Serpentine
Francis King
The Masque of St Eadmundsburg Humphrey R. Morrison (Blond & Briggs £7.95) C ince, in its passage from classical L./to mediaeval times, the Latin word universitas came to denote not merely the universe but a society, company, corpora- tion or community regarded collectively, it is natural that the university as a microcosm should have been a constant theme of literature.
In Humphrey R. Morrison's The Masque of St Eadmundsburg, the microcosm is a German university in the early 1600's. Eberhard Dolke (or `Dolcchius', as his name appears on his works of learning) is an elderly, highly respected academic to whom the Seneschal or Rector of the time entrusts the task of devising a masque to celebrate five years of prosperity under his ambitious rule. The masque, as the Seneschal envisages it, will 'display to the city, the university and to the King ... the rights, form and hierarchy of a glorious
foundation.' It will bring together 'not merely costliness and splendours, but also craft and music; feeling and elegance and beauty.'
In choosing Dolke, however, the Seneschal has made a grave miscalculation. This Doctor of Laws, at once learned and unworldly, is already obsessed with the con- flict between permanence and flux, between the ideal and the real, which he discerns in all human existence. To order the accurate representation of the university in a masque is a task as difficult as to order the accurate representation of himself in effigy, recum- bent in his robes of master, in the gilded tomb which his college has decreed, even before his death, should be made ready for him. How can a single effigy portray all the contradictory emotions and impulses of a long life? And similarly how can a single dramatic work portray an institution in a constant state of turbulent evolution? This same problem of conflict between change- lessness and change also applies to any codification of the law.
Having received his commission, Dolke calls on his colleagues and, more recklessly, also on his pupils for help. The colleagues share a quasi-mystical, Newmanesque idea of their university as something more than the sum of its members, past and present, and their achievements. Such an idea is comparable to the model of a perfect and complete Via Flaminia, unknown to any Roman Emperor, which one of Dolke's pupils has constructed with infinite patience and resource in a room in his home. The undergraduates, on the other hand, at once plot an anti-masque, in which the revered institution will be dismantled into what they see as its many shoddy and gimcrack com- ponents. This anti-masque contains 'no history, no religion and no permanence; no scholarship, no order and no reverence.' In it, 'the tempting faces of each passing mo- ment' are presented as though, between them, they made up some abiding truth.
This is a first novel conceived and written with a remarkable self-confidence. The evocation of the city, with a castle above it and a river below, reaches its apogee in the passages which describe the onset of a winter so cruel that herds of deer begin a migration southwards, many people die for lack of food and only the arrival of the King on a mission of succour prevents a rebellion. It is difficult not to see in this im- age of a frozen world which can no longer sustain its creatures a symbol of petrified institutions which, incapable of change, starve the spirits of their members. So, too, Mr Morrison's rapt descriptions of the architecture, by turns Gothic and Renaissance, of his imaginary city, seem to be intended to symbolise the conflict bet- ween sombre theocracy and sunny hum- anism which is one of the pivots of his nar- rative.
The one major fault of Mr Morrison's book is that he is too often either negligent or contemptuous of the needs of his readers, who will no doubt repeatedly find themselves turning back the pages in the
hope, often disappointed, of discovering precisely what it is that this erudite, higillY imaginative author is trying to convey. In particular, the relationships of Dolke himself a figure mysteriously without a past or an adequate domestic setting — with his colleagues and students are often obscure: with too much implied and too little stated or illustrated. This obscurity is intensified by the author's passion for long, snake-like sentences, the convolutions of which, wind ing back and forth, recall a description °' the university buildings in which 'galleries and passages intersected or slipped one another by landings and newel stairs' When a shaft of light does shine down into the murky labyrinth, it illuminates I° brilliant effect. Thus the style of the book' by turns spikily Gothic and arriP,! Renaissance, becomes, in a remarkatN6 way, an emanation of its setting.
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