on which a certain coveted tree stands, but which allows it to lease that beautiful feature of the landscape to a neighboring college. A thing like that is really charming, and has forever the freshness of a whimsical impulse, where whimsical impulses of many sorts must have abounded without making any such memorable sign.

In the reticence of the place all sorts of silent character will have been accumulating through the centuries until now the sum of it must be prodigious. But that is a kind of thing which if one has any direct knowledge of it one feels to be a kind of confidence, and which one lets one’s conjecture play about, in the absence of knowledge, very guardedly. For my part I prefer to leave quite to the reader’s imagination the charming traits of the acquaintance I would fain have made my friends. Sometimes they were of difficult conversation, but not more so than certain Old Cambridge men, whom I remembered from my youth; the studious life is nowhere favorable to the cultivation of the smaller talk; but now that so many of the Fellows are married the silence is less unbroken, and the teas, if not the dinners, recur in a music which is not the less agreeable for the prevalence of the soprano or the contralto note. It seemed to me that there were a good many teas, out-doors when it shone and in-doors when it rained, but there were never enough, and now I feel there were all too few. They had the _entourage_ which the like social dramas cannot have for yet some centuries in our centres of learning; between the tinkle of the silver and the light clash of the china one caught the muted voices of the past speaking from the storied architecture, or the immemorial trees, or even the secular sward underfoot. But one must not suppose that the lawns which are velvet to one’s tread are quite voluntarily velvet. I was once sighing enviously to a momentary host and saying of his turf that nothing but the incessant play of the garden-hose could keep the grass in such vernal green with us, when he promptly answered that the garden-hose had also its useful part in the miracle of his own lawn. I dared not ask if the lawnmower likewise lent its magic; that would have been

H. W. Taunt & Co.]

going too far. Or at least I thought so; and in the midst of the surrounding reticences I always felt it was better not to push the bounds of knowledge.

There is so much passive erudition, hived from the flowers of a thousand summers in such a place of learning, that I felt the chances were that if the stranger came there conscious of some of his own little treasure of honey, he would find it a few thin drops beside the rich stores of any first apiarist to whom he opened it. In that long, long quiet, that illimitable opportunity, that generously defended leisure, the scholarship is not only deep, but it is so wide that it may well include the special learning of the comer, and he may hear that this or that different don who is known for a master in a certain kind has made it his recreation to surpass in provinces where the comer’s field shrinks to parochial measure. How many things they keep to themselves at Oxford, it must remain part of one’s general ignorance not to know, and it is more comfortable not to inquire. But out of the sense of their guarded, their hidden, lore may spring the habit of referring everything to the university, which represents them as far as they can manage not to represent it. They may have imaginably outlived our raw passion of doing, and have become serenely content with being. This is a way of saying an illanguagible thing, and, of course, oversaying it.

The finer impressions of such a place--there is no other such in the world unless it is Cambridge, England, or Old Cambridge, Massachusetts,--escape the will to impart them. The coarser ones are what I have been giving the reader, and trying to pass off upon him in their fragility for something subtile. If one could have stayed the witchery of an instant of twilight in a college quadrangle, or of morning sunshine in a college garden, or of a glimpse of the High Street with the academic walls and towers and spires richly foreshortened in its perspective, or of the beauty of some meadow widening to the level Isis, or the tender solemnity of a long-drawn aisle of trees leading to the stream under the pale English noon, and could now transfer the spell to another, something worth while might be done. But short of this endeavor is vain. There was a walk, which I should like to distinguish from others, all delightful, where we passed in a grassy field over an old battle-ground of the Parliamentarians and the Royalists, and saw traces of the old lager-beads, the earthworks in which the hostile camps pushed closer and closer to each other, and left the word “loggerheads” to their language. But I do not now find this very typical, and I am rather glad that the details of my sojourn are so inextricably interwoven that I need not try to unravel the threads which glow so rich a pattern in my memory.

X

THE CHARM OF CHESTER

Because Chester is the handiest piece of English antiquity for new Americans to try their infant teeth on, I had fancied myself avoiding it as unworthy my greater maturity. I had not now landed in Liverpool, and as often as I had hitherto landed there before, I had proudly disobeyed the charge of more imperfectly travelled friends to be sure and break the run to London at Chester, for there was nothing like it in all England. Having indulged my haughty spirit for nearly half a century, one of the sudden caprices which undermine the firmest resolutions determined me to pass at Chester the day which must intervene before the steamer I was going to meet at Liverpool was due. Naturally I did everything I could to difference myself from the swarm of my crude countrymen whom I found there, and I was rewarded at the delightful restaurant in the Rows, where I asked for tea in my most carefully guarded chest-notes, with a pot of the odious oolong which observation has taught the English is most acceptable to the palate of our average compatriots, when they cannot get green tea or Japan tea. Perhaps it was my mortifying failure in this matter which fixed me in my wish never to be taken for an Englishman, except by other Americans whom it was easy to deceive.

