Jackson put his head on one side again.
“I don’t know that there’s much more to be said for any modern art,” he answered. “I myself am unable to give even the most admired modern painters a place in the pictorial tripos. Sargent, for instance: I don’t consider his portraits more than mere posters, pieces of scenic painting if you will, dabbed on, without any finish, like a copy of Greek prose without any accents. Ha, here’s Alison: now we’ll get to work.”
It was curious to note now, immediately on the advent of the players to make up their table at whist, all these lesser problems and pronouncements with regard to the position of Wagner, Sargent and Debussy in the realms of art were immediately dismissed for the greater preoccupation. For those middle-aged men, in spite of their gently-fossilized existence, their indulgent contempt for anything that was not immediately “Cambridge,” their general pessimism about modern effort, retained a certain streak of boyishness and gusto, in that they were genuinely fond of games, both the milder and more sedentary ones that they themselves played, and those better suited to the robust vigour of their pupils, accepting the importance of them as a clause in the creed that made Cambridge just precisely what it was. Their theories about them, just as about education, might be all cut and dried, and the sap as completely be gone out of them as out of the pressed flowers in some botancial collection (which they would unanimously have alluded to as a Hortus Siccus), but they did believe in them.
There was no elasticity or any possible growth or development that could come to those fibrous stems and crackling petals, but they believed in their creed and would have opposed with tooth and nail of conviction any suggested reform or innovation. For Cambridge, so long as the forts of classics and cricket stood secure, was to them an institution as abiding as the moon, and no criticism concerning it could be taken seriously, any more than you could take seriously a person who said that he would have preferred the colour of the moon to be pea-green or magenta. But Cambridge could only remain a permanent and perfect phenomenon, if it remained exactly as it was. Whatever in the world of flux and change might alter and crumble, Cambridge must present an unalterable front to the corroding centuries. Whatever change came there, must, in the very nature of things, be a change for the worse.
Of the great ancient fortress of Cambridge, St. Stephen’s College was beyond doubt the most impregnable bastion. Founded by Henry VII., it had had a glorious record of opposition to every reform and innovation that had assaulted its grey walls. When first railways began to knit England together, St. Stephen’s had headed every defensive manœuvre to keep their baleful facilities away from the sanctuary. St. Stephen’s collective spirit did not wish to “run up” to London in two or three hours: it preferred the sequestering methods of the stage-coach. Till some forty years ago it had consisted entirely of fellows and undergraduates who had been scholars of St. Stephen’s School, and at the conclusion of their enjoyment of Henry VII.’s endowment there, proceeded for the rest of their lives, if so disposed, to be supported by Henry VII. at St. Stephen’s College. They entered it as scholars, became fellows in due course, and taught to the succeeding generation precisely what they had learned.
Then had come that overwhelming assault on the tradition of centuries, which our four whist-players thought bitterly of even till to-day, when the college was thrown open to boys from other schools who, instead of necessarily taking up classics, went in for all sorts of debased subjects such as natural science and medicine. But there was no help for it: that particular gate of the bastion had to be opened, and scientists moral and physical, even students of modern languages, mingled with the white-robed classical choir. But the spirit of the more loyal-hearted portion of the garrison remained unbroken, and sturdily, long after the rest of Cambridge blazed with electric light, St. Stephen’s, owing chiefly to the determined stand made by Jackson and Butler, moved in its accustomed dusk of candles and oil lamps.
The introduction of bath-rooms provoked a not less gallant opposition: in the time of Henry VII. hot baths were unheard of, and if nowadays you wanted one, you could get a can of hot water from the kitchen. And it was only under the severest pressure that those debasing paraphernalia squeezed their way in. Not for a moment is it implied that Jackson and his friends were like bats who preferred the dark, or like cats who disliked water, but only that they disliked any change, and preferred things precisely as they were....
The game proceeded in the utmost harmony and with academic calm, and was interspersed with neat quotations. For instance, when at the conclusion of a hand, Waters said approvingly to his partner, “You saw my call all right,” Jackson without a moment’s thought replied, “Yes, Waters, one clear call for me.” Or when hearts were trumps, and Butler proved only to have one of that suit, he paused, without applying his lit match to his pipe, to say, “Eructavit cor meum.” As that one happened to be the ace, it was quickly and sharply that Alison said, “But your heart is inditing of a good matter.” Even when apt quotation failed, something academic was fragrant in their most ordinary remarks, as when, spades being turned up as trumps for the third time running, Butler referred to “the prevalence of those agricultural implements,” or when his partner found that his hand contained seven diamonds, he called it “a jewel song.” There was not one atom of pose or desire for effect in those little mots, their minds thought like that, and their tongues faithfully expressed their impressions.
The third of these pleasant rubbers came to an end about a quarter to eleven, and, a “senatus consultum” being taken, it was resolved not to begin a new one, but to relax into conversation.
“Non semper arcum,” said Butler, rising. “Ho, everyone that thirsteth, you will help yourselves, please. I think you said, Alison, that when we had finished Sarah Battling, you wanted to tell us what the Master spoke to you about.”