Present Concerns Page 8
This, by the by, is the most important of all facts about literature. There never was a falser maxim than ut pictura poesis. We are sometimes told that everything in the word can come into literature. This is perhaps true in some sense. But it is a dangerous truth unless we balance it with the statement that nothing can go into literature except words, or (if you prefer) that nothing can go in except by becoming words. And words, like every other medium, have their own proper powers and limitations. (They are, for instance, all but impotent when it comes to describing even the simplest machines. Who could, in words, explain what a screw, or a pair of scissors, is like?)
One of these limitations is that the common names (as distinct from the childish, archaic, or scientific names) for certain things are ‘obscene’ words. It is the words, not the things, that are obscene. That is, they are words long consecrated (or desecrated) to insult, derision, and buffoonery. You cannot use them without bringing in the whole atmosphere of the slum, the barrack-room, and the public school.
It may of course be said that this state of affairs—this lack of any neutral and straightforward words for certain things—is itself the result of precious prudery. Not, to be sure, of ‘Victorian’ or ‘Puritan’ prudery, as the ignorant say, but of a prudery certainly pre-Christian and probably primeval. (Quintilian on the ‘indecencies’ which his contemporaries found in Virgil is an eye-opener; no Victorian was ever so pruriently proper.) The modern writer, if he wishes to introduce into serious writing (comic works are a different matter) a total liberty for the pen such as has nearly always been allowed to the pencil, is in fact taking on a much more formidable adversary than a local (and, we may hope, temporary) state of English law. He is attempting to rip up the whole fabric of the mind. I do not say that success is impossible, still less that the attempt is perverse. But before we commit ourselves to so gigantic an enterprise, two questions seem to be worth asking.
First, is it worth it? Have good writers not better things to do? For of course the present state of the law, and (what is less easily utterable) of taste, cannot really prevent any writer worth his salt from saying, in effect, whatever he wants to say. I should insult the technical proficiency of our contemporaries if I supposed them so little masters of the medium as to be unable, whatever their theme, to evade the law. Many perhaps would feel such evasion to be disgraceful. Yet why? The contemporary state of sensibility is surely, like the language, part of the author’s raw material. Evasion (I admit the word has a shabby sound) need not really be less creditable than the ‘turning’ of any other difficulty which one’s medium presents. Great work can be done in a difficult metre; why not also under difficult restraints of another kind? When authors rail too much (we may allow them to rail a little) against public taste, do they perhaps betray some insufficiency? They denigrate what they ought rather to use and finally transform by first obeying.
Secondly, do we not stand to lose more than we gain? For of course to remove all ‘prudery’ is to remove one area of vivid sensibility, to expunge a human feeling. There are quite enough etiolated, inert, neutral words knocking about already: do we want to increase their number? A strict moralist might possibly argue that the old human reticence about some of our bodily functions has bred such mystery and prurience (‘It is impossible’, said the girl in Shaw, ‘to explain decency without being indecent’) that it cannot be abolished too soon. But would the strict moralist be right? Has nothing good come out of it? It is the parent of three-quarters of the world’s jokes. Remove the standard of decency in the written word, and one of two results must follow. Either you can never laugh again at most of Aristophanes, Chaucer, or Rabelais, the joke having partly depended on the fact that what is mentioned is unmentionable, or, horrid thought, the oral fableau as we have all heard it in taproom (not by any means always vile or prurient, but often full of true humour and traditional art) will be replaced and killed by written, professional fableaux: just as the parlour games we played for ourselves fifty years ago are now played for us by professionals ‘on the air’. The smoking-room story is, I grant, the last and least of the folk-arts. But it is the only one we have left. Should not writers be willing to preserve it at the cost of a slight restraint on their own vocabulary?
XVII
INTERIM REPORT
[This was the first of a series of articles in The Cambridge Review comparing Oxford and Cambridge, by authors who had seen something of both universities. From 1925 to 1954 Lewis had been the Tutor in English Language and Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford. Besides tutorials he had also to give university lectures. In January 1955 Lewis began his duties (lectures, but no tutorials) at Cambridge as the Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature. This professorial Chair is attached to Magdalene College, Cambridge.]
The great difficulty in comparing my new university with my old is of course that of distinguishing differences between the universities as such from differences between my own life at the one and at the other. My change of allegiance has coincided with change of status. At Oxford I was a busy college teacher; here I am chair-borne. This is an overwhelming change and tends to obliterate every other. Add to this the rejuvenation which any new way of life and any new landscape ordinarily bring to a man in his fifties. These are factors which inevitably distort my vision.
