Читать книгу The Charm of Oxford - J. O. Wells - Страница 9

Since then, all kinds of University business have been carried on in the old Printing Press. The University Registrar and the University Treasurer (his style is "Secretary of the University Chest") have their offices there; the Proctors exercise discipline from there; the various University delegacies and committees meet there. And another side of Oxford life, not yet (in January 1920) fully recognized as belonging to the University, has found a home there; the top floor has been for twenty years past the centre of women's education in Oxford, a position elevated indeed, for it is up more than fifty stairs, but commodious and dignified when reached at last.

Perhaps the Clarendon Building has gained in lightness of effect by being contrasted with the clumsy mass of the Indian Institute, which forms the background of our picture. The nineteenth century proudly criticized the taste of the eighteenth; but it may well be doubted if any building in Oxford of the earlier and much-abused century is more inartistic and inappropriate than "Jumbo's Joss House," which used to rouse the scorn and anger of the late Professor of History, Edward A. Freeman.

No Oxford colleges are in this picture, though a small part of Exeter, one of Sir Gilbert Scott's least happy erections in Oxford, appears on the right, and a little piece of Trinity on the left; the last-named is the college of Professor Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, better known as "Q," one of the most delightful of Oxford's minor poets. The opening lines of his poem, "Alma Mater,"

"Know ye her secret none can utter,

Hers of the book, the tripled crown?

Still on the spire the pigeons flutter,

Still by the gateway flits the gown,

Still in the street from corbel and gutter

Faces of stone look down,"

may well have been inspired by this very scene in the Broad, for the grim faces of stone that surround the Sheldonian are one of the features and the puzzles of Oxford. Are they the Roman Emperors, or the Greek Philosophers, or neither? It does not matter, for they are unlike anything in heaven or in earth, and yet they are loved by all true Oxford men for their uncompromising ugliness, which has been familiar to so many generations.