THE MAY TERM IN CAMBRIDGE
Communication
[To the Editor of TIIE SPECTATOR.]
Sra,—The May term in Cambridge is one of concentration. The energy of the undergraduate, usually scattered mer a vast field, is directed with intensity on his books, through which looms the alarming figure of Tripos, growing daily nearer and therefore daily more alarming. Other pursuits are neglected. Intellectual societies lie dormant, and even the drama languishes. So that your correspondent, anxious to give an account of the activities and *life of the term, finds himself at a loss. For it would hardly make reading of general interest to give what are the most relevant facts of the term, namely, the number of hours' work done by different people for different examinations.
After this defensive prelude, however, it must be admitted that things have happened in fields other than the purely intellectual. Polities, for instance, have not been wholly neglected, and the Union has continued its left-wing career. Less .spectacular, perhaps,. in its motions and divisions than its Oxford equivalent, it is nevertheless consistent in its outlook. It still has a socialist majority on the Committee, and who knows whether it may not within a few terms have a communist president ? At the debates of the present term it has condemned rearmament and British Imperialism in India, and it has elected Haile Selassie an honorary member. All of which shows that its heart is in the right place, and apparently rather solidly fixed there.
Curiously enough the other scene of political activity in Cambridge this term has been King's Chapel. Its entry into politics was sudden and surreptitious ; its career short, but highly coloured. For a few hours on April 26th, its pinnacles were adorned with the Union Jack and the Ethiopian flag, between which stretched a banner with the device : "Save Ethiopia." Only the omniscient Crania has been able to solve the mystery of this decoration, and its account of the matter is so veiled that we have to take it on trust that it really knows the names and motives of the brave men who, in spite of a gale, scorning, apparently, the help of lightning-conductors, achieved this remarkable climb.
Cambridge, however, is not content with disfiguring its older buildings. It has recently put up a series of new buildings which are disfigurements in themselves. Trinity Hall has contrived to put up a small building which clashes, both in material and styles, with all its neighbours. I say styles because it would be difficult to refer to such a mixture in the singular. However, in the matter of architectural hotch-potch, the new building at Queens' beats all records. The tragedy is that this was one of the few occasions when sonic audacity would have been possible. The building, being across the river, can be considered in almost complete in- dependence of the older part of the college, from which it is veiled by trees, and the architect could therefore have risked some modernity without at the same time creating a dangerous clash with existing work. He could, here, have been free from that respect for traditional university style which kills almost all attempt at architectural inventiveness in Cambridge. But instead he has preferred to compose an anthology of banalities. The style, you would say at first sight, is roughly Tudor, with high-pitched roof and gables. But the windows are in a style only known, I think, in the '80's, with wooden frames, rectangular in outline but suddenly bursting into round heads for the functioning parts. And why, pray, is there a parapet round one tenth of the roof, making that section into a pseudo-Queen-Anne creation ? And what is the purpose of that remotely neo-Assyrian-via-Scott tower in the middle ? And, above all, • who can have allowed that deliberate tilting of the roof-ridge as it approaches the gable— a picturesque device which would have delighted the Prince Consort in one of his Nuremberg moods ?
In what humility admits to be the right sequence, Cam- bridge, after Oxford and London, has been honoured by the exhibition of recent painting and sculpture organised by Mrs. Gray under the title Abstract and Concrete. The Exhibition will undoubtedly be a success in Cambridge. People here are always prepared to look at anything at all novel, . and this particular exhibition has exactly the right kind of snob value for Cambridge : the paintings are difficult at first sight, not very wide in their appeal. and an admiration for thein is an assertion of intellectual chastity which will satisfy the prig lurking in every highbrow. The prig in me compels me to say that some people's enjoyment of the exhibition will be spoilt by the fact that it represents a movement which reached its height before the NVar and lost all vitality at least ten years ago.
Of the other arts music and the drams have been kept alive mainly by the infusion of foreign blood. The Arts Theatre has given a distinguished programme of which
much the Most important item Was the first performance of Vaughan Williams' opera, The Poisoned Kiss. NVorking on a
libretto which sometimes fell in wit to the level of an under- graduate comic paper, the composer, by taking his theme seriously, produced a work which completely captured the imagination and could even make the audience forget or ignore the elephantine caperings of gnomes or lilm?ttist. Those who were lucky heard the opera, at the matincle, conducted by the composer. But local dramatic talent will reassert itself in post-tripos mood next week. Mr. Hylands, having pro- duced all the plays of Shakespeare worth producing, is turning to lighter material and will produce the revue of the Footlights Dramatic Club. The more se s aspects of the drains will be represented when Samson Ago»istes is given next week in the Miltonic 17th-century setting of the Fellows' Garden in Christ's.
The last official event of the term will be the conferring of Honorary Degrees on June 9th, particularly associated with the opening of yet another new wing of the Fitzwillium Museum, which will take place on the same day. Under the directorship of Sir Sydney Cockerell we have conic more or less to expect a new wing of the Fitzwilliam to be opened each year, and this one, though smaller than some of its predeces- sors, will be a valuable addition to the Museum. It will contain a large gallery for armour, two smaller ones devoted to metal work and prints, and yet another at present filled with important loans, including Flemish tapestries and two of Gainsborough's most celebrated works.
The University in general and Trinity in particular have sustained this term one loss of which to say that it is irrepar- able seems feeble. A. E. Housman occupied in Cambridge a position unique in many different ways. Critics may haggle about whether he is a great poet or a good poet ; they may, and at the present moment actually do, argue, more irrele- vantly, whether he is a classical or a romantic poet, and in this process they may even suggest that he is often a bad poet. But even his extreme opponents have not attempted to deny that he was a very important poet. In scholarship his posit' is even more firmly established, and in that field the voice of denigration will only be the voice of the crushed textual emendator taking a late revenge. The conversation at the High Table of Trinity will hardly be changed in quantity by his absence, but it will be immeasurably lowered in quality.
Finally, as a part of the machine commented on so severely in your leading article, " The Future of the Universities," some weeks ago, may I say a word of approval and endorsement of the views expressed by your author ? Many people in -Cambridge itself are aware of the futility at the present time of regarding the University simply as a place for turning out English gentlemen with general culture and no training for anything, but it is always salutary to hear a challenge to the traditional view that the Universities are the world in minia- ture and that they provide the right transition from school to practical and active life. They seem, if anything, only to prolong as far as possible the view that life's a game and that there's nothing more to it. True, in many ways the t 'niversity already provides more serious kinds of educat ion, but steps in
that direction arc always hindered by the ghost of gentlemanli- ness, the refu.sal to learn anything from what are condescend- ingly referred to as the younger universities, and to some extent the tyranny of the classics which, though broken, is not quite destroyed.---I am, Sir, &e., • YOUR CAMBRIDGE Coast IPONDENT.
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