THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

3

I do not remember that we ever lifted our criticism to the dons and

the organisation of the University. I think we took them for

granted. When I look back at my youth Iam always astonished by the

multitude of things that we took for granted. It seemed to us that

Cambridge was in the order of things, for all the world like having

eyebrows or a vermiform appendix. Now with the larger scepticism of

middle age I can entertain very fundamental doubts about these old

universities. Indeed I had a scheme-

I do not see what harm I can do now by laying bare the purpose of

the political combinations I was trying to effect.

My educational scheme was indeed the starting-point of all the big

project of conscious public reconstruction at which I aimed. I

wanted to build up a new educational machine altogether for the

governing class out of a consolidated system of special public

service schools. I meant to get to work upon this whatever office I

was given in the new government. I could have begun my plan from

the Admiralty or the War Office quite as easily as from the

Education Office. Iam firmly convinced it is hopeless to think of

reforming the old public schools and universities to meet the needs

of a modern state, they send their roots too deep and far, the cost

would exceed any good that could possibly be effected, and so I have

sought a way round this invincible obstacle. I do think it would be

quite practicable to side-track, as the Americans say, the whole

system by creating hardworking, hard-living, modern and scientific

boys' schools, first for the Royal Navy and then for the public

service generally, and as they grew, opening them to the public

without any absolute obligation to subsequent service.

Simultaneously with this it would not be impossible to develop a new

college system with strong faculties in modern philosophy, modern

history, European literature and criticism, physical and biological

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

that had made him a success from the beginning. He has lectured

ever since. He lectures still. Year by year he has become plumper,

more rubicund and more and more of an item for the intelligent

visitor to see. Even in my time he was pointed out to people as

part of our innumerable enrichments, and obviously he knew it. He

has become now almost the leading Character in a little donnish

world of much too intensely appreciated Characters.

He boasted he took no exercise, and also of his knowledge of port

wine. Of other wines he confessed quite frankly he had no "special

knowledge." Beyond these things he had little pride except that he

claimed to have read every novel by a woman writer that had ever

entered the Union Library. This, however, he held to be remarkable

rather than ennobling, and such boasts as he made of it were tinged

with playfulness. Certainly he had a scholar's knowledge of the

works of Miss Marie Corelli, Miss Braddon, Miss Elizabeth Glyn and

Madame Sarah Grand that would have astonished and flattered those

ladies enormously, and he loved nothing so much in his hours of

relaxation as to propound and answer difficult questions upon their

books. Tusher of King's was his ineffectual rival in this field,

their bouts were memorable and rarely other than glorious for

Codger; but then Tusher spread himself too much, he also undertook

to rehearse whole pages out of Bradshaw, and tell you with all the

changes how to get from any station to any station in Great Britain

by the nearest and cheapest routes…

Codger lodged with a little deaf innocent old lady, Mrs. Araminta

Mergle, who was understood to be herself a very redoubtable

Character in the Gyp-Bedder class; about her he relatedquietly

absurd anecdotes. He displayed a marvellous invention in ascribing

to her plausible expressions of opinion entirely identical in import

with those of the Oxford and Harvard Pragmatists, against whom he

waged a fierce obscure war…

It was Codger's function to teach me philosophy, philosophy! the

intimate wisdom of things. He dealt in a variety of Hegelian stuff

like nothing else in the world, but marvellously consistent with

itself. It was a wonderful web he spun out of that queer big active

childish brain that had never lusted nor hated nor grieved nor

feared nor passionately loved,-a web of iridescent threads. He had

luminous final theories about Love and Death and Immortality, odd

matters they seemed for him to think about! and all his woven

thoughts lay across my perception of the realities of things, as

flimsy and irrelevant and clever and beautiful, oh!-as a dew-wet

spider's web slung in the morning sunshine across the black mouth of

a gun…