Читать книгу The Charm of Oxford - J. O. Wells - Страница 4

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In what does the charm of Oxford consist? Why does she stand out among the cities of the world as one of those most deserving a visit? It can hardly be said to be for the beauty of her natural surroundings. In spite of the charm of her

"Rivers twain of gentle foot that pass

Through the rich meadow-land of long green grass,"

in spite of her trees and gardens, which attract a visitor, especially one from the more barren north, Oxford must yield the palm of natural beauty to many English towns, not to mention those more remote.

But she has every other claim, and first, perhaps, may be mentioned that of historic interest.

An Englishman who knows anything of history is not likely to forget of how many striking events in the development of his country Oxford has been the scene. The element of romance is furnished early in her story by the daring escape of the Empress-Queen, Matilda, from Oxford Castle. The Provisions of Oxford (1258) were the work of one of the most famous Parliaments of the thirteenth century, the century which saw the building of the English constitution, and the students of the University fought for the cause which those Provisions represented. The burning of the martyr bishops in the sixteenth century is one of the greatest tragedies in the story of our Church. The seventeenth century saw Oxford the capital of Royalist England in the Civil War, and though there was no actual fighting there, Charles' night march in 1644 from Oxford to the West, between the two enclosing armies of Essex and Waller, is one of the most famous military movements ever carried out in our comparatively peaceful island. The Parliamentary history, too, of Oxford in the seventeenth century is full of interest, for it was there that in 1625 Charles' first Parliament met in the Divinity School. And fifty years later, his son, Charles II, triumphed over the Whig Parliament at Oxford, which was trying by factious violence to force the Exclusion Bill on a reluctant king and nation. Few towns beside London have been the scene of so many great historical events; yet any one who looks below the surface will attach less importance to these than to the great changes in thought which have found in Oxford their inspiration, and which make it a city of pilgrimage for those interested in the development of England's real life. Matthew Arnold's famous description, hackneyed though it is by quotation, gives one aspect of Oxford, an aspect which will appeal to many beside the scholar poet:

"Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!

'There are our young barbarians, all at play.'

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 Ages, 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?"

But this is not the real intellectual charm of Oxford, which has been ever the centre of strenuous life, rather than of dilettante dreamings. From the very beginning, she has been a city of "Movements." Some visitors, then, will come to Oxford as the home and the burial-place of Roger Bacon, representing as he does the Franciscan Order, with its Christ-like sympathy for the poor and its early attempts to develop the knowledge of Natural Science; Oxford was in the thirteenth century the great centre of the Friars' movement in England. Others will remember that in the next century it produced, in John Wycliffe, the great opponent of the Friars, the man who, as the first of the Reformers, is to many the most interesting figure in mediaeval English religious history. In the sixteenth century, Oxford plays no great part in the actual revolution in the English Church; yet it will be a place attractive to many who cherish the memory of the "Oxford Reformers," the members of Erasmus' circle—John Colet, Thomas More, William Grocyn, and other scholars—who hoped by sound learning to amend the Church without violent change. Some, on the other hand, will see in the sixteenth-century Oxford, the school which trained men for the Counter-Reformation, such as the heroic Jesuit, Campion, or Cardinal Alien, the founder of the English College at Douai. The Anglican "Via Media" found its special representatives in Oxford in Jewel and Hooker, and in Laud, the practical genius who carried out its principles in the Church administration of his day. It was fitting that the movement for the revival of Church teaching in England in the nineteenth century should be an Oxford movement, and Newman's pulpit at St. Mary's and the chapel of Oriel College are sacred in the eyes of Anglicans all over the world. In the interval between Laud and Newman, Church principles had found a different development in another Oxford man; John Wesley's character and spiritual life were built up in Oxford, till he went forth to do the work of an Evangelist during more than half of the eighteenth century. Wycliffe, More, Hooker, Laud, Wesley, Newman, these are not the names of men who have affected the religious history of the world as did Luther, Calvin or Ignatius Loyola; but they have affected profoundly the religious life of the English-speaking race, and Oxford must ever be a sacred place for their sakes.

And Oxford has been the starting-point of other than religious movements. No place in England has such a claim on the Englishmen of the New World as has Oxford. It was there that Richard Hakluyt taught geography, and collected in part his wonderful store of the tales of enterprise beyond the sea. Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, both Oxford men, were the founders of English colonization. By their failures they showed the way to success later, and Calvert in Maryland, Penn in Pennsylvania, John Locke in the Carolinas, and Oglethorpe in Georgia are all Oxford men who rank as founders of States in the great Union of the West. And in our own day, Cecil Rhodes has once more proved that the academic dreamer can go out and advance the development of a great continent. By his magnificent foundation of scholarships at Oxford, he showed that he considered his old university a formative influence of the greatest importance in world history. Oxford with reason puts up one tablet to mark his lodgings in the city, and another to commemorate him in her stately Examination Schools.