I last had occasion to write about the Cambridge mathematical tripos and its relationship to athleticism when, just over thirty years ago, I tried to describe the Leslie Stephen-inspired atmosphere of Trinity Hall for a life of Sir Charles Dilke, who went there in 1862, which I was then engaged in writing. ‘Stephen’, I wrote, ‘believed in plain living and hard work. He had a high respect for the discipline of the mathematical tripos and the habit of cool, detached enquiry, founded upon intensive application, to which it led. He was as distrustful of enthusiasm in affairs of the intellect (or of the emotions) as he was respectful to its exhibition on the tow-path. He disliked obscurity and ambiguity of expression, and thought of them as inevitable results of speculative generalization. Let a man stick to his last, write or talk only about those subjects to which he had applied himself (without attempting to weave them all into a single metaphysic), and it could all be done in good, calm, clear Cambridge English.’
I added that Stephen, having been a poor oar, had made himself one of the great rowing coaches of the century, had written the college boating song, liked thirty-mile walks and had at least once walked from Cambridge to London to attend a dinner and back again during the night. He was also the son-in-law of Thackeray, the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, and the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. He was in addition, I suggested, ‘almost perfectly suited to the Cambridge tripos system of the day, under which a man reading for honours was toned up like an athlete and won his awards by a combination of staying power during the long period of preliminary work and speed in the examination room.’
The key Oxford/Cambridge phrases in my attempted analysis of the intellectual style of Dilke’s mentor, in which I suspect I was heavily influenced by Stephen’s biography by Noël Annan, which had been the first book of the then recently elected ‘boy Provost’ of King’s, were ‘without attempting a single metaphysic’ and ‘calm, clear Cambridge English’.
This distinction after which I was groping was given somewhat farcical Cambridge expression thirty years after Stephen had left Trinity Hall, although I did not come across this until fifteen years after I wrote my Dilke book. H. S. Foxwell, notable St John’s economist who lived in I Harvey Road for almost as long as John Neville Keynes, Registrary of this University, lived in 6 Harvey Road, was disturbed by rumours in the early 1890s that his neighbour was about to be enticed away by the chair of political economy in the University of Oxford. ‘Pray don’t go,’ he wrote in half-serious horror. ‘Think of the effect your move may have on your son. He may grow up flippantly epigrammatical and end by becoming the proprietor of a Gutter Gazette, or the hero of a popular party; instead of emulating his father’s noble example, becoming an accurate, clear-headed Cambridge man spending his life in the valuable and unpretentious service of his kind, dying beloved of his friends, venerated by the wise and unknown to the masses, as true merit and worth mostly are.’
Keynes père did not go, and Keynes fils was protected from the superficial worldliness of an Oxford education which Professor Foxwell rather oddly thought would necessarily follow from such a translation. John Maynard Keynes, it must be said, did not entirely eschew either epigram or fame, but he remained faithful, if not to the extent of emulating the ‘warp and woof’ Cambridge life of his parents, at least to that of becoming one of this University’s greatest twentieth-century ornaments.
Was Foxwell expressing a truth in mocking language or was he merely being complacently denigrating of the university he did not know? I think he did have a fragment of reality concealed within his joke. It can be differently expressed by saying that although as a matter of simple geographical fact Cambridge is and always has been three miles nearer to London than Oxford, in most other senses Oxford has long been closer to the capital. And that is not only a function of the superiority of the Padding-ton over the Liverpool Street train service. It pre-dates the railway age. The operator of that fast coach from Carfax to the court at Whitehall in the late seventeenth century had done his market research well. He knew that amidst the ‘dreaming spires’ below ‘the soft-muffled Cumnor hills’ and in ‘the home of lost causes’ there were plenty of moths who would respond to the prospect of a quick journey to the metropolitan candle.
Oxford gradually became more of a nursery of government. Of the fourteen eighteenth-century Prime Ministers, seven were at Oxford, five at Cambridge and two at neither. It should however be said that if stature is the test, both Walpole and the Younger Pitt were from Cambridge, with only the Elder Pitt of comparable quality from Oxford. Of the nineteenth century’s nineteen (not counting the two who overlapped), nine were Oxonians, six Cantabrigians, three from neither. Oxford’s stars were Peel and Gladstone, Cambridge’s Palmerston. In this century Oxford has eight, Cambridge three and ‘nowhere or elsewhere’ seven. This time the greatest stars, Lloyd George and Churchill, were amongst the ‘nowheres’. What is perhaps more significant is that because Cambridge had no nineteenth-century Prime Minister after 1868, the last 120 years give a score of Oxford eleven and Cambridge three.