literature's purple draught; one hears there a peculiar thin scandal
like no other scandal in the world-a covetous scandal-so that Iam
always reminded of Ibsen in Cambridge. In Cambridge and the plays
of Ibsen alone does it seem appropriate for the heroine before the
great crisis of life to "enter, take off her overshoes, and put her
wet umbrella upon the writing desk."…
We have to make a new Academic mind for modern needs, and the last
thing to make it out of, Iam convinced, is the old Academic mind.
One might as soon try to fake the old VICTORY at Portsmouth into a
line of battleship again. Besides which the old Academic mind, like
those old bathless, damp Gothic colleges, is much too delightful in
its peculiar and distinctive way to damage by futile patching.
My heart warms to a sense of affectionate absurdity as I recall dear
old Codger, surely the most "unleaderly" of men. No more than from
the old Schoolmen, his kindred, could one get from him a School for
Princes. Yet apart from his teaching he was as curious and adorable
as a good Netsuke. Until quite recently he was a power in
Cambridge, he could make and bar and destroy, and in a way he has
become the quintessence of Cambridge in my thoughts.
I see him on his way to the morning's lecture, with his plump
childish face, his round innocent eyes, his absurdly non-prehensile
fat hand carrying his cap, his grey trousers braced up much too
high, his feet a trifle inturned, and going across the great court
with a queer tripping pace that seemed cultivated even to my naive
undergraduate eye. Or I see him lecturing. He lectured walking up
and down between the desks, talking in a fluting rapid voice, and
with the utmost lucidity. If he could not walk up and down he could
not lecture. His mind and voice had precisely the fluid quality of
some clear subtle liquid; one felt it could flow round anything and
overcome nothing. And its nimble eddies were wonderful! Or again I
recall him drinking port with little muscular movements in his neck
and cheek and chin and his brows knit-very judicial, very
concentrated, preparing to say the apt just thing; it was the last
thing he would have told a lie about.
When I think of Codger Iam reminded of an inscription I saw on some
occasion in Regent's Park above two eyes scarcely more limpidly
innocent than his-"Born in the Menagerie." Never once since Codger
began to display the early promise of scholarship at the age of
eight or more, had he been outside the bars. His utmost travel had
been to lecture here and lecture there. His student phase had
culminated in papers of quite exceptional brilliance, and he had
gone on to lecture with a cheerful combination of wit and mannerism
that had made him a success from the beginning. He has lectured
ever since. He lectures still. Year by year he has become plumper,
more rubicund and more and more of an item for the intelligent
visitor to see. Even in my time he was pointed out to people as
part of our innumerable enrichments, and obviously he knew it. He
has become now almost the leading Character in a little donnish
world of much too intensely appreciated Characters.
He boasted he took no exercise, and also of his knowledge of port
wine. Of other wines he confessed quite frankly he had no "special
knowledge." Beyond these things he had little pride except that he
claimed to have read every novel by a woman writer that had ever
entered the Union Library. This, however, he held to be remarkable
rather than ennobling, and such boasts as he made of it were tinged
with playfulness. Certainly he had a scholar's knowledge of the
works of Miss Marie Corelli, Miss Braddon, Miss Elizabeth Glyn and
Madame Sarah Grand that would have astonished and flattered those
ladies enormously, and he loved nothing so much in his hours of
relaxation as to propound and answer difficult questions upon their
books. Tusher of King's was his ineffectual rival in this field,
their bouts were memorable and rarely other than glorious for
Codger; but then Tusher spread himself too much, he also undertook
to rehearse whole pages out of Bradshaw, and tell you with all the
changes how to get from any station to any station in Great Britain
by the nearest and cheapest routes…
Codger lodged with a little deaf innocent old lady, Mrs. Araminta
Mergle, who was understood to be herself a very redoubtable
Character in the Gyp-Bedder class; about her he relatedquietly
absurd anecdotes. He displayed a marvellous invention in ascribing
to her plausible expressions of opinion entirely identical in import
with those of the Oxford and Harvard Pragmatists, against whom he
waged a fierce obscure war…
It was Codger's function to teach me philosophy, philosophy! the
intimate wisdom of things. He dealt in a variety of Hegelian stuff
like nothing else in the world, but marvellously consistent with
itself. It was a wonderful web he spun out of that queer big active
childish brain that had never lusted nor