I fly first, therefore, to what is simple, external, and certainly objective. The first and most obvious thing about Cambridge is a glorious negation: we have no Lord Nuffield here.1 All said and done, we are still a country town. The relief, the liberation, strike me afresh almost every day. In a way it is an eerie relief, for I seem to have recovered the past. Modern Oxford has been not unjustly described as ‘the Latin Quarter of Cowley’; Cambridge is very much more like the Oxford I first knew. And here, perhaps, another factor comes in. I was bred at a small college in Oxford; I am now, most gratefully and happily, domiciled in a small college at Cambridge. In between stretch the years in bustling Magdalen, so that this change also makes me feel as if I had been with Aeson in the cauldron. If I were to judge Cambridge and Oxford simply by Magdalen and Magdalene, I should be inclined to say that all I had ever heard of both universities was true except that the descriptions had somehow got interchanged; that Oxford was progressive, revolutionary, practical, and Cambridge stately, gentle, indulgent, and traditional; that here, not there, we find the last enchantments of the Middle Ages. This would no doubt be too hasty a generalisation. Yet there is some truth in it. Cambridge is more gorgeous. One wears a white tie more often; the feasts are more splendid.
Turning to less ponderable and more important things, I again meet a negation. To me, one of the oddest things about Cambridge is the absence of the philosopher. Of course there have been and are great Cambridge philosophers; indeed contemporary Oxonian philosophy largely represents a successful invasion from Cambridge. But this is apparently quite consistent with the absence of the philosopher. I hardly ever meet a philosopher here. What is even more important, when he is physically absent he does not, as at Oxford, continue to dominate the scene virtually and spiritually. You can talk to Cambridge dons for a whole evening without once hearing the word quâ. You can even meet unmistakable classical scholars who don’t assume the Republic and the Ethics2 as common ground; who behave for all the world as if these (the left and right lung of Oxford humanism) were just two classical texts like any others. It is shocking and refreshing (I never, myself, thought the Republic quite deserved its Oxonian status). Later I discovered that there is something at Cambridge which fills the same place philosophy filled at Oxford; a discipline which overflows the faculty of its birth and percolates through all the others and about which the freshman must pick up something if he means to be anybody. This is Literary Criticism (with the largest possible capitals for both words). You were never safe from the philosopher at Oxford; here, never from the Critic.
Everyone asks me what I think about religion at the two universities, so I suppose I must now say something of t
his subject. As it happens, I have formed a very definite and a very strange impression which may well, as I fully recognise, be premature. I give it for what it may be worth. On the one hand, I think the percentage both of dons and of undergraduates who accept, or even practise, some kind of Christianity is higher at Cambridge than at Oxford. It would be less safe here than there to assume that any man you happened to be talking to was an unbeliever. On the other hand, when unbelief does occur here it seems to be incomparably more militant, more self-conscious, more organised, more interested (even excited) than at Oxford. Over there I know scores of people who did not believe in the existence of God. But they were no more on their toes about it than about their disbelief in leprechauns or flying saucers. The subject hardly ever came up. Their scepticism was relaxed, unemphatic, taken for granted. I doubt if you could there have founded a society or ‘Movement’ based on agreement in that single negative proposition. If I am right in thinking that atheists are more numerous at Oxford, this might of course explain their attitude; they are strong enough to be careless. But I don’t feel that this is the whole truth. I can’t help thinking that Oxford scepticism and Cambridge scepticism have different genealogies. I suspect that the Oxonian unbeliever is the son of a privately unbelieving, externally conforming, nineteenth-century member of the Church of England; his grandfather was possibly an archdeacon. Behind his counterpart at Cambridge I suspect a Unitarian, beyond him a dissenter, then a Cromwellian, and finally a Puritan of Cartwright’s stamp.3 He broods (more ambivalently than he suspects) on persecution—‘stern to inflict and stubborn to endure’. He is (very properly) much concerned about freedom. He is a keen anti-clerical. Sometimes he seems really to believe that Laud or Mary4 might at any moment turn up again. To a newcomer from Oxford it is at first a little embarrassing; yet after all, in its way, rather admirable. If ever all this zeal could be directed against those who now really endanger our liberties, it would be of high value. Meanwhile I prefer the fierce to the flippant, who used to be (but is less so now) the characteristically Oxonian plague. For there is a bottomless urbanity that can be very boring.
In ‘the manners’ as our ancestors would have said—the social climate—I think I begin to discern some differences. But it would be quite misleading to describe these unless I said first, and with all possible emphasis, that they are, on a wide view, infinitesimal. Five minutes’ talk with anyone from Redbrick, or from an American or Continental university, will usually make it quite clear that Cambridge and Oxford are far more like one another than either is like anything else in the world. Only an eye long familiar with both could see any difference at all; they are like twins whom only their fond parents can tell apart. This is proved by the fact that I now hear told of famous Cambridge ‘characters’ some of the very same stories I used to hear told of famous Oxford ‘characters’; perhaps with equal falsehood, but clearly with equal plausibility, or both. And then there are the characters I have actually met, the ‘aged and great’ dons—crusty, fruity, ‘humourists’ (in the old sense), fathomlessly learned, and amidst all their kindness (there’s no perfect dish without some sharpness) merciless leg-pullers. This was what I feared I might lose by my migration. I must apologise for my fear; yet what Cambridge man, migrating in the opposite direction, would not have felt it too? It has proved gloriously false; quod quaeritis hic est,5 the pure, cool Oxbridge, the fine flower of humane studies, the thing England has done supremely well.
