The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses

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* (#ulink_d78d1dfb-6edb-5139-8683-591dee6f5819) Edward Eyre (1815–1901), Governor of Jamaica, put down riots by the black population in the island with great brutality: defended by Carlyle, prosecuted at the instigation of J. S. Mill, Huxley and Herbert Spencer.

CHAPTER FIVE The Don as Scholar – Frederic Maitland (#ulink_3fa5ec69-be6b-57ab-8a64-7f0186510fef)

Trinity is the greatest and grandest of all Cambridge colleges and in science the intellectual power-house of the university. It was the home of Newton and of those formidable classical scholars Bentley and Porson. But though Cambridge was spared the bitter divisions that split Oxford, it too became embroiled in similar political and religious controversy. By tradition Cambridge was a university of the Whigs, but in 1831, as the nation was rocked by the debates on the Reform Bill, the true sentiments of the dons became clear. The Whigs – a young Cavendish who had become second in the mathematical tripos, and young Palmerston – lost their seats in Parliament. The Master of Trinity, Christopher Wordsworth, deprived Connop Thirlwall, the outstanding young theologian of the day, of his assistant tutorship. Thirlwall had come out in favour of admitting Dissenters to Cambridge and had questioned the merit of compulsory attendance in chapel. Wordsworth did not stop there. He let it be known that, had he had the power to deprive Thirlwall of his fellowship, he would have done so. That was too much for the fellows of Trinity. They gave Wordsworth such a hard time that he found life in the Lodge as Master unendurable. But Wordsworth was not a man to give an inch to his enemies. He timed his resignation skilfully. The mastership of Trinity is a Crown appointment, and Wordsworth was determined that he should not be succeeded by the notable liberal and popular professor Adam Sedgwick. Watching the smoke signals from Westminster as keenly as any bushman, Wordsworth perceived that Melbourne’s administration was tottering and he waited until Peel formed a Tory government. Peel did not disappoint him. He nominated William Whewell as the next Master.

Whewell was a polymath. He introduced analysis into Cambridge mathematics after a visit to Germany, where he picked up crystallography and – after he had been appointed professor in the subject – mineralogy. A treatise on gothic architecture was tossed off, as was a work of considerable importance on the theory of tides and how they affected the British Isles. He was not an experimental scientist. He described science and became famous for a vast treatise on the history and philosophy of the inductive sciences. He had unbounded energy and boundless arrogance. Built like a prize-fighter, he was a bully. But he was not a die-hard and was generous on the rare occasions he suffered defeat. He bounced the university into accepting the Prince Consort as a candidate for the chancellorship, brought him home in a contested election and supported his plans for increasing the number of professorships. Whewell spoke in favour of establishing a natural and moral sciences tripos and put forward a not very practical plan for reforming the curriculum.

For intellectual distinction Trinity had a rival. Next door was St John’s, where Wordsworth found his sleep disturbed by Trinity’s loquacious clock and pealing organ where in the ante-chapel the statue stood

Of Newton with his prism and silent face

The marble index of a mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas thought, alone.

The Master of St John’s, William Bateson, was a more vigorous reformer than Whewell and considerably more genial. The Johnian mathematicians clocked up a record of successes in the tripos that surpassed even those of Trinity. The first chemistry laboratory in Cambridge was set up in St John’s under George Liveing; the moral science teachers included the economist Alfred Marshall; and skilled classicists from Shrewsbury School flocked there to be taught by a notable reformer, Heitland, and by T. E. Page, whose Latin texts for many years every schoolboy had to master. They were the successors of those whom William Wordsworth praised when he went there in 1787, ‘whose authority of Office serv’d, To set our minds on edge’. On the other hand the mathematicians at St John’s tended to be an unimaginative lot, the successors to Wordsworth’s

Men unscoured, grotesque

In character, tricked out like aged trees

Which, through the lapse of their infirmity

Give ready place to any random seed

That chuses to be rear’d upon their trunks.* (#litres_trial_promo)

Undergraduates studied either for a pass degree or for honours, i.e. the tripos. In the first half of the nineteenth century the pass men regarded the tutors as mere schoolmasters. They were rowdy. The reforming headmasters of the public schools got their boys under control by delegating the problem of discipline to housemasters and prefects and by promoting games. The tutors had no such resources. Their pupils were irritated by the intolerable numbers of petty university and college rules which may have been appropriate three centuries earlier when undergraduates were fifteen years old. To carry an umbrella while wearing cap and gown was an offence. So were pigeon-shooting, attendance at prize-fights, dinners in pubs – even, in one case, sporting a moustache. The college tutors were there to din into their heads the rudiments required for a pass degree – if they were in residence. It was said that you knew it was term-time in Cambridge if you saw Whewell, when he was tutor at Trinity, at the Athenaeum. Whewell knew none of his undergraduates: he argued that if he knew them he could not be an impartial examiner. He once rebuked his gyp (college servant) for not telling him when one of his pupils died.

The men reading for honours were equally dismissive of their tutors. Few of the 350 fellows taught them. If you sat for the mathematical or classical tripos you hired a coach (who had taken high honours in his time). He would charge you £7 or, if you settled for being taught once a day, £14 a term. The tutor was your enemy, fining or gating you for breaking a college rule. The coach was your friend. You paid him and his job was to get you as high a place as possible in the tripos list; in both classics and mathematics marks were awarded for each question and an exact order of merit was published in the class list. The coach would be an expert crammer adept at forecasting what the examiners might ask that year. He might even be a professor. Henslow, the professor of botany at Cambridge, was so ill-paid that he had to cram students for five to six hours a day. Undergraduates made their name by being classed senior Classic, or among the top Wranglers (i.e. mathematicians).

