science, education and sociology.
We could in fact create a new liberal education in this way, and cut
the umbilicus of the classical languages for good and all. I should
have set this going, and trusted it to correct or kill the old
public schools and the Oxford and Cambridge tradition altogether. I
had men in my mind to begin the work, and I should have found
others. I should have aimed at making a hard-trained, capable,
intellectually active, proud type of man. Everything else would
have been made subservient to that. I should have kept my grip on
the men through their vacation, and somehow or other I would have
contrived a young woman to match them. I think I could have seen to
it effectually enough that they didn't get at croquet and tennis
with the vicarage daughters and discover sex in the Peeping Tom
fashion I did, and that they realised quite early in life that it
isn't really virile to reek of tobacco. I should have had military
manoeuvres, training ships, aeroplane work, mountaineering and so
forth, in the place of the solemn trivialities of games, and I
should have fed and housed my men clean and very hard-where there
wasn't any audit ale, no credit tradesmen, and plenty of high
pressure douches…
I have revisited Cambridge and Oxford time after time since I came
down, and so far as the Empire goes, I want to get clear of those
two places…
Always I renew my old feelings, a physical oppression, a sense of
lowness and dampness almost exactly like the feeling of an
underground room where paper moulders and leaves the wall, a feeling
of ineradicable contagion in the Gothic buildings, in the narrow
ditch-like rivers, in those roads and roads of stuffy little villas.
Those little villas have destroyed all the good of the old monastic
system and none of its evil…
Some of the most charming people in the world live in them, but
their collective effect is below the quality of any individual among
them. Cambridge is a world of subdued tones, of excessively subtle
humours, of prim conduct and free thinking; it fears the Parent, but
it has no fear of God; it offers amidst surroundings that vary
between disguises and antiquarian charm the inflammation of
literature's purple draught; one hears there a peculiar thin scandal
like no other scandal in the world-a covetous scandal-so that Iam
always reminded of Ibsen in Cambridge. In Cambridge and the plays
of Ibsen alone does it seem appropriate for the heroine before the
great crisis of life to "enter, take off her overshoes, and put her
wet umbrella upon the writing desk."…
We have to make a new Academic mind for modern needs, and the last
thing to make it out of, Iam convinced, is the old Academic mind.
One might as soon try to fake the old VICTORY at Portsmouth into a
line of battleship again. Besides which the old Academic mind, like
those old bathless, damp Gothic colleges, is much too delightful in
its peculiar and distinctive way to damage by futile patching.
My heart warms to a sense of affectionate absurdity as I recall dear
old Codger, surely the most "unleaderly" of men. No more than from
the old Schoolmen, his kindred, could one get from him a School for
Princes. Yet apart from his teaching he was as curious and adorable
as a good Netsuke. Until quite recently he was a power in
Cambridge, he could make and bar and destroy, and in a way he has
become the quintessence of Cambridge in my thoughts.
I see him on his way to the morning's lecture, with his plump
childish face, his round innocent eyes, his absurdly non-prehensile
fat hand carrying his cap, his grey trousers braced up much too
high, his feet a trifle inturned, and going across the great court
with a queer tripping pace that seemed cultivated even to my naive
undergraduate eye. Or I see him lecturing. He lectured walking up
and down between the desks, talking in a fluting rapid voice, and
with the utmost lucidity. If he could not walk up and down he could
not lecture. His mind and voice had precisely the fluid quality of
some clear subtle liquid; one felt it could flow round anything and
overcome nothing. And its nimble eddies were wonderful! Or again I
recall him drinking port with little muscular movements in his neck
and cheek and chin and his brows knit-very judicial, very
concentrated, preparing to say the apt just thing; it was the last
thing he would have told a lie about.
When I think of Codger Iam reminded of an inscription I saw on some
occasion in Regent's Park above two eyes scarcely more limpidly
innocent than his-"Born in the Menagerie." Never once since Codger
began to display the early promise of scholarship at the age of
eight or more, had he been outside the bars. His utmost travel had
been to lecture here and lecture there. His student phase had
culminated in papers of quite exceptional brilliance, and he had
gone on to lecture with a cheerful combination of wit and mannerism