THE SPIRIT OF CAMBRIDGE.

THERE are a certain number of books published every year of which one could say that the authors wrote them because they wanted to write them. This is a different process, be it remarked, from that of writing a book mainly because you have been asked to do it, or because you did it in the ordinary business of authorship. The present writer once had this difference made plain to him by a distin- guished son of one of the British Dominions who spends his life in the study of economic questions. This economist is a very busy man, and the last thing that seemed likely was that he would undertake to contribute a slight volume to a "popular" series which was a mere publisher's venture. When the writer asked the economist why he had agreed to do it although he continually complained of being too busy, he said, "I asked the publisher if he would leave me absolutely free to do it in my own way, and when he said • Yes,' of course I accepted. It will be an amusement and a rest. Perhaps you think my interest in my country is represented by books on trade and economies. Well, you read my new book and then you will understand what I really have wanted to say about my country." The book, when it appeared, was the book of a man who reckoned nothing foreign to him, whether it concerned scenery, geology, botany, sport, or society, provided that it was a characteristic fact of the life of his Dominion. We have before us a book ("Cambridge from Within," by Charles Tennyson; Cbatto and Windus, 7s. 6d. net), of which we told ourselves before we had turned many pages that it was written because the author wanted to write it. It is one of a series, and probably the publisher suggested the subject to the author. But no matter; the publisher only provided the occasion for Mr. Tennyson to write what it was in him to write, and what must certainly have been written. sooner or later. It is the book of an affectionate son of Cambridge, who has been able to perform the rare feat of recapturing and fixing in extraordinarily apt and graceful phrases the "first fine careless rapture" of the feelings of a Cambridge man who has truly lived the life -of Cambridge. If anywhere the spirit of Cambridge, with its sodalitas, its youthful intellectual voyages of discovery, its potent traditions, its time-devouring hospitality, and its not wholly unprofitable dilettantism, has more exact justice done to it, we do not know where to look for it.

In getting at the quintessential meaning of Cambridge no one can well leave out Oxford, for that is the only standard of comparison, and without a standard we must necessarily talk very much in the air. Mr. Tennyson says you can tell an Oxford man from a Cambridge man at sight. We are not so sure about that.. The present writer was once instructed in the theory of a Cambridge man who said, that he could always tell an Oxford man from a Cambridge man by his voice. He had come to the conclusion that the more discursive reading of an Oxford Greats man, and-his more familiar- Contact with

affairs, expressed itself in an intonation made up of con- fidence and a conscious equipment of culture. Conscious culture, it seemed, was denoted, among other things, by a slightly higher key than the ordinary. It is to be hoped that by this he did not mean the rather fluty voice of some intellectuals, which is a caricature at once of culture and good breeding. At all events this Cambridge man was brought to the test very soon, and at the first judgment as to whether a stranger was an Oxford or a Cambridge man he was wrong. However, Mr. Tennyson may be a much more discriminating judge.

But to turn to a comparison of the brooding spirits of Oxford and Cambridge in general terms. Mr. Tennyson says in a very fine passage:—

" For though Cambridge studies less philosophy than Oxford, though she stands not cramped in a steaming valley but in a wide Place swept and purged by every wind of heaven, yet she breeds more philosophy and a more passive spirit in her children. Her ancient houses dominate less nobly the streets of the surrounding city, about which they lie scattered behind discreet walls and modest gardens. The hand of restoration has been heavier upon her, the calls of science in all its branches have met with a readier response at her hands, as many a bleak laboratory and lecture- room bear witness. She draws her children, too, from a wider circle in which the great public school tradition plays a less important part. Yet, in spite of all this, Cambridge is less of the world than Oxford and more definitely of the past. Something perhaps is due to the vast spaces of the plain on the face of which our forefathers planted her. On that expanse where every molehill commands blue distances and pigmy man walks every hour beneath the complete vault of heaven witness of the whole compass of its interminable splendour, the mind's eye insensibly turns upward. In a land arched by the whole circuit of day's naked splendours, ringed by all the legionary fires of night, shadowed by the full concourse of flying tempests, lit from rim to rim with the flush of dawn and evening, her generations have grown to a certain breadth, a certain austerity of temper foreign to her more worldly rival, a temper with more reserve, with a power of enthusiasm keener if less sustained, less human perhaps and less responsive to the calls of practical life, but nearer in kinship to the winds and stars."

Oxford indeed is a mediaeval city and a diocese, and would be of exceptional interest even if there were no University ; but it happens that to this city a University is added. Cambridge is only a University; the town is an appendage, a kind of canteen for messes. Yet there is nothing at Oxford so prohibitive of all comparison as the river, bridges, and lawns comprehended under the title of "the Backs." One would have thought that the mellow woodland scenes within which Oxford is set would be rather the nurturing place of poets; the Cambridgeshire fens and flats the theatre of cold and clear thought untinged by mysticism or the luxuries of language. But fate ruled it the other way. What Matthew Arnold said about Oxford being the home of great movements and Cambridge that of great men is true even of the poets. Milton, Dryden, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, and Tennyson all belonged to Cambridge. The same thing is true even of the humorous poets. The most famous lines about Oxford are by a Cambridge man—of course we mean Wordsworth.

