Communication
A Letter from Cambridge
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,—The tempo of change must be slower in Cambridge than in almost any other town in England. In many ways we are only a hundred years behind the times—as, for instance, in having no railway within a mile or two of the town. In other respects we live in a far more remote period ; mediaeval in our dress, we are mediaeval in our system of teaching : witness the survival of that most useless of all methods of instruction, the spoken lecture ; and many of us are Scholastic in our modes of thought, but generally without the divine insight of St. Thomas.
However, changes do occur in Cambridge, more rapidly perhaps in the body than in the soul of the place. In fact, the face of the town may be said to have been considerably rejuvenated during the last few yeari. The building scheme which Caius are at present putting into execution has involved the demolition of a. charming block of eighteenth-century houses on the north side of the Market Place, and the erection in their place of a more capacious building, which even in its skeleton forni dominates the neighbourhood. Kings have completed a less pretentious alteration, in which, however, they must be given the credit for crowding more conflicting archi- tectural. styles into a small space than. anyone since Horace Walpole. .Their serious work in construction is taking place outside the college on a_ site.between Peas Hill and St. Edward's Passage. : This scheme .will shortly force from his well-known lair that great benefactor to learning, David, whose book-shop is to vanish in the destruction, to reappear, in greater glory we hope, a few yards further down the passage. Some of his older customers have been shocked to find him so far yielding to modern. commercial methods as to advertise a " Great Re- building Sale," which, however, deceived. no one, since it is well known .that if David's prices were lowered a jot they would land him in dead loss.
But the object of all this demolition is good. The hostel for King's men to be built on the site will be of advantage principally to the College, but the whole University and town will benefit from the theatre which will stand next to it. For this is to be such a theatre as Cambridge has never had, no mere repertory theatre, nor a home from home for secondary companies touring the provinces, but a theatre of character, in which opera and ballet will alternate with only the highest dramatic productions. It is rumoured that the Ballets Jooss will be among the first visitors, and that Mrs. Keynes may once more be seen there in The Doll's House. It is even promised, though this we find it harder to • believe, that there will be a worthy restaurant attached to the theatre, and that at last Cambridge will have some opportunity of satisfying its stomach otherwise than. in obsolete clubs and refined testsliops. In the afternoons the theatre will transform itself into a' cinema, and in it will be shown that kind of good and 'generally foreign film with which Mr. Higgins has for some tirne 'past been supplying Cambridge at the Ccis- inopotitan Cinema.
The new theatre has apparently succeeded in taking the- cinema to its bosom, but its advances have met with a plain rebuff from the Amateur Dramatic Club. Having had its stage destroyed by a fire and its auditorium swept away by the .water, aimed at the extinction of this fire, the A.D.C. has rejected the hospitality offered to it by the promoters of the new theatre and has preferred to rebuild on its own site and in greatly improved form. It marked its return to life early this term by the production of a play by David Minlore, entitled The Invisible Barrier. The fact that this play was chosen not for its merits but .because it has an entirely male cast has some bearing on that eternal Cambridge problem, whether women shall be allowed to take part in University dramatic performances. This play seemed a strong argument in favour of their inclusion, the effect of which was somewhat decreased by the next pro- duction of the term, Thirteen at Dinner, a 'play by Romer Maugham, acted by an independent and ,mixed _vast, which was an almost equally strong argument against their inelusipn,
However, the whole question seems at last to be settled, since the A.D.C., following belatedly the lead of the Footlights and Marlowe Societies, has decided this week that in future women shall be alloWed to take part in its performances. With this falls the last resistance of• Cambridge drama to the attacks of woman, and the High. Table of Trinity is left in almost complete isolation as the stronghold of anti- feminism.
Drama is always the art to which most practical attention is paid in Cambridge, if only because of the personal vanity, of the undergraduate, but the others have not been wholly neglected. A small exhibition of Soviet art, organized by the Art Society, was instructive, but led one to hope that Russian artists would soon emerge from the tiresome period of merely producing bad imitations of traditional bourgeois styles. In music, Horowitz gave a recital early in the term, and Beecham is billed for next week. Literature was honoured at the Pepys dinner given last week by Magdalene, at which the new discoveries of Pepys manuscripts in the College library were' officially announced to the world. Literature also occupies some space in a new journal that has burst upon us this term, called Apes and Angles, but it is characteristic of the present temper of Cambridge that even a paper like this is forced to . devote its principal energy to politics. In fact, politics now occupy the minds of the intellectuals here as completely as the arts occupied them seven or eight years ago. The most significant feature of the term has been the sudden outburst: of peace societies, all claiming to be rim on non-party, and particularly on non-Communist lines. •It is perhaps relevant. that the only comparable crop of such societies was produced in the years 1910 to 1914. The situation of the various parties in Cambridge has been changed to some extent by the formation of a Labour Club to satisfy the tastes of those who found the Socialist Society too far to the left in its opinions, The new club does not seem to have perceptibly weakened the Socialist Society. The official event of the term has been the returning to Parliament of Mr. Pickthorn, tutor of Corpus, as member for the University in place of Mr. Wilson, Master of Clare, who is retiring from his seat. The day is. we imagine, remote when a non-Conservative member will be elected by the University, but it is possible to hope that there should at any rate be a contest at the next general election.
Some interesting research is being carried out on the reactionary opinions of dons, in particular in the case of war. Remarkable statements have been extracted from War-time speeches and sermons which, when published in pamphlet form, should present the University in a singular light. It is interesting to recollect Professor Ridgeway's action in preventing a member of Newnham from attending his lectures on the ground that she was a member of a pacifist organization, the Union of Democratic Control. Nor should Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's lecture on " Patriotism and Literature " be forgotten, in which he attacked the Germans for their inability to understand our literature, and of which the last part, as summarized by the Cambridge Magazine, reads : " There can be only one way of exorcizing this menace of dusty historicism —the sword in the hand of the young, who will see to it that the tumour is cleanly lanced."—I am, Sir, &c.,
YOUR CAMBRIDGE CORRESPONDENT.
[A letter from Oxford will be published next week.]
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