One of the obstacles to change was the existence of small colleges. Who was to teach new subjects such as science or history when the few fellows were able only to teach mathematics or classics? When the future historian G. G. Coulton came up to St Catharine’s in 1877 the senior tutor was such an inadequate teacher that Coulton paid to be taught classics by the junior tutor. The Dean was omniscient – that is to say he knew, if challenged on the spur of the moment, the price of a wooden leg and the added cost if it was tipped with brass. Five other fellows completed the list, three of whom were non-resident; and in order to keep out any younger man the old guard elected yet another non-resident in 1880.

There were, of course, a number of dons who were determined to bring about change. The impetus came from Trinity and St John’s. The reforming dons disliked the coaches because so long as they reigned supreme it was difficult to reform the tripos and bring into the classical curriculum philosophy, history and philology, or establish science as a separate tripos. The reformers finally undermined the coaches – though it took years to do so – not only by extending the curriculum but by abolishing the tradition of ranking candidates in the tripos results. The narrowness of the curriculum and the premium it put on memory as distinct from critical intelligence had been criticised outside more than inside the university. The Prince Consort let it be known where his sympathies lay, though he was careful not to suggest that German universities were superior to Cambridge in scholarship. When John Seeley gave his inaugural lecture, succeeding Charles Kingsley as Regius professor of history, he used the opportunity to criticise the narrowness of the classical curriculum and the pedantry of the great coach Richard Shilleto. It was this that drew from Hepworth Thompson, who had succeeded Whewell as Master of Trinity, the remark, ‘I never could have supposed that we should so soon regret the departure of poor Kingsley.’

Yet Thompson was one of those who did his share in reform. The statutes of all colleges were archaic, and when Lord John Russell’s commissioners appeared and numbers of colleges at first refused to cooperate, Whewell – despite reservations – was helpful. Twenty years later the junior fellows of Trinity again determined to revise the statutes and found themselves supported by Hepworth Thompson. Thompson had to keep reminding the fellows that the question was not how the statutes were to be reformed but how they were to be altered, that is to say redrafted to give effect to the changes the reformers wanted. It was at one of these interminable meetings that Thompson made his immortal dictum: ‘We are none of us infallible, not even the youngest.’ The revised statutes were passed to the Privy Council – which under Gladstone’s influence rejected them. Gladstone had a more comprehensive plan. He wanted to set up another Commission on Oxford and Cambridge, and the commissioners incorporated Thompson’s work into their recommendations.

Thompson was helped by three fellows in particular – Henry Jackson, Coutts Trotter and Henry Sidgwick. Coutts Trotter got the college to accept that candidates for fellowships should submit a dissertation; and that the tripos should not be considered as the sole guide to their intellectual promise. Henry Jackson became renowned as a great teacher and threw open his classes on Plato to the whole university. He was behind the removal of religious tests, the abolition of Greek as a requirement to enter the university, and he and Sidgwick supported the foundation of colleges for women. The third, Henry Sidgwick, was the outstanding utilitarian philosopher in the tradition of Mill. It was he who invited Michael Foster to teach physiology and become the first professor in the subject; and it was he who taught Frederic Maitland, who won a first in philosophy.

Trinity was the nest of Cambridge’s philosophers: of the Idealist M’Taggart, then of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and later of Wittgenstein – and also of the notably less original C. D. Broad. In history both G. M. Trevelyan and Steven Runciman* (#litres_trial_promo) were able as men with independent means to retire from Trinity when young to devote themselves to research and writing. But Trevelyan returned in 1926 as Regius professor of modern history and in 1940 accepted at Churchill’s insistence another Crown appointment, the mastership of Trinity.

The most famous scholar in classics was a Trinity don: Housman believed that the first duty of a classicist was to apply himself to textual criticism. He despised those who tried to explain why Greek and Latin poetry were so moving. Yet he was profoundly moved by poetry; and on one occasion he let the mask of rigid fidelity to textual criticism slip and at the end of a lecture on Horace he read his translation of what he considered the most poignant of all the odes, ‘Diffugere nives’. He refused to allow his name to go forward for a higher degree of Doctor of Letters on the grounds that he was not the equal in textual criticism of those Trinity scholars, Bentley and Porson. (As a result no other classical don dared put in for the degree.) His austerity, his determination to nil admirari became a tradition in Trinity. Andrew Gow, a classical scholar in the Housman tradition, was a friend to numbers of undergraduates, particularly if they were interested in painting. His colleague Gaillard Lapsley, the American-born medieval historian, asked Gow to look at a painting by Allan Ramsay he had bought and waited on tenterhooks for the connoisseur’s judgement. ‘Not a very good Allan Ramsay, is it?’ Pause. ‘But then Allan Ramsay wasn’t a very good painter, was he?’ When Housman deigned to review a fellow of Trinity’s history of Louis Napoleon and admitted that some of the epigrams hit the nail on the head, he could not resist adding, ‘the slang with which Mr Simpson now and then defiles his pen is probably slang he learnt in his cradle and believed in his innocence to be English: “a settlement of sorts for example …”’