Mr. Tennyson is much too good a critic, however, to let the faults of Cambridge pass. Summarizing the good and the evil characteristics, he says :—

" Among the good we may count a certain independence and spiritual honesty, an idealism able to rise above the grosser forms of self-interest, an intellectual tolerance of everything except (one must admit the qualification) the lack of intelligence. In the evil must be reckoned a certain inhumanity among the intellectual, and an aimlessness, which comes of too diffuse a culture, unguided by intellectual prejudice or material ambition. One sees, too often, a man capable of brilliant things drifting into an obscure place in the Civil Service and (for want of any impulse to apply them to a definite purpose) going contentedly through a life which makes no call upon his full faculties—his mind too widely dispersed to allow of any active exercise of his capabilities. The same weakness appears in another form among the less gifted, who, not being strong enough for independence, often fail to achieve that concentration which comes most easily through a rigid adherence to conventional ideals and an unthinking devotion to common ambitions. An excessive diffusion is the fault of Cambridge, an excessive concentration that of Oxford. One sees the contrast in the very dress and habit of their children. Where Oxford is all briskness, polish, and activity, Cambridge is marked by a certain carelessness of demeanour, by slow move- ments, deliberate, though irregular, speech, and occasional freaks of manner, such as grow upon men who live alone. Even among the groat majority, who most approximate to a common type, there is a lack of common characteristics. The hand of the drill sergeant-is noticeably absent, and one observes a diversity of dress and manner, which denotes not so much a greater develop- meat of individuality as a less concentrated discipline of the corporate body."

We wish we had room to quote many pages from this most discerning and witty book. Cambridge men will enjoy the discussion of the social divisions in colleges—the exclusive and the excluded; of the changes in the prestige of colleges; of the relations, or rather absence of relations, between the men's colleges and the women's; of typical college societies and, above all, of the characters of dons. How utterly sub- versive of all prophecy is the chilly aloofness of the men's colleges from Newnham and Girton ! There was a time when Liddon crusaded against the establishment of women's colleges in a male community as being opposed to Christianity. Yet the predictions of distraction in the lecture-rooms and clan- destine meetings at the church door are exploded beyond the possibility of revival. Parallel lines "which never meet "have as much concern with each other as the men's and women's colleges. Intellectual rivalry in the examinations is a cause of separation, not of union, as the young man felt—though he, to be sure, was an Oxford man—who beguiled his too numerous unoccupied moments during a stiff examination by writing :-

"I've spent all my means on a crammer, And shall only get Beta or Gamma; But that girl over there with the flaming red hair

Will get Alpha Plus easily, damn her!"

The intensity of his probably well-deserved chagrin mast excuse alike the language and the Cockney rhyme. As for the vicissitudes of colleges, they would be a fine theme for the august reflections of a Bernard Burke. Mr. Tennyson writes of the rapid recovery of popularity by one college which the knowing will be able to identify as Magdalene. A well-known schoolmaster for Master, a popular wife, a well-known writer among the dons—it is a very interesting prescription for success. It used to be said that the place of a college in esteem depended on its plane on the river. Perhaps that was a myth invented to drive freemen to the galleys. At all events Magdalene in the days of eclipse maintained its position at the bottom of the river with clockwork regularity, and its chief distinction was its understanding of horseflesh. We seem to remember a limerick which was one of many indifferent experiments in the manufacture of "spelling rhymes "

"There was a boat captain of Magdalene,

On the river who always was dagdalene, But the Master, ho cried,

' If you don't hunt or tied, I'm hanged if we keep you at Magdalene.'"

The chapter entitled "An Evening Out of College" is a wholly delightful picture of one of the debates of an intel- lectual society which exists for the reading and discussion of papers. Everyone who has had experience of such evenings will recognize the vivid but essential truthfulness with which Mr. Tennyson describes the opening of the meeting, the reading of the paper, the reluctant opening of the discussion, the crescendo of argument, and the crash and tumult of the culminating debate. Let us quote only a very small part:— "The reader throws himself back in his chair with a sigh of relief like one mentally out of breath, and there is a murmur and a shuffle of chairs and feet and cushions round the room. Some- body gets up to fetch the tobacco jar, and there is a feu de joie of matches, while pipes, which have gone out during tho enforced inactivity of the last half hour, are lit again. Then silence falls. Its effect is strangely disconcerting. We are 'all just on the point of the most apposite remarks, the most searching questions, but this sudden dumbness stifles us. We forget what we were going to say. Silence continues. It becomes oppressive. We remember what we were going to say, but on reflection discover that it is not worth saying. Still silence. It is growing intolerable. Tho man who speaks now will deserve canonization. Our host, finding the agony insupportable, feebly asks if any one would like more coffee. We are too petrified to do more than shake our heads. Besides, our recollections of its chill and dilute stream are not such as to encourage us to renew our acquaintance with it. However, the interruption suffices to break the spell A preliminary gasp is heard from a thin metaphysician in the corner of the sofa. He leans forward, fixes the reader with a menacing eye and, after the gasp aforesaid (his remarks are always prefaced by a sound like an inexpert singer practising the coup de plate), says with a sort of cold obstinacy : What you mean is that,' etc., etc. As a matter of fact, the meta- physician always says this to the reader of every paper he listens to as soon as the paper is finished.. The remark almost always provokes a fury of disclaimer, and the present occasion is no exception to the general rule, for the statement is in truth wildly inconsistent with everything the paper contained."