After the great likeness, the small differences. I think (but this may be accidental and illusory) that the Oxford don, whether in fact married or single, lives more en garçon than the Cambridge. You can meet him for a long time in pubs and at High Tables before you are asked to his house. (I have known young foreigners at Oxford who were puzzled and hurt by this.) Oxford has no University Combination Room. Until quite lately—I think I may claim some tiny share in breaking down the tradition—it was unlikely you would meet your female colleagues anywhere except at the Board of the Faculty or at a full dress dinner party. In undergraduate life I think the Junior Common Room counts for more than the Junior Combination Room; but this may vary from college to college.
Of course, not all the similarities between the two universities are desirable ones. I left behind me two evils (or such I think them) at Oxford which I meet again here.
The first needs to be handled with some delicacy, perhaps with more delicacy than I possess, but it is too grave to be passed over in silence. At both places the majority of undergraduates seem to me to be very nice people; much nicer than the pre-1914 vintage as depicted by Sir Compton Mackenzie.6 But at both there is a minority of unhappy young men really very like the ‘malcontents’ who provide villains for Jacobean drama. They seem to have some grudge or grievance; tense, tight-lipped, hot-eyed, beatle-browed boys, with cheeks as drab, but not so smooth, as putty. They are rude, not with the forgivable gaucherie of inexperienced youth (I hate an oldster who is querulous about that; we have all been cubs in our time) but, as it seems, on principle; in the cause of ‘integrity’ or some other equally detestable virtue. They matter for two reasons. First, they raise a fear that there may be something wrong about our method of intake, or its quantity (academic overproduction is possibly a real danger) or the structure of the educational ladder—in itself an admirable thing. Secondly, I fear that if this type continues it will in the next thirty years prove an extremely disastrous element in our national life. These are future schoolmasters and journalists or, worse still, unemployables with degrees. They could do great harm.
The other evil (in my view) is the incubus of ‘Research’. The system was, I believe, first devised to attract the Americans and to emulate the scientists. But the wisest Americans are themselves already sick of it; as one of them said to me, ‘I guess we got to come to giving every citizen a Ph. D. shortly after birth, same as baptism and vaccination.’ And it is surely clear by now that the needs of the humanities are different from those of the sciences. In science, I gather, a young student fresh from his First in the Tripos can really share in the work of one of his seniors in a way that is useful to himself and even to the subject. But this is not true of the man who has just got his First in English or Modern Languages. Such a man, far from being able or anxious (he is by definition no fool) to add to the sum of human knowledge, wants to acquire a good deal more of the knowledge we already have. He has lately begun to discover how many more things he needs to know in order to follow up his budding interests; that he needs economics, or theology, or philosophy, or archaeology (and always a few more languages). To head him off from these studies, to pinfold him in some small inquiry whose chief claim often is that no one has ever made it before, is cruel and frustrating. It wastes such years as he will never have again; for an old proverb says that ‘All the speed is in the morning’. What keeps the system going is the fact that it becomes increasingly difficult to get an academic job without a ‘research degree’. Can the two ancient universities do anything by combining to break down this bad usage?
There are other things . . . but I call to mind Stevenson’s twelfth Fable. It ends, you remember, ‘They buried the stranger at the dusk.’
XVIII
IS HISTORY BUNK?
The historical impulse—curiosity about what men thought, did, and suffered in the past—though not universal, seems to be permanent. Different justifications have been found for the works which gratify it. A very simple one is that offered in Barbour’s Bruce;1 exciting stories are in any case ‘delitabill’ and if they happen to be true as well then we shall get a ‘doubill pleasance’. More often graver motives are put forward. History is defended as instructive or exemplary: either ethically (the lasting fame or infamy which historians confer upon the dead will teach us to mind our morals) or politically (by seeing how national disasters were brought on in the past we may learn how to avoid them in the future).
As the study of history develops and becomes more like a science these justifications are less confidently
advanced. Modern historians are not so ready to classify kings as ‘good’ and ‘bad’. The lessons to be learned by statesmen from past errors become less obvious the more we know. The uniqueness of every historical situation stands out more clearly. In the end most of those who care about history find it safer and franker to admit that they are seeking knowledge of the past (as other men seek knowledge of the nebulae) for its own sake; that they are gratifying a ‘liberal’ curiosity.
The conception of a ‘liberal’ curiosity and of the ‘liberal’ studies which exist to satisfy it is one we owe to Aristotle. ‘We call a man free whose life is lived for his own sake, not for that of others. In the same way philosophy is of all studies the only free one: because it alone exists for its own sake’ (Metaphysics 982b). Of course philosophy does not here mean, as now, the rump or residuum left by the specialisation of the various sciences. And perhaps Aristotle would not, in any case, have allowed the word to cover history (cf. Poetics 1451b). That hardly matters. In his conception of a study pursued not for some end beyond itself but for its own sake he has provided most of the activities we carry on at universities with their charter.
Of course this conception (Aristotle meant it only for freemen) has always been baffling and repellent to certain minds. There will always be people who think that any more astronomy than a ship’s officer needs for navigation is a waste of time. There will always be those who, on discovering that history cannot really be turned to much practical account, will pronounce history to be Bunk. Aristotle would have called this servile or banausic; we, more civilly, may christen it Fordism.