Wisdom from the Ivory Tower

Several years ago, when I was a research student at Oxford, I was invited to a celebratory dinner at one of the university’s most venerable and academic colleges. As is sometimes the way with these affairs, guests were shifted around between courses, presumably in the hope that no diner should be stuck with anybody too dreadful for the entirety of their evening. A noble objective, in a way, but I have never been keen on the arrangement. It seems to graft on to an event that is already likely to be at least slightly awkward a mechanism for guaranteeing an experience in which awkwardness is destined to be king ‒ at least until the drink on offer has taken effect. On this occasion, however, I was glad of the custom. Each of my companions was pleasant and convivial; each seemed to recognize intuitively the most effective moment at which to ask rhetorically ‒ and only slightly too loudly ‒ whether we had run out of wine. And one fellow guest (who proved himself a master of that rhetorical question) had a conversation with me for which I am still grateful today.

He was a charming old don of a particular but familiar kind: direct yet gentle (‘I’m going to introduce myself now’); well-to-do but not pompous. He had pulled off the trick of contracting his quintuple-barrelled name to something like ‘Bill’, yet spoke so aristocratically that he had almost managed to reduce his pronunciation of ‘Thackeray’ to a single syllable. During the course of our conversation, he told me a story about the attempt in the late nineteenth century to establish an Anglo-Saxon-based school of English at the university. It was an initiative to which there was much opposition. The example ‘Bill’ gave, which he relayed with a gravity to rival that of Churchill in his wartime broadcasts, was offered by the moral philosopher Thomas Case. Admit the study of Anglo-Saxon to Oxford, said Case, ‘and an English School will grow up, nourishing our language not from the humanity of the Greeks and Romans, but from the savagery of the Goths and Anglo-Saxons. We are about to reverse the Renaissance.’ I love this story. The academic overreaction ‒ the assumption that what is going on with Oxford English is of hemispherical significance ‒ is both absurd and amusing, endearing and instructive. It contains, as I said to ‘Bill’ at the time, something of what I both like and dislike about academic life. ‘But remember, of course, that Case was serious,’ cautioned my companion: ‘hostility to change was rife back then ‒ absolutely rife. Still is today ‒ and it’s all fear of course. All fear. Do you know Cornford?’ I indicated that I did not. ‘Bill’ ‒ now indignant, now crestfallen ‒ gathered himself: ‘In 1908 F. M. Cornford ‒ a Cambridge man but there always is a fly in the ointment ‒ wrote a very great book called Microcosmographia Academica. It’s about academic politics ‒ but really it’s about life. You must read it. Read and absorb. Read and absorb.’ With that remark, ‘Bill’ and I parted company. We didn’t speak again for the rest of the evening. But I did hear from him once more, the morning after our encounter, when I found in my college pigeon-hole, protruding from the usual mess of bills and papers, a large manila envelope, unsealed. Inside there was a note and a book. ‘For Matthew’, ran the note: ‘Read and absorb. Yours, B.’ The volume in question was F. M. Cornford’s Microcosmographia Academica: Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician. The title, which translates as ‘A Study of a Tiny Academic World’, refers to the enclave that was Cambridge University in the 1900s, at which time Cornford was a fellow of classics at Trinity College (where he had been an undergraduate in the late nineteenth century). There was much about this world that he disliked, and many of these dissatisfactions can seem rather minor and arcane. But his principal and most important objections ‒ objections from which Microcosmographia Academica would arise ‒ were related to such minutiae. They came from a willingness to question, a willingness to think differently, and they took the form of a kind of gentle exasperation with the smug isolationism of academic life (the then regnant notion of ‘pure’ or ‘sound’ scholarship); with the chaotic nature of Cambridge teaching; with the reluctance of academics to address an audience beyond that found in the University; with a concomitant and pervasive resistance to change. Cornford was dismayed by the staid and parasitic content of undergraduate lectures which, he felt, failed to bring students into proximity with the lecturer’s recent, original work. ‘When a man’s mind is full of fresh ideas and quickened by the excitement of fresh discovery,’ he said,  ‘then is the time to lecture: there is the chance of interesting his class, while the discipline of exposition will test and clarify his thoughts.’ Some of the charm of this comes from Cornford’s amusing modesty (‘there is the chance of interesting his class’). Yet what is also appealing is the sense of responsibility he has to his students, and the implication that, properly treated, those students might also serve as his teacher. Cornford really did believe in exposing ideas to critique, in the importance of risking error, and he would have been thrilled by the judgement of a reader of his Thucydides mythistoricus (1907), who remarked: ‘Much of the book is wrong, but I have learnt more from it than from any book I have read for years.’ Allied to these scholarly heresies was an appetite for a more social kind of reform. In 1897, prior to his election as a fellow, Cornford helped to organize a petition in support of degrees for women; a mere five years into his fellowship he published a flysheet, Compulsory Chapel (1904), that helped to bring an end to enforced chapel attendance at Trinity; he helped to establish a Cambridge summer course for members of the Working Men’s College; and he was a co-founder, with Charles Kay Ogden, of the Cambridge Society of Heretics. Well, Microcosmographia Academica is nothing if not heretical. Initially published anonymously in 1908, it belongs to a branch of satire (popularized by Erasmus’s Moriae Encomium) characterized by works of intellectual virtuosity, perverse reasoning, playful wit, often satirically praising (by way of a mode known as the paradoxical encomium) subjects customarily met with opprobrium. For Erasmus, who initially put his book together over the course of a week, that subject was folly; for Cornford, who took a rather tardy two, it was the social and intellectual mores of academic life. A measure of the book’s tone can be gauged from one of Cornford’s implied addressees, The Young Man in a Hurry, who is ‘afflicted with a conscience, which is apt to break out, like measles, in patches’. (Other such types include The Adullamites, who are ‘dangerous, because they know what they want’ and who ‘inhabit a series of caves near Downing Street’.) Cornford invokes these figures as representations of the sorts of people who are likely to agitate for, or resist, institutional change. To achieve either of those ends, he says, requires influence. This ‘may be acquired in exactly the same way as the gout . . . The method is to sit tight and to drink port wine. You will thus gain the reputation of being a good fellow; and not a few wild oats will be condoned in one who is sound at heart, if not at the lower extremities.’ In other words: keep your counsel; make free with the drink; and don’t, as Cornford might himself have phrased it, overset the apple-cart. Such figures are, of course, fairly recognizable academic types, though I daresay they have been and are encountered elsewhere. I have certainly happened upon my share of Young Men in a Hurry ‒ those whose conscience seems invariably to break out at a time that is most propitious for them and least propitious for you ‒ both within and without the walls of the university. And I trust you won’t think me ungallant when I reveal that my romantic history, such as it is, suggests that some women can be in Hurries of their own. Still, Cornford is largely confining himself here to the world of the university. Although that remains his ostensible subject throughout the satire, the later parts of the book reverberate with questions of broader social and personal significance, with the struggles facing those who wish to move, live and excite change in the world. To take part in that world, Cornford knows, is to move in an environment that is thick with obfuscation, sore with legislation. ‘The principle of Discipline’, he writes in the first of his several great Principles, ‘is that “there must be some rules”’. Why? Because ‘Plainly, the more rules you can invent, the less need there will be to waste time over fruitless puzzling about right and wrong.’ Such purging of moral speculation should in itself help prevent people wanting to do things, for as Cornford says: ‘the argument for doing something is that it is the right thing to do’. Nonetheless, to make absolutely certain of inaction, other Principles ‘of universal application have been added to the rhetorical ingenuity of mankind’. Here they are, abridged, in the order offered by Cornford:

The Principle of the Wedge is that you should not act justly now for fear of raising expectations that you may act still more justly in the future ‒ expectations which you are afraid you will not have the courage to satisfy.

The Principle of Dangerous Precedent is that you should not now do an admittedly right action for fear you, or your equally timid successors, should not have the courage to do right in some future case . . . Every public action which is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time.

The Principle of Unripe Time is that people should not do at the present moment what they think right at that moment, because the moment at which they think it right has not yet arrived.

These methods of obstruction, a form of which I am sure most of you have encountered, clearly resonate strongly with large political questions, with debates over interventionism and the like. Yet they also provide a fascinating insight into, and understanding of, what it is to be human. Note in the passages above the prevalence of fear, even when fear is not mentioned by name. Cornford understood that the business of being human can be frightening, understood that most people act, fail to act, speak, do not speak, not out of malevolence, but out of a complicated mixture of fear and good intention. Those fears may seem small ‒ they include ‘Giving yourself away’, ‘The Public Washing of Linen’, ‘What will Dr____ say’ ‒ but they are related to larger fears: to fear of ‘The Great World’, the fear of exposing who we are. ‘Have you ever noticed’, Cornford asks, ‘how people say “I’m afraid I don’t” when they mean, “I think I don’t . . . ?”’ It is this aptitude for noticing ‒ noticing, and understanding ‒ that makes Cornford so compelling, so likable. His satire is rich with penetrating apprehensions of human motivation: it is the product of an individual who sees the silent choreography that lies behind our daily interactions (see here his chapter on Squaring), and in this it can remind us – like Erasmus’s Moriae Encomium – of the novel, that most forgiving of literary forms. And although Microcosmographia is a satire, is biting, corrective, instructive, it is also forgiving, predicated on an aptitude for human understanding that helps to account for the ease with which it has endured. Cornford is speaking half of the truth when, at the start of the book, he disavows his status as a satirist. He speaks the whole truth when he states that he is not an embittered man. And when he says that he is offering his book to the reader as ‘the merest sketch of the little world that lies before you’, the echo of the closing lines of Milton’s Paradise Lost directs us to another truth: that the world of which Cornford is writing is also, in part and in a slight way, the great and sometimes frightening world that lies before us all.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 49 © Matthew Adams 2016