THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

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 te

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 i

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

i

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 ma