The Americans abounded in Chester, not only on the present occasion but in my three successive chance visits to the place; and if they were by an immense majority nearly all of the same sex, they were none the worse for that. By pretty twos, by pretty threes, by yet larger lovely groups, and, in serious, middle-aged instances, singly, they wandered in and out of the plain old cathedral; they strayed through the Rows or arcades by which Chester distinguishes herself from other cities in having two-storied sidewalks; they clustered in the shops where the prices were adjusted to their ignorance of English values and they could pay as much for a pair of gloves as in New York or Chicago; they crowded the narrow promenade which tops the city wall; they haunted the historic houses, where they strayed whispering about with their Baedekers shut on their thumbs, attentive to the instruction of the custodians; they rode on the tops of the municipal tram-cars with apparently no apprehension from their violation of the sacred American principle of corporational enterprise in transportation; they followed on foot the wanderings of the desultory streets; at the corners and before the quainter façades the sun caught the slant of their lifted eye-glasses and flashed them into an involuntary conspicuity. In all his round I doubt if his ray could have visited countenances of a more diffused intelligence, expressive of a more generous and truly poetic interest in those new things of the old English world on which they were now feeding full the longing, and realizing rapturously the dreaming, of the years and years of vague hopes. I could read from my own past the pathos of some lives, restricted and remote, to which the present opportunity was like a glad delirium, a glory of unimagined chance, in which they trod the stones of Old Chester as if they were the golden streets of the New Jerusalem. These

and such as these have forever the better of those born to the manner; as for those assuming to be naturalized to the manner, they are not worthy to be confounded with such envoys from the present to the past. It is only the newest Americans who ever really see England, and they are apt to see it in the measure of that simplicity for which sincerity is by no means a satisfactory substitute.

It could well be in a passion of humility that a sophisticated traveller might wish to hide himself from them in the depths of that Roman bath which apparently so few visitors to Chester see. We found it with some difficulty, by the direction of a kindly shop-woman who, though she had lived all her life opposite, could only go so far as to say she believed it was under a certain small newspaper and periodical store across the way. Asking the young man we found there, he owned the fact, and leaving a yet younger man in charge, he lighted a stump of candle, and led to a sort of cavern back of his shop, where the classic relic, rude but unmistakable, was. Rough, low pillars supported the roof and the modern buildings overhead, and the bath, clumsily shaped of stone, attested the civilization once dominant in Chester. Our guide had his fact or his fable concerning the spring which supplied the bath; but whether it is in summer or in winter that this spring almost wholly disappears, I am ashamed not to remember.

The Rome that was built upon Britain underlies so much of England that if one begins to long for its excavation one must be willing to involve so much mediæval and modern superstructure in a common ruin that one’s wisdom must be doubted. So far as the Roman remains showed themselves to a pretty ignorant observer they did not seem worth digging out in their entirety; here and there an example seems to serve; they are the unpolished monuments of life in a remote and partially settled province, not to be compared, except at Bath and York, with those of Pompeii or Herculaneum. To be sure, if one knew they underlay New York, one would gladly level all the sky-scrapers in the town, that they might be given to the light. But in Chester it is another matter. There is already an interesting if not satisfactory collection of antiquities in Chester; and if it came to question of demolishing the delightful old wall, or the Rows, with God’s Providence House, and Bishop Lloyd’s House, or even the cathedral, though it is, to my knowledge, the least sympathetic of English cathedrals, one would wish to think twice. At the wall, especially, one would like to hesitate, walking perhaps all the way round the city on it, and pausing at discreet intervals to repose and ponder. It does not convince everywhere of an equal antiquity; there are parts that are evidently restorations and parts that are reproductions, and the gates frankly own themselves modern. But there are towers that moulder and bastions that have plainly borne the brunt of time. In the circuit of the wall you may look down on the roofs of old Chester within, and that much larger and busier new Chester without, which stretches with its shops and mills and suburban cottages and villas into the pretty country, as far as you like. But our affair was never with that Chester; except where the country began under the walls, and widened away beyond the river Dee, with bridges and tramways presently lost to the eye in the shadow of pleasant groves, we cared for nothing beyond the walls. There were places where these dropped sheer to the waters of the Dee, which obliged us at one point of its flow with a vivid rapid, or (I will not be sure) the swift slope of a dam, where a man stood midway casting his line into the ripple. He could by some stretch of the imagination have been a Jolly Miller who lived on the river Dee, though I remember no mills in sight; and by an equal stroke of fancy, he could have been casting his line for the salmon with which the sands of Dee are also associated in song. I do not insist that the reader shall hazard either conjecture with me; but what I say is that all England is so closely netted over and embroidered with literary reminiscence, with race-memories, from the earliest hours of personal consciousness, that wherever the American goes his mind catches in some rhyme, some phrase, some story of fact or fable that makes the place more home to him than the house where he was born. That is the sweetness, the kindness of travel in England, and that is the enchanting strangeness. To other lands we relate ourselves by an effort, but there the charm lies waiting for us, to seize us and hold us fast with ties running to the inmost and furthermost of our earthly being.

