Gunning’s “Reminiscences of Cambridge”
An English University so closely connected with New England must have special interest to you. Yet those who have been to our Cambridge would find it indeed hard to recognise it in the place I am now about to put before you. It changed beyond recognition within the long lifetime of the author, whose reminiscences, put down during his long last illness, will be the text of my lecture. He had remarkable opportunities of observing University life, and many faculties of making the best of them. His hard shrewd face looks down upon us when we take our wine after dinner as guests in the combination room of Christ’s College, and is an indication of his character. He was no Boswell; for he lacked appreciation of the men he described and though capable of devoted friendship, had little affection for many of them. But he is an admirable raconteur with a shrewd eye for the absurdity of a situation, and will, I think, prove excellent company for us during the time at my disposal.
Many of my audience have doubtless visited our English Cambridge before this war broke out, and will be able to check the remarks I am about to make. An easy run from London brings the traveller to a railway station so inconvenient that it could only have been imagined in a bad dream; and he finds himself in the outskirts of a fair sized and rapidly increasing town.
A dull drive through a street of shops brings you to the colleges; and, if you happened to arrive at midday, you would find a stream of undergraduates in cap and gown with women students from Girton and Newnham issuing from or flowing into the lecture rooms. Supposing your host to be in his college, you would find the courts populous with undergraduates, some in cap and gown, some in flannel blazers, and some, proh pudor! in evening pumps or even in carpet slippers. If you asked a question of one of them, you would be answered obligingly, if not with elaborate courtesy. Your host (a fellow of the college) would probably be working with a few pupils; and when they withdrew you would either be given lunch in his rooms or taken to his house. A few friends would be asked to meet you. The meal would be, I hope, a good one, and several would not even take the wine which was provided. Why I say this will appear later. If it were summer, you would have been taken for a walk in the “Backs,” and have found the narrow river crowded with boats full of gaily flannelled men and a good many ladies; and, I think, you would have admired the brightness of the scene. You might witness a cricket match, and, later in the evening, have watched the eights practising, with their coaches running, cycling, or riding beside them. If you dined in the college hall, you would find a good if not elaborate dinner neatly served; and the company, if not brilliant, would be at least variegated. In the combination room, over a modest glass of port and perhaps a cigar, the conversation would turn on many topics. The presiding fellow, who has been everywhere, would be laying down the law to a somewhat inattentive audience about hotels in Buda-Pesth and the old college friends he had met on the Yukon River. A famous man of letters would be giving his views on finance and town planning. A chemist and a mathematician would be absorbed in discussing bird life. A great authority on art might be explaining his views on the religion of the future to a D.D., who ought to know, being by repute a heretic, but is somewhat inattentive as he is trying to listen, and at the same time endeavouring to explain to another man what are the prospects of the college boat. An anthropologist of European fame is being instructed by the junior fellow how the last fashionable dance ought to be performed; and the tutor, a silent man, suddenly breaks in with a question as to the progress of one of his pupils. Naturally the guest is not neglected; he would perhaps rather listen, especially as everyone is talking about something he does not make his specialty, as all sensible people do after dinner. It may be our supposed guest is taken to the Master’s Lodge and finds several undergraduates on terms of easy familiarity with the “dons” and even with the, in old days unapproachable and awful, Head of the college. I am of course speaking of happier days before the War had depleted our numbers and when we all felt friendly and sociable.
In every scene in this imaginary sketch the contrast with Cambridge in the eighteenth century would be apparent. Except for parts of the buildings all is changed. In one respect the traveller who visited Cambridge a century ago would have had the advantage. Had he approached by either of the hills, by Madingley or the Gog Magogs, the town would have appeared more beautiful than now. Here is a description of his first view of the place by John Henry Newman in 1832, who was too great an admirer of the beauties of Oxford to fail to see how lovely was her rival:
“Cambridge, July 16th, 1832.
“Having come to this place with no anticipations, I am quite taken by surprise and overcome with delight. This, doubtless, you will think premature in me, inasmuch as I have seen yet scarcely anything, and have been writing letters of business to Mr. Rose and Rivingtons. But really, when I saw at the distance of four miles, on an extended plain, wider than Oxford, amid thicker and greener groves, the Alma Mater Cantabrigiensis lying before me, I thought I should not be able to contain myself, and in spite of my regret at her present defects and past history, and all that is wrong about her,[18] I seemed about to cry Floreat in eternum. Surely there is a genius loci here, as in my own dear home; and the nearer I came to it, the more I felt its power. I do really think the place finer than Oxford, though I suppose it isn’t, for everyone says so. I like the narrow streets; they have a character, and they make the University buildings look larger by contrast. I cannot believe that King’s College is not far grander than anything with us; the stone, too, is richer, and the foliage more thick and encompassing. I found my way from the town to Trinity College like old Œdipus, without guide, by instinct; how, I know not. I never studied the plan of Cambridge.”
Ill paved, ill drained as was the town, narrow as were the streets, it must have been picturesque to the eye, and the colleges, unspoiled by modern additions, are very attractive, to judge by the old prints. On the whole, however, I think our verdict would have been that old Cambridge was a pleasanter place for us to explore than for its inhabitants to live in.
Let us now exercise our imagination a little more and try to fancy what a day spent in Cambridge would have been like to a stranger towards the close of the eighteenth century. One thing, I think, may be assumed to be unaltered. Had he come to visit a friend, he would have been hospitably received. Let us suppose that he also arrived at midday in summer when it was full term and that, to quote Wordsworth, he—
“At the Hoop alighted ... famous inn.”