The Camford Visitation - ebook

A CONTEMPORARY REVIEW OF “THE CAMFORD VISITATION”

MR. WELLS’s address as president of the Educational Science Section of the British Association last year dealt with certain aspects of education in the schools only. In his latest story, with its cover of dark and light blue, he deals with university education and its place in society. The story begins with an amusing sketch of a dyed-in-the-wool scholar, the master of Holy Innocents College, a preserver of culture, of true scholarship, born to appreciate without ever creating.

His breakfast oration has got to the stage of denouncing “the dictatorship of the half-educated. We are being endowed, Sir, and told what to know and teach, by the unholy wealth of ironmongers and the overblown profits of syndicated shop-keepers.”

Then enters the visitant as a voice, an unseen presence, asking: “Half-educated? Now how can you measure education and divide it into halves and quarters? What do you mean by education?...”

For the rest of the story the visitant subjects human life, and in particular its treatment by the University of Camford, to a sympathetic but quite unsparing scrutiny. The general thesis is an appeal to the universities to play a part in “so heroic an ordering of knowledge, so valiant a beating out of opinions, such a refreshment of teaching and such an organization of brains as will constitute a real and living world university, head, eyes and purpose for Man”.

–Nature, Februar 12, 1938I. THE UNEXPECTED VOICE

THE story of the Camford Visitation begins quite suddenly in the dining-room of Holy Innocents College. Four or five of the Fellows had assembled for breakfast, there was a guest of the Senior Fellow and there was of course the Master. There was nothing remarkable and certainly nothing sinister or disagreeable about the visible scene. It was–as people say–brightly matutinal–though why anyone should ever use that detestable word is difficult to explain. There was no suggestion at all of occult influences or unseen participation. The company was cheered by a bright coal-fire and protected from it by a vast glass screen. The wistaria on the garden wall outside which separates the domains of Holy Innocents from the garden of the Warden of University was brightly sunlit and at its glowing best.

The Master was talking at his guest.

Talking at a guest was a habit with him. He was grey and leathery and wrinkled about the face, he had a large nose and a variously baggy neck in which his voice reverberated and was enriched, his mouth was wide and wayward and dropped a little and his eyes beneath his grey eyebrow thatch were bright and brown and wicked. The guest was in fact a New Zealander but the Master had conceived an idea that he was an American full of intellectual unseemliness, presuming on the impertinent endowments of his fellow-countrymen to have opinions in matters far above his quality and erudition. Anyhow he looked modern and neat and unscholarly–and he passed opinions. He did pass opinions. The Master had never got over the gross disloyalty of the War of Independence and blamed it for practically everything that had happened since.

“Beautiful old wall,” the guest had said, pausing, his ham and eggs in hand, midway between hot plate and table and staring out of the window. “Your Camford walls are wonderful.”

“We need high walls,” said the Master.

There had been a certain sense of strain about the table-talk. The academic weather was unsettled and even into the large comfort of Holy Innocents the disturbance had penetrated. Projects were afoot in Camford that the Master manifestly disliked intensely. One of the fellows present was an archaeologist, one of those tiresome creatures who dig and dig beneath the foundations of our classical culture, and the other was an exploring ethnologist, an unbookish stray, who treated the disgusting habits of Papuans, the shameful speculations of Dr Freud and the extravagancies of Dr Jung as suitable material for theorization about early Greek life. Early Greek life was beautiful and sacred, the Gods and fauns were gentlemen who ought not to be spied and pried upon; old Triton blew his wreathed horn, and that was that; the less you went into details about it the better. It seemed to the Master that these younger Fellows had bit the hand that had reared them. Recently both of them had favoured two monstrous new proposals for setting up strange schools, one in modern industrial and commercial history–no doubt, the Master sneered, with a professor or so of permissible adulteration and prize-coupon giving–and the other in human ecology, in which mankind was to be studied as though they were rabbits or guinea-pigs or lemmings, and much good would that do anyone. Birth-rates and emigration and statistics. An invasion of laborious claptrap on an unprecedented scale, the Master reiterated: “Laborious claptrap. We had better import a few Americans to show us how,” said the Master.

This guest before he apprehended the tension in the air had been actually asking questions, at once ignorant and exasperating, about these matters, and the Master had already strung a few epithets. It was possibly with the idea of creating a diversion that the guest had expressed his aesthetic appreciation of Camford. But the Master’s reply had jerked things back again.

“We are a beleaguered fastness,” he said. “True scholarship lives here, Sir, on the defensive. The Philistine rages without. We need these walls.

“Maybe they will hold,” he said, making his voice reveal something of its deeper nuances. “Maybe.”

The pause encouraged him to go on.

“It was the Germans, those disastrous people, who first discovered that slag heaps and by-products might also count as learning, but I doubt if we can blame any one race or nation in particular for setting dumps and dustbins above the treasure cabinets of scholarship. Crudity is in the spirit of the age. We make war for raw materials. We live by paper money, canned food and substitutes for learning. There is a positive antagonism to any crystalline thing. In South Africa they corner diamonds and hide them away. Everywhere pure gold is buried. They take it out of mines to put it into vaults. That University affair they are building in London, that glorified mechanics’ institute, is all made, they tell me, of a sort of mineral nougat, lavatory style, no taste, no dignity–quite suitable, very suitable there–for shop-boys and night schools. It’s the dictatorship of the half-educated we are under. We are being endowed, Sir, and told what to know and teach, by the unholy wealth of ironmongers and the overblown profits of syndicated shop-keepers. We certainly need our walls here, Sir. We need them badly, every wall we have.”

And then it was the Voice spoke.

It said very clearly and distinctly: “Half-educated? Now how can you measure education and divide it into halves and quarters? What do you mean by education?...”

It is to be noted that the first impulse of everyone present was to turn towards the space between the table and the window. It was as if someone had come into the room and stood there and spoken. Everyone had either been watching the eloquent workings of the Master’s face folds or looking shamefacedly at his eggs and bacon and sausages or what not, and now by a common attraction they all turned to look at–

Emptiness!

Two of the college servants stood in the doorway beyond and to the left of that talking piece of space, but they were both as incapable of that clear enunciation as of piping like a nightingale or barking like a dog.

Then the eyes of the company came back to the Master and the guest.

“You said, Sir–?” said the Master, leaning forward on his elbow.

“I said nothing,” said the guest.

He spoke clearly and precisely but unless he was fitted with a double system of vocal organs he was certainly not responsible for the curiously penetrating intonations they had just heard.

Because later when they came to compare notes there was a general agreement that there was something in the colour of the voice that was not quite human. What that difference was they found it difficult to say. “Steely” was one word used, and another was “luminous”. But upon the subtle inhumanity of it they were all agreed.

They questioned each other mutely. Had they really heard it? Was there an element of hallucination in their apprehension? Had they located it properly? The youngest fellow got up briskly and went to the open window and scrutinized the space below the sill. Nothing but innocent lavender and antirrhinum. No lurking golden-voiced undergraduate there. The comparative ethnologist was moved by this to look under the table. The college butler came forward to assist him.

“Did you hear a voice, Martilow?” asked the comparative ethnologist.

Martilow backed out from under the table and knelt up interrogatively.

The comparative ethnologist repeated his question.

“Yessir. It seemed to me, if you ask me, Sir, to come from–”

He got up and went back to the space between window and table, stood and then with an air of the most delicate discrimination, put out his left foot and tapped the faded carpet. “Here,” he said.

“Lift up the carpet,” said the archaeologist, and the servants set about it with brisk curiosity.

But there was nothing under the carpet.