At one point in our first ramble on the wall at Chester we came to a house built close upon it, of such quaintness and demureness that it needed no second glance, in the long June twilight, to convince us that one of Thomas Hardy’s heroines lived there; or if it did, no possible doubt of the fact could be left when we encountered at the descent to the next city gate the smartest of red-coated sergeants mounting the wall to go and pay court to her. Afterwards we found many houses level with the top of the wall, with little gardened door-yards or leafy spaces beside them. I do not say they all had Hardy heroines in them; there were not sergeants enough for that; but the dwellings were all of an insurpassable quaintness and demureness, or only less quaint and less demure than the first. One of the most winning traits of the past wherever you find it is its apparent willingness to be friends with the present, to make room for it when it can, and to respond as far as possible to its commonplace and even sordid occasions. Like old walls that I had known in Italy, the old wall at Chester lent itself not only to the domestic but the commercial demands of to-day, and if the shops which it allowed to front upon its promenade were preferably those of dealers in bric-à-brac and second-hand books, still the principle is the same. In one of these shops was an old (it looked old) sundial which tempted and tempted the poor American, who knew very well he could not get it home without intolerable inconvenience and expense; and who tore himself from it at last with the hope of returning another day and carrying it all the way, if need be, to New York in his arms. As is the custom of sundials it professed to number only the sunny hours; but he had (or is this his subsequent invention?) the belief that somewhere on its round was indelibly if invisibly marked that gloomy moment of the September afternoon when King Charles looked from the Phœnix Tower hard by the shop where the dial lurked, and saw his army routed by the Parliamentarians on Rowton Moor. To be sure the moment was bright for the Parliamentarians; there is the consolation in every defeat that it is the victory of at least one side, and in this instance it was the right side which won.

You are advised that if you would see Chester Cathedral aright you had best look at it across the grassy space which lies between it and the wall near Phœnix Tower. It is indeed finest there, for it is a fane that asks distance, and if you go visit it by the pale twilight

at nine o’clock of the long June day, the brown stone it is built of will remind you less than it might at noon-day of the brown-stone fronts of the old New York streets. But who am I that I should criticise even the material body of any English cathedral? If we had this one of Chester in the finest American city, in Boston itself, we should throng to it with our guide-books if not our prayer-books, and would not allow that any ecclesiastical structure in the country compared with it. All that I say to my compatriots of either sex, who come to its Perpendicular Gothic fresh from the Oblique Doric of their Cunarders or White Stars at Liverpool, is: “Wait! Do not lavish your precipitate raptures all upon this good but plain edifice. Keep some of them rather for the gentler and lovelier dreams of architecture at Wells, at Ely, at Exeter, and supremely the minster at York, to which you should not come impoverished of the emotions you have been storing up from the beginning of your æsthetic consciousness. Yet, stay! Forbear to turn slightingly from your first cathedral because some one tells you it is not the best. It will have more to say to that precious newness of yours (you cannot yet realize how precious your newness is) than fairer temples shall to your more shop-worn sensibility.” It is always well in travel to cherish the first moments of it, for these are richer in potentialities of joy than any that can follow; and it is doubtless in the wise order of Providence that such a city as Chester should lie so near the great port of entry for three hundred thousand Americans that they may have something worthy of their emotions while they have still their sea-legs on, and may reel under the stroke without causing suspicion.

I have said how constantly one met them, how inevitably; and if they were wondering, willingly or unwillingly, what Chester could be bought for and sent home, in bulk or piecemeal, and set up again, say an hour from New York, just beyond Harlem River, I do not know that I should blame them. Naturally, there would be the question of the customs; the place could not be brought in duty free; but some nobler-minded millionaire might expand to the magnitude of the generous enterprise and offer to pay the duties if an equal sum toward the purchase could be raised. We should of course want only the Chester within the walls, but the walls and gates must be included.